Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Find Joy by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant. 

5/5 rating. 

Book #111 of 2019. Read September 28, 2019. 

This book discusses many people who have faced adversity and the ways they were able to breed resilience and find joy in their lives. The numerous stories she includes, as well as her own about her recently-deceased husband had me tearing up constantly, but the sheer hope that these people were able to muster made this an uplifting read. If you have gone through any type of tragedy lately (as unfortunately, way too many of us have had to face), this book is a beautiful tool that I highly recommend!

Quotes:

“Option A is not available. So let’s just kick the shit out of Option B.”

“We plant the seeds of resilience in the ways we process negative events.”

“Recognizing that negative events aren’t personal, pervasive, or permanent makes people less likely to get depressed and better able to cope.”

“I stressed that not everything that happens to(ital) us happens because of us.”

“Years earlier, I’d noticed that when I got sad or anxious, often the second derivative of those feelings made them doubly upsetting. When I felt down, I felt down that I was down. When I felt anxious, I felt anxious that I was anxious. ‘Part of every misery,’ C.S. Lewis wrote, is ‘misery’s shadow…the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer.’”

“I learned that when life pulls you under, you can kick against the bottom, break the surface, and breathe again.”

“Adam was certain people wanted to talk about it but they didn’t know how. I was less sure. Friends were asking, ‘How are you?’ but I took this more of a standard greeting than a genuine question. I wanted to scream back, ‘My husband just died, how do you think I am?’ I didn’t know how to respond to pleasantries. Aside from that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?“

“I hated asking for help, hated needing it, worried incessantly that I was a huge burden to everyone, and yet depended on their constant support. I was suffering from so many insecurities that I almost started a People Afraid of Inconveniencing Others support group, until I realized that all the members would be afraid of imposing on one another and no one would show up.”

“‘I realized that friends can become your family.’ He made a pact with himself to always be there for his friends. ‘To call at tough times. To really try and connect with people and get to know them.’”

“As blogger Tim Urban describes it, happiness is the joy you find on hundreds of forgettable Wednesdays.”

“Then Adam suggested a new idea: write down three moments of joy every day.”

“There are more refugees today than there have been at any time since World War II; more than 65 million people have had their lives viciously torn apart. If Option B for me means coping with the loss of a spouse, Option B for refugees means coping with loss upon loss upon loss: loss of loves ones, home, country, and all that is familiar.”

“High-quality preschool education is known to improve children’s cognitive development, and providing support even earlier makes a difference. All around the United States, the Nurse-Family Partnership has proven through rigorous experiments how valuable investing in children can be. When disadvantaged families are provided with home visits and counseling from the start of pregnancy until the kids turn two, over the next decade and a half there are 79 percent fewer cases of child abuse and neglect. By the time these children turn fifteen, on average they are arrested half as often as their peers, and their mothers receive cash assistance benefits for thirty fewer months. Programs like this help build resilience within families. Along with being the correct moral choice, these investments make economic sense too: every dollar put into these visits yields about $5.70 in benefits.”

“Whether children develop a fixed or growth mindset depends in part on the type of praise they receive from parents and teachers. Dweck’s team randomly assigned students to receive different kinds of positive feedback after they took a test. The kids who were praised for being smart did worse on later tests because they viewed their intelligence as a fixed attribute. When the ‘smart’ ones struggled, they decided that they just didn’t have the ability. Instead of attempting to complete a more difficult test, they gave up. But when kids were praised for trying, they worked harder on the challenging test and made more of an effort to finish it.”

“After students at risk of dropping out of high school completed an online exercise emphasizing that skills can be developed, their academic performance improved. When college freshmen completed this same exercise during orientation, the dropout risk among black, Latino, and first-generation students decreased by 46 percent.”

“In Denmark, mattering is part of the school curriculum. During a weekly hour called Klassen Time, students come together to discuss problems and help one another. Danish children do this every week from age six until they graduate from high school. To sweeten the deal, each week a different student brings cake. When children present their own problems, they feel listened to, and when their classmates seek guidance, they feel they can make a difference. The children learn empathy by hearing others’ perspectives and reflecting on how their behavior affects those around them. They are taught to think, ‘How do others feel? And how do my actions make them feel?’”

“Move fast and break things” 

“I was surprised that after every mission – and even after every training session – the Marines do formal debriefs. Then they record the lessons learned in a repository so that everyone can access them. The Marines taught me the importance of creating a culture where failure is seen as a learning opportunity.”

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