Would you like to Shortcut Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant? My hope is for you to experience 80% of the value from Option B in just thirty minutes including a book summary, a quick lesson in the skills taught in the book, a retelling of my favorite stories, a review of what actions I took as a result of reading Option B, a look at my life as I was reading, and the unique challenges I experienced as a reader. If you want it even faster, here are the notes I took while reading!
Skills
Resilience. Using setbacks, trauma, and struggle to advance. Asking for help is essential. Seek to appreciate and understand instead of saying I am sorry for your loss. See what each of our struggles have in common which is often loneliness, a feeling of uselessness, and self pity. Critical for a healthy relationship to say yes to the other partner's request for attention. "Hey look at this" with "sure" or "no"
Summary
Sheryl Sandberg is the COO at Facebook and author of Lean In. Adam Grant is her friend and a psychologist. Sheryl's husband Dave died at 47 years old while they were traveling in Mexico together to celebrate a friend's birthday. Option B shares what Sheryl has learned through her grief and raising her children without their father combined with Adam's professional experience. An introduction shares the story of Dave's death followed by a chapter named Breathing Again which focuses on life after Dave especially processing the grief through personalization, pervasiveness, and permanence. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 discuss building friendships through loss, developing self-compassion, and viewing a tragedy as an opportunity to bounce forward with new opportunities. Taking back joy and raising resilient kids offer stories about noticing each happy moment and helping children see the chance for growth in everything that happens.
Stories
Dave's death. Nanny kills two children and parents appreciate each other and the third. Survivors of plane crash maintaining hopeBillboard in New York most regrets are failures to act like not following dreams or not giving hugs or not repairing a relationship.
Action
Sent what I hope is a better text to my sisters after they lost their grandpa. Reflected on my actions relative to my own mortality and my family. Made a more loving and honest conversation with my mother after dad has been gone.
Context
Read with wife sitting on couch cried and very grateful a chapter or two at a time over a weekLost my father at 29 and am an alcoholic with three years sobriety that attends AA daily. Related a lot with grief and trauma. Syncs well with Brene Brown.
Challenges
Brings out feelings of separation as a man. Many stories feature violence of man against woman with follow up on woman's resilience with little attention to how the creator of the violence got that way or can recover or law of attraction that people in pain attract others in pain. Is she doing well speaking to her audience or showing her own limitations or triggering some of my own hidden beliefs? Frequent calls for policy changes to problems which might have more effective solutions outside of policy. Implied assumptions and judgement on poverty that having a life with more is better. Would have preferred more personal stories of "hard times" and less suggestions for what external changes need to be made to see improvement.
In 2005 while I was in college at the University of South Carolina, I tried to start working online. I signed up for an MLM program and a survey website. A month later, I had refunds from both and figured working online was not possible because everything was a scam. The truth was I was afraid to fail again.
In 2011, I moved in with my wife and launched an online business focusing on video game addiction in an attempt to avoid dealing with any of my other problems. In a few months, I changed my business to selling shirts because I realized there was no money in video game addiction. A year after starting my business, I dropped out of my criminology PHD program at the University of South Florida to run my business full time which by then had changed to helping clients with Facebook and Google ads based on my experience failing to do them successfully for myself.
In 2013, I starting sharing everything I knew for free on YouTube because I hoped it would help me get more clients. By April 2014, I was nearly bankrupt after failing at 15+ different business models. I was also nearly dead from trying to drink the pain away and fortunately the fear of death motivated me to get into recovery. Being in recovery motivated me to focus more on being of true service to others and less on what I would get out of it. I started making courses online with Udemy which soon turned into my first real business. I partnered with as many talented instructors as I could and learned from top instructors how to get my courses the most sales.
In 2015, I tried making some inspirational videos sharing what I learned in recovery and got an amazing response on YouTube. To make the background on my videos more interesting, I started making the inspirational videos while playing video games. To make a more helpful website, I hired a freelancer to convert the videos into blog posts including this about page originally.