Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy
Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant, 2017
KnopfDoubleday
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781524732684
Summary
A powerful, inspiring, and practical book about building resilience and moving forward after life’s inevitable setbacks.
After the sudden death of her husband, Sheryl Sandberg felt certain that she and her children would never feel pure joy again. "I was in ‘the void," she writes, "a vast emptiness that fills your heart and lungs and restricts your ability to think or even breathe."
Her friend Adam Grant, a psychologist at Wharton, told her there are concrete steps people can take to recover and rebound from life-shattering experiences. We are not born with a fixed amount of resilience. It is a muscle that everyone can build.
Option B combines Sheryl’s personal insights with Adam’s eye-opening research on finding strength in the face of adversity. Beginning with the gut-wrenching moment when she finds her husband, Dave Goldberg, collapsed on a gym floor, Sheryl opens up her heart—and her journal—to describe the acute grief and isolation she felt in the wake of his death.
But Option B goes beyond Sheryl’s loss to explore how a broad range of people have overcome hardships including illness, job loss, sexual assault, natural disasters, and the violence of war. Their stories reveal the capacity of the human spirit to persevere …and to rediscover joy.
Resilience comes from deep within us and from support outside us. Even after the most devastating events, it is possible to grow by finding deeper meaning and gaining greater appreciation in our lives.
Option B illuminates how to help others in crisis, develop compassion for ourselves, raise strong children, and create resilient families, communities, and workplaces. Many of these lessons can be applied to everyday struggles, allowing us to brave whatever lies ahead.
Two weeks after losing her husband, Sheryl was preparing for a father-child activity. "I want Dave," she cried. Her friend replied, "Option A is not available," and then promised to help her make the most of Option B. We all live some form of Option B. This book will help us all make the most of it. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 28, 1969
• Where—Washington, D.C., USA
• Raised—North Miami Beach, Florida
• Education—B.A., M.B.A., Harvard University
• Currently—lives in Northern California
Sheryl Kara Sandberg is an American businesswoman and author, who has served as the chief operating officer of Facebook since 2008. In June 2012, she was also elected to the board of directors by the existing board members becoming the first woman to serve on its board.
She has written one book and co-authored a second: on her own, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013) and, with Adam Grant, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy (2017). The latter was written after the death of her husband, David Goldberg. Both books became bestsellers.
Before Facebook, Sandberg was Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google. She also was involved in launching Google's philanthropic arm Google.org. Before Google, Sandberg served as chief of staff for the United States Department of the Treasury. In 2012, she was named in "Time 100," an annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world assembled by Time.
Background
Sandberg is the daughter of Adele and Joel Sandberg and the oldest of three siblings. Her father, Joel, is an optometrist, and her mother, Adele, has a Ph. D. and worked as a French teacher before concentrating on raising her children. Her family moved to North Miami Beach, Florida when she was two years old. She attended public school and taught aerobics in the 1980s while still in high school.
In 1987, Sandberg enrolled at Harvard College and graduated in 1991 summa cum laude with an A.B. in economics and was awarded the John H. Williams Prize for the top graduating student in economics. While at Harvard, Sandberg met then-professor Larry Summers, who became her mentor and thesis adviser. Summers recruited her to be his research assistant at the World Bank, where she worked on health projects in India dealing with leprosy, AIDS, and blindness.
In 1993, she enrolled at Harvard Business School and in 1995 she earned her M.B.A. with highest distinction. After business school, Sandberg worked as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company. From 1996 to 2001, Sandberg served as Chief of Staff to then United States Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers under President Bill Clinton where she helped lead the Treasury’s work on forgiving debt in the developing world during the Asian financial crisis.
She joined Google Inc. in 2001 and served as its Vice President of Global Online Sales & Operations, from November 2001 to March 2008. She was responsible for online sales of Google's advertising & publishing products and also for sales operations of Google's consumer products & Google Book Search.
Facebook
Facebook
In late 2007, Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, met Sandberg at a Christmas party; at the time, she was considering becoming a senior executive for The Washington Post Company. Zuckerberg had no formal search for a COO but thought of Sandberg as "a perfect fit" for this role. They spent more time together in January 2008 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and in March 2008 Facebook announced hiring Sheryl Sandberg away from Google.
After joining the company, Sandberg quickly began trying to figure out how to make Facebook profitable. Before she joined, the company was "primarily interested in building a really cool site; profits, they assumed, would follow." By late spring, Facebook's leadership had agreed to rely on advertising, "with the ads discreetly presented"; by 2010, Facebook became profitable. According to Facebook, Sandberg oversees the firm's business operations including sales, marketing, business development, human resources, public policy and communications.
Her executive compensation for FY 2011 was $300,000 base salary plus $30,491,613 in FB shares. According to her Form 3, she also owns 38,122,000 stock options and restricted stock units (worth approx. $1.45 billion as of mid-May 2012) that will be completely vested by May 2022, subject to her continued employment through the vesting date.
In 2012 she became the eighth member (and the first female member) of Facebook's board of directors.
Personal
In 2004, Sandberg married David Goldberg. The couple lived in Northern California with their two children. Tragically, David died from a head injury after falling from a treadmill while the couple was on vacaction in Mexico.
Sandberg's grief inspired her to pair with psychologist Adam Grant in order to write Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy. The book, published in 2017, became a New York Times bestseller. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved, 2013; updated, 2017.)
Adam Grant is a psychologist and the New York Times best-selling author of Originals: How Nonconformists Move the World (2016) and Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success (2013). His also co-authored, with Sheryl Sandberg, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy (2017).
As Wharton’s top-rated professor for five straight years, Adam is a leading expert on how we can find motivation and meaning, and live more generous and creative lives. He has been recognized as one of the world’s 25 most influential management thinkers and received distinguished scholarly achievement awards from the American Psychological Association and the National Science Foundation.
Grant received his B.A. from Harvard University with Phi Beta Kappa honors and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He serves as a contributing op-ed writer for The New York Times on work and psychology.
His keynote speaking and consulting clients include Facebook and Google, the NBA, Teach For America, and the U.S. Army and Navy. Adam is a former Junior Olympic springboard diver. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, their two daughters, and their son. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[A] remarkable achievement: generous, honest, almost unbearably poignant. It reveals an aspect of Sandberg's character that Lean In had suggested but…did not fully demonstrate: her impulse to be helpful. She has little to gain by sharing, in excruciating detail, the events of her life over the past two years. This is a book that will be quietly passed from hand to hand, and it will surely offer great comfort to its intended readers.… The intimacy of detail that fills the book is unsettling; there were times I felt that I had come across someone's secret knowledge, that I shouldn't have been in possession of something that seemed so deeply private. But the candor and simplicity with which she shares all of it…is a kind of gift.
Caitlin Flanagan - New York Times Book Review
Sandberg is wise and honest and funny and practical in ways that are likely to stay with the reader. Her deeply personal book is more than memoir; interspersed with devastating scenes are equally powerful strategies for coping when your world has gone tilt.
Tracy Grant - Washington Post
Being among the most powerful women in the world didn’t spare Sheryl Sandberg from the sudden death of her husband, not quite two years ago. Option B is at its best when pinpointing specific tips for coping with overwhelming grief. Sandberg writes how she created new rituals, such as taking a moment at dinner each evening to express gratitude for something positive that day, and declaring ‘small wins.’ Day by day, the book says, these small victories can become building blocks to a return to emotional equanimity.
Diane Cole - Wall Street Journal
Option B chronicles Sandberg’s devastating loss, her grief and how she emerged from it with a new perspective on life. The most affecting parts of the book recount not just Sandberg's grief, but that of her children.… "Tragedy does not have to be personal, pervasive or permanent, but resilience can be," she writes. "We can build it and carry it with us throughout our lives."
Associated Press
Intimate, personal.… Within Option B there are lessons for leaders who want to make organizations more resilient, help employees recover from a loss—or crisis—and create workplaces that are more prepared to deal with failure.
Jena McGregor - Los Angeles Times
Like her debut volume, Sandberg’s Option B is an optimistic book, even if one riven with sorrow. She argues that after adversity and loss, there is an opportunity for "post-traumatic growth." Thus the book is in part a moving memoir.
Rebecca Mead - New Yorker
Sandberg’s new book is tough, full of the raw, painful emotions.… Option B [has] advice for people who are grieving. But it’s also a book for nearly everyone — people who may not know what to say or do in the wake of a tragedy. It’s also a deeply optimistic book, framed around the question, what’s next?
Rebecca J. Rosen - Atlantic
Admirably honest, optimistic.… Sandberg shares a great deal of herself and what she has learned. At its core the book helps those who have been felled by despair: a guide both for those who have directly suffered loss and for those who are close to people who have.
Economist
[H]elpful and hopeful.… [A]uthors show how… strengthened relationships and a greater sense of gratitude, can be gleaned from awful situations. Those suffering [or] seeking to provide comfort should find both solace and wisdom in this book.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) While the authors concede that everyone's story is different, they explore…what others have gone through in order to find joy and strength after difficulty.… This captivating memoir offers genuine hope.
Library Journal
A memoir of the loss of a husband and finding a path forward beyond the grieving process.… A book that provides illuminating ways to make headway through the days when there doesn't seem to be a way forward.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for Option B … then take off on your own:
1. What do you think of Sheryl Sandberg's Option B? Do you find it enlightening? Has it helped you cope with your own grief or offer guidance for helping others? What was your experience reading the book? Did you feel uncomfortable reading some of the rawer, more intimate sections? Or did the book's candor create a more sympathetic connection between you (the reader) and Sandberg (the author)?
2. Sandberg writes about starting rituals, such as taking a moment each evening to express gratitude for something positive that happened that day. What was, in your mind, the most important or helpful advice in Option B? What struck you most or resonated with your own personal experiences? Are there suggestions or observations in the book you disagree with?
3. If you read Lean In, does Sandberg come across the same in Option B … or does she seem different? If you haven't read Lean In, how you feel about Sheryl Sandberg: what kind of person is she?
4. Sandberg acknowledges that her wealth and status insulate her from the economic insecurity many feel after loss. As one of the top executives and most accomplished women in the country, is she capable of offering advice to us more mud-bound souls (an occasional criticism of Lean In)? When, on the first anniversary of their father's death, she takes her kids to a SpaceX launch, does someone like Sandberg have something of relevance to say to the rest of us? Does wealth cushion one from despair and grief? Or, ultimately, is money irrelevant?
5. Talk about the book's title and its derivation. What is "Option A" and why is it "not available"?
6. What are the "three P's" that, according to Martin Seligman, hinder recovery after trauma or loss? Talk about why they end up working against us when we most need comfort?
7. It can be fashionable to level scorn at our over-use of social media. But Sandberg points to Facebook as a venue to help people express their own grief or offer solace to others. What are your thoughts and experiences regarding Facebook?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)