Option B by Sheryl Sandberg & Adam Grant

Author:Sheryl Sandberg & Adam Grant [Sandberg, Sheryl & Grant, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780753548301
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

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Finding Strength Together

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,1 tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.

—martin luther king jr.

In 1972, a plane flying from Uruguay to Chile crashed into a mountain in the Andes,2 split in half, and barreled down a snowy slope. For the thirty-three survivors, this was just the beginning of an extraordinary ordeal. Over the next seventy-two days, the group battled shock, frostbite, avalanches, and starvation. Only sixteen of them made it out. Alive.

Thanks to the popular book and movie, many of us know the extreme measures taken by the group in order to survive. New analysis by Spencer Harrison—a researcher, mountain climber, and colleague of Adam’s—explains not just how these men survived, but why. Spencer tracked down four of the survivors, combed through their journals, and even visited the crash site with one of them. Every survivor’s story shared a common theme: a key to their resilience was hope.

Most of the forty-five people on board were rugby players in their late teens and early twenties traveling to an exhibition match. Damage to the plane’s radio meant they could not send communications, but they could still receive them. Their first plan was to wait for rescue in the shelter of the plane. “We all believed that rescue was our only chance of survival,” Nando Parrado wrote, “and we clung to that hope with an almost religious zeal.” Nine days later, their supplies were depleted. The group was forced to turn to their only remaining source of food: the flesh from the frozen bodies of their teammates who had died. The next morning, a few of the passengers heard over the radio that the search had been called off. “We mustn’t tell them,” said the team captain. “At least let them go on hoping.” Another passenger, Gustavo Nicolich, disagreed. “Good news!” he shouted. “We’re going to get out of here on our own.”

We normally think of hope as something individuals hold in their heads and in their hearts. But people can build hope together. By creating a shared identity, individuals can form a group that has a past and a brighter future.

“Some people say, ‘If there’s life, there’s hope,’” survivor Roberto Canessa explained. “But for us, it was the opposite: ‘If there’s hope, there’s life.’” During long, cold, and hungry days, the crash survivors prayed together. They planned projects to launch after returning to civilization: one passenger spoke of opening a restaurant, another dreamed of having a farm. Each night, two of the survivors looked at the moon and imagined that right then their parents were looking at the same moon. Another took pictures to record their plight. Many wrote letters to their families declaring their will to live. “To maintain faith at all times, despite our setbacks, we had to become alchemists,” survivor Javier Methol said. “Changing tragedy into a miracle, depression into hope.”

Of course hope by itself isn’t enough. Many of the passengers had hope yet still lost their lives.

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