Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy

On May 1, 2015, Dave Goldberg died suddenly at age 47 from a cardiac arrhythmia while exercising on a treadmill in Mexico. He was the CEO of SurveyMonkey, a beloved and brilliant man, and the husband of Sheryl Sandberg, then the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook. Their two children were eight and ten years old. Sandberg was forty-five.

What happened in the aftermath of that loss — the grief, the darkness, the slow and painful rebuilding of a life that had been shattered — became the foundation for Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy. Written with psychologist and researcher Adam Grant, the book is simultaneously a memoir of grief, a rigorous examination of the science of resilience and recovery, and a practical guide for anyone who has encountered the worst that life can deliver and is trying to figure out how to live fully again.

The title comes from a moment early in Sandberg’s grief when she asked a friend to help her arrange seating at an event so that Dave could have sat next to her. Her friend gently told her that Dave wouldn’t be there. Sandberg said she knew that — she wanted to feel Dave’s presence in some way. Then, heartbroken, she told another friend that she wanted Dave — that she just wanted Dave. Her friend put his arm around her and said, “Option A is not available. So let’s just kick the shit out of Option B.”

The book is about learning to kick the shit out of Option B. Not about pretending things are fine when they aren’t. Not about rushing grief or performing resilience. But about understanding what actually helps people recover from devastating losses, and about building the capacities — individually and collectively — that make genuine recovery possible.

The Three P’s That Block Recovery

One of the most practically useful frameworks in Option B comes from psychologist Martin Seligman’s research on explanatory style — the habitual way people explain why bad things happen to them. Seligman identified three patterns that, when applied to adversity, tend to prolong suffering and block recovery: personalization, pervasiveness, and permanence.

Personalization is the belief that the adversity is your fault — that there is something about you, something you did or failed to do, that caused the catastrophe. In the context of grief, this often manifests as “if only I had —” thinking: if only I had noticed something was wrong, if only we hadn’t taken that trip, if only I had said what I needed to say. Personalization is painful not because self-examination is wrong but because, applied to losses that were genuinely unforeseeable and outside your control, it generates guilt without insight — suffering without any productive outcome.

Pervasiveness is the belief that the adversity will affect every area of your life — that the loss in one domain means loss in all domains. Sandberg describes how, in the early weeks of her grief, she would think “I can’t do anything right” when a meeting went poorly. The grief of losing Dave bled into her professional identity, her sense of competence, her capacity to function in any domain. Recognizing pervasiveness as a cognitive pattern — as the mind generalizing from one catastrophic loss to a global judgment — creates the possibility of limiting it: the meeting went poorly because grief is cognitively exhausting, not because I’ve lost the capacity to lead.

Permanence is the belief that the pain will last forever — that the devastating reality of right now will be the devastating reality forever. In the acute phase of grief, everything the grieving person knows tells them this is true. They cannot imagine feeling differently. They cannot access any memory of feeling okay. The pain feels permanent because in the present moment it IS present and shows no signs of changing.

The research shows that people who recognize these three patterns in their own thinking — who can say “I’m personalizing, I’m catastrophizing about pervasiveness, I’m assuming permanence” — tend to recover more fully and more quickly than those who accept these narratives without examination. This is not about toxic positivity or refusing to feel what you feel. It is about developing a relationship with your own thoughts that doesn’t simply accept the darkest narratives as fixed truth.

Post-Traumatic Growth

Much of the cultural conversation about trauma focuses on post-traumatic stress — the debilitating symptoms, the flashbacks, the dysregulation that can persist long after traumatic events. This is real and serious and deserves the attention it receives. But Option B devotes substantial attention to a different phenomenon that the research has documented with equal rigor: post-traumatic growth.

Post-traumatic growth is the experience of positive psychological change that can emerge from the struggle with highly challenging life circumstances. It is not the absence of distress — people experiencing post-traumatic growth still feel grief, still have bad days, still mourn what they’ve lost. But alongside that distress, something new can emerge: a greater appreciation for life and its fragility, deeper relationships characterized by authenticity and presence, the discovery of new possibilities that were not visible before the loss, increased personal strength forged in the encounter with what seemed unsurvivable, and a richer spiritual or philosophical life.

The research on post-traumatic growth is carefully distinguished from mere positive reframing. It is not about telling yourself things are fine when they aren’t. It is about the genuine emergence of something new — capacities, insights, relationships, and orientations — from the process of engaging honestly with devastating experience. The growth is possible precisely because the loss is taken seriously rather than managed from a distance.

Sandberg’s account of her own post-traumatic growth is honest about the coexistence of growth and ongoing grief. She did not become someone who was grateful for losing Dave. She became someone who, in the process of surviving that loss, discovered capacities in herself and qualities in her relationships that had not been accessible before. The growth didn’t compensate for the loss. It coexisted with it — an unexpected and unwanted gift from the worst thing that had ever happened to her.

The Role of Community in Recovery

One of the most important themes in Option B is the role of community — friends, family, colleagues, and the broader social environment — in supporting or hindering recovery from loss. Sandberg is remarkably frank about the ways in which well-meaning people made things harder, and the ways in which others, perhaps surprisingly, made things easier.

The most common problem she describes is what she calls “the elephant in the room” dynamic: people avoiding any mention of Dave, acting as if his death hadn’t happened, changing the subject whenever the loss might have been acknowledged. This avoidance, however well-intentioned, communicates something devastating to the grieving person: that their loss is too much, that it makes others uncomfortable, that they should manage their grief privately so as not to burden those around them. The isolation this creates is itself a form of suffering piled on top of the original loss.

The alternative — the approach that actually helps — is simple but requires courage: acknowledging the loss directly. Not with elaborate expressions of sympathy or with advice about how to cope, but with the simple willingness to say “I know you must be thinking about Dave today” or “I miss him too.” The person who says the dead person’s name, who acknowledges that the loss is real and ongoing, who doesn’t change the subject when grief surfaces — that person gives the grieving person permission to be where they actually are rather than performing recovery for the comfort of others.

Sandberg and Grant extend this analysis to organizational contexts — to workplaces, schools, and institutions — noting that the same avoidance dynamics operate at scale in these settings, with significant costs for the people who experience losses while trying to function in professional contexts that have no culturally legitimized space for grief. The workplace that acknowledges employees’ losses, that provides the flexibility and support necessary for people to grieve while continuing to function, is not just a kinder workplace. It is also, the research suggests, a more productive one — because the suppression of grief requires enormous psychological energy that is then unavailable for actual work.

Resilience Is a Skill, Not a Trait

Perhaps the most important conceptual reframing in Option B is the argument about resilience as a skill rather than a fixed trait. The popular conception of resilience — as something you either have or you don’t, as a quality that some people are born with and others simply lack — is both empirically wrong and practically harmful. It is wrong because the research shows clearly that resilience is shaped significantly by circumstances, relationships, skills, and practices that can be cultivated. And it is harmful because it leads people who are struggling after loss to conclude that they simply aren’t resilient enough — that their suffering reflects personal inadequacy rather than the normal response to devastating experience.

The research on resilience identifies specific practices and conditions that support recovery. Social connection — not isolation — is the most consistently supported factor. People who maintain or rebuild relationships after loss recover more fully than those who withdraw. The quality matters as well as the quantity: relationships that allow authentic expression of grief, rather than requiring performance of recovery, are more supportive than those that pressure the grieving person to “move on.”

Self-compassion — the ability to treat yourself with the same kindness you would offer a close friend who was suffering — is another consistently supported factor. The grieving person who is harshly self-critical, who adds shame and self-blame to the original grief, extends and deepens their suffering unnecessarily. The research on self-compassion distinguishes it clearly from self-pity: it is not about wallowing or excusing yourself from the demands of life. It is about responding to your own suffering with basic human kindness rather than contempt.

Narrative — the practice of making meaning from experience by integrating it into a coherent story about your life — is another skill that supports resilience. Not a fixed narrative that minimizes the loss or imposes false meaning on it, but a flexible narrative that can accommodate the reality of what happened while also making room for the possibility of continued life, growth, and even joy. The ability to hold both the tragedy and the possibility simultaneously — to say “this was devastating and I am still here” — is a skill that can be practiced and developed.

Children and Grief

Some of the most moving and practically valuable sections of Option B address the challenge of supporting children through loss — a challenge that Sandberg faced directly with her own children and that she and Grant examine with both personal honesty and research grounding.

The instinct of adults faced with children’s grief is often to protect — to shield children from the full reality of loss, to provide reassurance rather than honest acknowledgment, to redirect attention away from the painful toward the manageable. This instinct is understandable and well-intentioned. It is also, the research suggests, often counterproductive.

Children are not protected from grief by having it minimized or avoided. They are protected from the additional burden of navigating their grief alone — without adult acknowledgment that what they’re feeling is real and valid and shared. When adults tell children that everything will be okay, or avoid talking about the person who has died, or suggest that the grief should be over by now, they add the burden of isolation and confusion to the grief itself. The child who learns that grief must be performed privately, that expressing it upsets the adults around them, faces a harder recovery path than the child who is allowed to grieve openly and supported in doing so.

Sandberg describes learning to talk openly with her children about Dave — to say his name, to encourage them to share their memories, to acknowledge directly that she missed him too. This wasn’t easy. Every reminder of Dave was a fresh stab of grief for her. But the alternative — an enforced silence that communicated that grief was too dangerous to express — would have been worse for all of them. The conversations that hurt were also the conversations that healed.

Finding Joy After Loss

One of the more surprising aspects of Option B is its willingness to address the question of joy — specifically, whether and how genuine joy is possible after devastating loss, and what it means to experience it without guilt. Sandberg describes the particular guilt that comes with moments of happiness after loss: the laugh that cuts itself short, the fun that feels like betrayal, the enjoyment that seems like a statement that things are somehow okay when they fundamentally are not.

The research has a clear answer to this question, and it is more hopeful than grieving people typically believe: joy and grief are not mutually exclusive. The brain can hold both simultaneously. A moment of genuine laughter at a child’s joke is not a statement that the loss doesn’t hurt. It is simply a moment of laughter — a function of a human nervous system that is capable of multiple emotional states at once, and that requires joy as much as it requires grief for full functioning.

The ability to allow joy — to not suppress it with guilt, to not interpret it as evidence of insufficient grief — is itself a form of resilience. It is the capacity to be where you actually are rather than insisting on being somewhere else out of loyalty to the lost. Dave Goldberg, Sandberg writes, would have wanted his children to laugh. He would have wanted his wife to find moments of genuine pleasure in her life. The grief that demands the permanent suspension of joy is not loyalty to the dead. It is a form of self-punishment that serves neither the living nor the memory of those who are gone.

Building Resilience Before Adversity Strikes

One of the most practically important arguments in Option B concerns preparation — the building of resilience capacities before adversity strikes, rather than only in response to it. This is counterintuitive because we tend to think of resilience as something activated by crisis. But like any other capacity, resilience is more available to those who have been building it during the periods of relative calm.

Strong social relationships — the kind that allow authentic expression of vulnerability and difficulty — are more available when they’ve been cultivated over time rather than sought out in crisis. The person who has practiced honest communication in their close relationships, who has allowed themselves to be seen in difficulty and been supported through it, has a relational infrastructure that will hold weight when a catastrophic loss tests it. The person who has maintained only surface-level relationships — the kind that work fine when things are going well but lack the depth for genuine support in crisis — is more isolated precisely when they need connection most.

The practice of acknowledging and working with difficult emotions — rather than suppressing or avoiding them — is also a resilience practice that pays dividends before and after adversity. People who have developed some capacity to sit with discomfort, to notice and name their emotional states, and to respond to them with compassion rather than avoidance, tend to navigate loss more effectively than those for whom any significant emotional experience is threatening.

Sandberg and Grant also discuss the importance of purpose — having something beyond yourself that your life is in service of — as a resilience factor. People who experience loss in the context of a life that feels meaningful and purposeful tend to recover more fully than those who don’t. The loss is no less devastating, but the context in which it occurs provides a foundation to rebuild on. Purpose is not a buffer against grief, but it is a resource for navigating it.

The Collective Dimension: Organizational and Cultural Resilience

The final sections of Option B extend the resilience framework from individuals to organizations and communities — to workplaces, schools, and the broader cultural institutions that shape how we respond to adversity collectively. This is an important extension, because individual resilience doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It is shaped significantly by the environments in which it is exercised.

Organizations that build cultures of psychological safety — in which honest expression of difficulty is not punished, in which admitting struggle is not interpreted as weakness, in which employees are treated as full human beings rather than productive units — create conditions that support individual resilience and the organizational resilience that follows from it. The workplace that supports an employee through devastating loss and returns a more committed, more authentic, more capable employee is making an investment, not just an accommodation.

Educational institutions that teach resilience explicitly — that build programs for developing the social-emotional skills underlying recovery from adversity — are making an investment in the future that pays dividends whenever those students encounter the inevitable difficulties of adult life. The student who has practiced identifying and challenging the three P’s, who has learned to seek support rather than withdraw, who understands that resilience is a skill they can develop rather than a trait they either have or don’t — that student will handle the adversities of their life better than one who never received that education.

A Book for Everyone Who Will Face Adversity

Option B is, ultimately, a book for everyone — because everyone will face adversity, everyone will experience loss, and everyone can benefit from understanding what actually helps people recover and what doesn’t. Sandberg’s willingness to share her own most devastating experience in service of this understanding is an act of extraordinary generosity. The research she and Grant present enriches that generosity with the precision and rigor that transforms personal experience into something more broadly applicable.

The message at the core of the book is simple and powerful: resilience is not something you have or you don’t. It is something you build — through practice, through relationship, through honest engagement with difficulty, and through the slow, patient work of making meaning from what cannot be undone. Option A may not be available. But Option B, engaged fully and honestly, can be more than sufficient. It can be, in its own way, a life worth living.

Dave Goldberg would have been proud of the book his wife wrote. He would have been proud of the children they raised together. And the fact that this book exists — that something good and useful and healing came from the worst thing — is itself a demonstration of the possibility it describes. The kick the shit out of Option B. It turns out the kick is real.

Bouncing Forward, Not Just Back

The popular concept of resilience involves bouncing back — returning to the state you were in before adversity struck, restoring the equilibrium that the loss disrupted. Sandberg and Grant offer a more honest and ultimately more useful frame: bouncing forward. The person who has lost something irreplaceable does not return to what they were before. That person no longer exists. What is possible — and what the most fortunate grievers manage to build — is something new: a self and a life that have been shaped by the loss, that carry its mark, but that are not diminished by it. A self that has grown in some dimensions precisely because of having been forced through something that could not be avoided.

Bouncing forward requires a different orientation than bouncing back. It requires asking not “how do I get back to normal?” but “what is the new normal that I can build from here?” It requires releasing the idea that recovery means restoring what was lost, and embracing the idea that recovery means building something real from what remains. This is harder and slower than restoration would be if it were available. But it produces something that restoration never could: a life that has been tested and found to hold, a self that knows its own depth because it has been forced to discover it.

This is not presented as consolation for loss. No consolation adequately addresses genuine loss. It is presented as the honest description of what the best recovery actually looks like — what it means to not just survive adversity but to live a full life after it. The distinction matters because the goal of bouncing back — which can never be achieved when the loss is irreversible — becomes a source of ongoing suffering if it remains the standard against which recovery is measured. The goal of bouncing forward — building something real from what remains — is one that the research shows is genuinely achievable. And achievable is, ultimately, more useful than ideal.

Gratitude Within Grief

One of the more nuanced psychological observations in Option B is the relationship between grief and gratitude — specifically, the possibility of holding both simultaneously. Sandberg describes moments of profound gratitude that coexisted with profound grief: gratitude for the years she had with Dave, for the children they raised together, for the memories that no loss can take, for the friends who showed up in the darkness. These moments of gratitude didn’t diminish the grief. They coexisted with it in the way that makes full human experience possible — through the nervous system’s capacity to hold complexity.

The research on gratitude in the context of grief and adversity shows that gratitude practices can meaningfully support recovery — not by replacing grief with positivity but by expanding the emotional field within which grief occurs. The person who can simultaneously acknowledge devastating loss and genuine appreciation for what remains has a richer psychological environment to inhabit than the person for whom loss obliterates everything else. This is not toxic positivity. It is the authentic complexity of actual human experience, and it is more available than most grieving people initially believe.

Sandberg writes about teaching her children to express three things they were grateful for at the Sabbath dinner table each week — a practice that she continued in the weeks after Dave died, not because everything was fine but because the practice itself was one of the ways they stayed connected to the life they were still living. The gratitude didn’t erase the empty chair. But it kept the other chairs from emptying too.

The Legacy We Build

Option B also raises the question of legacy — of how we honor those we’ve lost by the lives we build in their absence. Sandberg describes the ways she has tried to embody what she valued most about Dave in her own work and parenting. She describes the Dave Goldberg Scholarship Fund that she and her family established to support research in social science. She describes the ways she has tried to be the partner and parent that his loss made her understand she wanted to be.

Legacy in this sense is not about grandiose monuments or institutional naming rights. It is about the small, daily choices to live in ways that are worthy of the person whose absence has taught you what matters. It is about using the clarity that loss sometimes brings — the stripping away of trivialities that comes from direct encounter with what can’t be recovered — to live more deliberately and more fully in the time you have.

This is, ultimately, the deepest message of Option B: that adversity, engaged honestly and supported well, can produce not just survival but genuine transformation — a life more fully inhabited, relationships more authentically held, and a self more honestly known. That is not a comfortable promise. It requires accepting that the worst things that happen to us can also be the source of some of our most important growth. But it is an honest one. And honest, even when it’s hard, is what we actually need.

The Science of Meaning-Making

Psychologist Viktor Frankl, writing from his experience in Nazi concentration camps, argued that the last human freedom is the freedom to choose one’s attitude toward unavoidable suffering. This idea — that meaning can be found even in the most devastating circumstances — is not a comfortable one, and it can be misused as pressure on grieving people to “find the silver lining” when what they need is simply to be allowed to grieve. But the research that Sandberg and Grant cite suggests that the capacity to make meaning from loss — not to explain it away, not to justify it, but to integrate it into a coherent understanding of one’s life — is one of the most powerful predictors of recovery.

The meaning-making process is not instantaneous and it is not uniform. People find meaning in different ways, on different timelines, through different practices and relationships. Some find meaning through religious or spiritual frameworks that provide a context for understanding suffering. Others find meaning through the relationships that loss deepens and authenticates. Others find meaning through work — through dedicating their professional lives to addressing the issues that their loss made vivid and urgent. And many find meaning through the book they write, the scholarship they establish, or the organization they build in the name of someone they loved and lost.

The common element in successful meaning-making is not the specific content of the meaning but the act of meaning-making itself — the turning toward experience rather than away from it, the engagement with the question “what does this mean for my life?” rather than the attempt to manage the question into silence. That turning toward is not natural or easy. It requires courage. But it is available to anyone willing to exercise it. And the research suggests it is worth doing.

What You Can Do Now

For readers who are currently grieving, Option B offers the enormous gift of validation — the confirmation that what you’re feeling is normal, that recovery is possible and takes as long as it takes, that you are not alone, and that the path forward, however unclear it looks right now, exists. It also offers specific, research-based guidance on the practices and conditions that support recovery: maintaining social connection rather than withdrawing, practicing self-compassion rather than self-criticism, noticing and challenging the three P’s when they appear, allowing joy rather than suppressing it with guilt, and making meaning over time through whatever practices work for you.

For readers who are not currently grieving but who will be — which is everyone — Option B offers both preparation and a better understanding of how to support others. The knowledge of what helps and what doesn’t, what to say and what to avoid, how to be present with someone’s pain without trying to fix it or avoid it — this knowledge is valuable before it’s urgently needed. The friend who has read this book is better equipped to be the friend someone needs after their world falls apart.

And for everyone, the book offers a reorientation toward adversity itself — an understanding that the worst things that can happen to us, however devastating, are not simply destruction. They are also, potentially, the raw material for something genuine, something hard-won, something that could only have come from being willing to go through the fire rather than around it. That is not a consolation. But it is a truth. And truth, even when it’s painful, has a way of making us more capable of the life we’re trying to live.

Option B. Kick the shit out of it. You are more capable of that than you know. And you are not doing it alone.

The Research Behind the Recovery

Adam Grant’s contribution to this book — which might easily have been simply a grief memoir — is the rigorous research framework that transforms personal experience into broadly applicable guidance. Grant is a psychologist at the Wharton School whose work on motivation, giving, and organizational behavior has made him one of the most cited researchers in his field. His collaboration with Sandberg is not merely editorial: he brings decades of research on human psychology, resilience, and behavior change to bear on questions that her personal experience makes urgent and vivid.

The research they draw on includes studies of bereaved parents, widows and widowers, cancer survivors, veterans returning from combat, and children who have experienced abuse or neglect. It includes experimental research on the effects of social support, self-compassion, expressive writing, gratitude practices, and meaning-making interventions. And it includes Sandberg’s own experience — not as an n of 1 anecdote, but as a close, honest observation of what the research says is true actually playing out in a specific human life under real conditions.

This combination — the rigor of systematic research and the authenticity of personal experience — is what makes Option B more than either a grief memoir or a psychology textbook. It occupies the productive middle ground between these forms, using each to enrich and validate the other. The result is a book that is both intellectually credible and humanly true — that speaks to both the mind that wants to understand and the heart that simply needs to be heard.

That is, ultimately, what the best books about human resilience do. They make us feel less alone. They give us language for what we’re experiencing. They provide evidence that recovery is possible and tools for pursuing it. And they remind us that the capacity to face what we cannot change and build something real from it is among the most distinctly human things we do. Option B does all of this. It deserves to be read — carefully, honestly, and with whatever hope you can bring to it.

Sheryl Sandberg could have kept her grief private. She could have processed it quietly and returned to public life without sharing what that process looked like. She chose instead to make her suffering useful — to turn her most devastating experience into something that might help other people through theirs. That choice is, itself, an act of resilience. And the book it produced is an act of love — for Dave Goldberg, for her children, and for anyone else who is trying to figure out how to live fully when the life they planned is no longer available.