the Ripening

The following are my favorites quotes from Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant's Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy.

Resilience is the strength and speed of our response to adversity -- and we can build it. It isn't about having a backbone. It's about strengthening the muscles around our backbone.
Not everything that happens to us happens because of us.
Friendship isn't only what you can give, it's what you're able to receive.
On my fourth day on skis, my mother and I took a wrong turn and wound up on a difficult run. I looked down the mountain, panicked, and fell into the snow, knowing it would be impossible for me to get down alive. My mom told me not to look at the bottom but instead just take ten turns. She coaxed me to get up and then helped me count ten turns out loud. After those ten turns, I did another ten. Then another. Eventually, I found my way to the bottom.
The costs of placing a four-year-old and an infant in child care exceed annual median rent payments in every state.
Post traumatic growth could take five different forms: finding personal strength, gaining appreciation, forming deeper relationships, discovering more meaning in life, and seeing new possibilities.
When we focus on others, we find motivation that is difficult to marshal for ourselves alone.
When we look for joy, we often focus on the big moments. Graduating from school. Having a child. Getting a job. Being reunited with family. But happiness is the frequency of positive experiences, not the intensity.
"How we spend our days," author Annie Dillard writes, is "how we spend our lives."
A friend of mine who lost his wife of forty-eight years right after his seventieth birthday told me that to fight despair he needed to shake up his routine. Doing the same things he'd done with his wife left him yearning for his old life, so he made a concerted effort to seek out new activities.
Whether you see joy as a discipline, an act of defiance, a luxury, or a necessity, it is something everyone deserves. Joy allows us to go on living and loving and being there for others.
When parents treat failures as an opportunity to learn rather than an embarrassment to be avoided, kids are more likely to take on challenges. When a kid struggles at math, instead of saying, "Maybe math isn't one of your strengths, " [Carol] Dweck recommends, "The feeling of math being hard is the feeling of your brain growing."
Resilience is not just built in individuals. It is built among individuals -- in our neighborhoods, schools, towns, and governments. When we build resilience together, we become stronger ourselves and form communities that can overcome obstacles and prevent adversity. Collective resilience requires more than just shared hope -- it is also fueled by shared experiences, shared narratives, and shared power.
It's actually a sign of strength to recognize when you don't have the skills to do something -- and reach out for help. Wanting to improve is not a sign of weakness.
As Martin Luther King Jr. said, "Let no man pull you so low as to hate him."
Of the hundreds of answers, most had one thing in common: the majority of regrets were about failures to act, not actions that failed.
One of my favorite posters on our office walls reads, "Nothing at Facebook is someone else's problem."

Notes & Quotes: Option B by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant