Copyright: 2009
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 978-0-446-58024-3

Ben Sherwood has experienced some of the toughest survival training in the world.  As part of the research for his book, he went through the Aviation Survival Training program in Miramar, CA.  There he learned what it's like to be drug across the ocean by a parachute, how it feels to be pulled up a cable in the rotor blast of a helicopter and what a helicopter crew goes through if their chopper crashes in the water.  For Sherwood though, survival is about more than just military training and accident survival.  This book, The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life is about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.  Cancer survivors, lost loved ones survivors, suicide survivors and a number of other survival situations are explored.  The first rule about survivors according to Sherman: Everyone is a survivor. 

Survivor Tools

If you want to read some incredibly fascinating stories about survivors you should really read the book.  For my own purposes I am going to cut to the chase and list some of the more pertinent and practical points that Sherman addresses in his book.  The following is a list of what he calls the Survivor Tools.  You don't have to have all of these (in fact few people will have all of them) but knowing which ones you have can help you in a crisis.

  • Adaptibility - Able to adjust to new circumstances
  • Resilience - Ability to bend but not break
  • Faith - Trusting that God will look after you
  • Hope - Believe good things will happen, but don't be naive
  • Purpose - Passion for life and dreams to live for
  • Tenacity - Persistence and determination to stick to it, even when others let go
  • Love - Do anything for those you love
  • Empathy - Able to help others strickent by misfortune
  • Intelligence - Problem solving skills
  • Ingenuity - MacGyver-like abilities. Bricolage: the art of building things from whats available
  • Flow - Stay cool when others panic, just go with it
  • Instinct - No panic or obsess, simply act

Survivor Types

Sherwood identifies a number of different types of people who survive. 

  • Fighter - Refuse to surrender no matter what
  • Believer - Trust in God to deliver you from all situations
  • Connector - Draw on the power of relationships to get you through adversity
  • Thinker - Multi-dimensioned intelligence.  Book learning coupled with common sense and street smarts
  • Realist - Take life as it is, you can control some but what you can't you don't stress about

Decisions

One tidbit in the book that I found fascinating was Sherman's discussion of airplane crashes.  In one section he talks about what most people do when a plane crashes.  We usually think "everyone panics" but Sherman's research indicates otherwise.  He describes a situations called behavioral inaction or negative panic.  It is when a crisis occurs and people do nothing.

Why would people do nothing in a crisis situation?  Simply put, they can't comprehend what is happening.  The military calls this phenomenon the dislocation of expectation.  If you look out your window and see the wing of the plane on fire, your brain tries to process the scene by matching it to memories of similar incidents.  Failing to come up with something your brain goes into an endless loop trying to process what is happening. 

Interestingly, I have seen this situation come up watching computer users.  A computer crash or an error in a program is nowhere near as spectacular as an airplane on fire, but people can still have the same reaction.  Their fingers freeze over the keyboard, their mouse aimlessly wanders around the screen and they don't know what to do. 

This also happens when people are in the learning phase of a new program.  Particularly when the application introduces new user interaction paradigms.  Just because a user is familiar with the domain of the application, an unusual UI or a work-flow that doesn't match their mental map of their work can send their brain into the same dead end loop. 

As a developer, particularly a UI developer, my goal is to keep this from happening. I want my users to flow through my application.  In other words, I want transparency such that a user gets his or her work done without even thinking about the application.  In order to do this, I need to make sure I don't present the user with scenarios that don't make sense to them.  When errors occur, I need to either handle them or direct the user to the next steps in handling them.  This is not easy, but it is an essential part of good software design. 

Conclusion

This book is not tremendously deep in terms of understanding the psychology of survivors.  Nor is it intensely practical in that there really isn't a lot of "do this and you will be more likely to survive situation blah."  Instead, it is a delightfully engaging look at the human will to survive and a very insightful look into what it takes to be a survivor.  I thoroughly enjoyed the book and I would recommend it to just about anyone.