Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg talks about returning to work after her husband’s death, and Wharton management and psychology professor Adam Grant discusses what the research says about resilience. In this joint interview, they talk about how to build resilience in yourself, your team, and your organization. They’re the authors of the new book, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast, from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael.

In the spring of 2015, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg lost her husband. Dave Goldberg died suddenly from a heart condition while the couple were on vacation.

Sandberg struggled for a while, at home and at work, coming to terms with the grief and pain. And also with how it affected her relationships with friends and coworkers, including her boss, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

She posted a long essay about her suffering and sense of isolation on Facebook. And she reached out to Wharton professor Adam Grant to learn about what the research says about resilience. Together, they wrote a new book called: Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy.

To hear about how to build resilience in yourself, your team, and your organization, HBR editor-in-chief Adi Ignatius interviewed the two coauthors. He talked to Sandberg and Grant together at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. And he started by asking Sandberg why she wanted to write a book from such a traumatic experience.

SHERYL SANDBERG: Losing Dave’s the hardest thing I’ve ever been through. It’s an unimaginable thing to find your husband, you know, on the floor of a gym and later realize he’s dead, have to sit down on a couch and tell your children their father died. And I think in those early days, in those weeks, in those months, anyone who’s been through something like this knows you feel like you’re just not going to get through it like you’re not going to survive the minutes, the weeks, the days, the months.

And so I asked, you know, Adam, my friend and, you know, great psychologist and researcher, what are the things I could do to help us get through this? And what I learned through this is that you know, resilience is not something we have a fixed amount of, but it’s really something we build. And we can build it in ourselves, in our children, in our organizations, in our communities. And we learned that by looking at the research and also looking at so many examples of so many amazing people that have faced all kinds of resilience. And so Option B is our attempt to share what we’ve learned.

ADI IGNATIUS: So I guess, you know, given that you are, you know, a very public person, you know, by choice or otherwise, you are. I mean, to what extent did you feel you either had a responsibility or maybe an opportunity to kind of talk about these issues?

SHERYL SANDBERG: After Dave died, you know, it wasn’t just the overwhelming grief of each moment. It was also this feeling of real isolation. That before that I had, you know, pretty friendly and very open relationships with my colleagues, with my neighbors, with my friends. And when I lost Dave, I also lost the ease with which I interacted with people. You know, I came back to work after the Jewish period of shiva, the Jewish period of mourning ends, and I felt like most people were looking at me like a ghost, and they were afraid to say anything. And as the days went on, I felt increasingly isolated, increasingly alone in this. Even though so many other people have been through grief, but people don’t talk about it.

And so 30 days in, which this period of shloshim, which is the mourning period for a spouse, ended, I started writing this post. And I wasn’t sure I was going to share it or not. But it was about how I felt. And the process of trying to be in the world after a loss like this. And then, you know, I just said, OK, this isn’t going to make things worse, and it might make them a little bit better, and I just hit post and posted publically.

And what happened after that post really helped me, because my friends and colleagues started talking about it. And maybe even more importantly or movingly, the responses of other people on the post just blew me away. You know, there was a man who had lost his wife right before their third anniversary, and he talked about honoring her life by trying to help women succeed in her field. There was a mother who lost one twin and was in neonatal intensive care who talked about trying to find the strength to give that surviving twin a great life. And strangers, friends, people kept posting support for each other.

And I think that was the path to writing the book, because what I found was that exploring resilience with that, and looking at the research, looking at other people’s stories, and sharing that helped kick this ginormous elephant out of the room.

ADI IGNATIUS: How has this changed how you operate as a leader, you know, having exposed yourself, exposed your feelings, exposed your vulnerability? How does that change how you interact with people who report to you?

SHERYL SANDBERG: So before this, when anyone was going through a personal hardship — you know, I’m lucky, at Facebook we are able to give our employees tremendous flexibility — I would always say things like, “Take whatever time you need,” or “Don’t worry if you can’t do this project on time, how could you with everything you’re going through?” And I still say that. That’s really important, to give people as much flexibility as you can. But now I do something else, which is, I also say when they come back to work, if they contribute well, “That was a great contribution.”

Because I realized when I came back to work, I was so overwhelmed with grief, I could barely get through a meeting. And so when people said to me, “Well, of course, you can’t really contribute, look at all you’re going through,” my self-confidence crumbled even further. I felt that I lost Dave and I was going to lose my ability to say a coherent sentence, much less do my job. And so counterintuitively, one of the ways people helped, and especially [Facebook CEO] Mark [Zuckerberg], is when I came back and I said, “Oh my God, I made a total fool of myself because I rambled, I cried, I couldn’t remember where anyone worked,” stories I share in the book, Mark said, “You actually made a really good point. Thank you for that.” Or, “I don’t think that’s right. I think you really helped us today.” And that actually was super important.

And so now when colleagues are facing adversity, I still, “How much time do you need? Take what you need.” Try not to put too much pressure on them. But I also help build them up when they contribute, take that extra step of noticing it and helping to rebuild their confidence. Because when you have tragedy in one area of your life, the secondary loss of it bleeding into the other areas of your life is so real. And at work, our colleagues can really help change that.

ADI IGNATIUS: So is your view for anyone facing a similar thing that, you know, they should basically get back to work as soon as possible? Or you know, engage as quickly as possible? I mean, you’re talking about finding yourself again because, or you know, coming to where you are now because of opening up, because of supportive colleagues. You know, so I’m sort of hearing, that’s what one should do.

SHERYL SANDBERG: Yeah, no. Absolutely not. There’s no one way to grieve, and there’s no one path, and the timing for one person is not the timing for another. We share a story in the book of a woman who went back to work, I think, the next day after her husband died, and felt very judged by her colleagues. You know, she just didn’t want to be home. She could not be home. And she just needed somewhere else to go. I took what was the shiva period, and then came back to work, but only in the hours my children were at school. So a much more limited schedule. Other people may need months. They may need even longer. Everyone has to find their own path.

It’s also true on how much sharing you want to do. I found my way to sharing much more openly than I would have expected, through really trying to break through the isolation. But then through the experience writing this book, some people don’t want to share. And we have to respect everyone’s timing and everyone’s feelings. But once people come back to work, helping them realize that they can still contribute, not writing them off because they’re sick, not writing them off because their husband died, can be an incredibly important thing to do.

ADAM GRANT: I had stumbled into research on this a decade ago, finding that when companies had assistance programs where, you know, if your house was destroyed by a tornado or if you were, you know, in a position where you had to care for somebody who was very ill, when the company provided some financial support, some time off, it actually paid dividends in that people felt like they belong now to a more caring company. They took pride in their employer as a really human place to work. And they were more committed as a result. And so I think there’s a real case to be made for organizations to step up here.

SHERYL SANDBERG: And I think we’ve learned that if you give employees the support they need, both structurally in your policies, but also individually as colleagues, it makes the hugest difference. I never would have gotten through this without Mark [Zuckerberg]. Mark was at my house the day I came home from Mexico and told my children. Mark literally planned Dave’s funeral. And Mark was with me every step of the way.

When I came back to work and felt like I was a ghost and no one would talk to me, I took refuge in his conference room. He’s where I went to close the door, cry, and say, “I don’t know how to do this, how to get through this.” And providing that kind of support to our colleagues, I think we think about providing that kind of emotional support to our friends, and that is super important with our friends and family. But we can also do it at work. And it makes us closer to the people we work with. And I think it builds a much stronger organization.

ADI IGNATIUS: Talk more about that phenomenon where people don’t know what to say, and say nothing, or say the wrong thing.

SHERYL SANDBERG: I think before I lost Dave, I might say I was sorry to a colleague once who got diagnosed with cancer or lost a spouse, but if I brought it up again I thought I was reminding them. Losing Dave made me realize how absurd that was. You could not remind me that I had just lost Dave. I remembered that. And so acknowledging it, even not just that week, but the month later, “Hey, I know this a brutal time for you and your kids, how are you?” Made such a big difference. Telling people you’re in it with them. You know, the people who said to me, “You’re going to get through this,” that’s very kind. But what is way kinder is, “We’re going to get through this.”

And I think the third thing is, the very specific acts of helping. I think what I used to do before, and a lot of people do, is the, “Can I do anything?” That’s a nice offer, but it actually puts the burden on the person you’re trying to help to think about what might help them, or ask for it, which is super hard. Because you feel so overwhelmed with sadness, how could anyone, you know, what do you ask for? How does it make it better?

Dan Levy works here [at Facebook] and his son was in the hospital, was very sick and then unfortunately died. And when he was in the hospital, he had a friend who texted him, “What do you not want on a burger?” Not, “Do you need anything?” But, “What do you not want on a burger?” Another friend showed up in the hospital lobby and said, “I’m in the lobby for a hug whether you come down or not.” The act of doing something specific is incredibly helpful, and certainly a lesson I learned that I needed to do much better.

ADAM GRANT: And Sheryl, to that point, I can’t help but think of the colleague and friend of ours who was diagnosed with cancer not long ago, and watching the way that you stepped up there I just thought was extraordinary. Where you know, she has this terrible diagnosis, it’s completely by surprise, and instead of doing the usual platitude of, “You’re going to be OK,” which you just can’t know, you said, “You know, we’re in this together, I’m here with you.” And then you showed up and checked in every single week.

SHERYL SANDBERG: Yeah, I think before this, when someone was going through something hard, I, with the best of intentions, as I’m sure other people had the best of intentions for me, would try to make them feel better by saying, “It’s going to be OK.” That is not acknowledging the situation they’re in now.

A colleague here was diagnosed with cancer after Dave died. What I said to her was not, “You’re going to be OK.” It was, “I don’t know if you’re going to be OK. And I know you don’t either. But I want you to know that you’re not going to go through this alone. I am here and I will go through it with you.” And then, rather than not saying it again, waiting for her to bring it up if she needed something, I would bring it up pretty continually and say, “I’m thinking of you, how’s it going today?”

ADI IGNATIUS: So one of the things you talk about is, so resilience, you know, probably literally means snapping back to where you were before. But you talk in the book about post-traumatic growth. That’s pretty interesting. Can you sort of talk a little bit about that?

ADAM GRANT: Yeah, I actually learned about this when I was an undergrad. The research was just starting to take off, and the psychologists Tedeschi and Calhoun, who you know, kind of put this on the map, were really surprised. They were working with parents who had lost a child, which I think is literally the worst thing that anybody could go through. And they found that these parents were, you know, consistently depressed, feeling despair, had ongoing anxiety, and really had a difficult time moving forward with their lives.

And yet, along with the sadness, a lot of the parents said, there are some positive changes in my life that came from this horrible, horrible experience which I would never wish on anyone, and I wish I could undo. But you know, that some things happened as a result of this tragedy that, you know, that did help me not just bounce back, but bounce forward. And you know, at first it was like, what, wait, I’m sorry, bounce forward? Like, you just went through something awful. It’s enough to bounce back, now I have to grow, too? But actually the, you know, the parents are very articulate in describing specific ways that they had gained since, you know, surviving something so unimaginable.

And they went on then, the whole community of researchers actually, to try to figure out, you know, what does it mean to grow from trauma? So a lot of people felt stronger. And they said, I got through this, I can get through anything. And now the things that used to stress me out don’t freak me out as much, right? Like, go ahead, move my cheese. It’s all right. There was appreciation. People found gratitude, knowing how much worse things could be. There were new and deeper relationships where people said, you know, I’ve been able to bond with people in life, having survived something together that I couldn’t have before. I’ve connected with new people because of this.

And then there was a sense of meaning and new possibilities, that people walked away with a renewed sense of purpose, that I have to make something of my life. And that I maybe now see opportunities or, you know, options that I hadn’t considered before. And I remember, Sheryl, we talked about this, it wasn’t until a few months in you had noticed that you’d grown in some of these ways without ever meaning to.

SHERYL SANDBERG: I would absolutely trade it all back to have Dave back. But when trauma happens, we can grow from it. I’m lucky that I have close friends and family, and even before this, but I’m way closer to my friends and family than I was, because I needed them so much. I needed help, I still need help getting through the holidays, getting through just the bad days, making sure my kids would be OK, I would be OK. Gratitude is probably, I think, the deepest lesson of this.

I remember early on Adam said to me, “Well you know, things could be a lot worse.” And I said to him, “Are you kidding? Dave just died suddenly, how could things be worse?” And Adam said, “Dave could have had that same cardiac arrhythmia driving your children.” The thought that I could have lost all three of them had never occurred to me. And immediately when you said that, I felt way better. Like, oh my God, my kids are healthy and happy and alive, I’m OK. And so it’s very counterintuitive to try to recover from tragedy by thinking about an even worse tragedy, but it’s a very powerful lesson because it gets us to gratitude for what is still good in our lives. I definitely think that I took just life for granted before.

ADI IGNATIUS: So how do we teach people to feel that all the time?

SHERYL SANDBERG: Pre-traumatic growth. We really care about this.

ADAM GRANT: This is one of the really fun things about working together, is like, so rarely do we get to juxtapose social science against people’s lived experiences. And Sheryl said, “Well, we have post-traumatic growth, why don’t we have pre-traumatic growth?” And I was like, “Pre-what?” I think this is such a great concept because it is really unfortunate that people have, you know, have to learn this stuff through events that we would never, ever want to have to face.

SHERYL SANDBERG: My friend Katie, after Dave died — and she was close to both of us — she started writing long letters to her friends when their birthdays happened telling them why she loved them and appreciated them. Really long, detailed letters. And some of her friends started copying that. So that is deepening your relationships, it’s finding meaning, and it’s really finding gratitude before the trauma. I would give anything to go back and be able to experience life with Dave, realizing how precious every minute was. Something I don’t think I fully appreciated before. I also think we build resilience and grow to prepare for whatever comes.

ADAM GRANT: And you know, I think part of what’s interesting is, after Sheryl coined this term of pre-traumatic growth, I started to see it all around. That we all know people who have been able to find that kind of appreciation without having to suffer tragedy. And I think if we look to those people in our lives, it’s a lot easier to find that growth.

ADI IGNATIUS: Is there a toolkit for resilience?

SHERYL SANDBERG: So I think there are things we can do, both as individuals and as organizations.

ADAM GRANT: Yeah, I think as individuals, one of the things that’s been powerful for us is thinking about learning from failure. That’s really the only way that we can build our resilience. I think, I had a chance to learn this when I was in grad school. I was terrified of public speaking, and I had to get ready to go and teach. And so, how am I going to learn, how am I going to get feedback? I started volunteering to give guest lectures for other people’s classes. And this was really uncomfortable, but I then said, all right, if I’m going to learn from this, I need to get feedback.

So I started giving out feedback forms. At the end of every guest lecture I gave, I had students write everything they would do differently, everything they disliked. And it was really unpleasant to read all the feedback. But I learned really quickly what my systematic mistakes were. And then I was able to set goals to try and improve upon that. And then I tried to bring that into my own classes when I taught and really seek that feedback regularly.

And I guess at some level it’s something I learned from early days in sports. I had a coach who would give me feedback on every single thing I did as a springboard diver. And you know, moving into the workplace it’s like, we all have a coach in sports and we expect somebody to be there critiquing us and helping us improve, and if we could bring that same kind of openness to our jobs, I think it’s a really critical starting point.

SHERYL SANDBERG: We’ve tried really hard to learn from failures, learn from mistakes, and build it into our culture. Every year our management team takes a trip to an organization we can learn from. We know we’re a young company and we have a lot to learn. And one year we took, Mark and I took everyone to Marine Corps training at Quantico. And we did these exercises, you know, things that seem easy but are hard in the moment, like turning on and off a faucet at a strict command. Hoisting large things over walls. And what we learned there is that, every exercise they do, whether it’s in the field for real or just an exercise, they do full debriefs of everything that went wrong.

And I think before this I always wanted, you know, people to take responsibility at work. If I did something wrong, I would own it, other people. But doing a full-on debrief step-by-step of what went wrong felt like piling on. And now I learned, we learned there, and I really learned that doing those debriefs and building it into the culture, it feels expected, and then you just become a more learning organization. And that’s been really, really important. I think it was in the research for the book I learned that that’s actually building organizational resilience, but something we’ve focused on for many years.

ADI IGNATIUS: You know, learning from failures. Everybody would say, yes. And yet probably people don’t do it very well, or a lot of companies still don’t do it very well. So I guess the first question is, what is it that we don’t understand about it, and why are we doing it wrong?

ADAM GRANT: The simple answer is ego. We all know that failure, if we treat it as a learning opportunity, it can make us better. I don’t know anyone who wants to fail in the moment. I don’t know anyone who deliberately sets out to say: “You know what? I’m going to screw up as badly as I can, just so I learn.”

And so when we fail, it tends to catch us off guard. We usually expected to succeed. And then we get into a mode of trying to defend both our egos as well as our images, right, to prove to ourselves and other people that we’re not stupid. And I think that stands in the way of improving and making progress. And it’s been really interesting to look at the evidence on what you do about that. I think the first thing that you do is, you create a culture where people talk openly about their failures and mistakes. And maybe even celebrate some of that, if you know, if people learn from them or if they were willing to own up to them quickly. That can be a behavior to reward.

SHERYL SANDBERG: I spend a lot of time at Facebook talking about hard conversations, telling each other the truth. You know, how do you sit down with someone and say, “Here’s how I can work with you better,” or better yet ask someone, “What can I do to make you better able to work with me?” And again, it’s one of those things everyone says they do, everyone says they want feedback, but it’s actually hard to take feedback well. One of the great ideas that Adam brought, I think, to the book was from the research on giving yourself feedback on how you take feedback.

ADAM GRANT: Yeah, meta-feedback. This is fun, right? So you just go in assuming that you’re not going to like being criticized. And you say, look, OK, I can’t undo the error I made, or the poor performance that, you know, is going to be on stage here. What I can do is, I can evaluate my reaction to that, and I can say look, even if I failed in this really important situation, I can try to not fail in how well I take the feedback. And so I actually teach this in the classroom. When I work with executives, I ask them to score not only their performance in a given episode but also score how well they took the feedback on their performance.

ADI IGNATIUS: So resilient companies, OK, they learn from failure. But there’s also sort of adaptability necessity. How do you instill that?

ADAM GRANT: I don’t think you can write a playbook for any of this stuff, right? I think that resilience is about the speed and strength of your response to adversity. And so the best thing you can do is build routines that might be applicable in an unexpected situation.

I found SpaceX really interesting on this. We sat down with Elon Musk and he said, you know, SpaceX failed over and over again, and they had, you know, a series of big problems. And one of the things he did was, he asked people for a list of the ten biggest launch risks. And it turned out one of the explosions was caused by number 11. So the lesson here is, always ask for top 11. But I think that’s an example of a routine, right, that you set in place. And high-reliability organizations know how to do this. They exhaustively make lists of things that could go wrong, they pre-check them, and then every time they have unexpected failures, they expand that list. And I think that those kinds of routines are really all we can do.

ADI IGNATIUS: One’s odds of surviving a catastrophe go up enormously with even sort of minimal preparation, that there is a sort of, you know, reading the card in the seat pocket of an airplane increases your chance should something happen.

SHERYL SANDBERG: I think being a learning organization in the first place makes a really big difference. So Mark very famously does these big challenges every year, big challenges. “I’m going to learn Chinese.” It’s kind of hard to announce you’re going to learn Chinese while being a CEO of a company, and then he’s actually done it publically. You know, he doesn’t speak Chinese perfectly, and he didn’t wait to speak Chinese perfectly to do it publically or say that. But he set a big, audacious goal, a goal that he could fail at.

He actually did quite well, I think to everyone’s shock and his own. But Mark says pretty often that there’s two ways companies fail. They can fail by not hitting their plan, or they can fail by hitting their plan but the plan wasn’t ambitious enough. And he never wants us to fail the second way. So it is the discipline of setting really ambitious goals, making it safe for people to debrief and own failure and get feedback, and then being willing to learn and correct and prepare.

ADAM GRANT: And just seeing that pervade the culture, too. The number of times I’ve heard you say, Sheryl, like, “If Mark can learn Chinese, I can definitely do this.” That really matters.

SHERYL SANDBERG: Yeah, people say that a lot. “This is really hard, but it’s not as hard as learning Chinese, and Mark just did that.”

ADI IGNATIUS: HBR has written a lot about resilience over the years, and trying to figure out what it means, and Daniel Goldman and others have, you know, some of the things they’ve talked about is, you know, needing to schedule or to take unscheduled breaks. To you know, this is partly to avoid sort of burnout but to be a resilient person you need to deprogram. You know, whether it’s breaking away from technology, or breaking away from routine, that that would be a way to sort of build, increase the odds of individuals in the company being resilient.

ADAM GRANT: I think there’s certainly a lot of evidence to speak to that. I think that we tend to define breaks too narrowly though. There’s some research I love by Kim Elsbach which actually shows that one of the best breaks you give people is mindless work. So if you think about being an overstretched, you know, knowledge worker, for example. Or you know, working in tech, right, where the world is just getting more dynamic at an accelerating pace, one of the things you can do is work on tasks that are rote and repetitive, which starts to free up your mind to think creatively, which gives you a chance to re-center.

And I think one of the mistakes that we make systematically is, as people advance, as they have more complicated skills, we try to take all of those repetitive tasks off their plate, when in fact the switching between really challenging creative problems and then being able to say, you know what, like, the rhythm of entering data in a spreadsheet for a few minutes, until we have AI that can do all that for us, is actually something that will help me recharge. And I think that that kind of structuring of a workday is something I’d love to see more companies working on.

ADI IGNATIUS: You know, a lot of the things we publish too have said humor is sort of the key to resilience. You know, how in the world do you access humor in these sort of darkest moments?

SHERYL SANDBERG: I think humor is huge. Nell Scovell, who wrote Lean In with me, was an editor on this book, was a TV comedy writer, and she had four siblings. And at her mother’s funeral, she stood up with an envelope and said, “I have in this envelope the name of mom’s favorite child.” You know, in those really, really, really dark moments, being able to laugh, even for a second, particularly about the event itself, is a huge stress release, and it goes against permanence. It makes you feel like: Oh my God, it’ll be OK.

I also think humor, if it’s done well, can be a great tool in organizations to make points. I remember Marne Levine, when she first started working at Facebook she was head of global public policy, and she was in a meeting with someone who kept asking her questions, kept asking her questions. And what she really needed was the person to go write the congressional letter we needed to send.

And so with a huge smile on her face she said, “Here’s the thing. I’m going to answer all your questions, but right now the only thing that’s going to keep me from having a heart attack on the floor is if you get up and go write that letter, and then come back and ask questions.” And she did it as a joke. You know, and had she done it without the humor, it wouldn’t have gone down as well. And I have seen people, both in personal context and in professional context, communicate something with humor that can be very, very effective.

ADI IGNATIUS: You guys talk in the book about how to help your kids be resilient, you know, helping them to understand their strengths and who they are and how they can share that, and other things. You know is that a model for helping your employees be resilient?

ADAM GRANT: Yeah, I think so, in some ways. Right? With the caveat that parenting is way harder than leadership, as anyone who’s been both a parent and a leader can attest, right Sheryl?

SHERYL SANDBERG: Oh my God, yeah.

ADAM GRANT: One of the drivers for resilience for kids is mattering. Sociologists define mattering as the belief that other people notice you, care about you, and rely on you. It’s the answer to the question, like, do I have significance in the world? Do I make a difference to others? And when kids answer that question no, the consequences can be pretty devastating. Right? Deviant behavior, antisocial behavior, aggression. And when that answer is a yes, you see a very different kind of child.

And I think this is something we can think about as every leader’s responsibility, right? To make every single one of my employees know that they matter. To show that, you know, that they’re noticed. That’s I think one of the reasons that management by walking around has been popular for as long as it’s been, to make every employee feel valued, right? So that they know they’re not just valued for their work, but they’re appreciated as human beings. And to also feel that they’re relied on, right?

I think a lot of times leaders are afraid to ask for help. And the reality is that people want to know that their contributions can have an impact. And sometimes one of the most powerful things a leader can do is say, “I don’t know the answer here,” or, “I’m kind of stuck on this.” And that level of vulnerability is a way to show people just how much they really do matter. And it’s something we could probably all apply a little more.

ADI IGNATIUS: When Lean In came out, and that was obviously a hugely successful book, you know, there were a small number of people who said, yeah, but you know, Sheryl’s life is just different from anybody else’s, and this doesn’t relate to me because I’m not her. You know, are you anticipating what the small number of critics are going to say about this new book?

SHERYL SANDBERG: I know how fortunate I am in many aspects, certainly not in Dave’s death, but in so many other aspects of my life. I have a great job, a great boss, resources very few people have. Option B draws on not just my story, but the research and stories of so many people overcoming all kinds of adversity.

I think there are things that we can all do to build resilience in ourselves, but also to build resilience in each other. That one of the main lessons of the book is that none of us go through this alone, and that we need to support other people through this. We need to build resilience in our companies, we need to have the right policies for our employees, we need to build resilience in our children. We need to help people of all circumstance overcome the things in their life.

It is definitely true that adversity and hardship are not evenly distributed. People who are underprivileged have more to grieve and have more to overcome. And that’s why I think as friends, as employers, in our public policies we need to do more. And that’s a really big lesson of Option B.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Sheryl Sandberg is the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook. Adam Grant is a professor at The Wharton School. They’re the authors of the new book, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy. They were interviewed by Harvard Business Review editor-in-chief Adi Ignatius.

HBR is on Facebook. We’re on LinkedIn, and on Twitter at HarvardBiz. And there’s always more to read at HBR.org.

Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael.