I See The Potential

MGK Radio: The Survivors Club

by Steve on 8, March, 2010

Guest: Ben Sherwood – “The Survivors Club” – Survive & Thrive When Life Knocks You Down

Listen to our interview with Ben Sherwood ~ HERE (or visit the link on the bottom of this post to listen and download the interview)

Earthquakes, tsunamis, mudslides, record breaking blizzards. It almost seems like the natural world has it out for us this year.

Cancer (what doesn’t cause cancer these days), plane crashes, Toyota’s runaway cars, foreclosures, bankruptcy, swine flu, seasonal flu, terrorism, tornados …. oy, the list of things attacking our physical, mental, emotional and financial well-being these days can get a bit overwhelming.

But that’s kind of the point?

When bad things happen – be they natural or not – who lives, survives and thrives and who ….. gets overwhelmed, shuts down or perishes?

As Ben Sherwood describes it in “The Survivors Club”:

In tough times, who bounces back and who doesn’t? Who overcomes adversity and who gives up? And perhaps most important: What do survivors and thrivers know about beating the odds that the rest of us don’t?

Already this year we’ve witnessed unbelievable stories of survival from babies being pulled out of the rubble after being buried alive for 8 days to people escaping tsunami storm surges after surviving a devastating earthquake.

It’s almost impossible to watch all of these stories and not think at least once …. could I do that?

Would I be able to survive being buried alive?

How long could I survive being shut off from all of the things that makes modern society….modern?

That’s exactly what Ben Sherwood thought for years as he watched the regular flow of guests and news stories as a Senior Producer for the “NBC Nightly News” and then later as an Executive Producer for “Good Morning America”. After years of wondering, he went out and tried to figure out the answers to those questions. In the process he met more amazing people with amazing survival stories – attacked by a mountain lion, hit by a 20 ton truck, ejecting at the last second (literally) from a fighter jet flying supersonic (still the only person to do that and live), surviving years in a prisoner of war camp, surviving as a child in a Nazi concentration camp, surviving a raging flesh eating bacteria attack, surviving getting attacked with acid …. well, the stories go on and on.

Out of all of these stories, interviews and research comes his book The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life. Now if all of his research just gave us a book full of wild stories that would be cool enough. However, the real value of the book (and what sets it apart from other amazing stories books) is the fact that Ben didn’t just want to tell stories, he wanted to get down to the “why’s” of survival and maybe even more important to figure out if these lessons could be applied to everyone else in their everyday life.

The book, and our interview, is chock full of great thoughts, advice and tips on what makes a survivor and how to cope and thrive in your daily life, whether that means fighting to pay the bills, survive a layoff, cancer or …. getting a knitting needle shoved through your heart (okay, the odds of that are slim but that’s what Ellin Klor thought too!)