The Survivor’s Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life

Rounding out our month on survival and preparing for the worst, this week’s book of the week is The Survivor’s Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life by Ben Sherwood.

Author Ben Sherwood studied people who had survived some of the most horrific incidents known to man. He interviewed people who survived plane crashes, mountain lion attack, ejecting from a fighter plane at low altitude, falling off a cruise ship, acid attacks, having a knitting needle pierce their heart, and the Holocaust. And many more. Each chapter includes several stories of someone who survived SOMETHING, interspersed with testimony from the people who have either studied the individual cases or medically treated the survivor.

All of this was done to determine how they did it. How did these people manage to survive, when so many others would have died, or in some cases DID die?

And there was quite a bit of crossover in what Sherwood reported and what we learned from Mike Glover. Several reoccurring themes included the resilience mindset, exposure to stress as a method of prep work, situational awareness, and getting off the X. Sherwood also includes some other factors though, like having a community of family and friends to help pull you back from the brink, and religious faith, the belief that God has some higher purpose for you.

Sherwood believes that everyone is a survivor. Everyone has the capacity to reach deep and make it through the crucible to the other side. But in addition, Sherwood also examines who DOESN’T survive. And it’s not just the obvious, plane crashed, and person was killed on impact. He relates a story of a ferry crash in the North Sea where one of the survivors’ reports seeing people frozen and unable to move. Turns out, you can study the freeze effect…if you’re Johnny-on-the-Spot when catastrophe happens. Of 989 people on board the Estonia when it sank, 852 died. And a solid chunk of those froze in the spot, or lost faith in their own survival.

He discusses the 10-80-10 theory, which says basically 10 percent of people in a live or die situation will handle a crisis in a calm and rational way, and up their chances of surviving. 80 percent will freeze initially. This is where getting off the X makes the difference between life and death. The faster you can break yourself out of a freeze, the faster you can begin to react to the situation. 80 PERCENT OF US fall into this category. The remaining 10 percent do the wrong thing. This can include the ones who go into full freak out, or are unable to break the freeze, or sometimes just can’t believe an emergency is happening and ignore the situation.

He covers the best way to up your chances of surviving, of being able to break the freeze and move in case of emergency. And a lot of it is simple stuff. When flying, pay attention to the emergency safety announcements. Read the flight safety card and plan your exit. For the love of God, if your plane goes down, LEAVE EVERYTHING BEHIND! Apparently, an alarming number of people die when their purse or bag gets caught up on plane hardware as they try to escape. Your STUFF can be replaced. You can’t. And neither can the people who are stuck behind your dumbass struggling with the luggage.

If you’re on a boat, same thing, pay attention to the emergency procedures. If you’re on a bus or a train, make sure you know the closest exit in case of accident. When staying in a hotel, take a minute to study the mandated escape map that is on the back of literally every hotel room door in the country that tells you the closest exit. When you go to public locations, make sure you know where the closest exits are.

Now, when this book was initially released in 2009, there was a website and a quiz you could take to determine your survival profile. Now, 14 years later, that website is defunct, but the results of the quiz, i.e., the profiles, are included in the book.

He has it broken down into five types: The Fighter, The Believer, The Connector, The Thinker, and The Realist. And the types are more or less as they sound. Some people survive by fighting and never quitting. Some survive through their supreme faith in a higher power. Some survive through their connections to their friends and family. Some survive by supreme reason and thinking their way through with extreme focus and turning thought into action. And some survive through recognizing the curveballs life throws at them and adjusting on the fly to the reality around them.

Now, these are predominant survivor types. Most of us are probably a crossover of several of those types, but Sherwood believes each of us have a predominance of one type.

On top of a primary survivor type, we each have a survival tool kit that pulls on several strengths, which Sherwood identified over the course of the book, but summed up in part two. The top strengths are adaptability, resilience, faith, hope, purpose, tenacity, love, empathy, intelligence, ingenuity, flow, and instinct.

So, let’s look at these. Adaptability is actually misunderstood in a survival situation. Darwin’s theory was not actually survival of the fittest. It was “in the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.” Being able to adjust on the fly to an emerging situation is a sign of adaptability.

Resilience. You bend rather than break. When life tries to knock you down, you get back up again. And again. And again.

Faith. This is the god connection again. The key is the absolute belief that God, whoever that may be for you, has a purpose for you. And that your purpose isn’t done yet.

Hope can see you through some of the darkest times. The belief that everything will turn out for the best. This is more than just optimism, which blind optimism can actually turn against you in a survival situation, but the hope for what’s ahead can be what lifts you up when the chips are down.

Purpose, striving toward goals, with a sense of duty and conviction. Sometimes that purpose can just be to keep swimming, like the guy who literally fell off a cruise ship and swam for seventeen hours. That is a long damn time to tread water.

Tenacity. Stubbornness. Persistence and determination to just keep going.

Love. Love of family, love of friends, love of life. Sometimes love is the strongest power.

Empathy. Sometimes what keeps you going is helping others to keep on keeping on.

Intelligence, the ability to reason out a situation and see the logical path forwards.

Ingenuity. Basically, MacGyver. Innovation and invention to hack your way out of the situation.

Flow. Is almost like resilience, except a bit more…buoyant. Rather than bouncing back from adversity, the ability to flow with it means you see the adversity and remain confident that you’ll make it through.

And Instinct…and intuition. You don’t have to think it through, and getting off the X is your strong suit. You trust your gut, and your gut is rarely wrong. Interesting that during this description, Sherwood quotes Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear, which I read last week.

But more than any of the above, how you can survive is to break any situation down into bite sized chunks. First, see your exit, next get there, then escape. Or as Glover says…. set your PACE. Know your primary, alternate, contingency, and emergency action plans.

And at the end of it all…. Sometimes it really is just luck. Luck that the passenger next to you died, when you didn’t. Luck that you were one row behind the emergency exit. Luck that you decided to sleep on the deck rather than in a cabin.

This book is…oddly inspiring. I mean, dark. He drags you through some dark situations that people survived, but the fact they survived is inspiring.

This book was originally reviewed on YouTube on July 23, 2023, but is now available on Rumble and PodBean.