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Ben Sherwood had
intended towrite The Survivors Club:The Secrets and Science That Could Save Your Life at night and on weekends while working as executive producer of ABC’s “Good Morning America,”which he calls “one of the great jobs in journalism.” But the book—and the subject—consumed him, and for several years, traveling around the country to meet with survivors and the people who study them became his full-time job, and his passion.A Masters Series speaker at PCMA’s 2011 Convening Leaders in LasVegas this January, Sherwood recently spoke to Convene
from his home in Los Angeles over the course of an hour, dur- ing which time, he pointed out, “about 170 people in the United States were diagnosed with cancer, 180 people in the United States were victimized by a violent crime, and I can’t even tell you how many thousands of people were admitted to emergency rooms.” Sherwood isn’t an alarmist. Rather, he said, the goal of The
Survivors Club—both the book and the standalone website (www.thesurvivorsclub.org)—is to inspire people with sto- ries about survivors who thrive, and also to help themdevelop the tools to become survivors themselves. Because, Sherwood said, “stuff happens.”
What was it like to speak to all the survivors in yourbook? It’s incredibly humbling to meet men and women who liter- ally have been run over by garbage trucks, left for dead on Mount Everest, violently attacked in Central Park, and mauled by mountain lions,…and to hear their stories, learn their secrets, and find the lessons they offer the rest of us who
On_the_Web
For more information about PCMA 2011 Convening Leaders, visitwww.pcma.org/2011. To learn more about Ben Sherwood and the Survivors Club, visit www.thesurvivorsclub.org.
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have not been similarly challenged. It was very profound. Meeting these incredible people left me much more connected to what is important in life—family, children, friends—and wanting to live life fully. Which is how I define survivorship. It’s not just about getting by, or subsisting. Surviving is about living fully as you define it with the time that you have left.
What would you say was your biggest surprise in writing this book? I came to this subject with a journalist’s skepticism about things that cannot be explained by facts. I ended up really astonished and awed by the power and the role of faith in helping people overcome the most incredible adversity. In cer- tain ways, I ended up feeling almost envious of the people of resolute faith, because of that extra tool—which ended up being the most universal one—that they have in their sur- vival kit. [Faith] makes meek people strong and desperate people calm. It multiplies the strength and power of people who are otherwise knocked down. A lot of people said to me that it must be very depressing to
meet person after person who were trapped underground in coalmines, who had survivedmultiple primary cancers. And the thing is, it was almost magical. I found each story to be nourishing in an unusual way. The other big surprise was that I had thought the people I
would interview would be superheroes, different than you and me—the elite international stars of survival. And I realized that these people are just like us. That’s ultimately where the “Survivors Club” concept comes from:We’re allmembers of