Book Review: The Adversity Advantage

I stumbled upon this book by accident. It was sitting on a library shelf for new books, and when I saw one of the authors to be Erik Weihenmayer, I just couldn’t walk by.

In case the name doesn’t ring a bell, Erik Weihenmayer is the only blind person to have ever climbed the highest peaks on the seven continents. To my even greater surprise, Erik didn’t stop there. He also tried his hand in paragliding and skiing.

In Adversity Advantage, Erik gives a rather brief overview of each assent: both failures and successes along the way to the top. The stories are interesting and highly educational.

If Erik wrote this book by himself, it would’ve been priceless. His co-author, Paul Stoltz, dragged in his Adversity Quotient (AQ) theory with a host of silly acronyms, checklists, plans, guidelines, etc. Great fodder for your training seminars, Paul! It’s this half of the book that nearly destroys its value. Thank goodness, Erik’s stories are printed in a different typeface, so you can skip all the AQ nonsense.

Adversity advantage in a nutshell

If you ever want to achieve something, you need to step outside of your comfort zone. At times, you have to deliberately put yourself in uncomfortable circumstances to get the creative juices flowing. There’s no better drive to success than genuine, painful need to overcome adversity. There. If you feel you need to pay money for training to understand it, send me a check.

As you see, I have mixed feelings about the book because great content is buried in stupid acronyms and pointless adversity theories.

My favorite quote

“When Erik assembles a climbing team, he absolutely avoids dreamy optimists. They’re dangerous. He believes his teammates should possess a “healthy schizophrenia”—the capacity to hope for and have faith in the best, along with obsessing, preparing for, and being brutally realistic about the worst.”

You might recall I had a similar quote by James Stockdale earlier.

On the funny side of things, check out this hilarious news blooper where an anchor lady introduces Erik and… well… creates an embarrassing situation.