I survived being a throw away teenager with no support of any kind from my parents. I did horrible things to survive. Sometimes I feel shame over this and sometimes I admire myself - how in the world did I survive? Some situations were life & death situations. Now that I am almost 50, earned a college degree and have a happy home with friends. I sometimes view my old self like a person I do not know entirely. Street smarts are great but I don't recommend getting street creed to improve your personality.
Here is to all the survivors out there - teenagers, homeless and others who were only told they were nothing and would never be nothing. We survived and thrived.
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What It Takes To Survive
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In any emergency, people divide into three categories, Leach says. First, there are the survivors like the 155 people on US Airways Flight 1549, who manage to save themselves in the worst situations. Second, there are unavoidable fatalities: people who never have a chance, like so many of the 200,000 people in Southeast Asia who were swept away by the tsunami of 2004. Third, there are victims who should have lived but perished unnecessarily.
After examining countless disasters and categorizing the ways people respond to life-threatening situations, Leach came up with what might be called the theory of 10-80-10. First, around 10 percent of us will handle a crisis in a relatively calm and rational state of mind. The top 10 percent are leaders, like a few passengers on the US Airways flight who took charge and guided others off the plane.
Leach says the vast majority of us—around 80 percent—fall into the second category. In a crisis, most will "quite simply be stunned and bewildered." We'll find that our "reasoning is significantly impaired and that thinking is difficult." We'll behave in "a reflexive, almost automatic or mechanical manner." We'll sweat. We'll feel sick, lethargic, numb. Our hearts may race. And we'll experience "perceptual narrowing" or tunnel vision. We'll barely hear people around us. It's OK—it's not necessarily fatal—and it doesn't last forever. The key is to recover quickly from brain lock or analysis paralysis, shake off the shock and figure out what to do.
The last group—the final 10 percent—is the one you definitely want to avoid in an emergency. Simply put, the third band does the wrong thing. They behave inappropriately and often counterproductively. In plain terms, they freak out and can't pull themselves together. And they often don't survive.
Prof. Richard Wiseman can tell if you're lucky or unlucky just by handing you a newspaper and asking you to count the number of photographs in its pages. Some folks finish the job in a few seconds while others need a couple of minutes to tally all the pictures. The reason for the difference isn't that some people are better counters than others. Rather, the secret lies on page two of the newspaper where Wiseman has inserted a huge message in one-inch letters:
STOP COUNTING—THERE ARE 43 PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS NEWSPAPER.
Believe it or not, many people actually miss this enormous headline in the paper. They're too busy counting photos to notice. The giant message isn't a trick. There really are 43 pictures in the paper. Professor Wiseman has found that if you see the announcement right away, you tend to be a lucky person open to random opportunities. By contrast, if you don't spot it, you're usually an unlucky person more likely to miss out on fortuitous possibilities.
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