Books - Viktor Frankl

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

I recently read Man’s Search for Meaning, a memoir written by Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist and miraculous Holocaust concentration camp survivor.

Viktor Frankl’s writing is a gift to the world. This is a book to read and re-read throughout life as you discover your own revelations on what brings you meaning in life; and knowing your “why” in life is enough to know the “how” in carrying it out. It’s short and concise, extremely deep and philosophical, and it will change you into being a better person through your conscious choices of responsibleness in answering the questions life asks of you.

His goal was to provoke people into realizing that they could and should exercise their capacity for choice to achieve their own goals. Writing about tragic optimism, he cautioned us that “the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.” Frankl was once asked to express in one sentence the meaning of his own life. He wrote the response on paper and asked his students to guess what he had written. After some moments of quiet rejection, a student surprised Frankl by saying, “The meaning of your life is to help others find the meaning of theirs.” “That was it, exactly,” Frankl said. “Those are the very words I had written.”