Man's Search for Meaning

I wrote just yesterday about how I worry about my ability to resonate with my audience. That worry all but subsided today when I was able to resonate with a survivor of the Holocaust. 

Man’s Search for Meaning details the life of Viktor Frankl prior to, during, and after he survived the Holocaust. This book was his life’s work - taking him only 9 days to write, but being a large incentive for him to survive. 

While I can’t resonate with the trials that Viktor faced while he was in the four camps that he endured in what I can only imagine to be the longest three years of his life, I found myself strongly resonating with his mindset and perspective on life. 

He was described in the postscript as an accepting man and this was the icing on the cake for my connection to him. This was described in religious and philosophical contexts, with him even admiring a former Nazi sympathizer - which I can imagine was hard to do given him losing his family and his friends while nearly starving to death under their regime. 

The cake itself came in the form of two messages within the book. The first, that what matters in life is not life’s meaning but life’s meaning at a specific point in time. 

I wrote two ideas down from this book and this was the first. 

This idea is beautiful as it allows people to shift the meaning of their life. It gives them permission to not be a static character, but dynamic. The pursuit of the various meanings that we experience during life is what makes up our broader purpose - helping craft the fragments of a larger story that we can only see at the end of life when we have one last moment to reflect on everything that has led us to this point. 

The second message that I wrote down made my eyes well with tears due to how deeply it resonated with me. “The meaning of life is to help others find meaning in theirs.” 

This sentence is what Viktor Frankl wrote to summarize the meaning of his life. He lived this meaning so well that a student was able to guess that this was how Viktor summarized it. 

This deep-rooted desire to help others with all that he experienced is incredible. What I admire most is that he managed to align his actions so clearly with this meaning that others could pick up on it. 

We often talk about the actions of people not aligning with their talk but Viktor clearly managed harmony. 

Viktor’s ability to deeply connect with me despite his death, a language barrier, and a tragic experience that I can’t fathom reminded me that what happens in your life is one component of how people resonate with you. 

While some people may connect with you off of shared experiences, others may connect with your passions, others with your ability to tell stories, and others, like me, with your deepest rooted values. 

No matter who you are, no matter where you come from or what your life experience is made up of, there are people who will resonate deeply with your message. 

In a five hour audiobook, I didn’t feel much connection to Viktor until the last 30 minutes where I pulled these two messages. While I sympathize for him and his horrible experience, it’s impossible for me to truly understand how much the people suffered as I didn’t experience it first hand. 

He made me feel fortunate and grateful for my life but I couldn’t relate to his suffering. But I could relate to what kept him going. His underlying purpose and reason for surviving the suffering day after day. 

The power in this story is the vulnerability of it. Viktor shared not only a tragic experience, but his learnings from it. He shared his thoughts, his perspectives. He subjected himself to potential ridicule so people could connect with him and so that he could help people.

While I hope your story is not nearly as tragic or as full of hardships as Viktor’s, I implore you to share it. To share it for the rest of your life. Doing so will help you refine your ideas. Your five hour audiobook could span your life and people may not resonate until your last 30 minutes but that last 30 minutes might just be your greatest contribution to the world.