Finding Your Purpose: Lessons from Viktor Frankl

“Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality.”

Victor Frankl

Have you ever wondered what gives life meaning? Viktor Frankl, a doctor who survived the horrors of the Holocaust, learned a lot about this. His story can teach us powerful things about finding meaning, even when life gets really tough.

Viktor Frankl's Big Idea: Logotherapy

• Frankl created a type of therapy that says people need to find meaning in their lives to feel good; he called this logotherapy
• He believed that what drives us most is our wanting to find purpose or what he identified as the? "will to meaning”

What He Learned in Tough Times

• Frankl wrote a book called "Man's Search for Meaning" about his time in concentration camps. He wrote 38 other books
• He noticed that people who found a reason to keep going were more likely to survive
• Even when things were terrible, people could still choose how they reacted

How to Find Meaning, According to Dr. Frankl

Frankl said there are 3 ways to find meaning:

1. Doing something creative
2. Loving someone or something
3. Choosing how you feel about tough times

Goodness in Bad Places

1. Even though he saw and experienced really bad things, Frankl still believed people could be good
2. He saw people being kind and helpful, even in the camps
3. He believed that people can always choose to be good, no matter what

Why This Matters

His message is that even when life is hard, we can still find meaning and hope. We can choose how we react to what happens to us.

Your Turn: What do you believe gives your life meaning?

Recommended Reading

PubMed entry from the European Journal of Psychology titled Searching for Meaning in Chaos: Viktor Frankl’s Story on https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8763215/

Logotherapy on Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logotherapy

Viktor Frankl’s book “Man’s Search For Meaning.” Reading it has changed my life! https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4069.Man_s_Search_for_Meaning