Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Finally polished this one off.

The copy I bought off Amazon has a bird sitting on a barbed wire fence which is quite fascinating, and as you progress into the book you’ll understand why.

I can’t help but feel grateful for the lives most of us live having read this book, and trust you will too. The suffering described in concentration camps by Viktor Frankl is grim reading.

But I wanted to read this book because a lot of the self-help gurus out there make reference to it.

Why?

Because after reading 75 pages or so of camp life and struggle, the underlying lesson of this book emerges – thought and attitude.

And I quote…

“Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in numbers, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Let this be a lesson to you that no matter where you are in life: just getting by, or the lowest of the low – you can choose your attitude and you can choose your own way.

Sincerely,

Sam

P.S. The final third of this book is dedicated to Frankl’s theory logotheraphy, which I didn’t think much of. But it’s the first two-thirds which are important. Overall, rate the book 7.2/10 for drilling home the significance of this lesson.