“Nothing is likely to help a person overcome or endure troubles than the consciousness of having a task in life.”- Dr. Victor Frankl
When I was a child, I attended a talk given by a famous doctor of Dehradun, at our school. After giving us several practical tit bits on how to best live life, he concluded his talk with an advice which has held me in good stead since then. He said, “When you feel you can’t find a way through. close your eyes and pray whole heartedly to god. He may help you through a person or through a book, but he will never leave your prayers unanswered.”
Fast forward a few years, I was going through a bad breakup and found my self in the midst of a job in which I absolutely dreaded the idea of going to work. I could see no meaning to my life. I couldn’t find a meaning behind all the daily pain and struggles I had to go through. Eventually it came to a point where I found myself with no motivation. As I came to my wits’ end, I remembered the advice that doctor gave us, many years ago in school. By then, I had become dubious of the existence of god. However, I knew I couldn’t do it all alone, I wanted a higher power, if it existed, to guide me and so I prayed. As a stroke of divine grace, the next day I came across a book, called ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’, written by Victor Frankl which seemed like a god send to me and helped me find meaning in life.
Victor Frankl was a famous Jewish-Austrian psychiatrist who founded logotherapy, a school of psychotherapy that describes a search for life’s meaning as the central human motivational force. He himself, was no stranger to suffering. While practicing psychiatry, and just 9 months into his marriage, he along with his family was sent into concentration camps. His mother, father, brother and wife were all slaughtered in those camps, while he had to live through those inhumane places of torture for 4 hears. During his years at the camp , he found that the main motivating factor which made people to bear the extreme day to day suffering of concentration camps, was a sense of meaning in their life. Whereas the people who had lost all sense of purpose in their life, eventually succumbed to the torture and died.
Following are some of his most influential quotes which will help you overcome struggles and live a fulfilling life :
How to overcome misery?
In the words of Dr. Victor Frankl, “‘The self-transcendence of human existence’…being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself—be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself…self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.”
As a famous Indian sage once said, the way to overcome personal misery is to share universal misery. The way to expand personal joy is to share universal joy. So if you want to overcome your misery, go out and devote yourself to a cause greater than yourself or to a person you love.
How to find meaning in your life ?
According to Dr. Frankl, the meaning of life always changes, but that it never ceases to be. We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways:
(1) By creating a work or doing a deed : Suppose you are a student and you absolutely hate studying Mathematics. So you can find a meaning behind the struggle of studying Mathematics, by researching on the cool engineering tools you can build if you persist with your struggle.
(2) By experiencing something or encountering someone : Continuing with the above example, suppose you are student and hate studying Mathematics. You can find meaning behind the struggle, by telling yourself that if you persist with the struggle then you can land a good job and hence helping your loves one live a comfortable life.
(3) By the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering : When we find that suffering is inevitable then we can choose our attitude towards it, which is always in our control. We can either frown upon our fate or face it with fortitude, thus setting an example for others around us. As the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius once said, “Death smiles at us all, but all a man can do is smile back.”
If you want happiness and success stop thinking about it, focus on this instead…
In the words of Dr. Frankl, “Again and again I admonish my students: Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.”
Thanks for reading 🙂
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