One Takeaway From Viktor Frankl’s "Man's Search For Meaning"

My all time favorite book is Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning.

This book was recommended to me by a friend many years ago and he also gave me a copy to read. Since then I have recommended this book to almost anyone who would ask me for a book recommendation.

I also noticed that this is one of the highly rated and most recommended books in many blog posts and forums on platforms like Medium and Substack.

This book is the author's true life experience from the most difficult chapter in his life. This book does not fall in the category of business or leadership or fiction. Though it is biographical, it is a portion of the author's life. 

The author wrote this book while in the concentration camps during World War II. While we all have ups and downs in life, and I have faced some serious hardships myself, nothing compares to the author's experience in this book.

He wrote this for his own journaling and hid it while in the camps, most of it was destroyed and he had to re-write from memory. He did not intend for this to become a book, let me a best selling book in many languages.

The author talks about his companions who had positive thoughts and survived the hard conditions. He also talks about folks who gave up hope and ended up dead. Some portions of the book are really hard to read, but it portrays the reality of those camps in a first person perspective. 

He always envisioned getting out of the camps and giving lectures and curing people as he is a doctor. 

Author writes quotes like, "If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete".

The one takeaway for me is: 

One cannot control what happens in the outside world and what happens to them. But one can definitely control how they feel and how they react to the outside world no matter what happens. 

This is a simple but powerful life lesson that resonated with me and millions who read the book. If you are curious, and haven't had a chance to read this book, highly recommend it.