In my conversations with my students, I’ve tried to help them define their personal project, which includes both a professional and a life project.  To learn to overcome difficulties and define these life goals, I liked to give them the example of Viktor Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist who was imprisoned during World War II in the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps. There, he saw his father, mother, and wife die.  After experiencing such a painful and horrific situation, he wrote “Man’s Search for Meaning,“  which is one of the most widely read books in history and is highly recommended for people of all ages who need to find meaning in their lives.

“Everything can be taken from a person but one thing: the last of the human freedoms: the right to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”  These words by Frankl make clear the importance of one’s attitude toward the circumstances in which one lives.

When you allow circumstances to determine your attitude, you lose control of your life. As Frankl recalls,  “The experiences of life in a concentration camp prove that man has the capacity for choice.”  Many of the concentration camp prisoners believed their chance to live had already passed, yet the reality is that it represented both an opportunity and a challenge: one  can either turn the experience into victory, an inner triumph, or one can ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as most of them did. 

We always have the ability to choose, and that choice can shape our lives. “We,” Frankl writes, “can remember the men who walked from hut to hut, comforting others, giving away their piece of bread. The men who helped may have been few, but they are proof enough that everything can be taken away from you, except the freedom to act as you wish.”  There is nothing in the world that empowers a person to overcome “external” difficulties and “internal” limitations like the awareness of having a meaning in life.

If we are clear about our life goals and want to be happy, we will be able to answer questions like:  What should my attitude be toward different life circumstances? What do I want to do with my life?