Timeless Wisdom: Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Chris Albert 00:00:00 (link to this point)

The Warrior Soul podcast is written, produced, and edited by me, Albert. Our mission is to provide tools, tactics, strategies, and ideas to US military veterans and anybody else willing to listen to help them to navigate toward living their absolute best lives. If you find these episodes helpful, please share them out with somebody that you know of that can use them. And if you really like the podcast, please also head over to iTunes and write us a written rating and review. It really helps us to spread word about the show, and it really helps to get these tools in the hands of others who really need them.

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If you head over to www.dropanfbomb.com and use the code Warrior Soul at checkout, you'll get 20% off of that first order. And I'm gonna keep the announcements short and sweet today. If you can stick around to the end, I got a really special announcement about a brotherhood that we're creating here at Warrior Soul. So hope you enjoy this episode. I hope you get a lot out of it.

And without delay, let's get into it.

This is Chris Albert, and I'm here to remind you of one thing. Someday, you're going to die. That's not some morbid statement or scary idea. It's solid fact. Your time here on this earth is limited.

We need to be reminded of this as much as possible for one simple reason, to live your best life while you can. This is the Warrior Soul Podcast.

You know, I get a lot of questions about what books I read. And, you know, that's the cool thing about living in this time and place. We can literally go to Amazon, get any book we want, have it delivered to our place, sometimes in the same day. Right? That's amazing.

That's amazing. But that leaves a lot of choice for us. Right? We literally have thousands of choices about what we're going to put into our brains on a daily basis, and not just from books, but from podcasts like this one, from YouTube videos, from blog articles and things like that. But I still think that books hold such a special place.

Because while a podcast, right, like this one, it'll be here forever, but this podcast thing's only been around for like a decade. Right? We don't know what the staying power of these things is gonna be. There's books out there that have stood the test of time for a very long time. Thinking of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, right?

That's thousands of years. Crazy. The book I'm going to talk to you about today is one that I'm pretty sure will stand the test of time for thousands of years. And it's a book that relatively, when compared to Marcus Aurelius, hasn't been around very long, but it's it's been around for a few decades. And it's called Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

Everybody always asked me what they should read, and I think that everybody, no matter who you are, needs to read this book. You need to read this book because it discusses one of the most universal aspects of the human condition, and that is suffering. You see, Frankl was a psychiatrist. And in 1942, was sent to the Nazi concentration camps. He was a psychiatrist in Vienna, had the chance to leave Vienna, but instead decided to stay there for his patients and then was sent to the Nazi concentration camps.

And the first half of this book details his experiences in these camps, The absolute squalor they lived in, how they starved, how they slept on beds that were soaked with urine and feces every single day, how they they existed in clothes that were constantly soiled. How they dealt with the constant death around them. Looking up at the the smoke coming from the chimneys after a group of prisoners was sent to the other part of the camp where prisoners were executed. And how he got through all this by trying to find meaning in it. You see for Frankl, Frankl as a psychiatrist, he created something called Logotherapy.

And Logotherapy comes from the word logos, which in Greek means meaning. He holds, unlike Freud, because Freud up at the up to this point, Freud held that man's primary drive was pleasure. But for Frankl, he holds that man's primary drive in life is not pleasure, but the discovery and the pursuit of what we personally find meaningful. And he used his time in the concentration camps to show that even in the absolute worst of conditions, you can find meaning and find reason to live. And there's a whole lot of different sides to this.

You know, Frankl didn't know it, but his pregnant wife, his family, his his father, his mother, everybody he knew was killed. And he would go through each day thinking about his wife, thinking about how she looked, thinking about her face and things like that. And he talks about this in the book. But when he got out of the concentration camps, the thing he was hoping for most throughout his time there, he found that his wife had perished, that she died, and so had the rest of his family. So he basically went through two and a half, three years in a concentration camp, and came out to find that he was alone in the world, that he had no one else, and that he had to start over.

Now, I don't know about you, but I couldn't imagine that scenario. That is something that is absolutely surreal to me. But Frankl was able to set up his own practice again in Vienna. He was able to contribute massively to the field of psychiatry with his logos therapy. And he was able to live the rest of his life with a whole lot of meaning.

Lived up to the year, I believe 1997. So what do we take from this? What do we gain by reading Frankl? And I think it's actually quite profound. You see, hopefully, and I pray that this is the case, none of us will ever face life in a concentration camp.

I pray that none of us listening to this right now or in the future will ever have to face the prospect of their entire family being slaughtered simply because they were born a certain way or practiced a certain religion. But inevitably, because of the human condition, every single one of us is going to suffer in some way. We're gonna suffer tragedy. We're going to suffer hardship. We are going to face obstacles.

And we're gonna face sadness and so many different things. And because suffering is inevitable, what's gonna make the difference for you in your life isn't whether or not you suffer. It's how you choose to cope with it. How you choose to deal with your own suffering. Are you going to allow it to shut you down?

Are you gonna allow it to dehumanize you? Are you gonna allow it to turn you into another person? Or are you going to find meaning in the suffering? Are you going to allow it to make you grow, to make you stronger, to make you more resilient? And above everything else, I believe that that's what you can get from reading this amazing book.

I purposely have not gone through the details of this book. I will say that I want each and every one of you to read it, and I want each and every one of you to really, you know, listen to this story. Get through this story. It's it's something that I believe is so important not just for you, but so that you could teach your children, and so that you can carry this wisdom and bring it forward. So we'll have a link up on the show notes so you can get to this book and purchase it off of Amazon.

Anything you purchase off of Amazon through a link on our site actually delivers a small commission to the Warrior Soul podcast, and that helps us to support things, helps us to pay for bandwidth, helps us to pay for the production of this show. So we really appreciate it if you do use those links. And with that, guys, that's all I've got. I really appreciate you guys listening. I hope you get a lot out of these episodes.

Please, I'm I'm gonna ask you this and and I'm going to, to make a plea to you. Please, if you can, find the time, head over to iTunes. Write us a written rating and review. It really, really helps us to spread word about the show. And if you email me a picture of that written rating and review, meaning you screenshot the picture, and you send it over to me at chris@warriorsoulagoge.com, I will send you a free copy of our Fitness is Freedom ebook, which is a goal setting guide for all your fitness goals.

And that's just a token of my appreciation for you helping out the show. Finally, I just wanted to say that we are kicking off the Warrior's Obituary Society. This is something that I've wanted to do for a long time with Warrior Soul. That is to set up a brotherhood, a group of men who are pushing each other to be their absolute best. And the Warrior's Obituary Society starts with an eight week development program.

We're putting our members through a very intense process of getting together their fitness, their personal finances, their personal productivity habits, their nutrition, their relationships, everything that they need to push forward with life. Once that eight week development program is over, because I didn't want this to just be some course that somebody does and then they're no longer with a group, they're going to take their seats as full brothers in the Warrior's Obituary Society. And that is where the work truly begins. So each week, we're gonna have live calls. We're gonna be sitting down each month going over each member's goals.

As we push forward, we are gonna be growing and each member is gonna take a leadership role within the group. And the whole point of this is to power all of our brothers to be able to live lives that are worthy of epic obituaries. And the vision here is to have a society that matches a lot of the societies and fraternities you'll see coming out of places like Harvard or Yale. I always thought that this should be the case for our community. Veterans, of course, are welcome.

We also welcome civilians too. What this group is about is values. If you've got high values, if you are a person who wants the best out of life, if you are somebody who wants to serve others, then this group is for you. It's a paid program, but here's the thing. I didn't make the prices crazy.

I didn't want to make the prices crazy because I wanna get as many people involved in this as possible. We need to earn enough money to keep the lights on and keep operations going, but it's not something that's gonna drive you into the poor house. So if you are interested in this, let me know. Either DM me on Instagram or you can email me at chris@warriorsoulagoge.com. Maybe at some point, I'll start giving you guys my phone number too.

We'll see. We'll see how many people would actually text me. But, for now, you got my email address and my DM. Alright? So if you're interested, let me know.

And with that, we'll be talking to you guys later on this week with some more awesome content. Get out there and live your best lives while you can, and this is Chris Albert out.