Now reading: Viktor Frankl, Mans Search for Meaning (1946). (notes)

Actually, I'm listening to this one, not reading it—I picked up the audiobook, read by Simon Vance, from the St. Louis County Library. I don't remember exactly where I heard of this book. I might have heard of it—several times, even—from guests on Tim Ferriss' podcast. It doesn't matter. It's ubiquitous. It has 255,039 reviews on Goodreads and 4,358 customer reviews on Amazon.

It's enough reason to read it, I think, because someone made it through the Holocaust with their mind intact, and shared not just an action story but what he was thinking as he was a prisoner. So my troubles aren't really troubles with that as a measuring stick. But as it relates to someone like me, I'll just steal this line from a summary on the library's book entry: "At the core of his theory is the belief that man's primary motivational force is his search for meaning."

From somewhere near the beginning:

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

I can't really explain it, but the idea of keeping on and keeping on, as evidenced by the book, dredges up two passages in my memory from unrelated books. Might as well share them:

This is how we go on: one day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root-canal at a time; boat-builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind us as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things - fish and unicorns and men on horseback - but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightening flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.

—Stephen King, Bag of Bones (1998)

It was Trout's fantasy that somebody would be outraged by the footprints. This would give him the opportunity to reply grandly, "What is it that offends you so? I am simply using man's first printing press. You are reading a bold and universal headline which says, 'I am here, I am here, I am here.'

—Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions (1973)