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1/ I have a list of half a dozen books that I like to review at the end of the year. One of them is Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. A thread with a summary and some of my favorite quotes 
2/ Man’s Search for Meaning is part memoir of surviving a concentration camp and part explanation of what Jewish psychoanalyst Viktor Frankl learned from the experience, formalized in his theory of logotherapy.
3/ While he was in a concentration camp, Frankl saw that everything can be taken from a human but one thing: the ability to choose one’s attitude.
4/ The prisoner’s that survived the concentration camp were those that had some greater purpose or meaning that they were striving towards: seeing a loved one or finishing a half-written book.
5/ Frankl used this experience to conclude that the purpose of life, what literally makes it worth living is search for meaning.
6/ Meaning is unique and specific to each individual that it must and can be fulfilled by him or her alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy the will to meaning.
7/ Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times.
8/ Some quotes I really like:
9/ “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 dedication to a cause greater than...
10/ ...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."
11/ "An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize values in creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fulfillment in experiencing beauty, art, or nature."
12/ "“Life is like being at the dentist. You always think that the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already.”
13/ "it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life-daily and hourly. Our answer must...
14/ ...consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct."
15/ "mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and...
16/ ...therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency"
17/ "we can understand Schopenhauer when he said that mankind was apparently doomed to vacillate eternally between the two poles of boredom and anxiety"
18/ My full notes from Man's Search for Meaning are here: taylorpearson.me/book-review/ma…
19/ The other books I like to look over are Finite and Infinite Games by Carse, Ray Dalio Principles Section 1, Seneca's On the Shortness of Life, and Out of Your Mind by Alan Watts
20/ I have a free post about annual planning process here: taylorpearson.me/planning/
21/ I'm also hosting a one-time annual review and planning workshop this weekend with @fortelabs that includes access to both our courses: learn.fortelabs.co/p/building-a-s…
