Viktor Frankl on Success

In 1945, shortly after his release from the concentration camps where his mother and brother had been murdered in the gas chambers, not yet knowing the love of his life was ailing with the typhus that would soon kill her, Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997) sat down at his desk to compose what would become the epochal classic Man’s Search for Meaning.

As it poured out of him over the course of just nine consecutive days, he wrote with “the firm determination” to publish it anonymously. It was only on his friends’ ardent insistence that he conceded at the last minute to have his name at least appear on the title page, though he refused to have it printed on the cover.

Viktor Frankl

By the end of his life, the book had been published in twenty-two languages, with 100 printings in English alone.

In the preface to the 1992 edition, the eight-seven-year-old Frankl looks back on the paradox of having attained such staggering success with something that had begun so unconcerned with personal acclaim, so passionately purposed with a fundamental human yearning.

In a sentiment emanating the ancient Chinese philosophy of wu-wei — “trying not to try” — he writes:

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 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.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a solo print.

He adds a mighty antidote to our modern pathology of instant gratification:

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 of it.

Complement with artist and philosopher Rockwell Kent, writing a generation before Frankl, on how not to be a victim of success, and Arundhati Roy, writing a generation after him, on its deepest measure, then revisit Frankl’s lost lectures on how to say “yes” to life in spite of everything.

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