Today’s Book: Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

In this messy world, probably the first thing to take care of is our communication – thus we began with yesterday’s post on Non Violent Communication (NVC).

Now, fundamentally, what do we do with communication? We create meaning, of course! Dealing with people implies dealing with their meanings. Meanings can hurt and meanings can heal. Meanings can create boundaries and meanings can demolish walls (like the fall of Berlin Wall).

Humans have always been slave to their meanings – especially about their race, community and religion. With a surge in conflicts across the globe on nationalist, ethnic and religious grounds, humans have started closing their borders to “outsiders” and started dealing with “illegal immigrants”.

Especially in current times, it is critical to learn and master the process of meaning creation.

The quality of our life depends on the meaning we give to people and events in our life. How true is this statement? What about extremely adverse experiences like being in a tsunami, an earthquake or something like a holocaust? How does “meaning” help in such situations?

Meet Viktor Frankl, whose experiences with prisoners at Nazi concentration camps (and his own incarceration) led him to develop logotherapy – it proposes that the prime motivation or opportunity for humans is to find meaning.

An extremely condensed summary of logotherapy, in one sentence, is this:

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked.

– Victor Frankl

Read Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning to discover how you can use the tool of logotherapy or “meaning creation” to transform yourself as a “driving force” to create a powerful life.