Sometimes it’s good to take a step back from the day to day of the marketing world and Twitter stream and step into a good book about life. A few weeks ago my friend Jay gave me just such a reminder by giving me his copy of Man’s Search for Meaning, a book by Viktor E. Frankl first published in 1959. Of course Jay knows my mission in this blog well, and while it was an enjoyable read for diversion, it also reinforced my belief in the mission of creating Marketing with Meaning.

Man’s Search for Meaning is Frankl’s memoir of his survival of the Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Unlike other stories of holocaust suffering and survival that you may have read, Frankl’s perspective as a psychiatrist results in a unique examination of the meaning of suffering and of life. His years in tortuous conditions provided him with the opportunity to see how many of his fellow men and his own mind were affected.

Frankl discovered that the people who tended to survive 1-in-28 odds were those who had some purpose to live for—say, a wife and children, an unwritten novel, or, in Frankl’s case, to teach the lessons that he learned in the concentration camp. Interestingly, Frankl suggests that growing cases of drug abuse and depression are a result of too many people who feel they have no meaning in their lives.

Two specific quotes stood out for me in reading this book, and drive me to continuously positively impact the world. First, a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche:

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

This was one of Frankl’s key discoveries in the concentration camps, but he expanded it in his psychotherapy research and practice in the years after the war. By choosing a “why” to live, suffering itself can be given meaning. While my personal suffering is tiny in comparison to Frankl’s, I find a personal connection to these words. This project and upcoming book around Marketing with Meaning has taken a toll on my personal and family life, and there have been setbacks and disappointments, but the possibility of changing the world for the better—and early feedback from you, dear readers—provides a powerful “why” to keep me going.

A second quote by Frankl is similarly powerful:

Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”

Who has not had the fantasy of going back to a time and place in your past, and, having the confidence and knowledge of today, acting much more confident and directed? That is the guidance of Frankl, a concept that confronts man with “life’s finiteness as well as the finality of what he makes out of both his life and himself.”

This concept is what gets me up at 6 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday mornings to write this blog or work on the book. It’s my personal conviction to “not leave anything on the court” in the game of life goals. My biggest fear is not failure itself, but rather the failure to do some small thing that could have helped create success because I was lazy or over-confident.

I am glad to have something bigger than myself to live and struggle for, and I am proud that this work around Marketing with Meaning has already touched a handful of people around the world. I hope to not only create meaning for myself, but spark a new meaning of life for millions of other marketers around the world. Perhaps that is what Frankl meant when he said:

Being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself—be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actually realizes himself.”