Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how y... — Viktor E. Frankl

Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.

Author: Viktor E. Frankl

Insight: We like to think we control our lives, but really we're only ever in charge of one small thing: our reaction. The job disappears, the relationship ends, the diagnosis comes back bad—and suddenly you realize how little of the world actually obeys you. What Frankl is pointing to, though, isn't depressing. It's oddly liberating. The tricky part is that this freedom feels fake when you're in the middle of it. Your nervous system is flooded, your mind is spinning through worst-case scenarios, and it doesn't feel like you have any choice at all. But there's a real difference between what happened to you and what you do with it. You can't control whether you lose your job, but you can control whether you spend the next month paralyzed or whether you start making calls. You can't control someone's cruelty, but you can choose whether to let it define how you see yourself. That gap between circumstance and response—that's where your actual power lives. The revolutionary part is realizing this isn't about positive thinking or "good vibes." It's about taking ownership of the one thing nobody can take from you, even when everything else is gone.

Source: Man's Search for Meaning, p. 86, 1946