Based on last week’s post, Jeff kindly sent me to a wonderful four-minute lecture excerpt by Viktor Frankl. Even through the grainy recording you can see the twinkle in Frankl’s eye and his passion for humanity, with all its flaws and all of its potential.
The core of the video is Frankl relating a story of what he recently learned in his flying lessons, about crosswinds and where you have to aim when searching for your destination.
In Frankl’s words, from the video, “If you don’t recognize man’s search for meaning you make him worse, you make him dull, you make him frustrated, you add and contribute to his frustrations…” Rather, borrowing the words of Goethe, let us aim high, for “if we take man as he is, we make him worse, but if we take man as he should be we make him capable of what he can be.”
Summed up even more simply by Frankl, “We have to be idealists in a way, because then we end up as true realists.” Indeed.
Here’s the rare clip, a 4 minute video of Frankl himself.
