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The most powerful lesson you’ll learn about the creative life.
Never Forget: The Response is Always Yours.
It’s the most powerful idea in the storytelling life and there are two reasons to talk with you about it today, but first let’s get to the root of the idea itself.
It has many expressions but perhaps the best encapsulation comes from Viktor Frankl, the psychologist and Holocaust survivor, who wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Frankl’s talking about the power to choose. In every situation in life, in every encounter, you have the power to choose how you’ll respond.
It often doesn’t feel that way. It often feels like life’s cornered you. Frankl certainly felt cornered in Auschwitz. But as he wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning:
“The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond…The last of one’s freedom’s is to choose one’s attitudes in any given circumstance.”
Even in a concentration camp, then, where despair was as prevalent as death, Frankl found a way to look at the horrors around him and choose to think about his wife, or his home, or how the camp itself…
