Man's Search for Meaning
Viktor Frankl survived Auschwitz. What he found there is the clearest reason I know for why some people rise and some don’t.
A few years ago I stood on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro with a group of 8 burn survivors. Two of them, Isla and Isabella, 11 and 12 years old, had each spent more than six painful months in a burn center. Standing up there, I kept circling one question: how does a person walk through something like that and come out loving life, unabashed about their scars, and climbing mountains? A psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz had already answered it, decades before I ever asked.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE · AS QUOTED BY VIKTOR FRANKL
“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
Someone handed me Viktor’s book, saying it was one of the best business books they’d ever read. A memoir written by a man who survived Auschwitz. It reshaped how I look at life, sports, and business.
Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist in Vienna when the Nazis took everything. In the camps, he watched people die and people survive, and it was not always the strongest, not always the youngest. What he noticed was something else entirely. The ones who held on were almost always the ones who had something to live for. A person waiting for them. A purpose they hadn’t finished. A why bigger than their suffering. He called it logotherapy: the idea that meaning is the most powerful force in human life. Not pleasure. Not power. Meaning.
I spent 15 years working alongside the Arizona Burn Center. The patients became friends. Some spent up to nine months in our walls from life-altering, excruciating injuries most people can’t begin to picture. Those two girls were among them. I watched them for seven days, with 6 other survivors, twist themselves inside out to reach the top of Kilimanjaro together, the tallest free-standing mountain in the world, because they knew we were making a documentary that would hopefully give burn survivors down the road the hope and faith that they could get there too. We called the expedition Courage Rising.
The burn survivors I met who came all the way back, who truly came back to life, were almost always the ones who found their why.
They took the worst thing that ever happened to them and turned it into fuel to serve others. Their suffering was transformed into their purpose. Their pain then became their platform.
That’s the hero’s journey: not the absence of adversity, but the transformation of it into something that serves others.
This is bigger than philosophy.
Neuroscientists who study human performance for a living, in business and in locker rooms, keep landing on the same finding. When the work is tied to a purpose bigger than yourself, you don’t just push harder. You last longer.
The why changes your relationship to the how.
And the Bible has been saying it for thousands of years. “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart.” Colossians 3:23. When you know why it matters, you give more than 80% and tackle bigger problems for the team. The purpose becomes the fuel.
“The bigger the why, the easier the how.” – Nate Diggity
So here’s what I’ve been sitting with. If a why can carry a person through a concentration camp, through a burn center, up the side of a mountain, then that same WHY can fuel championship teams and the best businesses on earth. So I came up with one for myself at Bjerk, a why, anchored in service, to help me stay strong in my purpose when the adversity comes. It stems from my personal why.
MY PERSONAL WHY
“To strengthen lives and empower purpose-driven leaders.”
THE WHY I’VE COME UP WITH FOR MYSELF AT BJERK
Driven to Strengthen the Way the World Builds.
Please share with me what matters most to you. It’s important to me.
THIS WEEK: SIT WITH THIS
What’s your why?
Bigger than your job description, bigger than a paycheck, and ESPECIALLY bigger than working for a boss… the deep reason you would fight to get stronger, better, faster each day. Sit with that this week.
Find yours. Get it clear. Get it strong. We’ll talk about ours together soon.
The why has to be personal before it can ever be ours. Start there.
Let’s get after it in life, family, and business.
Lots of love, Nate
