The Story Is Always Ours to Write

What Viktor Frankl and a friend’s failures reminded me this morning.

I’m rereading Man’s Search for Meaning this morning. (If you haven’t read it yet, please make it a priority… or maybe just stop what you’re doing right now and order it on Amazon or Audible.)

Frankl writes that you can be stripped of everything… your home, your work, your family, your freedom. But no one can take away your power to choose your response.

It hit me hard today.

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The talk that mirrored it

Before I even picked up the book, a YouTube short popped up from a college friend who’s absolutely killing it as a thought leader in the business space. She’s everywhere right now.

In this clip, she listed her failures like a rap sheet:

• Served.

• Sued.

• Broke.

• Bankrupt.

• Lost her best employees.

• Lost her best clients.

And then she said: None of that made me quit.

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That’s the throughline

That’s Frankl.
The suffering doesn’t define you.
The bankruptcy doesn’t define you.
The loss doesn’t define you.

What defines you is the meaning you assign to it.

Do you decide it means you’re done?
Or do you decide it means you’re building the muscle that makes you unstoppable?

Frankl found meaning inside a concentration camp.
My friend found meaning after losing everything multiple times.
And I’m finding meaning now in the rebuild.

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The trap we fall into

Here’s the problem: most of us don’t need catastrophic failure to get derailed.

We get triggered by something small and indulge in it.
We trip over a minor setback, and suddenly it’s a “bad day.”
We get one email with bad news and decide everything’s going wrong.

We give ourselves permission to be unhappy.

But what if, instead, we flipped it?
What if we took the bad news, the lost client, the papers served, and asked:

👉 What did I do to get here?
👉 And what clarity is this moment giving me?

Because clarity is the real payoff.
It’s the data, the lesson, the roadmap forward.

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The choice

Frankl’s book reminds me of this:

We always have the power to choose our story.
We always have the ability to turn the tables on ourselves.

It’s not the pain that breaks us.
It’s the story we tell about it.

And the story is always ours to write.