People You Admire

[April_R]

Ze Frank

I love this guy. He makes me laugh, cry, think, and wonder with his online projects.

See this video on Ted Talks about him:

He is pretty awesome

So who are some people you admire and why?

[April_R]

oh and P.S. here is his website. You could probably waste days looking at his various projects and other interactive links. http://www.zefrank.com/

[Spice_Weasel]

Viktor Frankl - Holocaust survivor and trauma psychologist who developed his own treatment for trauma by observing himself and treating others in the concentration camps. When he was forced to work outside in deep snow he would mentally rehearse the lectures he would someday give on the subject. What makes him even better is that despite all he has been through, he is just as compassionate toward those going through comparatively ‘‘minor’’ things - a death, unemployment, marital struggles - as he is toward fellow survivors. He discusses his experiences and his existentialist-inspired treatment, logotherapy, in his autobiography Man’s Search for Meaning: From Death Camp to Existentialism. In essence, logotherapy helps people to find meaning in their own suffering.

Frankl is extremely quotable, including my favorite quote ever,

What is to give light must endure burning.

Other great quotes include:

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes - within the limits of endowment and environment- he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.

Yep. I sure do love me some Frankl.