I’ve read a lot of books over the years. Technical books, business books, philosophy, psychology, self-help, biographies—the usual wandering path of someone who is perpetually curious.

Most books give me an idea or two.

A few change the way I see the world.

Three, in particular, have stayed with me: Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, and Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life.

Meaning Is Something We Choose

Man’s Search for Meaning hit me differently than almost anything else I’ve read.

Frankl’s experiences are far beyond anything most of us will ever face, but the lesson I carried away is remarkably practical: circumstances matter, but our relationship to those circumstances matters too.

We don’t always get to choose what happens. We do get some choice in what we make of it.

That idea has resurfaced repeatedly in my life—during difficult periods, uncertainty, business challenges, loss, and the thousand smaller frustrations that accumulate along the way.

Meaning isn’t necessarily something we find.

Sometimes, we construct it.

Control What You Can

Marcus Aurelius gave me another tool.

Meditations is essentially the private notebook of a man reminding himself, over and over, how he wants to behave.

That matters to me.

He wasn’t writing from some perfect state of enlightenment. He was practicing.

Control your reactions. Do the work in front of you. Don’t waste energy trying to control people, events, or outcomes that aren’t yours to control.

Simple.

Not easy.

I still fail at it regularly.

That’s probably why I keep coming back to it.

Your Life Is Happening Now

Then there’s Seneca.

On the Shortness of Life carries a message that becomes louder as I get older: life isn’t necessarily short—we waste a tremendous amount of it.

We postpone things.

We wait for the right time.

We trade enormous pieces of our lives for things that, viewed from a distance, don’t matter very much.

That realization has changed how I think about attention, work, relationships, experiences, and increasingly, legacy.

Time isn’t simply a resource.

It is the resource.

The Thread Between Them

These three books ultimately point me toward the same place:

Find meaning.

Control what you can.

Pay attention to how you spend your time.

I don’t manage any of those perfectly. Not even close.

But perhaps that’s the point.

These aren’t books I finished.

They’re books I continue to practice.

And, like most worthwhile experiments, I suspect I’ll be working on them for the rest of my life.

 

If you enjoy these kinds of personal explorations and want to support my continued writing and research, you can buy me a coffee. Thanks for reading.

 

PS – Thanks to my friend, Simone, for the impetus to write this one…