Success Quote by Viktor E. Frankl

Frankl smuggles a quiet revolution into a line that reads almost like common sense. We’re used to imagining the psyche as an engine: instincts, trauma, libido, hunger, fear. Life, in that model, is mostly reactive - pushed from behind by forces we didn’t choose. Frankl doesn’t deny drives; he demotes them. His wager is that human experience is also organized by something ahead of us: goals, meanings, commitments. Not wishes, not vague positivity, but chosen aims that exert real gravitational pull.

The elegance is in the symmetry. “Just as surely” is a provocation: purpose isn’t a sentimental add-on; it’s as causally potent as biology and compulsion. “Pulled” versus “pushed” reframes agency without resorting to motivational poster rhetoric. Pull implies direction, a vector. You can suffer and still move, not because pain is noble, but because the mind can attach itself to a “why” that outmuscles the “how.”

Context sharpens the stakes. Frankl’s logotherapy was forged against the most brutal evidence for determinism: the concentration camps, where drives for survival were constant and dignity was systematically dismantled. To argue for goals in that setting isn’t self-help; it’s a refusal to let circumstances write the whole script. The subtext is both compassionate and demanding: if a life can be pulled, then we’re implicated in what we let pull us. Goals become an ethical choice, not merely a therapeutic technique.