"No experience is a cause of success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences, so-called trauma - but we make out of them just what suits our purposes"

Adler argues that events do not mechanically produce outcomes; the human mind assigns direction, forming a style of life that uses experience to serve a chosen aim. Success and failure become less the consequence of what happened and more the expression of how we arrange what happened to fit our guiding story. The creative self selects, emphasizes, and interprets, turning the same raw facts into either reasons to grow or licenses to retreat.

“Purposes” here include both conscious ambitions and the quieter, protective aims of the psyche: to maintain dignity, to avoid humiliation, to feel significant, to belong. A setback can be shaped into fuel for mastery or into proof that effort is futile. Childhood slights can become motivation to develop competence and contribute to others, or an alibi for cynicism and withdrawal. Two siblings may endure the same hardships; one fashions a life of responsibility and social interest, the other a pattern of grievance. The difference is not the event but the goal that experience is made to serve.

This perspective does not deny pain. It challenges determinism. Suffering is real, yet it does not dictate a single trajectory. Meaning-making mediates impact. Even trauma, which can alter bodies and brains, is still filtered through interpretation, relationship, and purpose. Healing strengthens the capacity to choose a more useful story, not by pretending the past was good, but by refusing to let it set the purpose of the future.

The claim also carries an ethical edge. If we can arrange experience to suit destructive aims, we can also arrange it to serve community, courage, and contribution. Responsibility emerges: not blame for what happened, but accountability for what we make of it now. Practices that support this include honest self-examination, cultivating social interest, reframing setbacks as information, and aligning daily actions with a chosen ideal. Agency grows where purpose is clarified, and experience becomes material for building rather than a sentence to be served.