A recommendation from a friend coupled with a recent TEDtalk by Viktor Frankl led me to purchase his book, Man’s Search for Meaning. Within the foreword, he talks about the irony of the book and its eventual success. Turns out that he was incredibly close to publishing the book under an anonymous name because he did not want to draw attention from the message to the author. And of all the books he ever published, this is the one that spread like wildfire. His point in those first pages? Success truly comes only when you don’t aim for it.

I agree to a certain extent. The last few days here in Toronto have been a bit of a whirlwind filled with happy surprises and small but fulfilled wishes culminating in an intangible but deep contentment with life in general. For those of you who know what’s been happening in the last two months the reason I’m in Toronto doing what I am doing at the moment was the result of missteps and disappointments followed by a moment of luck. Well…this is the summarized story I tell thought in reality, it wasn’t quite that simple. Yes, opportunities fell in front of me by chance, but I know enough to admit that they never could have solidified had I not spent the last year reading, learning, and pursuing the goal that never came true

In short, it is true that I couldn’t have seen any of this coming, much less aimed for it. At first glance, it seems like Viktor Frankl is right in that the things that we don’t seek are what come to us. However, while we cannot control the environment that hits us, this is not a reason to just wait because we can control the state we’re in when it happens. Viktor didn’t know that this book was going to ultimately become his message to a worldwide audience, but he had spent the years leading up to this moment capturing his challenges and experiences and distilling his philosophies not as seeds for his own success but because he saw a real lesson he could share with others. This made it such that when the right environment was in place, he made a real and enormous impact on the world.

So what have I learned in the last month? The first is that there are opportunities every single day all around me. And rather than chasing them, I should focus on bringing myself to a point where I can make those opportunities count. Aka taking in and giving back to those in my immediate surroundings so that I create an ongoing environment filled with small lessons, small victories, and small failures that all push me to a new starting point.

Secondly, I’m learning the verity in the statement repeated over and over again by leaders everywhere and that is that in order to move forward and find true meaning, we should seek to fulfill a cause that is larger and far more important than ourselves. When you do that, the context around you changes for the better. I think I spent many of the winter months trying to get myself somewhere and trying it convince myself that self-determination and well, selflessness, was the only way to accomplish that. It was only when I redirected my efforts to greater causes without motives that life got a little more awesome.

These aren’t new realizations but they are lessons that I’ve forgotten. The last few months have been a wonderful reminder.

Thanks to all who keep smiling with me through the big dips and the big bounces.