Everyone, at one point or another, goes through difficult times in their life.

Viktor Frankl was born in Austria in 1905, spent three years in a Nazi concentration camp, and eventually founded logotherapy. He led an incredible life, and I would never have heard of him if it wasn’t for his book, A Man’s Search for Meaning.

It was through this book that I learned some very important lessons about how to deal with adversity in life. Now, let’s make one thing very clear: nothing in my life (nor probably in your own) will ever compare to the horrors Frankl experienced in the Nazi camps. But as he tells us in his book, there’s something everyone can learn from his experiences.

The book is structured into two distinct parts.

In the first, he talks about his experiences in the camps, the things he saw, and what he and other prisoners felt throughout the experience. There was misery, there was laughter, there was pain, and there were even moments of peace.

The second is his introduction to logotherapy, which believes that the most important aspect of a man’s life is finding meaning in life. The second part sometimes gets a little technical, but Frankl interweaves some personal and professional (he was also a therapist) experiences that make everything crystal clear.

But one thing stood out for me in this book and really hit home for me: how he looks at his experiences in the camp and the meaning he derives from them. From his book, I learned three things about dealing with adversity:

Adversity is a Unique, Sacred Opportunity

In his book, Frankl talks about moments of adversity as opportunities. How often does someone get imprisoned in a concentration camp? Not very. Think of the worst possible thing that’s ever happened to you and ask yourself, “How rare was it?”

Instead of seeing these moments as terrible things that we must overcome, why not use them as tests? Have you ever wondered how strong you really are? How kind you could be? How generous you could be? These types of moments give us a chance to see what we’re really made of.

They test us and sometimes only through these tests do we really learn about ourselves and who we are.

The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up the cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.

One of the worst things that’s happened to me (and it’s really not that bad) was a serious jaw surgery I underwent some years ago. There was pain, stress, and a pinch of despair. But I was a really good patient. I also learned to listen (I couldn’t talk, which helped).

This type of procedure is very rare, and it showed me the kind of person I am capable of being when stripped of my chattery mouth and upbeat personality. What I saw was someone else entirely, but still someone I was “OK” with.

So the next time something “terrible” happens—be it a slip-up at work, a break up with a significant other, or some other event that shakes your universe—look at it as an opportunity to see what you’re made of. Of enduring with dignity and class.

As Frankl said, when all was stripped of the prisoners and they knew they were going to die, they went into the gas chambers with their heads held high.

The Power of Humor

You wouldn’t expect to hear a lot about humor in a book that talks about life in a concentration camp, would you? Well, Frankl singles it out because it was one of the main ways the prisoners dealt with the situation:

Humor was another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation. It is well know that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.

If humor has a place in Nazi concentration camps, then it’s clear we can all use a little more of it in our everyday lives. So laugh a little at work: it’s good for you.

The Importance of Setting Goals

Personal-finance sites talk about the importance of setting goals all the time, and it makes sense if you really want to get things done. But did you know that setting goals can save your life? Frankl mentions certain prisoners that gave up—it entailed no longer setting goals. Goals to see family members, friends, etc. They simply stopped seeing the possibility of anything worthwhile happening in the future.

None of them knew when they would get out (which was understandable maddening), but these prisoners no longer cared about the future and they typically died a couple of days later.

The lesson here? Set goals—they’ll give you something to live for.

I may or may not have described Frankl, his book, and his philosophy very well, but I highly recommend his book. It’s a quick read and you won’t regret it.

Related Posts

• BookLamp Can Help You Find New Books
• Turning a Negative Into Something Positive
• Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

This despite the fact that the only story I ever got paid for (it won an award) was written in two and a half hours and then edited a whole bunch afterwards.

National Novel Writing Month has already taught me this lesson: I can write a short story in no time. If word count is what we’re using to judge a short story, I can write one out in an hour if unleash the reins and just let go.

I’m in the middle of a month-long marathon but it’s amazing to see the ground I can cover in one day: 2,500 words is not too bad. That’s about the length of my “award-winning” short story. I knew running was a good analogy for writing.

The writer Haruki Murakami knows this all too well.

Gotta get back to the writing…I have a quota to make!

Related Posts

• Freelance Job
• Top Ten Reasons I Want to Retire Tomorrow
• Reading Bryson and Inspiration

After a two-year hiatus, I am undergoing one of the most transformative experiences I’ve ever had as a writer: I’m doing NaNoWriMo again.

For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month and the goal is to start from scratch on November 1 and write a 175-page novel, or 50,000 words.

The goal is to get writers writing and what setting a quota like this does is gets your brain to shut off so you can just write and write and write.

I did it a few years ago and it was amazing, you learn a lot about yourself and the craft of writing. To complete the goal, you pretty much have to write every single day, or at least think about writing every day.

So for a month you get to live the life of a writer.

So far I’m at around 4,000 words. The first time I did it I calculated around 2,500 per business day (so I’d still have my weekends) and that worked great until Thanksgiving came around, then it all fell apart.

This year I’m planning on pushing the envelope early on so I can actually hit 50,000. The first time I came in around 42,000. Oh and this time I’m writing on a computer, so I won’t have to manually count and calculate how many words I’m at.

Some early observations:

• Writing in stream of consciousness: That’s what this is all about. To find that rhythm where the words just start coming and you just get them out on the page without really thinking about how good or bad they are. Silencing the inner editor is the key to getting started. This is, after all, a shitty first draft.
• I can type a LOT faster than I can write: After an hour of typing yesterday I had met my quota, and I was shocked. Writing by hand slows things down, which can be good, but it can also get in the way. I’ll worry about prettying stuff up and everything after I’m done. Right now I only have 29 more days!
• There is no such thing as fiction: Everything you write has some basis in fact. What’s happening in your life and in your mind has an impact on what you’re writing, so it’s hard to say that something is 100% fiction when it’s wrapped in so much reality.

I’ll continue to post interesting stuff about money and all else, but it may be very sporadic (you’re probably used to it by now) since my time is being focused in the writing.

I’m off to a good start and I’m feeling inspired!

It’s about time…

Image by binbing

Related Posts

• November is National Novel Writing Month!
• Money Legitimizes Everything
• The importance of rewriting

I wanted to highlight a post I wrote for Wisebread a while back that I really think flew under the radar when I first published it.

For whatever reason, it didn’t seem to ring true with many people even though I keep seeing more and more instances that remind me of this question: are you a swiss-army knife or a hammer at work?

The question is simple: when it comes to the workplace, are you really good at one specific thing or pretty good at a variety of things? And which is more valuable in the long run?

Check out the post to see what other people have commented.

Image by Basheertome

Related Posts

• Are Real Estate Agents Really Necessary?
• Quality of posts
• Illegal Downloads: Do You Do It?

The other day I was flipping through the complimentary Men’s Health Magazine that I got from running the Urbanathlon last weekend.

One of the sections included tips to battle bad habits. Habits like spending too much in front of the boob tube.

As someone who’s had his own personal struggles with TV watching, I was curious to hear what Men’s Health Magazine had to say about this.

I assumed it would say something like “Get off your fat ass and go run 10 miles instead of watching the Bears game for three hours while eating avocado-flavored potato chips.”

So I was surprised to see that Men’s Health wasn’t as draconian as I assumed it would be: their tip was to DVR/TiVo what you want to watch so you spend less time in front of the TV without missing your show.

And you skip those annoying commercials.

Makes sense, right? The reason I like the tip so much is because it’s realistic. Will most people stop watching their favorite TV shows to go out and run some miles? Nope. But this is a very easy, actionable tip: if you have TiVo or a DVR, this is a tip you can’t turn away from.

And on Sunday, I put it into practice. Instead of watching the Bears get destroyed by the Bengals in real time, I watched them get dismantled on my DVR.

• Average NFL game length: 3 hours 30 minutes
• Time I spent watching the whole game: 1 hour 41 minutes

That’s 1 hour and 20 minutes that I spent doing relatively productive stuff instead of watching commercials of switching to another channel.

Think about how many shows you watch and how much time you could “create” with this tip. For heavy TV watchers, this could mean an extra two or three hours a week to read a book, write a blog, or sit in the dark and scare your wife.

It’s your time, use it as you see fit.

Does anyone else have some good, realistic tips to make our TV watching more efficient and less of a waste of time?

Related Posts

• Great Quote on Writing
• Coming up with Good Blog Ideas
• Money Hacks Carnival: Welcome to 2009

I like the analogy of the travel agent—are any of those still around? If so, business is probably pretty slow—the Internet has made us all our own travel agents.

There are some good comments for both sides of the argument, so feel free to chime in with your thoughts.

Related Posts

• Buying New vs. Fixing
• Wasting Time vs. Spending Money
• Ad Friday

I ran the race last year for the first time and it was quite the experience. My final time was 1:39 and I was GASSED at the end. I almost puked right before I crossed the finish line.

I thought I did pretty well for someone that had never run a race before.

This year I knew what to expect and I knew what I needed to do differently to improve my time. I didn’t train as hard as last year because I knew what was coming. What I did have was a plan.

Thanks to the experience I gained from running it last year, I would be doing two things differently:

1. Calm down: when you get to each one of the obstacles, there are people cheering and you get all pumped up. You want to speed through the obstacle as fast as you can. After all, it is a race. But I learned my lesson from last year—doing that takes a LOT of energy. And running 11 miles after speeding through these obstacles means you’ll be in pain at the end.
2. Go faster at the end: I dragged during the last leg of the race last year. A LOT of people passed me and I remember thinking to myself, “Wow, I’m losing ground pretty fast here.” I was hurting, but I knew I could’ve gone a little bit faster here if I knew how I’d feel before hitting the stairs.

So that was the plan: don’t use up your energy by blazing through the obstacles and use some of that saved energy on the last leg to really step it up. Sounds simple, right?

Well, coming up with the plan is easy, it’s following you own instructions that’s hard. Because once you’re out there and you see that first obstacle, it’s very tough to control yourself. I managed to execute.

I took it easy and had some gas left at the end, which I used to pass a whole bunch of people during that last leg (running with my iPod helped too).

The result? I ran the race in 1:35—an improvement of four minutes from last year’s time. And I probably trained half as hard as last year.

What Does This Have to do with Anything?

I used my experience to formulate a plan and I stuck to the plan when I was out there. It sounds simple, but this formula will take you far in anything you do. Whether it’s trading stocks or setting up your budget, using what you’ve learned from a previous experience and executing a plan based off of it will usually pay off.

As long as you get incrementally better at what you’re doing, you’re moving in the right direction.

And don’t forget to save a little something for the wall.

Related Posts

• How Many Resumes do You Have?
• Black Friday Redux
• 3 Ways Viktor Frankl Inspired Me to Deal With Adversity

OK, honestly? I’ve never run a marathon—but I am in training for the Urbanathlon (an eleven mile race with obstacles mixed in). And that means going on long runs that, most of the time, aren’t fun.

But running long distances has some unintended benefits—you learn a lot of things you can apply to totally unrelated parts of your life.

Don’t Stop

You’re going to want to stop—trust me. Because every part of your body hurts and you start asking yourself questions like “Why am I doing this?” But you have to keep going because once you stop, the odds of starting back up again are pretty low. And if you stop a bunch of times you’ll never finish.

Investing works the same way—that’s why making it automatic is so important. Make it so it happens without you even noticing it—that way it’ll make it harder for you to stop. Which you’ll want to because you want to buy a house, a new TV, etc. But don’t stop—just put your head down and keep on running.

Focus on What’s In Front of You

You’re going to be out there for a long time. A LONG time—and that can be pretty overwhelming. I know I’m in trouble when I’m five minutes into a run and I’m already thinking about heading back. That will make the run feel even longer. So I focus on the pavement in front of me and try to put all thoughts of the finish line out of my head—music helps.

What’s your ultimate investing goal? For me, it’s retirement—and that’s not going to happen any time soon. But saving all this money and telling myself that it’ll be worth it when I’m old and wrinkly is sort of depressing. So I just save the money, invest it as I see fit, and go about my life. And yes—music helps here too. This is why it helps to set goals along the way—they can give you a real sense of progress.

Don’t Forget it’s a Marathon

Just don’t forget you have a long ways to go. Focusing only on that sliver of pavement ahead of you can be dangerous because you might run out of gas before you finish the race. You have to pace yourself and leave enough in the tank so you’re in good shape to cross the finish line. I get a little excited sometimes when a great jam comes on and start going really fast. Then I get gassed and finish in pain.

Don’t get all excited about this and decide you’re going to save $3,000 this month to kick start your investing fund—these types of one-offs are unsustainable. Just like you can’t sprint through a marathon, you’ll never be able to “pump yourself up” with enough energy to pull this kind of stuff off. No way. You need to set a good, reasonable pace and stick to it.

Try Not to Compare Yourself to Others

When you’re out there training, you’ll see other runners blow by you and you’ll think to yourself, “I suck.” But you don’t know if they just got started, if they’re only running a couple of miles, or if they just robbed a bank. So comparing yourself to those around you is only going to get you in trouble—only you know your pace.

Someone will always save more than you, invest better than you, and wind up with more money than you. Maybe they had a trust fund, maybe they got lucky, or maybe they robbed a bank. You never know—so don’t try to figure it out. It’ll just drive you crazy.

Break Through the Pain

If I’m running 8–10 miles, I’ll usually hit a wall around mile 3. My body feels like it’s done and can’t go any further, and I start thinking that maybe something is wrong. How am I supposed to run for another five miles? But you push through that wall and find a well of endurance on the other side. It’s weird, but the sooner you get that out of the way, the smoother the run will go.

Starting is the tough part—we all know that. But stick with it long enough and you’ll see that it only gets easier and easier. Sure, the stock market might collapse again and you’ll lose a lot of your hard-earned money, but that’s just a part of investing.

If that happens, you can always go out and rob a bank.

For more on running and money, check out The Steve Prefontaine Guide to Getting Rich and Three Things Running Can Teach Us About Personal Finance.

Sweet image by Duncan Rawlinson

Related Posts

• I Am Running an Urbanathlon
• Financial Statements and Baseball Statistics
• Clean Energy Stocks and Dividends

When I get really philosophical about stuff, I’m one of those people that are like, “We only have a set amount of time in this life, so we should take advantage of it.”

PUKE, right? But there’s something to that cliché and so I decided to break out how I spend most of my time. I already know what I want to cut out of my “time budget,” but seeing it visually is always helpful.

It’s kind of depressing to see how much of my time is spent sleeping and sitting at my desk at work. Pretty crazy, but it also reinforces the thinking that I should be very picky with the other parts of the pie.

Ideally, I’d spend less time watching TV and more time reading.

Here’s my ideal scenario:

See the differences? I’m cool with the sleeping—I can handle feeling a little tired every now and then if it means I have more time to do stuff like reading, blogging, and —hello!— writing.

And by writing I mean creative writing. The kind of writing I used to do on a regular basis but have gotten away from over the years.

I want to feel like I did during NaNoWriMo.

What did I sacrifice? Well, this goes into one of the challenges I want to set for myself: to go without TV for a week.

Hopefully I’ll recreate the incredible time I had in Paris all those years ago when all I had was a stack of books, a mattress on the floor, and a couple of windows.

It was awesome. I would literally read until I fell asleep. Then I’d wake up, have a glass of water, write for an hour, and read for another hour. Then I’d fall asleep again, wake up, and go out for a walk in the streets of Paris.

My God I wish I could recreate those days…

Related Posts

• The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp
• How Blogging can get you more Money and a Better Job
• The Formula for More Writing

But yesterday I went for a run (this year’s Urbanathlon is on Saturday) and found my zen. I had an epiphany of sorts about this site and my writing in general.

When I first started blogging, it was for two main reasons: I wanted people to read what I had to say and I wanted to make some money. That eventually evolved into me trying to make some money. It took a lot of time and work to get this site to where it is, and I felt like I deserved some compensation.

And I have made a little bit of money. I’ve tried to squeeze as much juice as I could out of it by placing links in strategic ways, writing about certain topics, etc.

And you know what? It’s kind of boring. I’d rather just write about the things I’m passionate about and use this site as a place to hone my writing and say what I really want to say instead of what I think people want to read about.

In other words, this is going to be more of a soap box for me. And why not? It’s my site, and I’ll do whatever I want to on it.

I took down the ad that runs at the top of each post and I’m considering going back to just one sidebar—I want the focus to be on the content, not the ads.

Anyway, I don’t want “credit” for this or anything, but in the spirit of this being the place where I say whatever the hell I want, I’m saying it.

Over and out.

Related Posts

• My Best Investments of All Time
• Reader Feedback: Help me Help You
• Poetry is Cool. Who Knew?