In his book Man’s Search for Meaning Viktor Frankl, a Jewish German neurologist/psychiatrist colleague of Freud who fathered logotherapy (considered the “Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy” after Freud’s psychoanalysis and Adler’s individual psychology) and survived the Holocaust, talks about three values in life: the creative value, the experiential value, and the attitudinal value. If you have ever recovered well from an awesomely bad situation, more likely than not, you used some attitudinal value to do so.
Let me give you an example and then you can leave a comment below talking about your own example.
I consider myself Greatly! blessed with a large, multi-generational family. We live, laugh, and love, mostly together as one. We celebrate, we support each other in good times and bad, and we grow and learn together. And when we fight, we fight like cats and dogs and then, except for a few valid exceptions, when we are done, we are done, and we kiss and make up and move on.
Other than one’s god and one’s self, there is no responsibility higher than taking care of one’s family. Doing so as often and as much as is needed persistently, consistently, and continuously in the various circumstances that amorphously present themselves requires an equally ever-changing application of life’s precious resources of self, time, effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people.
Some of my family members suffer a variety of mental and physical maladies that either limit their ability to help themselves or others and/or cause them to consume other people’s helpful resources like a black hole. We love them anyway.
In order to care over the long term for someone who is a net resource consumer, you must be able to yield a net gain of your entire set of life’s 8 precious resources from the experience. If you put in a total amount of more or less, but at least some, of each of your life’s precious resources, then, unless you get out of the experience a larger amount of more or less, but at least some, of each of those types of resources, you are going to be much less likely to help that family member in the future.
If the situation of required inputs being more than outputs happens too much, then you will eventually run out of resources and you will never be able to care in the future for yourself or anyone else.
A Great! resource for catalyzing growth in other types of resources is using the intellectual knowledge of how to extract attitudinal value from less than Great! situations and experiences. When God gives you an over-abundance of over-ripe tomatoes, you learn how to both cook and love tomato sauce. When you have two many soft, brown bananas, you learn to bake and enjoy banana bread.
On a more serious note, when my wife Susan’s cancerous ovaries grew from walnuts to softballs, requiring removal of them and her womb, we both learned to love the resultant less of her more than ever. Me, especially.
She had already used all that stuff to grace our lives with six practically perfect children, so we satisfied ourselves with changing our outlook on working and living for the future and learned how to focus almost exclusively on the present and enjoy life moment to moment instead of sacrificing everything now to enjoy something else some other time, maybe.
Instead of whining, “Why me,” it was during this time that I wrote Great! All the Time! to memorialize the life-changing lessons we picked up out of the experience. I put an extreme amount of all my resources into helping both Susan and the rest of our family recover from her illness and I got a good deal of emotional support from a lot of friends and family. More importantly, I got to know God, my self, and my wife a lot better than I ever had before.
The ability to extract an attitudinal value from a bad situation allows one to get emotional and intellectual value from a bad situation when little else can be gained.
Question: What is your most vivid memory of a bad situation that lived up to the saying, “That which does not kill me only makes me stronger”?
Leave me a comment below so we can discuss it.
In the meantime, your GOTTABGATT!, so go out there today and be Great! All the time!