The book he wrote in nine days.

Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist in Vienna when the Nazis took him, his wife and his parents to the camps. He survived four of them. His wife, his mother and his father did not. When it was over, he sat down and wrote a short book in nine days, at first intending to publish it anonymously, and it has since sold in the tens of millions and been named among the most influential books ever written.

The first half is a plain account of life inside the camps, observed by a doctor trying to understand how some people kept going while others gave up. The second half is the theory he built from it, which he called logotherapy. Its core is simple and hard. We cannot always control what happens to us, but we can always choose our response, and the search for meaning, even in suffering, is what keeps a person alive.

Frankl watched men give away their last piece of bread. He noticed that the prisoners who survived longest were often not the physically strongest but the ones who still had a reason to live, a person to return to, a task left unfinished. Meaning, he concluded, is not a luxury for good times. It is the load-bearing structure of a human life, and it holds best under weight.

The line the book is remembered for is that everything can be taken from a person but one thing, the last of the human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances. He did not write it as comfort. He earned it as testimony.

For anyone making anything, or simply trying to keep going, the book is a permanent correction to the idea that we need the right conditions before we can act. The conditions are almost never right. Frankl found meaning in the one place that should have made it impossible, and in doing so proved it is available anywhere.

Ask not what you want from your work, but what your work, and this moment, is asking of you.