The Other Task

The brilliant clinical psychologist Viktor Frankl spent nearly three years in Nazi concentration camps. He came out convinced that purposelessness was more likely to do a man in than the strain of the camps.

"What man actually needs," he wrote in Man's Search for Meaning, "is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task."

You have almost certainly chosen a task, and probably more than one. We build a practice or a business. We provide for a family. These are good goals. They get us up in the morning, and they deserve the effort we give them.

There is another task most of us never give the same attention to. It is the development of the self.

Name one vice

Character rarely improves by accident. Rather, it improves one fault at a time, and usually only after you have explicitly named it.

Start with honesty about where you are weakest. Maybe you talk too much and say things in a hurry that take days to walk back. Maybe you indulge your appetites past what you need. Maybe fear makes more of your decisions than you would admit.

Pick one. Write it down. Type it into a "Notes" app on your phone. Write it on a sticky note and put it on your bathroom mirror. Treat it the way you would treat a financial or fitness goal: something specific that you check.

The Stoics practiced exactly this. Seneca ended each day by putting himself on trial. Once the lamp was out and the house was quiet, he reviewed the day and asked what bad habit he had cured and what vice he had resisted. For Seneca this was bookkeeping, done every night.

Why it rounds out the rest

Vices do not stay in their lane. If we cannot hold our tongue at the dinner table we will not hold it in a tense meeting. An appetite left unchecked at home finds its way into how we spend and how we work. Fear that governs small choices will govern the large ones too.

So the inner work is not a rival to your other goals. It runs in parallel and makes obtaining the other ones more likely.

Isn't all this attention to oneself a little self-absorbed? Frankl himself insisted that meaning is discovered in the world, beyond the closed room of one's own mind. And he's right. You curb your tongue for the people who have to live with you. You master your fear because someone is counting on you to act. Done well and viewed correctly we see that the development of the self is aimed outward.

The last day

Most of our goals have a finish line. The practice gets sold. The children grow up and leave home. We finish the race we had been training for.

This task has no finish line short of the grave. Martin Short put it well in a recent documentary about his life: "I'd like to think I was the best version of myself on the last day of my life."

That is the right standard. The last day is the one that counts. It means the work is never done, and it means it is never too late to start.

Where the Stoics stop

Seneca knew his nightly ledger would never balance. The Stoics measured progress against the sage, the perfectly wise man, and they admitted they had never met one. They strove toward an ideal without a face.

Paul wrote about the same striving from a prison cell. Like Frankl, he was a man in chains thinking about the goal ahead. "Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect," he told the Philippians, "but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own."

Two things separate Paul's striving from Seneca's. The goal has a face: the work of the self is the work of becoming more like Christ. And the work does not start with us. Paul presses on precisely because he has a higher calling than himself. The Christian does not improve himself in order to be accepted. He improves because he has been. And because he is called to it.

This week

Choose your vice. Name it. Then ask yourself tonight, and again tomorrow night, where you gave ground today and where you held.

You have goals for your work and for your family. Give yourself one more. Be the best version of yourself on the last day of your life.