Let go of the target and success will ensue….
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“Don’t aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.” – Viktor Frankl [1905-1997]
What makes the above quote stand apart from typical motivational one-liners is who spoke it. Viktor Frankl was not a self-help influencer chasing clicks. He was a neurologist and psychiatrist-psychotherapist who survived four concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Dachau and lost his father, mother, brother and wife to the Holocaust.
When someone who endured that speaks about meaning over outcome, the words carry a different kind of authority entirely. Viktor Frankl turned unimaginable suffering into one of the most studied ideas in modern psychology.
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Long before this quote made headlines, young Viktor Frankl was already unusual. Born in Vienna in 1905, he was studying philosophy and learning hypnosis by age 15 and lecturing publicly on the meaning of life by 22. By the time he was 25, he had launched free youth counseling centers that drove Vienna’s teen suicide rate to zero within a single year, a staggering achievement almost nobody talks about today. Before the war, he ran the so-called pavilion for suicidal women at Steinhof Psychiatric Hospital.
Then came the death camps. Frankl survived Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Dachau-Kaufering III and Dachau-Türkheim, losing nearly his entire family along the way and returning home in 1945 to find nothing left of his old life.
Rather than collapse, Frankl wrote his most famous book, “Man’s Search for Meaning”, in just nine days, originally publishing it anonymously because he wanted total honesty. The book later sold over ten million copies worldwide and was named one of the ten most influential books in America by the Library of Congress in 1991.
Frankl did not theorize about resilience from comfort. He lived it, lost almost everything, and still chose meaning over despair, which is exactly why his words refuse to fade.
Therefore the quote is not just an inspirational filler for our morning scroll. It is a lesson forged in a concentration camp, tested against real loss and still relevant for anyone burning out while chasing goals today.
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Frankl believed that success cannot be pursued directly, because the harder you chase it, the further it tends to slip away. He believed real success arrives only as a side effect of living for something bigger than oneself. That idea sounds simple on the surface, yet it challenges almost everything modern that today’s hustle culture teaches us.
Like happiness, success cannot be pursued directly and turning it into a target virtually guarantees we will miss it. Instead, Frankl argued, success shows up unannounced, as a natural byproduct of dedicating ourselves to a cause larger than our own ego.
If we peel back the surface of the quote, we find a radical rejection of outcome-obsessed living. Frankl was warning against what he later called the “existential vacuum”, that hollow feeling people get when life becomes only about ticking boxes and hitting targets. Much after the war, he noticed this emptiness especially in students and young professionals, people who had every material comfort and yet felt strangely lost.
Frankl founded an entire branch of psychotherapy called “logotherapy” [healing through meaning], whose premise is that the fundamental raison d’etre of all humans is to find meaning in life. That is why we go about fixing goals. Purpose, not pleasure or achievement, is what actually sustains a human being through hardship. Success should ensue, not be pursued. It is like when we are building something worthwhile, the clouds open up and sunlight shines on us. We don’t have to stare directly at the Sun.
Frankl also pushed back hard against the modern-day obsession with the pursuit of happiness and the role that psychotherapy plays in it. He argued that psychotherapy’s real job was never to manufacture happiness on demand. Its job, he believed, was to help people find the courage to face real life, with all its unavoidable difficulty and disappointment that comes with it.
The act of focusing too fiercely on a desired outcome actually frightens it away. It is like trying to fall asleep, but keeping awake, tossing and turning. The harder we consciously try to force ourselves to sleep, the more awake we become.
Happiness is quite similar. It is a shy, elusive emotion. If we look it right in the eye and demand it appear, it hides from us. It is like a very faint star at nighttime which is invisible if one looks directly at it, but appears when we shift our gaze and look past it. Frankl taught us that we need to look past happiness, focusing instead on the task at hand and let joy slip in through the back door, unnoticed.
Success must ensue and not be pursued. When we bring absolute excellence, care, and love into whatever we do, success becomes an inevitable byproduct. It follows us; we do not follow it. This is the core of Frankl’s philosophy, known as self-transcendence.
We find meaning by forgetting our ego and dedicating our time to a massive project, may it be a beautiful art piece, a social cause, repairing damaged relationships or simply loving another human being unconditionally. The less we care about our own happiness and the more we care about something outside of ourselves, the more fulfilled we naturally become.
On his last days alive, when our dog, Shepherd, would lie on his side, his pain-wracked throat throbbing from a tonsillectomy that had gotten infected, he would still find the strength to wag his tail when we approached. “I’m fine, don’t worry,” he seemed to say, not wanting to stress us out. If we held out a piece of bread soaked in milk, he would gratefully try to swallow it, his tail berserk. “How fortunate I am to be here with you”, his eyes said. I can guarantee he died the happiest dog in the world.
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We live in an era of unprecedented comfort, yet rates of anxiety and depression are sky-high. Frankl identified this decades ago as the “existential vacuum”—a total feeling of inner emptiness, boredom and apathy. Single people, leading busy professional lives, may be struck by “Sunday neurosis” – a feeling of despondency, being at a loss to figure out how they will be able to get through the weekend.
Some might try to fill the void of the existential vacuum with money, if they are wealthy or famous, they may binge dive into social media, seeking cheap facile validation. These are attempts to target happiness directly. The hidden lesson here is that the existential vacuum cannot be filled by consuming things; it can only be filled by committing to things. Responsibility is the weight that anchors the human spirit.
Frankl said we shouldn’t be asking, “What does life owe me? What is the meaning of my life?” Instead, the universe is asking us the questions, every single day through our circumstances, our struggles and our relationships. And Ihe universe doesn’t want our words in response, but our choices and our commitment toward the greater good.
If we feel stuck, burnt out or empty while chasing our goals, Frankl advised we take our hands off the steering wheel of expectation and stop asking how today can make us successful. Instead, we need to ask: What cause can I serve today? Whom can I support?
—-—-Peter Drucker’s views———
Would the late management guru, Peter Drucker agree with Frankl? Interestingly, yes, he would, strongly….
While Frankl famously argued that success and happiness cannot be pursued but must ensue as the unintended side effect of dedication to a cause, Drucker championed a parallel concept in the corporate world – Management by Objectives(MBO). Drucker believed that MBO pursues single-mindedness, self-control and purpose and not blindly chasing arbitrary quotas.
Targets are tools to inform direction, not ultimate objectives in themselves. Drucker argued that “chasing a target” for the sake of the number leads to the distortion of an enterprise’s values. When an organization focuses entirely on the target rather than the mission (the value created), it suffers from ethical and operational decay.
When the management of a company forces workers to chase rigid, top-down numerical targets, it strips away their personal responsibility to “do the right thing” and replaces it with fear of failing to comply. Individuals must understand why their work matters to the bigger picture. Frankl believed that a human needs “to strive for meaning” to thrive and Drucker wrote that a worker needs a “will to contribute to his employer’s long-term success and role in the world” to perform. Its the same thing.
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Let go of the target and success will ensue.
