Having a purpose in life is very important. The synonym of purpose is objective, intension, goal etc.  A purpose or intension helps the mankind to stay focused on the things that matter most to him, the person, his family, friends etc. A purpose boosts spirit of living, it makes life interesting. It helps prioritize life; it helps to walk away from certain people or situations that do not add any value in other words are useless. A purpose in life helps us stay focused, it gives us the extra drive to move ahead in life. And, living purposefully is correlated to living longer. It keeps humans psychically healthy; it enables them to get healthy again even if they are seriously ill.

Viktor Emil Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist who founded logotherapy approach.  Logotherapy is a therapeutic approach that helps people find personal meaning in life. It is a form of psychotherapy that focuses on the future and on our ability to tolerate hardship and adversities suffering to achieve a purpose. Humans are unique; they have ability to think, learn, communicate and control their environment. This makes humanity genuinely different from all other living beings.

Viktor Frankl survived the horrific and adverse Nazi concentration camps in the 1940s. He witnessed many people dying in the camp who could not withstand the atrocities; he himself experienced lot of torture and he withstood the torture for four years. Frankl survived the experience of the concentration camp because of his strong desire to complete       a manuscript he had been working on named ‘The Doctor and the Soul’.

After being released from the camps, Victor Frankl developed a theory in which he stated that individuals can endure hardships when they have a purpose in life. He developed theory of “logotherapy” which is a therapeutic approach that helps people find personal meaning in life. It is a form of psychotherapy that is focused on the future and on our ability to bear hardship for a search for purpose. Logotherapy describes a search for life’s meaning which is the central human motivational force. An example that is often given to explain the basic tenets of logotherapy is the story of Frankl meeting with an elderly general practitioner who was struggling to overcome depression after the loss of his wife. Logotherapy is almost same as cognitive behavioral therapy.

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was jailed in cellular Jail at Andaman in which he was subjected to horrifying torture and inhumane treatment that tested the very limits of his conviction. He was eventually sentenced to double life imprisonment to be served at the infamous Kaala Pani prison, christened one of the darkest chapters in Savarkar’s life. He was, reportedly, restrained in chains, whipped, and resigned to six months of solitary confinement. Unlike numerous political prisoners who were driven to insanity or committed suicide, Savarkar showed remarkable resilience for his life’s mission freeing India from Britishers aa a Hindu nation.

 I wish to give another example of a renowned music composer Ravindra Jain. He was born visually impaired, but started singing at a young age and his passion for music led him to Indian music industry and in the decade of 1970s, he went on to become the most notable music director. He was so much dedicated to music that during one of the recording sessions his father passed away. But he didn’t leave the studio until the recording was completely finalized.  He once told a journalist “Music is everything for me. It is the very way of life for me” music was the purpose of his life.

Many people pick themselves up after severe illness, after losing a very dear person, after losing money, after being cheated – in short after a blow of fate that has knocked them down.  But they recover and go on with life because of a purpose. Instead of always looking back on what they have suffered, they live primarily in the present, which they shape as best they can according to a value driven vision of the future. In this way they liberate themselves from the unhealthy smog of their trauma.

Nelson Mandela spent 27 years of his life behind bars on Robben Island, a notoriously cruel jail.   He was confined to a small cell without a bed or plumbing and was forced to do hard labour in a quarry.  He survived the horrific experience for his life’s mission – the apartheid for fostering racial defrayal.

Psychologists and doctors have pointed out since last many decades that meaningful goals foster a sense of purpose in people who withstand adversities. The purpose fosters better physical and mental health. Many believe that God choses some individual for some special purposes but that may be the truth.

Logotherapy is set on the premise of facing adversity which is a great teacher. It comes as a chance to gain valuable insights. We truly learn from our mistakes and wrong judgements. adversity plays in shaping our character, resilience and endurance. During adverse time one develops a deeper understanding about himself and how the world works.

The meaning of the word adverse is hostile or critical situation. We all face some or the other adversities in life, it’s only during adversities one really comes to know who are friends and well-wishers. Like IQ, EQ, SQ there is an AQ (adversity quotient) which is a score that measures the ability of a person to deal with adversities in his or her life. One needs to increase resilience to overcome adversities in life. The term was coined by Paul Stoltz in 1997 in his book Adversity Quotient: Turning Obstacles into Opportunities. To quantify adversity quotient, Stoltz developed an assessment method called the Adversity Response Profile (ARP). The AQ is one of the possible indicators of a person’s success in life and is also primarily useful to predict attitude, mental stress, perseverance, longevity, learning, and style of responding to changes in environment.

There are umpteen examples of people who fought adversities and have become successful. The richest person in the whole world couldn’t make any money at first. Do you know that Bill Gates’ first company, Traf-O-Data (a device which could read traffic tapes and process the data), failed miserably. When Gates and his partner, Paul Allen, tried to sell it, the product wouldn’t even work. Gates and Allen didn’t let that stop them from trying again to fix the problem. Traf-O-Data helped them prepare Microsoft’s first product a couple of years later.

In the year 2000, when the entire world was celebrating the new century, Amitabh Bachchan was feeling disastrous because he had no films, no money, no company (ABCL), a million legal cases against him and the tax authorities had put notice of recovery on his house. The mega star was then in his late fifties. Yash Chopra offered him a role in his film Mohabattein. It was this time when Amitabh got a huge break through Kaun Banega Crorepati. It propelled him into national stardom and helped in the reversal of his fortunes. In my opinion, nobody can match Amitabh on Kaun Banega Crorepati.

AQ is the key determinant of success and winning in a person’s life. This does not mean that EQ and IQ are irrelevant; resilience in the face of stressful situations and in world of rapid changes determine success in life. In workplace, in business, in personal life when one faces difficulties yet fights out the problem courageously and moves ahead is a person with good AQ. Such a person is real Hero.  There is a magic that comes when one is strong enough to identify a goal and move steadily towards it while also being flexible enough to pick oneself off the ground when obscurities come in way.

It does not matter whether you are an entrepreneur, a musician, a home maker, a student, a clerk, a CEO or a plain Jane; rising to the occasion, especially during times of difficulty, should be included into the mentality of those who desire growth, development, and success. It’s effortless to remain stagnant when you are not happy, but it takes strong character to utilize how a transitional phase can work for you.

I don’t know the exact number of attempts and failures Edison had before he created the light bulb; it is debated that he failed 10,000 times. But what a great man Edison was. His response to his repeated failures was “I have not failed; I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work”

Across the world, organizations are emphasizing on testing AQ rather than just EQ and IQ testing. It can be difficult to test AQ, as seeing how people think and behave under pressure is not easy to simulate in an interview context. However, it is possible to screen a “fair-weather employee” from the resume; also, you can screen a hardworking employee; whether an employee can adapt to change easily or not; whether a person can cope when things get challenging at work; whether somebody is capable of taking more responsibility, or asked to do something he/she has never done before.

Look for resilience in the CV: Organizations must avoid individuals who tend to be easily discouraged when confronted with even minimal adversity. Such people will infect and weaken others in a team. They will kill the overall morale and culture. On the contrary, candidates who stuck out a job in dire circumstances even though the business subsequently closed deserve consideration. Often, such people exhibit greater depth and breadth of work experience because they have been the last persons standing and have worn many hats. The proverb “Rats abandon a sinking ship” tell a lot in an organization, when something is about to fail, large numbers of people begin to leave it. The people who leave are “rats” they are the selfish and disloyal employees. A further indication of AQ can be picked up from early life experiences of candidates who faced adversity and overcame or dealt with it.

Rewards: usually incentive structures reward contribution primarily on a origin basis. The risk with very simplistic appraisal model does not work, it may fail to reward someone demonstrating high AQ because often such employees fail to project their hard work because they get lost in solving problems or finding solution to a sticky snag, it has been observed that people, who are committed, do not run after getting rewarded for their work. Therefore, it is  important to adopt an incentive model that is sophisticated enough to acknowledge those working on difficult assignments, where they are contributing and delivering results, even when the fruits of their labor do not get fully realized.

Appreciation: A members of the team who demonstrates the highest AQ and delivers results, all other things being equal, should be promoted to a leadership position of the organization. Often, these team members will be the ones who are also the most productive and get things done as they are less prone to distraction or dissuasion by adverse circumstances surrounding them. A worker who is engrossed in his work, and is busy fixing some problem, will not have time to gossip or to advertise his achievements.

Improve your AQ:  The brain ideally is formed to create habits. First, identify the cue of a behavior, and then replace the behavior with a stronger one. The habits you have don’t have to be the same. You can start to change them straight away. Your response to adversity doesn’t have to stay the same. It can be changed, and gradually and immediately improve. We respond to adversity in constant, subconscious patterns. We have to receive feedback from others and give ourselves transparent feedback to become more self-aware about our lacking adversity quotient. Once you realize and identify how you respond to adversity, you can break off your pattern of response. Take an Adversity Quotient test. These are real tests that give you a number score just like the IQ test. Taking will tell you a lot about yourself you may have not known. There are plenty of them on Internet. Improve your AQ.