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The One Freedom You Always Have: A Lesson from Viktor Frankl

With Byron McCaughey · 23 July 2026

In this episode of In Session with Byron, psychologist Byron McCaughey draws on a powerful idea from Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning - that even when everything else is stripped away, we retain one freedom: the choice of how we respond to our circumstances. Frankl wrote this as a Jewish prisoner in a WWII concentration camp, and it's a principle Byron returns to often in session with founders. As entrepreneurs, we face our own adversities constantly - many of them entirely outside our control. But how we respond, the mindset we bring, and the actions we choose in the face of that adversity remain ours to decide. Learn why Frankl's idea of the "last human freedom" applies directly to founder life, how to separate what's outside your control from what's always within it, and a grounding reminder for the moments you're stuck worrying about things you can't change. No matter what you're facing, you always have the choice of how you respond.

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Transcript

Hi everyone, Byron here, psychologist for entrepreneurs. Today's In Session with Byron is on the topic of choice.

I'm going to paraphrase a line from Viktor Frankl's powerful book, Man's Search for Meaning: everything can be taken from a person but the last of all human freedoms - the choice we have in how we respond to any given set of circumstances. And this is coming from someone who was a Jewish prisoner in a concentration camp in World War II.

I think about this topic a lot, and I talk about it with founders in session. We have our own type of adversities that we're facing constantly as entrepreneurs, and while many of these challenges are totally outside of our control, what is always in our control is the choice we have about how we respond - the choice we have about our mindset, and the choice we have about the actions we take when facing those adversities.

So remember that when you find yourself getting caught up and stuck in worrying about all the things that are outside of your control, come back to remembering that no matter what you're facing, you always have the choice of how you respond.

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