The 1 Mindset All Successful People Have in Common

And It is Entirely within our hands

Ravi Shankar Rajan
Jul 20, 2017 · 6 min read

It started as the worst train commute of my life. My heart was palpitating badly, my senses were kaput and my future lay tattered before my very eyes.

That is what happens, when you are laid off for the very first time, without any prior notice what so ever.

That is when I noticed that guy

“A — M — O — R …. “AMOR FATI. I wonder What is that supposed to mean.” I murmured aloud as I saw that tattoo artistically engraved inside his right forearm.

He smiled and said-:

It is a Latin phrase that may be translated as “love of fate” or “love of one’s fate”. It is used to describe an attitude in which one sees everything that happens in one’s life, including suffering and loss, as good or, at the very least, necessary, in that they are among the facts of one’s life and existence, so they are always necessarily there whether one likes them or not. Moreover, amor fati is characterized by an acceptance of the events or situations that occur in one’s life.”

So you mean to say, I just accept everything bad which is happening to me and go along with the flow without any remorse. I am sorry I am a human being, not a saint. All this bullshit just looks good on tattoos and not in reality.” I said laced with sarcasm and bitterness.

He again smiled and asked, ignoring my sarcasms-:

Can you change your fate? If something bad is going to happen, it will happen, no matter what and there is nothing you can do about it. We should stop wishing for something else to happen, for a different fate. That is to live a false life. Often this wishing halts the doing. Simply visualizing a better state distracts us from taking the necessary steps to addressing our current fate.”

Intrigued, I waited for him to Explain -:

You don’t need to be a saint to resign to one’s fate. All that is required is to let go of the negative emotional baggage and free your mind so that it can look forward and accept newer challenges in life. This may sound difficult but very much doable. You need to embrace life as a spiritual warrior to come out of the dumps and start living life again.”

And this is how you can do it:

Live Life with no resentment

Viktor Frankl, the author of Man’s Search for Meaning, was a renowned psychologist focused on suicide prevention. In 1938, while living in Austria during the Nazi takeover, Frankl was prevented from treating “Aryan” patients due to his Jewish heritage. Four years later he, along with his wife and parents, was deported to a Nazi ghetto and later to Auschwitz and Dachau (two of the deadliest Nazi concentration camps).

Frankl was the only member of his family to survive the war (with the sole exception of his sister).

With his wife and parents dead at the hands of their Nazi oppressors, one might expect Frankl to be bitter or defeated. Yet this was not so.

Frankl urges us to understand, “You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.”

Thus Amor Fati makes you accept good and bad experiences that life throws at you. It helps you to live life without any bitterness or resentment, embracing whatever life throws at you.

Accept Challenges

Thomas Edison, at an age at which most of us would wish to retire, came home one late evening to eat dinner. A man burst into his home, interrupting him. He had dire news: there was a fire at his research facility.

At age sixty-seven, Edison arrived on the scene to see his campus ablaze.

One would imagine this is the point when Edison drops to his knees and screams out “Why me?” or some other exclamation.

However, Edison searched out his son and requested him to go and get his mother. Edison excitedly told his son, “They’ll never see a fire like this again.”

Naturally, Edison’s son thought he had lost his mind, and rightfully so. All of his experiments, things that could likely never be replicated, were burning to the ground.

“Don’t worry. It’s all right,” Edison said with calm, “We’ve just got rid of a lot of rubbish.”

In this, Edison revealed the true nature of amor fati — choosing to love any challenge life throws at you.

In fact, he was more revitalized than broken hearted.

So revitalized, in fact, that despite losing over $23 million (in today’s dollars, $1 million at the time), he was able to persevere and make over $200 million ($10 million, then).

Amor Fati helps you to look at ups and downs of life and teaches you life lessons for inner growth and transformation. This perspective thus helps you to live in bliss. When life throws you at a hard place, you simply learn how to deal with it, because there is no other way.

Don’t Fight Fate

Renowned Author Robert Greene nails it perfectly when they says-:

“I just fell in love with the concept because the power that you can have in life of accepting your fate is so immense that it’s almost hard to fathom. You feel that everything happens for a purpose, and that it is up to you to make this purpose something positive and active.”

A contented and productive life can only happen when we embrace everything that life throws at us. When we cannot change situations in life, letting go and surrendering can not only be empowering but can also help us to walk back on the path of correction.

Thus when you accept your fate, you free your mind of self-criticism and self-pity. It will help you to heal and move beyond the pain. You get a surge of inner compassion which heals all your pains and drowns all your sorrows.

The one lesson I learned

That one tête-à-tête with him on that day, gave me a new lease of life. As rightly said by somebody “when one door gets closed, another door opens somewhere else.” I lost my job that day but that opened a new door of entrepreneurship to me. It is now six months since then and my startup is doing quite well. I am not only earning now but I am also giving employment to several others; and I am proud of it.

It’s just human nature that, we all want certain things in life to be different, most of the time, better. But the cause of unhappiness isn’t about wanting something to be different. After all, we made a choice, we made a judgement, a decision to not like it in the first place. Rather than saying, “this isn’t bad or good, it just is”, we linked a desired outcome to an expectation. That is where unhappiness creeps in and erodes our confidence.

In reality, something is only good or bad because we judged it as such. Amor Fati provides us an alternative way of thinking is to accept things as just the way they are. Embrace the way things actually are and don’t resent it; That is the way to go!!!

As Friedrich Nietzsche rightly describes it:


About the author-:

Ravi Rajan is a global IT program manager based out of Mumbai, India. He is also an avid blogger, Haiku poetry writer, archaeology enthusiast and history maniac. Connect with Ravi on LinkedIn, Medium and Twitter.


If you enjoyed this story, please recommend and share to help others find it! Feel free to leave a comment below.

The Mission publishes stories, videos, and podcasts that make smart people smarter. You can subscribe to get them here.

Mission.org

A network of business & tech podcasts designed to accelerate learning. Selected as “Best of 2018” by Apple. Mission.org

)

Thanks to Mission

Ravi Shankar Rajan

Written by

Technology Manager,Poet,Archaeology Enthusiast,History Maniac.Also a prolific writer on varied topics from AI to Love.

Mission.org

A network of business & tech podcasts designed to accelerate learning. Selected as “Best of 2018” by Apple. Mission.org

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade