Throughout our life, we have to agree that there is no beauty without struggle. Nobody likes to hear the story of someone who got it all easily. People want to hear the stories of men and women who, although born in the valley of struggle, endured pain and turned their battles into gifts.
So how can you get stronger? What can you do to transform fighting into beauty? Do you want people to admire you? Or do you want people to feel sorry for you?
Today or tomorrow, you may be frustrated. Perhaps your dreams are not yet a concrete reality. Your life or career may have taken a wrong turn. But to change that, the first thing you have to do is search within yourself. So, I’ll tell you a quick story about my unusual path of change and transformation from battles to beauty over the years.
If I tell this story, it is because it is relevant to the theme of struggle, change, and beauty. The story begins when I knew from a very young age that I wanted to be and do something different from others. But I just couldn’t figure out what it was.
A period of wandering and fighting
Even to this day, I’m interested in all kinds of topics. In school, I liked biology. But growing up with horses, I naturally started working with them. Then one day, after a few years, I was drafted into the Soviet navy for three long years. They sent me away from everything I loved, near the arctic pole.
At first, this news was like a punch to the stomach. But in the months that followed, I realized that I loved animals, but I entered a career that just didn’t follow me. It was simply a way to earn a living and travel. This realization started a period of wandering and struggling in my life.
After my duty in the navy, I deserted while in the US, traveled all over North America and Europe, and worked every job imaginable. I was a waiter in Florida, became a security guard in Belgium, worked as a zoo keeper in Colorado, and then changed to be a surgeon assistant to a veterinarian. Then I entered the Hollywood film business where I worked as a rigger and stuntman, to later become a driver in Russia.
The beauty of it all
I also worked as a shoe salesman in Texas, served as a customer representative for a sightseeing tour in Austria. In between, I even returned to my native Ukraine, where I worked as a driver and bodyguard for escort girls, among other odd jobs. In these long years of wandering, fighting and beauty, he had added more than thirty different positions.
So here I was 50 years old and I couldn’t settle for anything. Yes, I had moments of doubt, but I did not feel lost. Instead, I was searching and exploring, and I was hungry for experiences. During all that time, I also loved writing. That year, while I was in Belgium, for another job, a friend gave me a book.
Suddenly, as I read it, every struggle and everything in my disjointed past seemed to fall into place, as if by magic. The beauty of it all was the result of all those various experiences. And so the horses, the vet, the zoo, the movie industry, and interestingly even the escort job gave me the skills to create my future and make myself stronger.
The moral of the story
All that experience gave me a vast storehouse of ideas that I could build on. Even those seemingly random, indifferent jobs exposed me to all sorts of cultures, mindsets, and beliefs. And also the languages that I learned while traveling taught me things.
All of these experiences added to rich layers of knowledge and practice that altered me from the inside out. In my strange and intuitive way, I gave myself the perfect education for what I am going to do in my life.
Now, the moral of this story is that you can tend to notice what you can see with your eyes. As humans, it is the most animal part of our nature. When you look at the changes and transformations in other people’s lives, you see the beauty and good luck someone had in being in the right place at the right time and ignoring the struggle they endured.
The fight turns into beauty
You see the success that attracts money and attention. In other words, see the visible signs of opportunity and prosperity. It compares to the struggle in your own life, but you are holding on to an illusion. What allows such dramatic changes are the things that happen inside a person and are completely invisible.
So beauty is the slow accumulation of knowledge and skills, incremental improvements in work habits, and the ability to withstand criticism. Any change in people’s fortunes is simply the visible manifestation of all that deep preparation over time.
The answer, the key to the ability to transform fighting into beauty is incredibly simple. You have to reverse your focus. Stop obsessing over what other people say, do or think. And finish the focus on money, connections, or the outward appearance of things.
Beauty looks in
Instead, look inward! Focus on the smaller internal changes that lay the foundation for a much larger change in fortune. It is the difference between holding on to an illusion and immersing yourself in reality. And reality is what will liberate and transform you. Here’s how this would work in your own life.
Primordial inclinations
Consider the fact that you are fundamentally one of a kind. Look at the beauty of your DNA, the particular configuration of your brain, and the experiences of your life. In early childhood, this uniqueness was manifested by the fact that he was particularly drawn to specific topics and activities. Is what the book “master’s degree“called primary inclinations.
You cannot rationally explain why you are so drawn to music, words, or particular questions about the world around you or any other field.
As you get older, you often lose touch with these inclinations. The struggle comes when you hear family members urge you to pursue a particular career. Or when teachers influence you, or by people who tell you what you are good at and what you are bad at. You listen to your friends telling you what is cool and what is not. At a certain point, you can almost become a stranger to yourself.
Reflect on beauty and struggle
And so you enter career paths that are not suitable for you, emotionally and intellectually. The beauty of your life’s task, your true vocation, or your purpose, as I call it, is to return to those inclinations and that uniqueness that marked you at birth.
And whatever age you are, like me, you should reflect on those early inclinations. You should look at those issues in the present that continue to awaken that intense childish curiosity in you.
And recapitulate the struggle of those issues and activities that you have been forced to carry out in recent years. Based on these reflections, determine the direction to take. So you have a flexible yet general framework that you can explore to find the angles and positions that suit you best.
There is no beauty without a fight
You need to listen carefully to yourself, to your internal radar. For me, it was the animal entertainment and Hollywood that didn’t feel right. And so he slowly advances narrowing his path, while accumulating skills.
However, most people do not want struggles, but simple, straight paths to the perfect position and success. But instead, you should welcome mistakes and wrong twists. They make you aware of your flaws. And broaden your experiences; they toughen you up and give you the beauty you want.
If you come to this process at a later age, you must cultivate a new skill set, just as I did. Gain skills that adapt to this change and direction you will take and find a way to combine them with your previous skills.
No reward no challenge
As the slightest opportunity presents itself, now it will seize it. In fact, you will keep fighting, but you will also attract new opportunities because people will realize how prepared you are. So the way to transform yourself is through your work.
Of course, you might believe that the beauty of self-transformation comes from a spiritual journey, therapy, a guru telling you what to do, social experiences, or even drugs. But it is not true because most of these are ways of running away from oneself. Instead, follow your inclinations and you can become who you really are instead of trying to be someone else.
Efforts, challenges, and hard times offer you much more value than at any other time in your life. You cannot grow or become stronger without struggle and resistance. So be grateful for its beauty and work on yourself to make sure your future is more pleasant than pain and regret.
