In the course of our life, we have to agree that there is no beauty without struggle. Nobody likes to hear the story of someone who got everything easily. People want to hear the stories of men and women who were born in the valley of struggle, endured pain, and turned their battles into a gift.
So how can you become stronger? What can you do to transform struggle into beauty? Do you want people to admire you? Or do you want people to feel sorry for you?
Today or tomorrow, you may feel frustrated. Perhaps your dreams are not yet a concrete reality. Your life or career may have somehow taken a wrong turn. But to change that, the first thing you have to do is look 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 he wanted to be and do something different from others. But he just couldn’t figure out what it was.
A period of wandering and fighting
Even to this day, all kinds of topics interest me. At school, I liked biology. But growing up with horses, I naturally took to working with them. Then one day, after a few years, I was drafted into the Soviet navy for three long years. I was sent 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 started a career that just didn’t suit me. It was just a way to make a living and travel. This realization began a period of wandering and struggle in my life.
After my service in the Navy, I deserted while in the US, traveling throughout North America and Europe and working every job imaginable. I was a waiter in Florida, became a security guard in Belgium, worked as a zookeeper in Colorado, then switched to assistant surgeon for a veterinarian. Then I got into the Hollywood movie business where I worked as an extra and a stuntman, later becoming a chauffeur in Russia.
The beauty of it all
I also worked as a shoe salesman in Texas, served as a customer representative for a tour in Austria. In between, I even went back to my native Ukraine, where I worked as a chauffeur 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 at 50 years old and unable to settle for anything. Yes, I had moments of doubt, but I did not feel lost. Instead, he was searching and exploring, and he 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, reading it, every fight and everything in my disjointed past seemed to fall into place, like magic. The beauty of it all was the result of all those diverse 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 become stronger.
The moral of the story
All that experience gave me a vast storehouse of ideas that I could draw on. Even those indifferent and seemingly random jobs exposed me to all kinds of cultures, mindsets, and beliefs. And also the languages I learned while traveling taught me things.
All of these experiences added up to rich layers of knowledge and practice that changed me from the inside out. In my own strange and intuitive way, I gave myself the perfect education for what I must do in my life.
Now, the moral of this story is that you might tend to obsess over 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 that someone had to be in the right place at the right time and not take into account the struggle they had to endure.
The fight turns into beauty
You see the success that money and attention brings. In other words, you see the visible signs of opportunity and prosperity. You compare yourself to the struggle in your own life, but you are holding on to an illusion. What allows such dramatic changes are things that happen inside a person and are completely invisible.
So beauty is the slow accumulation of knowledge and skills, the 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 struggle into beauty, is incredibly simple. You have to reverse your approach. Stop paying attention to what other people say, do or think. And it ends with the focus on money, connections, or the outward appearance of things.
beauty looks in
Instead, look within! Focus on the smaller internal changes that lay the groundwork for a much larger change of fortune. It is the difference between clinging to an illusion and immersing yourself in reality. And reality is what will set you free and transform you. This is how this would work in your own life.
primary inclinations
Consider the fact that you are fundamentally unique and 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 attracted to specific topics and activities. It is what the bookmaster’s degreecalled 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 arises when you listen to family members urging you to pursue a particular career path. Or when teachers influence you, or by people telling you what you’re good at and bad at. You listen to friends who tell you what is right 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 careers that are not right 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 in that uniqueness that marked you at birth.
And whatever age you are, as it happened to me, you should reflect on those early inclinations. You should look at those issues of the present that continue to arouse in you that intense childish curiosity.
And recap on the struggle of those issues and activities that you have been forced to do in recent years. Based on these reflections, you determine a direction you should take. So you have a broad but general framework that you can explore to find the angles and positions that work best for you.
There is no beauty without struggle
You need to listen carefully to yourself, to your inner radar. For me, it was entertainment with animals and Hollywood that didn’t feel right. And so, you slowly advance narrowing your path, while accumulating skills.
However, most people don’t want to fight, but rather simple, direct, straight-line paths to the perfect position and success. But instead you should welcome wrong turns and mistakes. They make you aware of your flaws. And they broaden your experiences; They harden you and bring the beauty you want.
If you come to this process at a later age, you need to cultivate a new set of skills, just like I did. Get skills that suit this change and direction it will take and find a way to combine them with your previous skills.
There is no reward without challenge
As the slightest opportunity presents itself to him, he will now exploit it. In fact, you will continue to fight, but you will also attract new opportunities because people will notice how prepared you are. So the way to transform yourself is through your work.
Of course, you may believe that the beauty of self-transformation comes through 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 yourself. Instead, follow your inclinations and you will be able to become who you really are instead of trying to be someone else.
The efforts, the challenges and the difficult moments offer you much more value than any other moment of your life. You cannot grow or become stronger without struggle and resistance. So be thankful for its beauty and work on yourself to make sure your future is more pleasant than painful and regretful.
