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Amor Fati – the antidote to anxiety and procrastination
Amor fati 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.
You need to have the mindset that it is impossible to fail. You need to be able to see what other people call failures as stepping stones to get you to success.
Let me ask you a question.
If you publish a post then it only gets one likes, how do you feel? If you publish the post and it got a thousand likes, how would you feel?
Similarly, if you ran a promotion and it gets one sign up, how do you feel? If you run a promotion and it gets 10,000 signups how do you feel?
Is it possible that you can feel the same regardless of whether you get results poor results far your expectations or amazing results that far exceed them?
When you become indifferent to the outcome, you have tremendous Jedi level power.
Why? Because you can get up every day and grind in ways that people who are emotionally attached cannot. If you had a bad day, if you had a failure, it’s so easy to wake up the next day and charge ahead and get right back at it again.
Whether something good or bad happens, can you be able to see it as a positive? Can you look at your past experiences to see things that you consider bad, and try to consider how something good might have actually come from it?
There’s a story of an old Taoist farmer that I want to share with you.
On his farm he had one horse. One day, the gate was left open and the horse ran away.
All of his friends said, such bad luck!
He just replied, “Maybe. We’ll see.”
Then suddenly, the horse came back a few days ago with three more wild mares. His friends once again said, “such good luck!”
Again he replied, “Maybe. We’ll see.”
As his son was breaking in one of the wild horses, it threw him from his saddle and he broke his leg.
Once more his neighbors came over and said, “such bad luck!”
He replied, “Maybe. We’ll see.”
The next day, military officials from the government came to the town to conscript young men for service in the military. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. Shortly after, almost all of the young men who were drafted perished in a great battle.
Once again, the neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out and told him “such good luck.”
“Maybe,” said the farmer.
The winds of fortune are always in flux. We need to arrive at a state of mind where chance does not affect us. Life does not always give us what we want, it gives us what we need. Nothing is good or bad, it simply is.