Love Your Fate： How Amor Fati Changed My Mindset and My Life

Hello my beautiful audience. I decided to shoot this video again impromptu. I was just finishing up a call with a client of mine online over Zoom. So if you don't know, I actually do online consultations about etiquette, soft skills, self-development, public speaking. So anything the client might need, we tailor, I tailor make those individual sessions. If you want to book one, you can do so by emailing info at to get the full information about how to book one. But as I was wrapping up a call and I was, you know, I took a break, went to make myself a cup of green tea to refuel. I was thinking about how life was unfolding for me in the ways that I did not perhaps foresee or expect. And I did my part of work. I obviously studied very hard as a young girl. I always wanted a big career. I was very career driven. I had a lot of goals and aspirations in life. But with that being said, if anyone told me even, I don't know, 10 years back that you would be doing this, this would be your life, I would say no way. Like I could not have dreamt it better than what I have right now. But it of course didn't come so easy. I had my moment where I felt like I didn't know what I was doing. I was lost. I didn't know if I chose the right educational background. I studied international relations at George Washington University did my master's in Belgium. So I was thinking where am I headed? What am I doing? And it was today in this current moment, as I'm sitting in my office, that I once dreamt of building. I actually did a whole office tour and it's on YouTube, a video, if you haven't watched it, make sure that you do. I think it's an inspirational video. The purpose of it was not to show off, but rather to inspire you that if you set your mind into something, if you dream big, if you work hard and lead the rest to God and faith, you will have things unfold for you in ways better than you even planned. So while I was, you know, finished my call, had a great session with my client, went to make yourself a cup of tea before I took on my next task to do, I thought about it. I'm going to just sit down and shoot this video while I'm still inspired. And I wanted to share these thoughts with you that I have been having for the past few days after actually watching a video on YouTube a while back on stoicism. So I'm really interested in philosophy and I always try to watch something that will nourish my soul, nourish my mind, and I curate the content that I let into my mind. Therefore, I also try to create content that I hope people are able to consume and that can actually impact their life in a good way, that can change perhaps lives in ways. So with that being said, I was watching this video on stoicism and it said about this concept called amor fati, which from Latin means amor is the love, and fati means faith or destiny. It's the love for your own destiny, or rather to put it otherwise, it's love your own destiny, love your own faith. And as I heard about this concept, I think I could have put it in a better wording, I could have created a better phrase for it, but it sounds better in Latin, also amor fati, and just remembering to love your destiny, love your life, love your faith in the way that it's created and written for you. I always have this actually, I would say arguments, but I'll have this debate with people that, you know, can we really control our life or is everything up to written, it's matuk, it's destiny, it's faith, whatever you might name it. I think part of it is yes, part of it is written, but also a lot of it depends on how you act and how you react. So we are given the free will, so God has created us in his own image and he's given us, unlike all the other creatures, the power of free will, so we are able to determine things for ourselves, we're able to make the choice. But I think out of the options that we are given, those perhaps might be written. So for example, maybe for you in your life, there could be 10 possible lives that you might be living and depending on the choices that you make, a certain life unfolds for you. I believe the things that you can control can be influenced by your actions and your reactions, but the things you cannot control, like your birth, obviously it's not something we get to choose, we get to decide, we get to control. Perhaps our parents in some way are able to, you know, take care of their health a certain way, make sure that they eat a certain way, especially our mother where she's pregnant with us, but really the rest is up to the genetics and God's will. And then death is something we don't get to choose because we're not able to control. So birth and death, I think, are written, but then the rest of your life, the way it unfolds, it's in certain ways written and in certain ways it's up to your belief, mindset, work ethics, morals, principles, trust in the universe, trust in people. So these things are really influencing the way your life unfolds. But the concept of muffat is not really necessarily arguing either for if everything is written or unwritten, it's rather the acceptance, or rather not just passive acceptance, like, okay, it has happened to me, I'm just going to acknowledge it, but it's really having the love for that. So even, I mean, it sounds very easy to do when you have good things unfold for you, obviously you're going to love your life because you're having such a great time, you're having a good life, everything comes easy to you. But it's also loving all the hard trips that you have to go through in order to have that beautiful life. Of course, I think with social media, we're only sharing, I mean, I know that it's for me for sure, I only share and I try to share only the good things, the things that inspire the beautiful things. And some people might think it's not being honest, or maybe it's like, in a way it's not being authentic. But I think it is authentic, because it's also part of my life. The reason I don't want to share the hard trips, the challenges, the setbacks, the tears, is because I want to keep my page, my Instagram page, my YouTube channel, a way of people to relax, a way of people to get inspired, a way of people to unwind. I don't want them to stress even more about my life, because they have already things to stress about their own. So for me, the end goal is to inspire, the end goal is to make people aspire for things, to relax, if I can, with my voice or my presence, anything that I can do to soothe their daily routine. So I use social media as a way to also escape from my reality sometimes, in a way that, you know, on the days that I feel sad, on the days that I feel upset, on the days that I don't feel like I'm myself, or things seem blown out of proportion for me in my mind, on certain days, I have those moments too. I go to Pinterest, I look up images that make me smile from my heart, you know, that make my heart go like that kind of a moment. I look at the pictures that I imagine my life to be like. I go on YouTube and look up videos on stoicism, on philosophy, on love of faith, on trusting, on believing in the universe and positive manifesting. I'm looking at all the things that can help me to be uplifted rather than to even feel more overwhelmed with the negativity. So the point of Amarfati is not just to embrace all the good things that you have in your life, but to really cherish all the bad things that have happened to you. And in retrospect, it's only in retrospect, and when we look back at life and really remember things that have happened to us, and in the moment felt, oh my God, it's so unjust, why this happened to me, I did not deserve this, you know, I should have been in their place or something like that. We don't know what life is preparing for us. And usually it's something better, bigger, brighter, or just different, and different in a good way. So I have loved my life thus far. And even if certain things did not work out the way I imagined when I was younger or thought I would have at this age in my life, I now see why I didn't get them. And I now see what kind of a bigger purpose they have served me. It takes a bit of time to come to this, because when the pain is fresh, when the pain is excruciating, when the pain is like an open wound, you are not really able to make sense of it. All you're feeling is the negativity. And it's very difficult at that moment to be like, oh, this pain is amazing, like it's going to serve me something. But I guarantee you that as the pain fades, or rather the wound starts covering up a little bit, and once it's completely healed, you're going to see why it happened to you. And maybe in the process of it happening to you, in the process of you healing, you are learning something about yourself, or about life, or about people around you, and how they were treating you, and how you were reacting to their care, or rather their negligence. So these things are helping us to realize that we are learning something in life from every single experience, no matter how bad it is. I remember back in the days, a friend of mine recommended me to read this book called Radical Acceptance. I read it, and I couldn't come to terms with it. I thought, okay, it's too radical for me, the idea that you have to accept and acknowledge and appreciate everything, and radically accept everything. And sometimes there's things in life that feel so unjust, and I feel like there's no way you can justify it, there's no way you can accept it. Like children being killed unjustly, wars being, I mean, children being killed unjustly, it's just generally everything happening is unjust. That is about kids, about children, you know, wars, people being held in prisons unjustly. I don't know, there's so many things in life that are happening, and we humans know it's not just, but there are still happening there. But I'm not saying that you can learn something from these experiences. It's very hard to wrap your hand around how you can learn about something as horrible as losing a child or losing your loved one. And I haven't come to terms of radically accepting these things and embracing the way that this book was talking about. But I think the concept of amor fati is really loving your life and accepting it as it is, because there's nothing else that you can do, like, for example, with a loss that you cannot really control. So what is the alternative of loving your life? It's hating it, but really living it with hatred. But why and for what? It's not going to make the pain go away. It's not going to make the loss come back. It's not going in any way make it better. So it's in a way also easing yourself or easing your life by accepting and loving what is happening to you or loving your faith and your destiny. I think every experience has taught me in retrospect, not in the moment, in the moment I thought I was a victim. And I love, I think, playing a little bit of that victim chord. I think I was always explaining to myself things from a perspective of a victim. And that helped me to live in that pain. And that helped me to just not take charge of anything in my life in a way that I was like, you know, I'm a victim of these circumstances. I was a victim of my own choices, for sure. But really, the circumstances were something maybe at the moment I couldn't change, but I could choose not to be a victim of those circumstances. And I could have chosen to take a different path. But that's in the past. What I'm saying now is I've learned to not victimize myself. And even when something happens to me, and I feel like, okay, this was unjust, I didn't deserve this. I mean, come on, how could they? Or how could this have happened to me? I think of, okay, this happened to me, it's hopefully going to serve me a better lesson. This is a blessing in disguise. I'm going to love my life with that. Because what's the option of not loving it? And hating it? I don't want to hate my life. I want to love it. And I want to live it fully. And in the process of going through Amorpati, loving my life, I'm also learning to ask the right kind of questions to myself. So if before I would always ask myself, oh, why this happened to me? Why did this person do this to me? Why did I end up doing this or being in this situation? Now I ask, what is it for? What was it for that I happened to be in this meeting with this person? What was it for that I happened to make this choice in my life? So instead of saying, why, being that, why, why, why did this happen to me? I'm more of, for what? For what purposes? For what bigger lessons? For what better blessings do I have this in my life? Or did I have this in my life? And when now I look at the character that I've built by going through the experiences that I've gone through, I would have been who I am with the same character that I have now, if not for those experiences. I think I was brought up in a family where I was in a way shielded from reality. I didn't see the world as it was. I saw the world as my parents portrayed it to me. And this was, I think, a children's amusement park. It was a Disney world. I had pink glasses on at all times. Not to say that our family didn't go through difficulties. We did. But I think the outer world was shown to me from a very nice side. I never saw people that I saw when I grew up and left my home. So when I moved to the United States, lived on my own, and later in my life, when I saw people, different kinds of people, people I never imagined even existed as those that were so hypocritical, so double-faced, triple-faced, people that didn't have any morals or principles, people that would be comfortable lying to one's face. So I came across all different kinds of people. And in the moment, I remember thinking to myself, why? How could I deserve this kind of a friend? How could I deserve this kind of a person I met in my life? How? How? How? Why? Why? Why? But now I know that the why was that, or for what it was, so that I would be more aware, so that I would be more careful, so that I would be more selective, so that I would learn to choose myself rather than trying to please people around me, because I realized that not everyone is as authentic as they want you to see them as. So with going through these experiences, I've learned to love myself and put myself first, and also trust my intuition a bit more than I did perhaps before, because I would try to wrap my head around someone and think, you know, and try to find reasons as to perhaps they were better than I thought, or it felt like, and then I would be let down, and I would be like, but why? And then my victim old self, but now I see for what, so that I learn to recognize people, so that I learn to distinguish good people from bad people, or trust my intuition more, or surround myself with good quality people, or surround myself with people that intuitively make sense to me. So this stoic concept of amorphity had really tremendously changed my approach to life, and there are a lot of different concepts that I try to learn, and I have this habit of learning new concepts and writing them down in my notebook, and sort of collecting world wisdom from people. I mean, you know, humans have always been humans, and so we come in different versions, in different shapes and forms, but pretty much the nature has been almost always the same, and I try to derive from these old wisdoms and concepts and notions like amorphity, like Anika, like Mehmet Domore, and many more like that, that really helped me approach life from a different perspective. And I write down these concepts, and I try to apply them in my daily life, or I try to incorporate them as sort of my life motto. And I mentioned this earlier in one of my videos, I think I did a video on quotes as well, that I love collecting quotes, that I like writing down quotes from people that were wise, people whose quotes have stood the test of time, that translate a certain wisdom, maturity, a life lesson, and we don't always have to make the mistakes in order to learn from life, we can just observe other people's mistakes, learn from literature, reading books, collecting quotes, there's so much wisdom in those quotes that can help us, without having to do that mistake, really incorporate those quotes into our lives, and live our lives by those quotes, by those concepts, by those notions that carry so much weight and wisdom. If you like this kind of a sit-down talk with me, do let me know in the comment section below, write out perhaps you have certain concepts that have helped you in life, what are those, share some thoughts with me as well, I love taking notes on your recommendations, on your thoughts and feedback, and as a community we can read the concepts that you're ready to share with us, perhaps there are certain concepts you live by, or some words of wisdom that you live by, and to leave you with the last message, I also wanted to share with you one of my favorite quotes, so if I were to pick my favorite at the moment life motto, that would be Amor Fati, and if I were to always quote my favorite quote of all times is, one day or day one, and I came across this quote many years ago, and up until today, I think it has been already 10 years, up until today, it's one of my favorite quotes of all times, and the quote says, one day or day one, and translates as, or explains as, you get to make the choice, if today is the day you start your new life, or the life you aspire to live, or it's one day, one day meaning tomorrow, the day after, and the day after, and you never make that decisive first step in order to start changing your life, and it's really up to you, after your choice, it's not just the fun written in your destiny, but it's your willpower that you make the choice to live the life that you aspire to live, and then love the life that is unfolding in front of you, based on the choices that you make. Thank you so much for watching this, I was meant to drink this tea for some time, and I haven't, I'm going to take a sip now, it feels so good, after a whole 20, what, two minutes of talking, I hope that you enjoyed it, and I hope that they can get to sit down more and more with you, and have this heart-to-heart conversations, and if you're still watching, I want to let you know that my books on etiquette are available for international shipment around the world, for now in the United States, a country we're not able to ship, with the art of entertaining at home, etiquette, and afternoon tea etiquette, as well as the Vagina Tea Ceremony, are available for international shipment to Canada, Latin America, Australia, Arab countries, Asia, so pretty much everywhere in the world, and they are also available as e-books, which means if you don't want to purchase the hardcover copy, you can get them as e-books, they're also available on my website, and also my courses are available on my website, they're pre-recorded, which means you can watch them anytime, anywhere in the world, all you have to do is just purchase them, and watch them at your free will, at any time you want, and those certificate, those courses will give you a certificate completion as well, and if you like watching etiquette content, you can join my Patreon etiquette club, where every month I do an etiquette analysis of different kinds of movies, so far I've done, I think over 50 by this point, movie analysis, so the classical ones, and all the famous movies from Titanic, Devil Wears Prada, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and so much more, by joining it now, you can actually have access to all those movie reviews, that content exclusive only to Patreon etiquette movie club, and it's a kind of a content that I think doesn't exist on any other platform, because you get to choose how, you get to see how etiquette is portrayed in the daily life, and how you get to see it in cinema, and how you get to learn lessons from the cinema as well, thank you, and I hope to see you in my next video, for now, until later, bye!