If The Struggle Is Real, It's Worth It In The End

Emotional Intensity

The American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a letter to his daughter Scottie in 1940 stating, "Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle."

Struggle is tied closely to the human condition, a simmering battle of opposing forces. It lurks amidst the anguish of opportunity and seizes upon us in moments of weakness.

The struggle is obvious, whether you're engaged in chasing your dreams or caught up in the grind of everyday living.

Embedded in each person's struggle is a purpose waiting to unfold.

Yet, many people never make it this far because the struggle intensifies their pain, and they quit even while they are ahead.

"Everything in your life - especially your challenges - is tailor-made to help you see your stories of struggle. Whatever is in the way is the way!" avows author Mary O'Malley in What's in the Way Is the Way: A Practical Guide for Waking Up to Life.

In fact, the biggest impediments faced during times of struggle are the thoughts that get in the way.

Just think of the last time you were enraged and considered writing an abrasive email, yet came back to it the following day.

I'm sure your emotional intensity waned, and you no longer felt the same. Why is that?

The point I wish to emphasise, is that your thoughts and their corresponding emotions are real. You experience their intensity and feel compelled to act on them.

Not necessarily.

Feel the emotions, but avoid being trapped by their impulsiveness.

Running away from pain only intensifies it. Explore the emotions by all means but don't stuff them down.

The issue is that you are trapped in your thoughts and are overstating what is taking place. You assign a storyline not reflecting reality.

"Struggles only persist when we search outside for causes and cures," asserts sports psychologist Garret Kramer in The Path of No Resistance: Why Overcoming is Simpler than You Think.

Looking back on history, the greatest stories arise from pain and struggle.

Joseph Campbell's mythological narrative of the Hero's Journey draws on twelve distinct themes, the two main encounters being: Crossing The Threshold and The Ordeal.

This same narrative is the basis of every successful Hollywood film. The main character experiences an obstacle in the beginning, only to overcome it in the end.

The American writer Mark Twain said, "Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't."

What transpires is more inexplicable than can be imagined.

We identify with this narrative because it is the human story we know all too well.

These forces are sewn into the fabric of life, designed to help you discover your greatness if you dare.

Resistance and Struggle

I value author and social researcher Brené Brown's perspective in Rising Strong: "But I'm learning that the process of struggling and navigating hurt has as much to offer us as the process of being brave and showing up."

Inner growth does not occur without resistance and struggle. Those with financial riches are not immune to life's challenges.

The struggle is the seed that gives life to the unfolding story that beckons you to explore.

What if your struggles have actually laid the foundations for something greater to emerge?

Is it worth exploring?

If there's a compelling enough reason, it may ultimately lead you to success. Nothing should stand in the way if your motives are strong enough.

"People who cheat want to avoid the struggle, the cost, or the fight. They don't know the truth about winning: Nothing of value in this world comes easy. The only way to get anywhere worthwhile is to go to work," states author Larry Weidel in Serial Winner: 5 Actions to Create Your Cycle of Success.

Rest if you must, take a break however long, but don't give up because you interfere with the unfolding story if you exit midway.

How can you maintain a hopeful outlook during uncertain times you ask?

The Struggle Is Real and Worth It

                            

First, embrace the struggle, the pain and the disappointment.

By associating with it, you appreciate the goal or dream is real. The frustration, the heartache and misery is inviting you to reach higher.

Recall the Hero's Journey?

No one portrays this more persuasively than former President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, in a speech entitled Man in the Arena. "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly... who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly."

Don't run away from the struggle as it will linger longer than you want it to.

Consider it an old friend who comes to stay for a while, yet is still sleeping on your couch six months later.

The struggle is not constrained by a timeline nor concerned by your disappointments. When it ushers into your life, it will turn you inside out and entrench itself deep within your psyche.

So invite it in, make it a cup of tea since it will be staying longer. Become acquainted with what it wants you to know and why it has called upon you.

Identify with the struggle and don't defeat it sooner because it will assuredly overstay its welcome if you force it to leave.

Author Mary O'Malley states, "In fact, everything in your life is a part of the journey into recognizing and living from a place that is beyond struggle."

Then one day, the struggle will disappear in search of another person to befriend.

Bid farewell and be ready to welcome the next episode; reward. When she sweeps in, it will be as though the struggle was a moment frozen in time.

It is with that we return to F. Scott Fitzgerald's opening quote and draw your attention to the deeper satisfactions of our lives emerge out of struggle.

Were it not for the pain, how would you know the depths of your character?

For hidden within the recesses of your soul lies the need for glory, made apparent as struggle.

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There Is No Beauty Without Struggle

In the course of our life, we have to agree that there is no beauty without struggle. No one likes to hear the story of someone who got everything easily. People want to listen to the stories of men and women who, while born in the valley of struggle, endured pain and turned their battles into a gift.

So, how can you get stronger? What can you do transform struggle into beauty? Do you want people to look up to you? Or do you want people just to feel sorry for you?

Today or tomorrow, you might feel frustrated. Maybe your dreams are not a concrete reality yet. Your life or career may somehow have taken a wrong turn. But to change that, the first thing you have to do is to search within yourself. So, I will tell you a quick story about my unusual path of change and transformation from battles to beauty over the years.

If I relate this tale, it is because it is relevant to the subject of struggle, change, and beauty. The story begins as I knew from a very young age that I wanted to be and do something different than anyone else. But I just could not figure out what it was.

A Period Of Wandering and Struggle

Even to this day, all kinds of subjects interest me. In school, I liked biology. But growing up with horses, I naturally drifted into working with them. Then one day, after a few years, I was draft in the Soviet navy for three long years. I was sent away far from everything I cherished, near the Arctic pole.

At first, this news was like a punch in the stomach. But in the months that followed, I realized that I loved animals but entered a career that just did not suit me. It was merely a way to make a living and travel. This realization initiated a period of wandering and struggle in my life.

After my duty in the navy, I defected while in the USA, traveled all across North America and Europe, and worked at every conceivable job. I was a waiter in Florida, became a security guard in Belgium, worked as a zookeeper in Colorado, then change to be an assistant surgeon for a veterinarian. Then I entered the Hollywood film business where I worked as a figurant and stuntman, to then convert as 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 sightseeing tour in Austria. In between, I even wandered back to my native Ukraine where I operated as a chauffeur and bodyguard for escort girls, among other odd jobs. In these long years of wandering, struggle, and beauty, I had totaled over thirty different positions.

So, here I was 50 years old and unable to 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 in Belgium, for yet another job, a friend gave me a book.

Suddenly, in reading it, every struggle and everything in my disjointed past seemed to click into place, like magic. The beauty of it all was the result of all of those various experiences. And so, the horses, the veterinarian, the zoo, the film industry, and oddly enough, even the escort job gave me the skills to create my future and get stronger.

The Moral of the Story

All of that experience gave me a vast storehouse of ideas that I could draw upon on. Even those indifferent, seemingly random jobs exposed me to every type of cultures, mentalities, 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 altered me from the inside out. In my own bizarre and intuitive way, I gave myself the perfect education for what I am to do in my lifetime.

Now the moral of this story is that you might tend to fixate on 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 in being at the right place at the right time and disregard the struggle they endured.

Struggle Transforms into Beauty

You see the success that brings the money and the attention. In other words, you see the visible signs of opportunity and prosperity. You compare to the struggle in your own life, but you are grasping at an illusion. What allows for such dramatic changes are the things that occur on the inside of a person and are completely invisible.

So, the 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 fortune is merely the visible manifestation of all of that deep preparation over time.

The answer, the key to the ability to transform struggle into beauty is insanely simple. You have to reverse your approach. Stop fixating on what other people are saying, doing or thinking. And end the focus on the money, the connections, or the outward appearance of things.

The Beauty is Looking Inward

Instead look inward! Focus on the smaller internal changes that lay the groundwork for a much larger shift in fortune. It is the difference between grasping at an illusion and immersing yourself in reality. And reality is what will liberate and transform you. Here is how this would work in your own life.

Primal 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 your life's experiences. In early childhood, this uniqueness manifested itself by the fact that you felt particularly drawn to specific subjects and activities. It is what the book "Mastery" calls primal inclinations.

You cannot rationally explain why you feel so drawn to music, or to words, or to particular questions about the world around you, or any other field.

As you get older, you often lose contact with these inclinations. The struggle comes when you listen to relatives who urge you to follow a particular career path. Or when teachers influence you, or by people that tell you what you are good and bad at. You listen to friends who tell you what is cool and 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 calling, 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 find yourself, as I did, you must reflect back on those earliest inclinations. You must look at those subjects in the present that continues to spark that intense childlike curiosity in you.

And recap on the struggle of those subjects and activities that you have been forced to do over the past years. Based on these reflections, you determine a direction you must take. So, you have a loose but overall framework which you can explore to find the angles and positions that suit you best.

No Beauty without Struggle

You need to listen carefully to yourself, to your internal radar. For me, it was animal entertainment and Hollywood that did not feel right. And so, you move on slowly narrowing your path, all the while accumulating skills.

Yet, most people do not want struggle, but simple, direct straight lined paths to the perfect position and into success. But instead, you must welcome wrong turns and mistakes. They make you aware of your flaws. And they widen your experiences; they toughen you up and bring the beauty you desire.

If you come to this process at a later age, you must cultivate a new set of skills, just as I did. Get abilities that suits this change and direction you will be taking and find a way to blend them with your previous skills.

No Reward without Challenge

As the slightest opportunity comes your way, you will now exploit it. In fact, you will still struggle but will also attract new opportunities to you because people will sense how prepared you are. So, the way to transform yourself is through your work.

Of course, you might believe that that the beauty of self-transformation comes through a spiritual journey, therapy, a guru who tells 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 can become who you really are instead of trying to be someone else.

Efforts, challenges and hard times offer you much more value than any other time in your life. You cannot grow or get stronger without struggle and resistance. So be grateful for the beauty of it and work on yourself to ensure that your future gets more pleasure than pain and regrets.

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It's a Fact of Life - Nobody Has An Easy Life

It's our human default to feel life should be easier than it is; we think we have a hard life. No matter how glitzy our social media looks, we all feel unfortunate, at least from time to time. But there are those who are genuinely unfortunate - those with a lot to lose and those with nothing left to lose.

Even the person who seems to have life easy has it hard. The unmotivated lazy person, for instance, isn't doing life easy, no matter how hard we're doing ours, even if they appear never to have to work hard. They have not only a tough present, where fear for the future controls them, their future really is laced with uncertainty.

The rich and 'blessed' person is no better off; their riches threaten to evaporate when fortunes change, and it's a biblical principle rooted in the truth of history that riches typically last three generations at most. The rich cannot secure their wealth for those coming after them. It depends on factors outside the realm of performance.

Then there is Joe You-and-Me. We run the gauntlet of life and we're blessed in the keeping up - but we must keep up, and that's stressful. Many days and many times during such days we feel life is unfair. We commonly look past many blessings, and that's because it's only within the capacity of hard work that blessings are commonly realised. We have to manage our fatigue, and where burnout is a possibility, coping measures must be learned, and that's an arduous trek!

Finally, there is the person who doesn't feel they struggle much at all, though if we were living their life we might disagree. Some of these people appear to live fortunate lives, but the operative word is 'appear'.

Everybody's life is hard. Nobody gets it easy. It's when we think some have it easy, we feel we have life especially hard. And that perception is fair on neither them nor us.

What helps us in our struggle is the knowledge that everyone has their struggle.

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Why You Can't Experience Progress Without a Struggle

Are you contented with your life? How about a little struggle? Why? Read on to find out.

Struggles in your life help you to measure milestones of progress. Without struggles, there is no progress in life. How is that?

With every struggle, you get to rise up to a challenge and hopefully overcome it. There's beauty in it. You get to reap the fruits of your struggle. With almost every struggle, there is a blessing - something to look forward to - some hidden treasure or gift, which says yes, you have done a good job and you deserve it. This is that milestone of progress.

Say, you want to earn good grades in school. There are competitors around. But that's not the point. You put in your efforts and struggle through your courses to come out on top. There's beauty in it - yes there is. You have the blessing of a good GPA in school which will always work to open up opportunities for good job purposes through your resumes. It is earned only once but work for you in benign ways a lifetime. In fact, it is a milestone of your life's progress.

Now suppose, you have a good job reputation, but you suddenly need to change areas and work in a different zone because of someone's demise, accident, or simply to be near your old parents. Your good job reputation is a milestone of your life's progress which will help you to progress another milestone if you do need to change areas or zones.

Take for instance, you have a challenging health problem. You want to overcome it and live your best life. With the will of your determination, you can rise up to the challenge and beat it - yes, you obviously can. A positive attitude and positive thoughts all along will help you further to cover the milestone of progress. You beat your health problem and give yourself an optimal life to live the rest of your life. How good is that?

How about earning the gold medal for swimming in the Olympics? You have to rehearse a lot. After practices and practices with your coach and fellow mates, you have to prove you are worthy and finally get selected to participate. All along it's been a struggle of struggles. But finally when the grand day comes, you are able to make it and win the desired medal triumphantly. So, on top of everything, it's a milestone of progress.

One milestone leads to another milestone of progress through struggles and winning battles. You pat yourself on the back along the way but not for long. You go on struggling and making milestones of progress until you are lying on your deathbed happy with the minimum regrets. Yes, you have lived a worthy life. You don't regret. You are smug and happy.

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