In the course of our lives, 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 get 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 be frustrated. Maybe your dreams are not yet a concrete reality. Your life or career may have taken a wrong turn in some way. But to change that, the first thing you have to do is search within yourself. So, I’ll give 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 sorts of topics interest me. At school, I liked biology. But growing up with horses, I naturally dedicated myself to 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 started a career that just didn’t suit me. It was simply a way to earn a living and travel. This realization started 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 vet. Then I got into the Hollywood movie business where I worked as an extra and stuntman, later becoming 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 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 amassed 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 didn’t feel lost. Instead, he was searching and exploring, and he was hungry for experiences. During all that time, I also loved to write. That year, while I was in Belgium for another job, a friend gave me a book.

Suddenly, reading it, every struggle and everything in my unconnected past seemed to fall into place, like 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 oddly enough even the escort job gave me the skills to create my future and grow stronger.

The moral of the story

All of that experience gave me a vast store 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 ​​that 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 weird and intuitive way, I gave myself the perfect education for what I need to 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 animalistic 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.

Struggle turns into beauty

You see the success that money and attention bring. 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 the things that happen inside 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 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 focus. Stop looking at 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 set the stage for a much bigger change in fortune. It’s the difference between clinging to an illusion and immersing yourself in reality. And reality is what will set you free and transform you. Here’s 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 unique makeup 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. It is what the book”master’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 hear your relatives urging you to pursue a particular career path. Or when teachers influence you, or by people telling you what you are good at and what you are bad at. You listen to friends who tell you what is good and what is not. At a certain point, you can almost become a stranger to yourself.

Reflect on beauty and struggle

And so, you go into careers that aren’t right 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 uniqueness that marked you at birth.

And whatever age you are at, as it happened to me, you should reflect on those early inclinations. You must pay attention to those topics 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 the animal entertainment and Hollywood that didn’t feel right. And so, you slowly advance narrowing your path, while accumulating skills.

However, most people do not want to fight, but rather simple, direct and straight paths to the perfect position and to 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 get to this process at a later age, you have 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 you, you 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’s not true because most of these are ways to run away from yourself. Instead, follow your inclinations and you can 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 in 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.