How to Love Your Fate
Even When It's Not What You Planned
There’s a version of your life you had mapped out.
Maybe it was a business. Maybe it was a relationship. Maybe it was just a general sense of how things were supposed to go. And at some point, life looked at that map and went a different direction entirely.
Most people spend years resenting that. Quietly carrying around a version of themselves that didn’t get to exist. Comparing what is to what should have been.
This post is about a different way to move through that.
It’s called amor fati. It’s Latin. It translates to “love of fate.” And before you dismiss it as something a philosophy professor puts on a coffee mug, let me tell you what it actually means in practice. Because it has nothing to do with being okay with everything that happens to you.
It has everything to do with what you decide to do next.
The Phrase Nobody Gets Right
When most people hear “love your fate,” they picture someone sitting cross-legged, eyes closed, completely at peace with the universe. Passive. Zen. Unbothered.
That’s not it.
The Stoics weren’t passive people. Marcus Aurelius ran an empire. Epictetus was a former slave who built a school of thought that outlasted his captors. These weren’t people who sat still and accepted whatever came.
They were people who understood something most of us are still learning: that the energy you spend fighting what already happened is energy you can’t spend on what comes next.
Amor fati isn’t about liking the bad thing. It’s about refusing to let the bad thing own you.
It’s the difference between being stuck and being in motion.
What Failure Actually Teaches You
I’ve started a lot of businesses.
An Etsy shop that quietly faded. A clothing brand called HERO that got some traction, real sales, real excitement, and then slowly ran out of momentum. A shoe brand that got close and didn’t quite make it.
Each one felt like the one. Each one didn’t work out the way I thought it would.
At the time, it was easy to frame those as failures. And they were, in the traditional sense. But here’s what I didn’t fully understand while I was inside them: every single one of those attempts was teaching me something I couldn’t have learned any other way.
The Etsy shop taught me design. HERO taught me what it felt like to build something from scratch, the product development, the branding, the customer. The shoe brand taught me about manufacturing, about timing, about the gap between almost and actually.
None of it felt like a lesson while I was living it. It felt like falling short.
But those failed attempts, all of them stacked together, are a direct line to me eventually running an agency that brought in over $200,000 in business. You don’t get there without everything that came before it. Not because failure is magic. But because repetition builds competence, and competence builds confidence, and confidence eventually builds results.
The thing is, most of us already know this. We just don’t believe it when we’re in the middle of it.
Every time I started something new after something didn’t work, I was practicing amor fati without realizing it. Not loving the failure. Moving through it anyway. Using it.
The Difference Between Acceptance and Surrender
I want to be careful here, because this is where people misread the concept.
There are things that happen in life that you will never be fully okay with. Loss that doesn’t resolve into a lesson. Grief that doesn’t tie itself up neatly at the end. Pain that just sits there, heavy, with no clear purpose attached to it.
I lost my younger brother Daniel.
That’s not something I can frame as a stepping stone. I won’t try to. Some things just cost more than the philosophy can account for, and anyone who tells you otherwise hasn’t actually lost anything yet.
But I will say this. In the middle of that, in the logistics and the coordination and the weight of holding things together for people who needed someone to hold things together, I found something I didn’t know I had.
Jordan Peterson has a line that’s stayed with me. He said:
It is necessary to be strong in the face of death, because death is intrinsic to life. It is for this reason that I tell my students: aim to be the person at your father’s funeral that everyone, in their grief and misery, can rely on. There’s a worthy and noble ambition: strength in the face of adversity.
It wasn’t my father. But I understood what he meant.
My parents leaned on me through all of it. To coordinate. To make sure things happened the way they needed to happen. And in being the person they needed, something in me solidified. Not because the loss was worth it. Nothing is worth that. But because I learned what I was made of when it was required of me.
That’s amor fati in its most honest form. Not gratitude for the hard thing. But the decision to become someone on the other side of it.
Fighting Your Circumstances vs. Fighting for Your Life
There’s a version of fighting your circumstances that drains you. That keeps you locked in resentment, in comparison, in the feeling that the deck was stacked against you and someone owes you something for it. That kind of fighting is exhausting because it has no real target. You’re swinging at the situation instead of building toward something.
And then there’s the other kind of fighting. The kind that costs you something but actually moves you forward.
You accept what is, and then you act anyway. Not because the outcome is guaranteed, but because the effort is yours. That distinction matters more than most people realize.
You can’t control what happens. You can control your inputs.
And if you can be better, if there’s a version of you on the other side of this that is sharper, more capable, more equipped, then you owe it to yourself to try. Not because you’re guaranteed to get there. But because the trying itself is the only thing that was ever fully in your hands.
The Ancient Formula for a Modern Problem
Nietzsche wrote about amor fati in 1882. He called it his “formula for greatness in a human being.” The idea that you could look at your life, every part of it, the good and the ugly and the confusing and the painful, and say yes to all of it. Not reluctantly. Completely.
He wasn’t soft about it. He’d spent most of his adult life in physical agony. Debilitating migraines. Near-blindness. A body that was consistently failing him. His conclusion was that the pain wasn’t a mistake. It was the source.
Viktor Frankl arrived at something similar from a completely different direction. He survived Nazi concentration camps and observed that the people who held on weren’t necessarily the strongest physically. They were the ones who had a reason to survive. Who could find meaning even inside the worst imaginable circumstances.
He wrote that suffering stops being suffering the moment it finds a meaning.
The principle scales. “Why is this happening to me” is a starting point, not a destination. The people who stay stuck are the ones who never leave it. The question that actually moves you is: what am I going to do about it?
One inch forward. That’s all it takes to start.
How to Actually Do This
I’m not going to give you a five-step framework.
But I will tell you the one sentence that functions as the whole practice for me, every time something goes sideways:
It is what it is. Now what are you going to do about it?
Just acknowledge the reality of what is, and then redirect your energy toward what you actually control.
The first half of the sentence is acceptance. The second half is agency. You need both. Acceptance without agency is resignation. Agency without acceptance is the kind of frantic, resentful effort that burns you out before you get anywhere.
Together, they move you.
When a business attempt fails, you don’t sit in it. You extract what it taught you and apply it to what comes next. You treat it as tuition, not punishment.
When a loss happens, real loss, the kind that doesn’t resolve, you let yourself feel the weight of it. In the hours after I heard about Daniel, I walked. Alone, for a while. No destination. Just moving through it, letting my mind do what it needed to do. Like a tornado had torn through a room and I was slowly, quietly putting things back in order.
But I didn’t do that alone. Not fully. My best friend flew in from New York just to be there. Not to fix anything. Just to be present. My wife was at my side through all of it. A friend of my brother’s sat with me and told me stories about who Daniel was to the people around him, how he loved people, how he showed up for them. That mattered more than I can explain.
Sometimes the “Now what?” isn’t a solo act. Sometimes it’s knowing who to call. Sometimes it’s letting someone sit with you in it. Amor fati doesn’t demand that you carry everything alone. It just asks that you keep moving, and sometimes the people around you are exactly what makes that possible.
Then, when you’re ready, you decide what kind of person you’re going to be because of it. Not despite it. Because of it.
When your circumstances aren’t what you planned, ask yourself honestly: am I fighting this because it’s wrong for me, or am I fighting this because I’m afraid? One of those fights is worth having. The other is just noise.
The One Thing Worth Remembering
Amor fati doesn’t promise you a good outcome.
It doesn’t guarantee that the business will work, or that the grief will lift, or that the circumstances will change. It isn’t magic and it isn’t naive.
What it offers is a way to move through anything without being destroyed by it. A way to stay in motion when the ground shifts. A way to be useful, to yourself and to the people around you, when things don’t go the way they were supposed to.
You are going to face things you didn’t plan for. You already have.
The question was never whether it would happen. It will. It always does.
The question is what you build while it does.