How To Control Your Destiny?

Do you control your destiny or …?

A lot of people are searching for the correct answer to this question. The purpose of this blog post is to conclude something that will deliver the most appropriate answer to this complex task. The first work to do is to try to define what “destiny” really is. It is easy to run into a sort of philosophical tangle. And before getting lost in a subject I definitely have not mastered, I prefer to consult other celebrities to see what they have to come up with.

One of the descriptions that I like the most is the one by Deepak Chopra.

“…in practice, we lead our lives according to a rich complexity of desires, duties, personal bonds, family ties, inclinations, accidental happenings and deliberate plans. The mixture is too complicated to figure out through a simple formula or by answering a cosmic riddle or two.”

Of the seven “ingredients,” I would say that you can control 50% of them. The rest depends on different circumstances. Now, if at least 50% of your destiny depends on happenings out of your control, how would you then act to prepare for the best possible outcome?

To control your destiny is about mindset

The mindset would rather be how to “conquer” the circumstances showing up. It’s like a surfer. He or she can train surfing to master the board. But at the moment of truth, the surfer can never control how the wave will perform but stand up on the wave and confidentially ride it out based on a long training and experience to rely on.

Life performs in the same way. There is a well-known quote talking about the rain, and it goes like this:

“Some people can feel the rain. Others just get wet.”

Life is constantly surrounded by different happenings and circumstances, good, bad, positive, or negative. The person who can pull out opportunities from every single incident will probably have a better possibility to control his or her destiny.

Famous entrepreneurs around the world build up their inventions and businesses around something where they take advantage of the circumstances. Some people talk about the importance of being at the correct spot at the right time. This could be true, but in such a case, I would like to add: Squeeze out the true opportunity from the correct circumstance. There is always a correct spot and time for something.

Abraham Lincoln said once:

“The best way to predict the future is to create it”

All famous entrepreneurs of our time seem to have followed literally Lincoln’s advice.

Let passion control your destiny

In school, I was never a brilliant student, but I did what I had to do to pass the exams. On the other side, I had a passion for running, and as my life was very much divided between studies and training, I seldom hung out with friends at discotheques and bars, but the school and my training filled up my entire weekly agenda.

Because of that, I met by an incident or by a circumstance a wonderful Mexican woman in my Swedish hometown. I fell in love, and the outcome of this story has had an important impact on my life. We married 40 years ago, and we are now living in Mexico. Our totally trilingual family with an exceptional international and multicultural experience would never see the daylight without a complicated and complex mixture of different circumstances.

The takeaway for me and what I have experienced in life is that you have to treat every single moment in life as an opportunity. “….do not get wet. Feel the rain”.

It is not a question of controlling your destiny or not, but rather dominating the occurring circumstances as the surfer who rides the wave.

Like the surfer, you need to train to confront the daily situations. It can be done in many different ways, and it is not only a question of professional skills such as engineering, finance, law, medicine, and others. All these skills can be bought or outsourced. It’s about the mindset and to be trained properly to view all opportunities around you on a daily basis.

Will the digital revolution control your destiny?

Right now, we are all going through a fascinating phase in our lives. The Digital Revolution is already changing the way we purchase, sell, get services, and much more. We have so far only seen the tip of the iceberg. This shift to a digital life will have an impact on every single person on Earth. For more details, see my blog post of the 8th of February, where more details are revealed.

At the age of 62, I found out (indeed very late in life) that the corporate world didn’t offer me the passion I had in my dreams. The problem I had, which most probably was the reason I didn’t suffer from it, was the fact that I didn’t know about anything better to change my lifestyle. I didn’t know that you could feel the rain. I just got wet year after year and accepted it as something natural you just have to live with.

Now I can feel the rain, and I have trained a lot to surf the waves properly and control them. It is an important breakthrough we all should have the opportunity to experience. In today’s fast-moving world, the statement once made by Jack Welch can’t be more accurate:

“Control your destiny or somebody else will.”