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The Step that will Transform your life: LOVE Your Fate
16 Plays16 days ago
In this episode of Voice of Growth, Manny Teran explores the powerful Stoic concept of Amor Fati — love your fate.
Rather than resisting adversity or wishing life had unfolded differently, the Stoics believed that every event — success, failure, hardship, or loss — is part of the path that shapes who we become.
Through personal stories of business challenges, personal loss, and life’s unexpected twists, Manny explains how adopting this mindset can transform the way we make decisions, build businesses, and navigate uncertainty.
If you want to develop resilience, clarity, and strength in both life and leadership, this episode offers a powerful framework.
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Transcript
Introduction to Amor Fati & Stoicism
00:00:04
Speaker
The Voice of Growth, Mastering the Mind and Market. Welcome to the Voice of Growth podcast, Mastering the Mind and Market. My name is Manny Churan and I'm your host.
00:00:18
Speaker
Amor Fateh. What the hell does that even mean? Well, first of all, the little translation in in Latin is love your fate.
00:00:30
Speaker
And love your fate, amor fati, is one of the central pillars of Stoic philosophy.
From Victim Mentality to Acceptance
00:00:36
Speaker
And why this is so important to you, I'll share with you in this podcast.
00:00:41
Speaker
Because for me, it's been life-changing. It's been a way to walk away from any semblance of a victim mentality and embrace whatever happens in the world for you.
00:00:55
Speaker
So one side is the world is happening around me and causing things to me. And the other one is the world's happening around me and causing things for me. It's a very subtle difference, but once you recognize the power of it, your business, your life will never be the same.
Personal Upbringing and Identity
00:01:12
Speaker
Here's my foundation. As a kid, I was captain victim. My father died when I was one. So I grew up without a father, which in a vacuum is not a big deal. I didn't really would have known the difference anyway.
00:01:30
Speaker
But what happened is people around me imprinted this victim mentality upon me. Aunts and uncles that had the best really the best at heart for me would say, oh, dear child, your father passed away when you were one. Oh my God, I'm so sorry for you. And so all these things happened around me. I'm like, what is happening here?
00:01:52
Speaker
And so I grew up with this thing like, oh, something's missing or that that I look just like him. And and for a while, I actually pushed this away of like, I'm my own person kind of a thing. And so I went this through this kind of complex aspect growing up.
00:02:08
Speaker
And what I realized probably early high school is when I really embraced this idea of, you know what? Where I once used to push away from the idea that i looked like my father, that I acted like the way he did and so forth, I'm going to embrace it.
00:02:26
Speaker
I'm going to embrace it because he is part of me, whether or not I ever met him or not, or remember or not. my height, my health, my mannerisms, my sense of being, my playfulness, my comic nature, whatever you want to call These are things that from a DNA aspect came to me through my father. He helped to create me. He helped me to bring me into
Business Perspective: Growth from Failure
00:02:54
Speaker
this world.
00:02:54
Speaker
So I embraced it. I embraced it. And in doing so, I actually went through my first sort of amor fati lesson. when I embraced the fact that I didn't have a father. So that gave me so many other things that many others in this life do not experience.
00:03:15
Speaker
First of all, by having not have had a father, I actually had the ability to create my sense of masculinity the way I wanted to. Me as a father, was able create create a sense of fatherhood without having any pretense of the way it was done to me.
00:03:35
Speaker
I had group when it was raised by my grandmother, my mother, actually both grandmothers. And I had this sense of of almost like a feminine um vision and ability to see empathy in a different way, sympathy in a different way, which helped me massively in business and in negotiations.
00:04:00
Speaker
All these things are edges that I have because I didn't grow up without a father. And so i embraced it. Is it sad? Do I do i ever sort of stray off the trail and and get sad about it? Of course I do.
00:04:16
Speaker
But very, very rarely because I've actually embraced it. And this aspect of embracing your fate comes with such power.
00:04:27
Speaker
It happened many years later as well. I had built up this company from nothing. I had great employees with ah just a fantastic culture. We were doing amazing projects.
00:04:39
Speaker
We were a pillar in the community and it all kind of came to an end. An earlier version of me might have said that it all came crashing down or might have said that the market was relentless and handed it to us.
00:04:59
Speaker
I could have said that, whatever, all these things, but I chose here to say that it came to an end because that chapter, as amazing as as it was, was nothing more than a chapter.
00:05:11
Speaker
And I love the fact that I got to start this company. And then I got to have such an amazing ride and was able now then to turn the page and have done amazing things afterwards.
00:05:30
Speaker
Now, some people would sit there and reflect, if well, if I would have continued on, i would have had this lifestyle or this or that. No one knows that. Nobody knows that. We don't know what tomorrow brings.
00:05:41
Speaker
But now in my life, I'm so thoroughly happy. I'm so joyful that I am i am where I am. I can't imagine having had that trajectory and where would it have gone? I don't know. I don't care.
00:05:58
Speaker
i don't live in that world. I live in this world. And I'm happy for that fate. Amor fati doesn't mean that you you embrace it or that you're like okay with it.
00:06:08
Speaker
No, it means you love it. You love your fate. You love it and you recognize that we're on this earth making waves, taking names, and making things happen.
00:06:20
Speaker
And that has so much power to it. I have friends that are still suffering from the loss of their companies, still struggling with the fact that they had to close down what was their dream job.
00:06:33
Speaker
And I'm giving them all the room they they they need and I'm being supportive, but I'm also pushing a bit. I'm also pushing a bit because I know that as human beings, we have a tendency
Embracing Discomfort for Growth
00:06:46
Speaker
to have this loop play back in our heads.
00:06:50
Speaker
You see, human beings, we want to be in stasis. Our body and our minds together want to keep us in stasis with very little variation because variation means discomfort and we're hardwired to seek comfort.
00:07:09
Speaker
And comfort is a killer. Comfort is a killer. You get complacent, you get stuck in a rut, You don't wanna move, you don't wanna change, you run you don't wanna make waves, so you stay in this stasis, in this place in the middle with very little variation.
00:07:26
Speaker
But it's when you open it all up, when you sit in the muck, you sort it out, You go to that high mountain, whatever it takes for you to to do that, sort it the hell out so that when you come back, you have this fervor about you to embrace whatever the world will bring you.
00:07:46
Speaker
And you change that narrative from this is happening to me to this is happening for me. I'm very passionate about this because I have lived it, I have lived through it, and now i live it in a different way.
00:08:03
Speaker
I have lived that victim mentality mentality when ah things are happening, oh my God, they're happening to me and woe is me, I tried so hard da-da-da-da-da. No, forget that.
00:08:16
Speaker
Now I embrace it as they come and it's given me this this calm sensibility So when I make decisions now, I'm making them from a very different place.
00:08:29
Speaker
And by having that different mentality, my decisions tend to be on a better path for growth.
Decision Making & Bias
00:08:40
Speaker
That idea of good or bad decision in business is something that I want you to get out of your head.
00:08:48
Speaker
Decisions are all based on available data. mixed in with the world around you, mixed in with bias, boom, decision.
00:09:00
Speaker
What happens is in that moment, your bias or the world around you or whatever might be happening may change over time. So what could have been or what you'd ascribe to be a good decision down the road could have could show itself to be a bad decision.
00:09:20
Speaker
I remember we hired this person back in when I had Aztera, my previous company. And this person was going to fill a role that was very critical in our organization. We really, we sought this person out for probably a year.
00:09:37
Speaker
Finally got them in, gave them this giant paycheck, gave them rolled out the red carpet because they were going to come in and bring everything together in our company and take us to new heights. Well, nine months later, we recognized that we had made the wrong decision, that that person had things about them that were not discovered during the interview process.
00:10:00
Speaker
Because as we've talked about in the past, some people are really good interviewers and terrible employees. And bias is the part that we need to get across and out of our vision in order to make the best decisions for that moment, recognizing that things may change.
00:10:21
Speaker
Now in business, things change all the time. There's other other moments where I thought, man, this decision I made was terrible. Year and a half, two years down the road, best decision ever.
00:10:33
Speaker
So that best and wrong and this and that, those things are, um you know, we use them as human beings because they're part of our language, but we got to recognize that there is the other elements of of bias and the world around us and time that will change that from one to the other, maybe even back to the first one.
Marriage, Divorce, and Growth
00:10:52
Speaker
In my life, I have endured a lot of hardship by my own making. I have taken things in my life and I have blown them out out out of proportion and I have sat in them and I've not gotten out of that filth for a long time out of my own doing.
00:11:12
Speaker
I met this amazing woman. i was out, had already graduated college. She was getting her PhD. She was beautiful, exotic, so smart, so funny. And we had all these moments together. And I decided over time, we started dating and eventually we moved to Michigan and I made her my wife. I proposed to her and we went through that whole process. It was beautiful. It was it was so many things that in my life I learned from that relationship.
00:11:43
Speaker
And over time, The narrative I told myself is that, oh, you never, you know, people change and I'm not happy with her anymore and dah, dah, dah, dah. And part of that is what I told myself.
00:11:57
Speaker
But the amor fati part is love your fate. Recognize that, you know, there's this adage of you never divorce the person you marry because obviously they change.
00:12:08
Speaker
We ended up getting divorced. And I had this sort of woe is me for probably a year when I was struggling with the fact that with this beautiful relationship came in crashing down, hear my words, crashing down, and that I was the person that was suffering because she changed and I was a perfect husband and all that.
00:12:33
Speaker
b s one hundred percent BS, What I just said there, and I chose my words carefully because I wanted to make a point that a person who I am now in a different place, resolved and healed from that situation, constantly learning, constantly reflecting, making adjustments, would instead say that I had this beautiful relationship, I made her my wife, we had beautiful children together.
00:13:04
Speaker
And we had precious moments. We learned so much. We had lots of moments of personal growth and challenges that opened up both our lives to a deeper form of happiness that we never would have had otherwise.
00:13:20
Speaker
And that came to an end. Simple as that. That came to an end. And we might struggle from time to time.
00:13:31
Speaker
but I always come back to the fact that we had this amazing time. And relationships that I've had past that and business operations and and partnerships that I've had past that, I now frame with that mentality of it was a moment in time that these amazing things happened, these other things for growth and personal development also happened, and it came to an end and it provided the energy, resources, experiences, and mission, direction, vision for me now that wouldn't have happened unless those things happened for me.
00:14:12
Speaker
I am so proud to be where I am today. and it's because of what in the world happened for me yesterday. This is a constant vigilant little operating system, little loop program that needs to run constantly.
00:14:34
Speaker
Do I veer off of it sometimes? Very rarely, but I do. There's moments when I have a wind of sadness or a wind of victimhood comes blowing down the way, but it doesn't last long.
00:14:49
Speaker
It may happen once a month here and there randomly. And I need ah sit with it. I don't push it away. These are all little hacks, by the way, that I've learned over over my days is, you know, you don't push these things away. You let them come, you let them fill you with whatever sense, whatever feelings that are there present.
00:15:08
Speaker
And then just as fast as they come in, they flow out. Sometimes when these things happen in my days and I feel a little sad or a little like what would it have been I take a walk.
00:15:21
Speaker
And I take a walk around my neighborhood here. I take a rock walk around the house. I take a walk in nature. And that moves my body and it moves my mind and it moves my spirit. And these things, they they too shall pass.
Health Challenges as Opportunities
00:15:35
Speaker
So as we close up the podcast here, I want you to think about amor fati, not as a, I tolerate my fate.
00:15:47
Speaker
I like my fate. No, amor. I love my fate. Whatever the world brings you, embrace it. As crappy as it may sound, as and much struggle as it causes in your day, love it.
00:16:09
Speaker
Even these things that are annoyances and things that are aggravating to you are all there part of a plan, part of your fate in order to get you prepared for you to make the decision to get to where you need to go.
00:16:31
Speaker
Had a recent, I'll tell you quick story, had a recent situation. So I've always had ah good teeth. I've taken care of my teeth. And years ago, I broke a tooth on a chicken bone, long story.
00:16:42
Speaker
um But ever since that, I've been very vigilant and been taking really good care of myself. Few days ago, I was having some ice cream and there was chunks of frozen chocolate bars in there.
00:16:54
Speaker
Took a bite, hit my right side and I'm like, what is happening? Didn't think much of it. Went to bed, woke up at three in the morning with this terrible pain. At six in the morning, I texted my dentist and set up appointment that day.
00:17:10
Speaker
Luckily, I have this amazing concierge dentist and was able to go in there immediately. Took a look. Turns out I had an infection in my upper, the root of my tooth, that I might have been there for months. Many, many, many months that I didn't even know about. i was a little bit tender there previously, but I didn't think much of it.
00:17:34
Speaker
This situation that happened for me in that toothache in the morning and me going to the dentist and having him do the x-ray and all that, it showed this infection that would not have been seen unless that occurred the way it did.
00:17:52
Speaker
It could have been catastrophic. It could have been something that got into my bloodstream and caused sepsis. It could have been massive. It could have been terrible. But because I caught it in time and i had this annoyance, this nuisance, I now have the ability to deal with this.
00:18:09
Speaker
And Lord willing, I'll be past this in no time at all. Annoyances, but love your fate.
Financial Struggles and Strategic Growth
00:18:17
Speaker
In business, we had this, remember this PO o we had,
00:18:22
Speaker
Man, it was about 50% of our yearly revenue. One single purchase order, massive back in the day. We got the check in the mail and went to cash it and we needed the money to buy equipment. We had payroll coming. We got all these things in place.
00:18:40
Speaker
Went to cash it and the bank said, we need to hold it for 10 days. What? First of all, it was a giant amount of money. that we had not seen a check like that before in our day.
00:18:50
Speaker
So the bank was certainly cautious and it was from a random bank in Massachusetts, some some like local bank. And this is back in like 2014, 2015. So you didn't have as much of this back end stuff on the banking system like we do now, all the FinTech stuff.
00:19:10
Speaker
So that 10 days was, I remember, a drag. We had payroll coming. I had never missed payroll.
00:19:21
Speaker
We had things we had to buy in order to to keep the machine running on new projects. So what do I do here?
00:19:32
Speaker
How do I deal with this situation? And I had lots of moments like this, by the way. And as entrepreneurs, as business owners, you know what I'm talking about. These moments when we make decisions, when we have to make decisions based on available data, understanding that our biases are in the mix, and knowing that the world's changing around us.
00:19:55
Speaker
But we make the best decision in that moment for balancing all these things out. So at the moment I made two decisions, both of which ended up being positive.
00:20:09
Speaker
One of them sounds negative. I had to take money out of savings to write a check to cover payroll. And that was it. Employees didn't know, my CFO knew, but nobody else knew.
00:20:20
Speaker
and And I didn't wanna make a big deal, whatever. I paid myself back. The second thing is we got a line of credit from the bank. And it allowed us, we didn't get it on the moment, but we took up about a month to get it.
00:20:32
Speaker
But that allowed us to then in the future deal with things like this when they came to pass, which by the way, happened about a year later when we had another massive purchase order and we had that line of credit that helped move things along and we were able to play our cards right and and win that game.
00:20:51
Speaker
So these things as they happen in the world for you, take that attitude, embrace them, love your fate, spend every day in gratitude and be aware that you get to make these decisions in your business.
Loving Fate and Gratitude
00:21:06
Speaker
You get to stand there and have these difficult moments with your employees, with your team, with the market. proud of yourself, be happy about it, embrace it and love your fate.
00:21:21
Speaker
Thanks for listening. Cheers.