Amor Fati is a Stoic concept that can help your mental game. It basically translates to “a love of fate”. You love what happens in your life, especially the events you tend to resist. Why would you want to love those? The short answer is: because they will happen and if you resist them, then you’ll suffer frustration and other limiting behaviors. 

Amor Fati ties in directly with the central quality I’ve found for improving your mental training: trusting how life unfolds. You trust that you can respond to struggles. An important part of this process is realizing that struggles will happen regardless of your resistance to them. So, you may as well relax into them and seek the learning lesson, when they’re occurring. 

Here are some links and excerpts that dig into why it’s helpful. 

Amor Fati: The Formula for Human Greatness

• “That one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backwards, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it….but love it.”
• Treating each and every moment—no matter how challenging—as something to be embraced, not avoided. To not only be okay with it, but love it and be better for it.
• Amor Fati prompts us to say: We will put our energies and emotions and exertions only where they will have real impact. We will tell ourselves: If this is what I’ve got to do or put up with, then I might as well be happy about it.

Ryan Holiday–the author of several books such as The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy, and Stillness is the Key–has a cool video describing this concept. 

Amor Fati: How to Apply This Philosophy to Your Life

• We’ve all heard the common saying that hindsight is 20/20. So, it’s quite normal to look back at decisions you’ve made and wish you had done things differently.
• So, why not be ahead of the game with amor fati and have 20/20 foresight? (Arno’s comment)

Train Your Mind: Abandon Any Hope of Fruition

• When we do anything, we usually do it for a purpose. We have some aim in mind and we hope to accomplish that aim. We hope to succeed rather than fail. That is fine. But what then happens is that our thoughts of success or failure begin to overpower the task at hand.
• Abandon Any Hope of Fruition. This slogan undercuts our attachment to either success or failure. It is a kind of positive giving up. Abandoning any hope of fruition does not mean abandoning our projects and ambitions. Instead it points to a way of going about things that is present focused rather than fixated on results.