The Best You: How to Conquer Adversity

By Alexander Wagner, Raymond Aaron and Loral Langemeier

In this book you'll learn how to overcome adversity, face your challenges and counter your worst enemy: yourself. The single most important thing you can take and apply right away is the understanding that you have the power to define your experiences—past and present. This knowledge can transform your life and free you from the bondage of whatever negatives you suffer from. You aren't bound by haphazard beliefs that have been set down subconsciously over the years. You are definitely not doomed to make the same mistakes over and over again. Within these pages are many tools and nuggets of knowledge offered to you. Accept Alexander Wagner's challenge to break down the walls of adversity and
redefine yourself, then you'll begin living purposefully and will be in a good position to reclaim your life, once and for all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781772773347

Book preview

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INTRODUCTION

Alexander Wagner offers to give us a lift with his book The Best You: How to Conquer Adversity. This is a young man who has been struck down by severe, ulcerative colitis. Yet he has thrived and gone on to win several gold medals from international karate competitions, has repeatedly placed in the top 10 academic achievers in his school and has won other athletic and scholarly awards which have brought him distinction amongst his peers. Now he wishes to pass on some of the methods which have brought him success.

Beginning with the question Why would you want to face your challenges? Alexander takes us down a road filled with adversity, showing us how some interesting people dealt with challenges in their lives and then talking about facing your personal challenges, overcoming yourself and giving something back to your community. He finishes the book with three important subjects: building good habits, goal setting, and how to define yourself.

The book is one that reads far beyond Alexander’s years. It will surprise you, entertain you and, most of all, it will teach you how to overcome challenges most people don’t even realize they have.

Raymond Aaron

1

Why Would You Want To Face Your Challenges?

I want to preface this book with an explanation of why you should face your challenges. Facing your hardships head-on can be a daunting and challenging task. When the world seems to be crashing down around you, it can sometimes be simpler to ignore adversity, hoping it will go away. Why not just run away from your problems? In general, our intuition tells us to head away from danger, not towards it. That being said, how can willingly accepting something that’s hard to do be good for you? I want to provide an explanation aside from the obvious. This is, of course, the fact that your problems will eventually catch up with you. Let’s imagine for a second, a situation in which this isn’t the case. In this dreamland, due to some external forces, all your troubles just somehow disappear. Perhaps you were born into the lap of luxury and can take care of your problems with copious amounts of money. Would it be okay to avoid your problems then? Short answer, no.

People experience innate feelings of shame when they don’t live up to their expectations. In other words, when you back down from your challenges or don’t give it your all in the face of catastrophe, you recognize this and feel disappointed, expecting less from yourself. There are many ways people cope with this. Lowering the bar for themselves, focusing on other people’s shortcomings, shifting blame, and this is besides worse methods like drugs and alcohol, which can make problems disappear temporarily. My intention is not to berate the people who do any of these things. I can only assume that constantly resorting to these actions is no way to live. Why not overcome this feeling of shame or guilt, in a way that is much more productive and will solve your problems? That way is, of course, facing your challenges.

Building Yourself

To delve deeper into the benefits of confronting your adversity, in the spirit of the book’s title, we must address how this will create The Best You. You can only grow through challenge, and only by voluntarily accepting it. What exactly does this mean? It’s not the same as having difficult situations cast upon you, separate from your own free will. Let’s take school, for example. A relatable example, but also one that seems to contradict what was just mentioned. As a child, the choice to go to school is not made of one’s own volition (or else I sure as heck would have stayed home). That being said, you can still choose to get the most out of school. When you decide to actively engage in school, you can genuinely learn from it. You can develop better habits, expand your ways of thinking and learn to better articulate yourself. Even learning to socialize can be considered a form of bettering yourself. School is not perfect. However, considering that you’ll dedicate a quarter of your life to learning, why not get the most out of it?

This is where voluntarily undergoing the challenge comes into play. To improve yourself in any of the matters mentioned above, you have to pay attention, do your work, study appropriately, etc. You have to willingly accept your situation and make the most of it, whether it’s enjoyable or not. Muhammad Ali famously said I hated every minute of training, but I said, don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion. Apply this to everything you do. Remember that no one worth anything pushed themselves only in the last moments of their success. When we witness people like Jeff Bezos, his status as the richest man in the world is what is immediately noticeable. We see the perfection that is the tip of the iceberg, but we don’t see the larger dirtier area that is holding it up. It is those imperfections that matter, as they come from countless years of attempts to accept and overcome challenges. Through technology, the strides to fame have become much quicker and at times easier, but regardless, it still takes many steps to get there. Everything you achieve, every time you push yourself to grow as a person, it’s another notch under the belt, another step closer to achieving your end goal. Ask yourself, what is it you want, what’s stopping you from getting it, and then do what is necessary to conquer those obstacles. Perhaps you want to be a motivational speaker: read, take classes on speaking, practice and discover what the pros are doing. What about entrepreneur, lawyer, doctor, you name it. In every case, there will be hurdles you have to face, but every time you beat them, you will be better for it.

The Alternative Sucks

Perhaps you’re not convinced yet that you should face your challenges. The other question you have to ask yourself is What other choice do I have? I ask this in a literal sense. You can delay, procrastinate or get someone else to do the work for you, but I ask Why? Why would you voluntarily choose to do nothing? By placing yourself in the victim seat, there is a resignation that you are incapable of influencing your surroundings. Perhaps something is comforting about living life this way. By degrading oneself to a mere spectator of life, the burden of responsibility is subsequently absolved, along with many of life’s pressures. Given this, why not just be an observer coasting through life? Simply put, facing adversity is what makes life worth living. To be of substance, you need to push back when the world shoves you. Existing the other way, you may as well be