The Daily Choice of Who to Be

And it's not anxiety or fear. It's that silent certainty of not being in the right place wherever you are. That whatever you've done, it's not enough. That there exists a version of you that you haven't reached yet, and maybe never will.

The rest is noise in a town of a thousand inhabitants whose name, Galluccio, means nothing to you.

I showed a version of me built to survive. A pile of habits collected over time — some from childhood when I was looking for attention, some from my teenage years when I was looking for respect, others from adulthood when I was trying to prove I could make it.

If you strip away everything — the habits you didn't choose, the beliefs you accepted wholesale, the tension of being who you think you should be — and focus your energy on what you truly want, you become energy. And where to channel it is yours alone to decide.

Last week I told you about choosing who to be. About deliberate behaviors. About new habits that create new identity.

Faced with every important choice you always have only two: the one that costs effort today and the one that costs effort tomorrow.

And like every habit, it's built one day at a time. One thought at a time. One choice at a time.

Happiness is not a destination. It's a habit.

For me it happened around seventeen. I didn't understand it right away. At first it seemed like healthy ambition. It seemed like hunger. It seemed like the engine that would take me far from a town of a thousand inhabitants.

Not because they were wise. Because they had chosen themselves. They had decided on a direction, even if small, and followed it, deaf to the rest.

Alcohol. Substances. Nights that never ended. People I never saw again. Work until four in the morning. Cities. Flights. Buying things. Stopping buying things. Diets. The gym. Wrong loves. Sports. New business ideas every two weeks.

Because it's one thing to make wrong choices at 15, another at 20, and a completely different story at 25.

┌────────────────────────────────────────┬───────────────────────────────┐ │ Without perimeter │ With perimeter │ ├────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────┤ │ Everything is negotiable │ Some things are not │ ├────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────┤ │ Open to everyone │ Close to few │ ├────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────┤ │ Reactive │ Chosen │ ├────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────┤ │ Always available │ Available when I've decided │ ├────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────┤ │ I confuse curiosity with laziness │ Curious within an identity │ ├────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────┤ �� I feel everywhere │ I know where I am │ ├────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────┤ │ I grow noise │ I grow weight │ └────────────────────────────────────────┴───────────────────────────────┘

The honest answer, the kind you only give in taxis, at four in the morning, in a city where no one knows you, was no.

He had grown up in a town of a thousand inhabitants, in Italy, and ran around the streets from morning to evening with another piece of tube.

I was in this small village, a thousand inhabitants.

He had grown up in a town of a thousand inhabitants, in Italy, and ran around the streets from morning to evening with another piece of pipe.

I was in this small village, a thousand inhabitants.

He and their mother decided they would have two daughters. That they would train them in tennis. That they would become number one in the world. That there would be two of them. And then they had them.

Because Venus and Serena, when they were born, were born into a direction. Someone had already decided what they were going to be. They didn't have the capacity to understand, want, choose — they were just creatures, that's all, and someone pointed them.

A whole month. Not four days, not a week, not "passing through and then we'll see." A month still in the same place, with the same door I open in the morning, the same corner café, the same sound coming through the window at seven.

On that construction site, every morning, there's a man. Let me show you.

I didn't decide it, I didn't reason about it, I didn't look to see if someone else went first. I just glanced right, glanced left, and crossed.

Because every decision of ours hides behind it a series of behaviors and habits that prevent us from changing and being better.

I came back to Italy, and for a few days my body stayed in Argentina. Jet lag does that: you wake up at four in the morning with your eyes wide open and your mind already running. The other night I was exactly there — awake, dark, head on the pillow and the phone a hand's width from my face.

But no. Let me tell you something I genuinely understood, not to play the guru: those books aren't valuable for how they're written. They're valuable for one thing only — if you take ONE concept, just one, and truly apply it to a specific situation in your life, that is the entire essence of growth. Not the book. What you do with the book. And in my case, some of those concepts genuinely changed my life. That's why I recommend them. Not to read them well — but to wake up in the morning a little more charged, and to become, day after day, a little more disciplined.

But when I got there, the morning after I woke up, like always, before everyone else, opened my laptop in a house where there was no one to wake, and worked. Like any other Tuesday.

Then I got there. And I understood, on that famous morning with the laptop open, that the reward didn't exist.