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.

Ten minutes, once, is nothing. But a habit doesn't make you pay once. It makes you pay every day, for years, in a currency you can't see: the things you don't notice, the people you don't really look at, the version of yourself you never become because you were in a hurry.

The uncomfortable truth is that most of the lives we don't live, we take from ourselves. Not with the big dramatic choices — with the small ones. Because behind every result, there's a behavior, a habit that stops you from being who you want to be.

Tomorrow I have another flight. And this morning, here in the sauna, staring at the floor, something came back to me.

Last week I told you that identity gets sewn onto us by other people. Well, maybe the only real work of a lifetime is this: to slowly unpick the one they put on you and sew your own. And you don't do it by changing the suitcase. You do it by changing the one who carries it. It hurts like hell, it takes years, and from the outside no one notices. But it's the only thing that actually, truly, moves.

Because — the book explains — the body has two modes. One is where it feels safe: rest, long breath, guard down. It's only inside that mode that a new thought can take hold, that a new version of you can put down roots. The other is survival mode: alarm, danger scanner always on, all your energy thrown into monitoring what could go wrong. And in that mode, no bridges get crossed. You don't have the strength: you're using all of it to defend yourself. The trouble is that modern life, with all the stress we carry around, almost always leaves us stuck there, on high alert, without even realizing it.

"No smoking, no alcohol, no pointless expenditure of energy, no pointless people, no pointless habits. Just me. And that's how I understood I want to live."

None of us chose the parents we got. No one chose what country to be born in, what school to attend, what phrases to hear repeated at the dinner table for twenty years. "Dreams stay in the drawer." "Be content." "Someone like us can't do certain things." You didn't choose those words — they started drilling them into you when you were too young to defend yourself. And after hearing them over and over, you believed them. They became your own voice.

The only real choice isn't "to be programmed or not." That one's lost from the start for everyone. The choice is: who holds the pen.

▎ I'm jealous of those who find their path. I'm jealous of those who live by certainties. I'm jealous of those who are sure that choice will be the right one for them.

But it has never happened to anyone. It has never made someone cry at two in the morning, never changed anyone's mind, never been copied into a message by a guy who didn't know how else to say it. It just sits there, all possibilities at once, like those electrons before the measurement. Waiting for someone to touch it.

Read it carefully. It was written in a rush, there's even a grammatical mistake at the start. But what's underneath is clear: I was ashamed of wanting a reader. I wrote it down like a defect to confess at three in the morning. "I can't figure out why," as if wanting someone to read were some kind of disease.