Deliberate Identity

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.

As a kid I picked hazelnuts, chestnuts, grapes and olives. Not to buy myself something. To get away. I didn't know where but I knew my place wasn't there.

Because the only competition that matters is the one with yourself. Not with who you think others are. But with who you know you can become.

And I've taken hits. Thirteen years of hits disguised as beginnings. But they didn't stop me. They taught me one thing — the secret isn't knowing who you are. It's choosing who you want to become.

But I knew it was a lie. I had trained my brain to understand when it lies to itself. I knew that if I stayed in that comfort zone I would never leave it. That I would continue building someone else's dream while telling myself I was building my own.

Do you know what compound interest is? It works like this: every difficult choice you make today doesn't pay you back just once — it multiplies. Today's pain becomes tomorrow's competence, which becomes the day after's advantage, which becomes an unbridgeable distance between you and those who chose the easy path. Those who postpone pay interest. Those who act collect it.

And when you start listening to yourself, you discover things you don't like. You discover that most of your thoughts are fears disguised as reasoning. That your emotions are automatic responses, not choices. That your unhappiness doesn't depend on what happens to you, but on how you interpret it.

For years I thought I would be happy when. When I had enough money. When I had the right company. When I found the right person. When I reached the right place.

Second phase: it steals the time to build a truly your own life. Because every minute spent measuring yourself against someone else is a minute stolen from who you need to become.

Not because they're more motivated. Because they start to feel that future version as a real person they have a debt to.

I personally have tried to silence it in every way over the years.

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

Because on those, and only on those, you build the person you become.

I had become a hotel-room-man. Clean, functional, identical to himself in any city. But belonging to someone, to no one.

I've spent my whole life chasing a next version of myself. The second company. The next country. The new idea. The evening when everything will finally make sense.

I'm saying this because I'm not a fan of "I'm going on a trip to find myself." Actually, it's a completely useless cliché.

I've spent my whole life chasing a next version of myself. The second company. The next country. The new idea. The evening when everything will finally make sense.

I say this because I'm not a fan of "going on a trip to find myself." In fact, it's a completely useless cliché.

If your version of Williams is a well-tended garden, a well-written book, a family held together well, a neighborhood shop that becomes an institution — it's exactly the same thing. It's just that you had to point yourself there. It's harder. It's worth more.

It means: someone put their finger on me and said, you are this thing here, and I'll guide you there. It means: I don't have to figure it out alone, I don't have to waste twenty-five years searching for myself, I don't have to fight against the culture surrounding me because the culture around me is already pre-aligned with what I'll become. It means: I have a track.

I arrived from São Paulo a few days ago — and before that from the mountains of India. I wrote to you last week about a music inside that doesn't play (reread it, if you don't remember), and one thing I know about myself is: my music plays in movement. Movement is the way. Stopping means quitting.

He arrives before all the others. Always. At seven he's already on the roof — the roof of a building that doesn't exist yet, exposed rebar sticking out of concrete, wooden planks, no protection, as if he were immortal.

And I, at that precise moment, would unblock myself. "Ah, see? He's doing it, I'll do it too." And I'd cross. Right behind, glued to his back.

I waited for permission. Some scrap of permission from someone, about something I had already decided inside, by myself, and even first.

Except this time I did something different. I left the phone alone and opened the Kindle. I was reading a book — one of those motivational books, personal growth, self-help, call it whatever you want.

And here I have to be honest with you, otherwise I become one of those videos myself. It's not like I wake up every morning and act like a champion. There are nights when I don't open the Kindle at all: I scroll like everyone else, I feel like crap, I fall asleep late and angry. Discipline isn't never falling. It's coming back. It's opening the book again the next morning anyway.

Because if the reward doesn't exist, then there's no longer any point in doing things to obtain it. Only one thing remains to love — the effort itself. Not the finish line. The climbing, not the having arrived. That's the thing to embrace, the only one they can't switch off with false promises.

You're right. And I'll say it plainly, without sugarcoating it — I see this as a curse. Because when I look around, I see almost everyone living in a kind of tranquility, a bubble so large they can't feel how fragile it is. And I find myself thinking that I, on the other hand, haven't enjoyed a single day in years. Not once.

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.

On the clock, sure. But stop for a second. In those ten minutes we drove down streets we never would have taken. We saw things we wouldn't have seen. We avoided a car, an intersection, maybe trouble. Maybe we avoided something worse. Even just my mind: ten minutes before I was one person, ten minutes after I was another, with different thoughts, different choices.

There's a phrase that's been spinning in my head for years. I don't even know where I picked it up anymore — maybe I made it up myself one night in an airport.

It's become my way of making decisions. Practically all of them.

I still don't know. But it's become my question, and this time I'm handing it straight to you: that person you've written you want to become — that chosen, yours, real version — why can't you become them? Because you don't know how? Or because, underneath it all, your body is still afraid to cross, and would rather keep you on the shore it knows, in the middle of others, even if it's a tight fit?

It says, in essence, this. The distance between who you are today and who you want to become isn't measured in miles. It's measured in nanometers. Twenty nanometers: the space between one neuron and the next, the exact point where a thought passes. Or doesn't. A ridiculous, invisible gap. And yet sometimes it feels like an endless journey.

She said it like an accusation. As if to say, you told yourself a story, you convinced yourself of something that doesn't apply to normal people, you're not one of us anymore.

Yes. I brainwashed myself. That's exactly what I did.

I've spent my life wanting to improve myself. Grow, evolve, change, have more, become. The last few letters I've written you are about nothing else: changing who carries the suitcase, rewiring the brain, deciding to become someone else. I still believe in all of it, by the way. I'm not taking anything back.

One day. When I've done that thing. When I've gotten there. When I have more, know more, when I've become that other Stefano — the real one, the finished one.

Putting yourself out there more is easy. For years I was the person who was extremely visible and extremely hidden at the same time. You can stand on a stage every day and never really step onto it.

Look at what we do when other people are around. We measure ourselves before speaking. We say the most acceptable version of what we actually think. We look around to figure out who's there, what they expect, whether we're too much or too little. We wait for the right moment — and the right moment is the one when we're sure it won't hurt us, which means never. We compare ourselves to that person over there who we think does it better, and we put it off until we're ready.