The Pattern of Quitting

I'll just say that at some point I stopped getting off the wave. Not because I'd become someone else. Because I'd seen and understood the pattern.

My mother would say: "stop playing grown-up games." It was her way of saying don't hurt yourself. The world is like this. Accept it.

Failures don't disappear when you stop talking about them. They're carved into the psyche. You feel them every time you look in the mirror and know that the version you show the world never matches the one you live with inside.

But it wasn't true. I hadn't chosen any of it. I had only inherited it, piece by piece, without ever stopping to ask: do I still need this? Does it make me better? Does it take me where I want to go?

In that moment I had two paths. Accept and continue as an employee. Or leave without knowing what I would do next.

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.

It sounds ridiculous, but that's where I understood something fundamental: my thoughts weren't mine. They were automatic reactions. Programmed responses. Patterns that repeated without me ever choosing them.

But the truth is different. Happiness isn't having what you want. It's stopping thinking that you're missing something.

But there's an exact moment when comparison stops being a tool in our favor and becomes poison.

It happens when you stop asking yourself "what can I learn from what others do?" and start asking yourself "where am I compared to others?"

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.

Then it came back stronger. The noise became a constant, the attempts to make it stop infinite, and the mistakes started to weigh heavy.

Open-to-everything is the adult version of the child who wants all the toys, and to have them leaves them all on the floor, and at the end of the day doesn't really play with any of them.

At a certain point I stopped telling myself it was a matter of time or means.

One road. A few houses. A woman cooking outside, on a blackened pot, with a gesture she's repeated I don't know how many times.

I'm not saying this for emotional effect. I mean it literally: I can't get into his brain. I don't know what he was thinking. I don't know what made him laugh. I don't know if he was fine or if he already wanted to leave.

One road. A few houses. A woman cooking outside, over a blackened pot, with a gesture she's repeated I don't know how many times.

I don't say this for emotional effect. I say it literally: I can't get into his brain. I don't know what he thought. I don't know what made him laugh. I don't know if he was fine or if he already wanted to leave.

And here I have to stop for a second, because the first thing that came to mind wasn't what an incredible story.

▎ Geniuses leave clues, I read somewhere.

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.

I don't know if he goes home in the evening and hugs his children. I don't know if he laughs at dinner, if he sleeps all night without noise in his head. Maybe he's ten thousand times happier than me — than me who's been moving for years and can't find a minute to stop, who looks at him from above and calls him blind while I'm the one who, from this window, can't see shit except the next goal to conquer.

"I feel decisive, often I feel like I really know what the right thing to do is. But then I get blocked, I stop... and I always wait for someone to give me the ok to proceed in my direction."

And you know what the beautiful thing is? It's not that now I always cross first — that, alone, doesn't count much. The beautiful thing is something else, and it's what I understood three years and one traffic light later: that we'll always have a traffic light in front of us. You never stop crossing.

But the part that floored me, and that I want to leave you with, is something else. It's how a champion operates.

This is the thing nobody tells you when they talk about "raising your standards." They make it sound like a question of motivation, of waking up charged, of having the right energy. Nonsense. Motivation is a houseguest: it shows up when it feels like it and leaves when it feels like it. What remains, when it's gone, is discipline. The champion isn't the most motivated one. It's the one who shows up even without motivation.

And after a while something strange happened. The children who were rewarded started drawing less. The ones who received nothing kept going like before, for the pleasure of it. The others didn't — the reward had switched something off. They had stopped drawing out of love, and were only drawing in relation to the prize.

And that's not even the worst part. The worst part is the price you pay without noticing. I let go of people I loved, because staying meant stopping, and stopping is something I've never known how to do. I watched people cry over me without being able to cry myself — I haven't done it since I was a kid. I sat at dinner across from a woman, in silence, and felt that there was nothing inside, as if I had died in that silence. That's the real price. Not sleep, not money. The people. Yourself.