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.

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.

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.

Because if you got it wrong, you can always turn back. Forward, no — that's the only train that doesn't leave again. Either you catch it in the exact moment you think it, or it dies right there, inside your own paranoia.

I like seeing how the brain, pushed into a corner, stops going around in circles and gets straight to the point.

That tiny gap is a bridge. On one shore stands who you are right now. On the other, who you want to be. And here's the part that floored me: if your body doesn't trust that bridge to hold, it won't let you cross. Full stop. Not with a new thought, not with good intentions, not with discipline, not with yet another well-worded resolution. If the body doesn't feel safe, you stay on this side. And it keeps you there by force.

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.

And here, I know, you're expecting me to tell you how to sustain that flat stretch. The trick for not quitting right there. I don't have one. In fact: a trick doesn't exist, and whoever sells you one is just profiting from your impatience. The only thing I found, I had written one night in Bangkok:

The trouble is that truly deciding is the most exhausting thing there is. Because deciding isn't the bold sentence you say at dinner. It's holding the pen even in the flat week, even when your brain begs you to quit, even when Mykonos calls. And most of us, myself included, choose not to choose. We leave the pen on the table. We go back to someone else's program. And then we call it fate.

And the other man stops him. Looks him in the eye and says: "Look at me. You are someone right now. Do you understand? I was someone long before people knew who I was. And I believed it. You are someone right now."

Not for the guru — that's usually stuff I skip. But for the guy. Because that guy is me. That "one day I'll be someone" is the sentence that's been circling my head for twenty years, except I've never said it out loud quite like that, with that look on my face.

There's this thing in physics, the one about the smallest pieces, the ones we're made of. When nobody's observing them they're not in any specific place: they're everywhere, they're possibilities, they're a wave. Then someone comes along, looks at them, measures them, and in that exact moment they stop being all the possibilities at once and become just one thing. A point. Right there.

It's called the double-slit experiment. You fire an electron at a wall with two slits and watch where it lands on the other side. If it were a little ball you'd see two lines, one per slit. Instead you see a striped pattern, the kind waves make when they meet: as if that single electron passed through both slits at the same time. But if you place an instrument to check which one it goes through, the stripes disappear. You're back to two lines.