Growth has a price, and nobody tells you before you pay it. Stefano describes it in his letters with brutal honesty: growing means losing people, abandoning versions of yourself, feeling alone in rooms where you used to have company. The price of growth is not just effort — it is grief. You are saying goodbye to the person you were, and not everyone around you will accept who you are becoming.
What Stefano says about the price of growth
From Letter 01 — Here we go again
Not compared to someone else, but compared to what you feel you could be. This distance doesn't close, not with work, not with money, let alone with cities. It doesn't close with anything.
But this time I won't leave these words in the notebook.
From Letter 02 — Choosing who to be
There's a precise moment when everything changes. Not when you understand what's wrong. You already know that. It changes when you decide that the old you isn't coming with you anymore. When you leave him there, with his habits, his fears, his excuses. And you start walking alone toward someone who doesn't exist yet but who you already feel inside. From that moment the game becomes something else. It becomes beautiful. Hard, but beautiful. Because the struggle finally has meaning. And like everything worth having, it takes practice
From Letter 03 — The price no one wants to pay
Faced with every important choice you always have only two: the one that costs effort today and the one that costs effort tomorrow.
And this is biology. The body is programmed to save energy and push away pain. In winter blood moves away from hands and feet and flows toward the heart. If you lose your hands you still live, if you lose your heart you don't. It's the same mechanism that keeps you on the couch when you should get your ass up.
From Letter 04 — Week 4 of 54 — Happiness is a habit
Last week I told you about the price no one wants to pay. About difficult roads, compound interest, anguish as an investment.
From Letter 05 — Week 5 of 54 — The real cancer
That feeling you get when you hear about a victory, you're not imagining it. It's your brain processing it as real pain.