The Price of Growth

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.

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

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.

Last week I told you about the price no one wants to pay. About difficult roads, compound interest, anguish as an investment.

That feeling you get when you hear about a victory, you're not imagining it. It's your brain processing it as real pain.

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.

┌────────────────────────────────────────┬───────────────────────────────┐ │ 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 │ └────────────────────────────────────────┴───────────────────────────────┘

I want to close with a question. I'll leave it here for you, I'm stealing it from the four in the morning taxi where I asked it to myself.

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.

I want to close with a question. I'll leave it here for you, I'm stealing it from the four AM taxi where I asked it of myself.

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 we, who were born in contexts of do whatever you want, pay the price of that freedom that's never sufficiently acknowledged.

▎ Geniuses leave clues, I read somewhere.

With anyone who does those jobs that, whether you want it or not, have nothing noble about them — except the pain and sacrifice of what they hide.

I remember when I used to do jobs like that. In Galluccio I picked hazelnuts, chestnuts, olives, mowed the lawn ten hours a day — in September, October, back bent for hours, hands that wouldn't close anymore at the end of the day, the dampness of five in the morning that would freeze on you.

Taking the risk. And taking responsibility — because in the end we're the ones who choose, we're the ones who live our life minute by minute, on our piece of road. And we're the ones who pay the consequences, even when we're wrong, even when we cross and realize it would have been better to stay put. The one who crosses pays, not the one watching from the other side. Never once has someone else signed off on screwing up my life.

I'll leave you this week's question on the edge of that sidewalk.

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.

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.

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.

The day after the only thing that truly worked in 8 years. A project built piece by piece, that at a certain point gains value and closes. For years I called it 'the finish line', that thing after which I would finally sit down and say ok, I made it, now I can rest.

There's that film — I couldn't even remember the title, then it came back to me: Sliding Doors. There's a woman who has to catch the train. In one version she makes it on board. In the other, the doors close in her face. That's all it takes. One train caught or missed. And the film shows you both lives in parallel, and they are two completely different lives. Different people, different loves, different ending.

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.

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.

For all this time, I tried to change the suitcase. I bought bigger ones, nicer ones, the kind people turn to look at in airports. I changed the clothes inside, made them cost more. I changed cities, beds, all those identical white ceilings. I changed everything that could be changed out there, convinced that eventually, by changing enough stuff, I'd finally feel ready to unpack it — that suitcase.

Last week I closed the letter by telling you that the only thing that really moves is the person carrying the suitcase. That everything else you can change indefinitely and stay exactly the same.

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.

This week I was in Mykonos. Before that, Barcelona. Celebration days, the kind that destroy your routine, shift your schedule, drag you away from where you'd arrived with such effort. Pleasant, yes. But they threw me off track again.

So get one uncomfortable thing into your head: there's no such thing as "the clean brain, the real me, just how I am." There's no one who hasn't been programmed by something or someone. There are only two kinds of people. Those who let their brain be washed by others and by chance, forever. And those who at some point pick up the pen and begin, painstakingly, to rewrite it themselves.

But there's a price I hadn't told you about. And it's this: the desire to become someone has made me forget that I already am one.

Comparison isn't dangerous just because it makes you feel behind. It's dangerous because it makes you forget that you're here. That you already exist. The exact moment you turn to look at whoever is ahead of you, you disappear from yourself. You're no longer there, alive, in the present — there's only the gap to close. And that gap never ends, because there will always be someone further ahead.

And I think that's where everything is. Not the career, not the money, not the stuff I chased for twenty years. Understanding who you are and being that, in the best way you can. That's the art. It has nothing to do with knowing how to paint or play an instrument: your art is your particular way of being in the world, the one nobody else does the same way. And showing it isn't exhibitionism. It's the only serious form of self-love I know.