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.
From Letter 07 — Week 7 of 54 — The art of defining your boundaries
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 │ └────────────────────────────────────────┴───────────────────────────────┘
From Letter 08 — Week 8 of 54 — Those who don't come down from the mountain
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.
From Letter 09 — Week 8 of 54 — Those Who Don't Come Down from the Mountain
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.
From Letter 10 — Week 9 of 54 — The music we keep inside
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.
From Letter 11 — Week 10 of 54 — The Man on the Roof
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.
From Letter 12 — Week 11 of 54 — The traffic light
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.
From Letter 13 — Week 12 of 54 — Head on the Pillow
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.
From Letter 14 — Week 13 of 54 — The Punishment
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.