The Harder Path

For those who know life can be hard, difficult, but despite everything are still here. Under a wonderful sky made of possibilities waiting to be seized.

I never could. Not out of courage, but out of inability.

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

You can slow down, sure. But don't stop. Momentum isn't lost from one hit. It's lost when you choose not to get back up.

Do you know what compound interest is? It works like this: every difficult choice you make today doesn't pay you back just once — it multiplies. Today's pain becomes tomorrow's competence, which becomes the day after's advantage, which becomes an unbridgeable distance between you and those who chose the easy path. Those who postpone pay interest. Those who act collect it.

The rule is simple: if two paths seem equivalent, always choose the one that requires effort in the short term.

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.

And that's how that information goes from being information to paths to follow. From knowledge to practical actions that guide you toward your future version. And that's how suffering transforms into a map that gives you a great advantage on the path.

Whatever happens, you can choose how to read it. You can choose what to focus on about that event, and how to react.

All the people I see not achieving, myself included, for years, did the opposite. They dispersed in the name of openness. They confused themselves in the name of freedom. They refused to choose in the name of not missing anything.

And every time I crossed paths with them, I felt the contrast. I was everywhere at 60%. They were in one place at 100%.

I've always given myself the same answer. The one I can define as "easy" today.

Between him and me there are too many flights, too many cities, too many versions of me overwritten one on top of the other like layers of paint. When I try to scrape them off, underneath I don't find him. I find the emptiness of someone who never really protected him.

I've always given myself the same answer. The one I can today define as "easy."

Between him and me there are too many flights, too many cities, too many versions of me overwritten one on top of the other like layers of paint. When I try to scrape them off, underneath I don't find him. I find the emptiness of someone who never really protected him.

I took a flight from India to Italy, two hours of switching luggage at the airport like doing grocery shopping, then another flight to Brazil. On the plane, when I can't sleep, I don't watch random movies. I choose. And that night I chose King Richard.

If you haven't seen it, it's the movie about Richard Williams. The father of Venus and Serena.

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 write it and it's so easy. Doing it, I haven't succeeded yet. And I know I never will.

▎ I choose for myself. I don't wait for anyone anymore.

It was one of those promises you write at night, with the conviction of finally having understood yourself, and the next day you're back there, on the edge of the same sidewalk, waiting for the guy with the earbuds. It was written by someone who still didn't know how to cross alone. Someone who gave himself courage on paper because he couldn't find the courage in the street.

Life is easy when we act, instead of sitting there thinking about how to act.

That's why the dumbest and most true piece of advice I can give you this week is this. Tonight, when you rest your head on the pillow and your hand moves on its own toward the phone — stop it. Instead of opening Instagram, open a book. It sounds like nothing, it sounds hard, and yet everything is right there: in that small gesture, ten centimeters, between one icon and another. You don't have to change your life tonight. You just have to change which screen you look at before you sleep.

Because if the reward doesn't exist, then there's no longer any point in doing things to obtain it. Only one thing remains to love — the effort itself. Not the finish line. The climbing, not the having arrived. That's the thing to embrace, the only one they can't switch off with false promises.

Because I understood that all this struggle, this never stopping, this never enjoying anything, is exactly the price for becoming who I truly want to be. For pulling out of my head, one by one, all the "no"s that had been sewn onto me as a child. For unlearning the story that someone from a town of a thousand people should keep their feet on the ground, be content, that certain dreams, unfortunately, must be put away in the famous drawer and forgotten.