Last week I told you about beginnings. About waves seen, caught, and let go before they ever reached shore. About the problem that's never outside.
This week I'm telling you what was going on inside.
We can't hide anything from ourselves.
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.
And there's no greater failure than the one you feel toward yourself. In your own self, in your own mind, in your own silence.
For years I did exactly this.
I showed a version of me built to survive. A pile of habits collected over time — some from childhood when I was looking for attention, some from my teenage years when I was looking for respect, others from adulthood when I was trying to prove I could make it.
And at some point those habits took over and became me. "That's just who I am." "It's my nature." "That's how I work."
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?
Without ever asking myself the more honest question: are these things keeping me exactly where I don't want to be?
I wrote in my journal: "I always thought others were better than me. That they had something more. That they were more capable, more attractive, more performing."
And that's where I understood the first mistake. I wasn't competing with them. I was competing with my idea of them. So I was already defeated before I started.
Because the only competition that matters is the one with yourself. Not with who you think others are. But with who you know you can become.
And that competition — you don't win it with talent. You win it with your endurance.
There's a line I carry with me everywhere I go.
"Tension comes from being who we think we should be. Relaxation only comes when we are who we are."
Think about it for a second. How much of your day do you spend being who you think you should be? For work, for others, for the image, for expectations no one ever asked you to meet.
And how much do you spend simply being you?
That tension you feel in your chest, the one you don't know how to name, the one I talked about in the first letter — it's not stress. It's not anxiety. It's the distance between who you are and who you pretend to be. And the more that distance grows, the louder the noise it produces.
One day I read something that changed the way I look at everything.
What we think, how we feel, and how we act determines our personality. And our personality determines our reality.
If your thoughts today are the same as yesterday, if your habits this week are the same as last year, if your reactions are always the same — what's left of your evolution?
If you're not guided by your vision of the future, you stay clinging to the emotions of the past. And your personality, instead of pushing you forward, drags you back. To where you've already been. To where you don't want to return but where it feels safe, at home, in a familiar place.
Someone said that being unbeatable doesn't mean you don't take hits. It means the hits don't stop you, because you learn to absorb them.
The damage is temporary. The confidence is permanent. But only if you build it every day. Not with ego. With preparation. With repetition. With the refusal to see failures as defeats.
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.
And I've taken hits. Thirteen years of hits disguised as beginnings. But they didn't stop me. They taught me one thing — the secret isn't knowing who you are. It's choosing who you want to become.
Every morning I started doing something simple. I get up, and before doing anything else, I ask myself: who do I choose to be today?
It's not meditation. It's not a mantra. It's a decision. Deliberate. Every day.
It's true freedom.
Because the habits you inherited are not you. The beliefs you accepted without thinking are not yours. Every "that's just who I am" deserves to be questioned.
And when you start choosing your behaviors, deliberately, one at a time, something unexpected happens. Those new behaviors create a new identity. And that new identity creates a new reality. And that new reality creates a new life.
It's not philosophy. It's what happened to me.
Two years after I started writing my journal, I reread it from the beginning.
I found a Stefano in constant escape. At war with himself. Full of habits he had never chosen — drugs, alcohol, parties, and wasted time.
A Stefano who was competing with his idea of others instead of with his idea of himself.
Two years later, I found a different Stefano. Not one who had found the answers. But one who had stopped looking for them outside.
A monk doesn't pray. He is the prayer. A monk doesn't perform a gesture. He becomes the gesture. I heard this in a temple in Japan, in a place called Koyasan. But that's another story.
If you strip away everything — the habits you didn't choose, the beliefs you accepted wholesale, the tension of being who you think you should be — and focus your energy on what you truly want, you become energy. And where to channel it is yours alone to decide.
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
one behavior at a time
one day at a time
one choice at a time
You don't have to prove who you are to anyone.
You just have to be sure of it.
The question is: if tomorrow you could choose who to be, who would you be?
But more importantly — what behaviors and habits would that person demonstrate to themselves?
Answer yourself honestly. And start.
Try. And if you feel like it, reply to this email and tell me how it went.
Fifty-four attempts to be better.
This is the second.
A greeting, Stefano.