Week 19 of 54 — A Show Without an Audience Is Not a Show

My life sometimes feels like a multiverse.

Two weeks ago I was in Mykonos living a life I used to dream about as a kid. A week ago I was in New York having breakfast with people who, from the moment they wake up, talk about nothing but how to make billions (me included). A week later I'm here, in my hometown, with people who couldn't care less about billions, but I swear, they smile twice as much as the ones in New York.

Anyway. Last night there was a rock band playing. One of those old-school ones, beer flowing and people shouting.

Low stage, bass you feel in your stomach, and the crowd in front singing songs they know by heart even though they're hearing the band for the first time.

Then they finish. The singer picks up the mic one last time, says thank you, and before stepping off drops a line.

"A show without an audience is not a show."

Applause, lights, everyone goes for a drink. And there I am, in the middle of the crowd, beer in hand, and instead of enjoying the last two minutes I start turning over a sentence said by some sweaty guy who just wanted to say goodbye.

I managed to ruin a concert with a parting quote.

Because the first thing I thought was: that's not true.

It's something we tell ourselves to feel important. A good person is good even when nobody's watching. Someone who plays well plays well in the garage too. You either have the value or you don't — the people in the room don't hand it to you.

I believed that for about forty seconds.

Then something came back to me that I'd read a while ago and never managed to shake.

There's this thing in physics, the one about the smallest pieces, the ones we're made of. When nobody's observing them they're not in any specific place: they're everywhere, they're possibilities, they're a wave. Then someone comes along, looks at them, measures them, and in that exact moment they stop being all the possibilities at once and become just one thing. A point. Right there.

Before the gaze: everything and nothing.

After the gaze: that.

Multiverse stuff, exactly.

Now, because something like this said at a bar sounds like the usual motivational reel nonsense, let me tell you where it comes from. Which is also why last night, instead of sleeping, I went back and brushed up on it properly.

It's called the double-slit experiment. You fire an electron at a wall with two slits and watch where it lands on the other side. If it were a little ball you'd see two lines, one per slit. Instead you see a striped pattern, the kind waves make when they meet: as if that single electron passed through both slits at the same time. But if you place an instrument to check which one it goes through, the stripes disappear. You're back to two lines.

The very act of looking changes the result.

This isn't theory: the experiment with electrons fired one at a time was carried out by three Italians, in Bologna, in 1974. And in 2002 physicists from around the world voted it the most beautiful experiment in the history of physics. If you want to check it's all there, and it's half an hour better spent than scrolling reels.

One clarification I'll keep for myself though, otherwise I feel like a snake-oil salesman. "Observing" in physics doesn't mean there's some guy watching and reality snaps to attention: it means there's an instrument interacting, a measurement taking place.

But the bare fact remains: as long as nothing touches that thing, that thing is nowhere.

And then I thought about a poem.

A beautiful poem, beautifully written, locked in a drawer for thirty years. Does it exist?

It's there, yes. The paper is there. The ink is there.

But it has never happened to anyone. It has never made someone cry at two in the morning, never changed anyone's mind, never been copied into a message by a guy who didn't know how else to say it. It just sits there, all possibilities at once, like those electrons before the measurement. Waiting for someone to touch it.

And so yes. That sweaty guy was right.

And here's where it turned back on me, as usual.

Because at that point I thought about my own drawer.

Which is part of why this newsletter exists.

And somewhere in my notes, at a certain point, I'd even caught myself red-handed:

▎ Writes because I want someone to read. I have this conditioned desire to come across as a "hero" and I can't figure out why.

— October 18, 2021

Read it carefully. It was written in a rush, there's even a grammatical mistake at the start. But what's underneath is clear: I was ashamed of wanting a reader. I wrote it down like a defect to confess at three in the morning. "I can't figure out why," as if wanting someone to read were some kind of disease.

As if wanting someone to tell you "well done" were a mistake.

And now let me tell you the part I arrived at afterward, the reason I'm actually writing this to you.

Because right now you might be thinking the moral is "put yourself out there more." It's not that. Actually, it's almost the opposite.

Putting yourself out there more is easy. For years I was the person who was extremely visible and extremely hidden at the same time. You can stand on a stage every day and never really step onto it.

Because the hard thing isn't being seen. It's being real while you're being seen.

Look at what we do when other people are around. We measure ourselves before speaking. We say the most acceptable version of what we actually think. We look around to figure out who's there, what they expect, whether we're too much or too little. We wait for the right moment — and the right moment is the one when we're sure it won't hurt us, which means never. We compare ourselves to that person over there who we think does it better, and we put it off until we're ready.

We don't hide because we're shy. We hide because being truly ourselves in front of people is the most uncomfortable thing in the world.

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.

There's a quote that almost everyone knows and almost everyone gets wrong. It says that our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate: it's that we are powerful beyond measure. That it's our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most.

Everyone attributes it to Nelson Mandela, inauguration speech, 1994. The New York Times fell for it, and so did a lot of important people in commencement speeches. Except Mandela never said it. It was written by an American author, Marianne Williamson, in a book from 1992, and the Mandela Foundation had to put out a statement to explain that.

I find it quite perfect that the world's most famous quote about one's own light was for thirty years attributed to someone else.

Anyway, in the same piece, she writes two things that stopped me in my tracks.

The first: "your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you."

The second: when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same.

Now that last one I'd never fully understood until now.

Because the real fear isn't that people will boo. The real fear is that it works. That you pull it off. That the thing that is you takes up space, and that by taking up space it takes air away from someone else. How many times have you kept yourself small so someone else wouldn't feel wrong? Me, a lot. And I told myself a good story about it too — I called it humility.

But light doesn't work that way. Turning yours on doesn't make the room darker for everyone else.

The opposite happens. One person steps up, and the ones below understand that stepping up is possible.

Last night's band stepped off and I already can't remember their name. I didn't buy anything, didn't look them up, haven't heard those songs since. Were they good? No idea. Average, maybe.

But that night, in my hometown, the show happened. And I'm fairly sure that among the people in front of that stage — the ones who couldn't care less about billions and smile twice as much — there was at least one who walked home thinking: I could do that too.

They didn't need to be the best. They just needed to step up.

I don't have a solution — you know I never do — and on this particular thing I'm the first to fail every day. I have a question, and tonight it's a simple one: what is your thing, the one that's you and nobody else, that you haven't shown anyone so far?

And are you keeping it in the drawer because you're afraid you won't be good enough, or because you're afraid you will be?

Fifty-four attempts to become better. This is the nineteenth. Best, Stefano.

Next week I'll talk about how you find that thing. Because it doesn't come through some flash of inspiration: it emerges from the intersection of three things — what you know how to do, what you love doing, and who you actually are. But that's another story.

If you feel like it, reply to this email and tell me. I read every single one, myself.

Fifty-four attempts to become better.
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