Week 21 of 54 — The Distance

The truth is not something you discover. It's a distance you measure.

Yesterday I was locked inside a sauna in China.

I love saunas. Beyond the physical benefits, it's one of those places where you can't bring anything with you and where you have a maximum amount of time to stay: so for once your thoughts have no competition, and they have to hurry up too.

I usually stay fifteen minutes, and while I was in there this question came to me: what is the hardest thing about being truly happy.

The answer came immediately, with that annoying certainty that true things have.

The answer was: the truth.

And a second later I realized I'd said it without knowing what I meant. "The truth" is one of those words everyone uses and that defines no one. So I spent the rest of the time in there trying to define it.

I'm writing to you about where I landed. It's not a conclusion — it's the point where a door opened for me.

The truth is not a thing. It's a distance.

We always talk about it as if it were an object: you have it or you don't, you tell it or you hide it, you find it or you lose it.

I don't think that's how it works.

The truth is the distance between where you are and the things you don't face. The fears you don't acknowledge. The limits you won't admit you have. It's not stuff you're hiding from other people — it's a space you've never measured for yourself.

And you measure it for one reason only, which is the part nobody ever tells us: to know how long the bridge needs to be — the bridge that, with great effort, you then have to build.

For yourself. To grow, to be more honest and more at peace.

Because the truth isn't there to make you feel bad. It's there to help you build. Nobody builds a bridge by guesswork: if you don't know the distance, you either never start, or you end up in the water.

That's why saying "I'm not capable of" is not a surrender. It's a measurement. It's what you take before the work begins.

Except we almost never take the measurement. And to avoid taking it, we've built ourselves an entire vocabulary.

The phrases we use to avoid measuring

The true things are the smallest phrases, which is exactly why we don't say them:

• I'm afraid of.

• I'm not capable of.

• I didn't understand what you just said.

• Who I'd like to love, and don't know how to love.

• Which person I'd like to confront, and don't confront.

• Who I'd like to be, and am not.

They're the simplest things in the world, and the most complex. And they're precisely what shapes our "state of being" — how I'm actually doing, to put it plainly.

Instead, we say other things — shorter, more comfortable — things that have the enormous advantage of being presentable: you can say them at dinner or in a meeting and nobody raises an eyebrow. "Yeah, sure." "All good." "I'll think about it and let you know." "It's not the right time." "That's just how I am."

They're not lies. They're measurements never taken.

(And this is coming from someone who writes a newsletter every week — someone who's had the ruler in his hand seven days a week and keeps putting it off. I'm not talking to you from the other side of the bridge. I'm in the middle of the river, exactly like you.)

But then the next question comes, and it ruins everything

If the truth is a distance, who measures it?

I'll give you the dumbest example I have, and it's mine, from this month. My constant traveling can be told in two ways, and both of them are true.

The first: it's wonderful, I'm always seeing new places, doing things I couldn't have imagined ten years ago.

The second: it's terrible, because I'm always alone.

Same days. Same flights. Same rooms. The only thing that changes is which of the two stories I decide to tell. And depending on which I choose, how I actually feel changes too — not as a pretense. For real.

So the truth isn't out there waiting, still and patient, for someone to find it. The truth differentiates itself only by the choice of which story we tell.

And at this point, a person can do one of two things. They can say: so it's all made up, everyone just tells themselves whatever they want, nothing means anything. Or they can realize that the story is the most serious thing they'll ever hold in their hands.

It took me four years to realize it, and I even have written proof from when I was stuck at the first.

▎ I remember feeling constantly dissatisfied. Having the constant feeling of someone who lies is horrible. But what is the difference between a lie and the truth if not a plan to pull it off?

— August 3, 2022, New York

I wrote that in a note, during a period when I was spending money I didn't have to look like someone I wasn't.

That version of me had understood the exact same thing I understood yesterday in the sauna. Identical. That between a lie and a truth the difference is construction. Except with that understanding, instead of a bridge, he built a façade.

And the difference between a façade and a bridge isn't in the materials. It's in where you point it. The façade you build toward others, and it's meant to make it look like the distance isn't there. The bridge you build toward your own shore, and it's meant to actually cross it.

Four years to understand the difference between two things that both require building.

The last piece, which is the hard one

The truth doesn't exist until you're the one who says what it is.

And just saying it isn't enough. It has to be said with certainty, and with an intention so strong that the weight of that choice grows larger than the other. That it becomes the guide.

Because until you choose, both stories stay right there — the beautiful one and the ugly one — and you stay in the middle. And you can't build anything in the middle: you don't even know which shore you're starting from, so the bridge never begins.

I'm not telling you to think positive. Thinking positive is choosing the comfortable story and hoping. I'm telling you something else: that you have to choose the story, and then you have to live inside it even on the days it doesn't feel right, because it's that choice that tells you where to build.

Let me give you a practical example.

A lot of people call Dubai fake. I've never called it fake — I've always called it built. Someone sat down at a table, decided what it needed to be, and believed in it enough to make it exactly that way. It's neither true nor false. It was chosen.

People work the same way. Between two people who have lived the exact same life, the difference is which story they decided to tell themselves and how strongly they believed it.

But be careful, because this is where it's incredibly easy to fool yourself — and I fool myself here too. The distance is real, and that part you don't choose. If you're not capable of something, you're not capable, and telling yourself a better story doesn't make you capable. What you choose is the story you build on top of it, and the way you act afterward.

First you measure. Then you choose. Then you act. In that order — otherwise it's just another façade.

I walked out at the fifteen-minute mark having resolved nothing, and that's fine: I suspect this is one of those things that doesn't get resolved in fifteen minutes.

But I understood one thing. For years I thought I was someone who doesn't tell himself certain things. That's not true. I'm someone who never measured them — and didn't measure them because he believed it would only make things worse.

In other words: who actually wants to tell themselves that the reason they're not happy is that they don't have the courage to face the fact that

________________________________

Fill in the blank yourself. That thing there is your measurement.

But knowing how long the bridge needs to be is the way to become who you dream of being. And it's possible.

I'm not asking you what your truth is — that's too big a question, nobody answers it.

I'm asking you this. What is the distance you haven't measured yet? And if you measured it tonight, what would you need to start building this Monday morning?

There's a story from when I was a kid, back in my hometown, that I haven't told you yet — and it connects to all of this more than I'd like to admit. We'll get there.

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

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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