Discipline

The rest is noise in a town of a thousand inhabitants whose name, Galluccio, means nothing to you.

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."

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?

Last week I told you about choosing who to be. About deliberate behaviors. About new habits that create new identity.

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

The brain doesn't understand this. The brain only sees today. Only sees the immediate pain to avoid. It doesn't see that postponed pain changes your body, makes you bitter, keeps you sulking repeating "nothing lucky ever happens to me."

Happiness is not a destination. It's a habit.

It sounds ridiculous, but that's where I understood something fundamental: my thoughts weren't mine. They were automatic reactions. Programmed responses. Patterns that repeated without me ever choosing them.

But I've learned that solitude isn't a problem to solve. It's a space to inhabit.

For me it happened around seventeen. I didn't understand it right away. At first it seemed like healthy ambition. It seemed like hunger. It seemed like the engine that would take me far from a town of a thousand inhabitants.

A family member who convinced you by repeating the same thing over and over, and you ended up believing it.

In the end, escaping monkey mind — even though it still screams sometimes, I admit — is a battle to fight every day.

And don't you want to really start being happy every day, and have that happiness lead you to live the life you want to live?

What actions and behaviors do you want to demonstrate to yourself every day?

I was in this small village, a thousand inhabitants.

One road. A few houses. A woman cooking outside, on a blackened pot, with a gesture she's repeated I don't know how many times.

He had grown up in a town of a thousand inhabitants, in Italy, and ran around the streets from morning to evening with another piece of tube.

I was in this small village, a thousand inhabitants.

One road. A few houses. A woman cooking outside, over a blackened pot, with a gesture she's repeated I don't know how many times.

He had grown up in a town of a thousand inhabitants, in Italy, and ran around the streets from morning to evening with another piece of pipe.

While we're there trying to figure out who we are, our habits are building. Our fears are taking root. The noise in our head — that monkey mind I told you about a few weeks ago, remember? — is getting louder, not quieter. Internal dialogues carve themselves in like water drops on stone. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves solidify.

They stop because uninstalling is more tiring than installing. They stop because life goes on anyway. They stop because at forty you have a mortgage, a family, a routine, and the price of redoing everything has become too high.

Then he always arrived. The guy. Anyone — earbuds in his ears, backpack on his shoulders, the look of someone who has more important things than a traffic light. He'd arrive, wouldn't even slow down, and cross on red as if the rule, for him, had never been written.

Because every decision of ours hides behind it a series of behaviors and habits that prevent us from changing and being better.

Because when you live with the hunger to grow, to improve every day, you'll always build another traffic light ahead. You cross one and another pops up in front of you, wider, with more traffic. Always.

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.

A champion doesn't wait to feel like it. They do what they need to do, for a precise number of hours every day, even when they don't feel like it, even when motivation is nowhere to be found — and it's almost never there, I'm telling you. They do it anyway. Because the goal is so clear, the image of the final result so sharp in front of their eyes, that nothing gets between them and that image anymore. Not tiredness, not a bad day, not "I'm just not feeling it today."

This is the thing nobody tells you when they talk about "raising your standards." They make it sound like a question of motivation, of waking up charged, of having the right energy. Nonsense. Motivation is a houseguest: it shows up when it feels like it and leaves when it feels like it. What remains, when it's gone, is discipline. The champion isn't the most motivated one. It's the one who shows up even without motivation.

They tell you that discipline is a punishment. A sentence you serve now for a reward that will come later. "Grit your teeth, the time to rest will come."

Ten minutes, once, is nothing. But a habit doesn't make you pay once. It makes you pay every day, for years, in a currency you can't see: the things you don't notice, the people you don't really look at, the version of yourself you never become because you were in a hurry.

Then I caught myself. Because doing things in a rush, not checking, not looking twice, not doing that one extra step that would clear the doubt, not going a little deeper into things — that's not a my brother thing. That's a me thing. It's the exact same habit I carry around. I just saw it from the outside, for one evening, from the passenger seat.

The uncomfortable truth is that most of the lives we don't live, we take from ourselves. Not with the big dramatic choices — with the small ones. Because behind every result, there's a behavior, a habit that stops you from being who you want to be.

That tiny gap is a bridge. On one shore stands who you are right now. On the other, who you want to be. And here's the part that floored me: if your body doesn't trust that bridge to hold, it won't let you cross. Full stop. Not with a new thought, not with good intentions, not with discipline, not with yet another well-worded resolution. If the body doesn't feel safe, you stay on this side. And it keeps you there by force.

"No smoking, no alcohol, no pointless expenditure of energy, no pointless people, no pointless habits. Just me. And that's how I understood I want to live."

I'd already mentioned it to you once — the alcohol, the nights that never ended, the diets started and abandoned — the monkey mind jumping from one thing to the next. It's the same beast. I know the script by heart: you go out, you spend, you drink, you stay out late, and you ruin the next day; the routine you'd been building crumbles in a single evening. I've been writing this down for years. And for years I've been doing it again exactly the same.

This week I was in Mykonos. Before that, Barcelona. Celebration days, the kind that destroy your routine, shift your schedule, drag you away from where you'd arrived with such effort. Pleasant, yes. But they threw me off track again.

None of us chose the parents we got. No one chose what country to be born in, what school to attend, what phrases to hear repeated at the dinner table for twenty years. "Dreams stay in the drawer." "Be content." "Someone like us can't do certain things." You didn't choose those words — they started drilling them into you when you were too young to defend yourself. And after hearing them over and over, you believed them. They became your own voice.

Read it slowly. "I choose not to choose." Me — the one who explains to his aunt over dinner that he's the one who decides about his own life — is the same one who confesses at night that most of the time he puts the pen down. I let the old program come back to write. This week, as it happens, I was in Mykonos letting myself be knocked off the routine I'd built with months of effort. Nobody forced me. I chose not to choose. Again.

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.

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?