Doubt

And it's not anxiety or fear. It's that silent certainty of not being in the right place wherever you are. That whatever you've done, it's not enough. That there exists a version of you that you haven't reached yet, and maybe never will.

I come from a place where questions are a euphemism. Not because people don't think, because the answers are already written. You're born. You work. You sit at the table on Sunday. You die.

These letters are born for those who still believe. For those who despite everything are sure it's possible. For all those who keep searching, door after door.

Without ever asking myself the more honest question: are these things keeping me exactly where I don't want to be?

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.

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.

After a year and a half I asked the question I had to ask: "I want to become a partner."

In 1954 an American psychologist, Leon Festinger, put it in black and white with a simple experiment: when we don't have objective measures to understand where we are, who we are, what we're worth, what's normal, we use others as a compass. That's how the species learned to survive.

In that moment I changed the axis of the question I had been asking myself for thirteen years.

And that debt, apparently, is a better measure of comparison than any life we see on Instagram.

And then the real questions. The ones that hurt.

These were the questions that monkey mind doesn't want you to ask yourself.

In most cases it's exactly the one you're already living. All you have to do is start asking yourself those questions, and create a new point of view.

I'm a bit ashamed to write this, because for years I confused this thing with curiosity. With open-mindedness. With flexibility.

And when you only have options, you're the sum of the pressures that hit you.

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 that's when the question came that hasn't let go of me since.

Because actually the question isn't what they've seen.

The question is: which of the two is better off now?

And that's when the question arrived that hasn't let go of me since.

Because actually the question isn't what they've seen.

The question is: which of the two is better off now?

I want to close with the question I asked myself at 35,000 feet, while below me passed an ocean I've never really looked at.

And now the second question, which is more uncomfortable.

Blind because I wonder if he knows he could be something else. If this job really fulfills him, or if he ended up in it — children who came too early, a family to support, and this was the only thing he could do. Or maybe he comes from a nearby country, from a poverty that never left him time to ask himself anything, and for him being on that roof, in Buenos Aires, is already a destination. Maybe, where he comes from, that up there is a status.

I wonder which of the many realities that exist he belongs to, and in my mind I remember and imagine all the steps he has to face to change his personality and reach the next stage of the Matrix.

I wrote to you last week about a music we keep inside. Here it is: I look at him and wonder if he has it, if he'll never play it, or if he's playing it right there, every morning at seven, with hammer blows on iron — and I'm the one who can't hear it.

I'll leave you this week's question on the edge of that sidewalk.

That night, the concept that got under my skin was the answer to a question I'd left you with a few weeks ago — one I'd been keeping in my pocket. I'll ask it again, so you don't have to remember it: is it right to settle, or do you always have to raise the bar?

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.

I'll leave this week's question on your pillow, and it's a double one.

And after a while something strange happened. The children who were rewarded started drawing less. The ones who received nothing kept going like before, for the pleasure of it. The others didn't — the reward had switched something off. They had stopped drawing out of love, and were only drawing in relation to the prize.

And I'll leave you with a simple but uncomfortable question.

Up at dawn, going until late at night, eating at the office and starting again. "High intensity," the good ones call it. I call it not knowing what day it is anymore.

"Mario, are you sure you put in the right place?"

Same street, different town. The GPS was calmly taking us the other direction, totally sure of itself, and we were right there trusting it.

I've stayed in this hotel before. Two years ago. Three, maybe — I'm not exactly sure.

I don't have a clean solution — you know how these letters go. I have a question.

It says, in essence, this. The distance between who you are today and who you want to become isn't measured in miles. It's measured in nanometers. Twenty nanometers: the space between one neuron and the next, the exact point where a thought passes. Or doesn't. A ridiculous, invisible gap. And yet sometimes it feels like an endless journey.

I still don't know. But it's become my question, and this time I'm handing it straight to you: that person you've written you want to become — that chosen, yours, real version — why can't you become them? Because you don't know how? Or because, underneath it all, your body is still afraid to cross, and would rather keep you on the shore it knows, in the middle of others, even if it's a tight fit?

At some point my cousin tells us about her very recent trip to New York. Her eyes light up. She says she'd like to go live there, maybe. And my aunt, with that rough affection of someone who wants to protect you, replies with something I've heard a thousand times in my life: "sure, but someone who comes from a small town has to accept certain things. How are you going to go live in New York?"

And here comes the hard part, the part that motivational quotes never include. Because "rewrite your brain" sounds wonderful, but it's an agonizingly slow thing, and your own brain rows against you even as you're doing it.

I read this from someone who studies how this machine works. He said that dopamine — what everyone calls the pleasure molecule — is actually the surprise molecule. The brain doesn't reward you for the result: it rewards you for the unexpected. That's why the first two weeks of something new are electrifying, and the sixth, seventh, eighth — the ones where you're actually building the part that matters — feel flat, dead, meaningless. Not because you're doing it wrong. But because the brain has switched off the charge, exactly when the thing was starting to work.

Beautiful, right? "I no longer compare myself to anyone." I had touched it. I had arrived at that place where you feel good about being yourself, full stop, without having to measure yourself against anyone.

▎ I'm jealous of those who find their path. I'm jealous of those who live by certainties. I'm jealous of those who are sure that choice will be the right one for them.

I don't have a solution, you know that. I have a question, and this time it's simpler than usual: while you're running to become who you'll be, have you noticed who you already are right now? Or are you also, like me, waiting for someone's permission to exist?

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.

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 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.