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.