Identity

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.

As a kid I picked hazelnuts, chestnuts, grapes and olives. Not to buy myself something. To get away. I didn't know where but I knew my place wasn't there.

My mother would say: "stop playing grown-up games." It was her way of saying don't hurt yourself. The world is like this. Accept it.

Failures don't disappear when you stop talking about them. They're carved into the psyche. You feel them every time you look in the mirror and know that the version you show the world never matches the one you live with inside.

And there's no greater failure than the one you feel toward yourself. In your own self, in your own mind, in your own silence.

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.

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

But I knew it was a lie. I had trained my brain to understand when it lies to itself. I knew that if I stayed in that comfort zone I would never leave it. That I would continue building someone else's dream while telling myself I was building my own.

Every result worth achieving required doing things I didn't feel like doing. It required becoming someone I wasn't yet.

For years I thought I would be happy when. When I had enough money. When I had the right company. When I found the right person. When I reached the right place.

They taught you that happiness is having. Having more, doing more, being more.

Meditating means one thing only: disconnecting from the noise and listening to yourself.

"I don't believe in myself, so I always have to prove things to others to make them true."

Not because they're more motivated. Because they start to feel that future version as a real person they have a debt to.

I hadn't had a vision. I had just changed the person I compared myself to. And that person was no longer in that room.

August 10, 2024 — "I'm finding myself, I'm centering myself. I'm becoming the man I want to be."

It wasn't to check. It was to avoid being.

I personally have tried to silence it in every way over the years.

Not because it was true in the good sense of motivational poster phrases.

And I asked myself if I, in all these years, had ever really done it.

I had dedicated myself to a hundred things at 60%. Never to one thing at 100%.

I've spent my whole life chasing a next version of myself. The second company. The next country. The new idea. The evening when everything will finally make sense.

I'm saying this because I'm not a fan of "I'm going on a trip to find myself." Actually, it's a completely useless cliché.

I've always given myself the same answer. The one I can define as "easy" today.

I've spent my whole life chasing a next version of myself. The second company. The next country. The new idea. The evening when everything will finally make sense.

I say this because I'm not a fan of "going on a trip to find myself." In fact, it's a completely useless cliché.

I've always given myself the same answer. The one I can today define as "easy."

If your version of Williams is a well-tended garden, a well-written book, a family held together well, a neighborhood shop that becomes an institution — it's exactly the same thing. It's just that you had to point yourself there. It's harder. It's worth more.

Not becoming Williams. Not being recognized worldwide. Not making it.

It means: someone put their finger on me and said, you are this thing here, and I'll guide you there. It means: I don't have to figure it out alone, I don't have to waste twenty-five years searching for myself, I don't have to fight against the culture surrounding me because the culture around me is already pre-aligned with what I'll become. It means: I have a track.

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 arrived from São Paulo a few days ago — and before that from the mountains of India. I wrote to you last week about a music inside that doesn't play (reread it, if you don't remember), and one thing I know about myself is: my music plays in movement. Movement is the way. Stopping means quitting.

I put the chestnut money aside. Not to buy myself something.

And I, at that precise moment, would unblock myself. "Ah, see? He's doing it, I'll do it too." And I'd cross. Right behind, glued to his back.

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

I waited for permission. Some scrap of permission from someone, about something I had already decided inside, by myself, and even first.

Except this time I did something different. I left the phone alone and opened the Kindle. I was reading a book — one of those motivational books, personal growth, self-help, call it whatever you want.

(I know what you're thinking, because I used to think the same thing: nonsense. Guys telling you to believe in yourself and that you'll get rich. You half-read them and half feel ashamed for reading them.)

Because everything already exists in this world. Whatever seems impossible to you, there's already someone out there doing it right now, while you're lying in bed telling yourself it can't be done. If they're doing it, it's possible. For you too. That's not faith — it's arithmetic. And the only real obstacle is one: you've never done it. And that doesn't live out in the world — it lives in your head, on the same pillow you rest your face on at night.

And that's not even the worst part. The worst part is the price you pay without noticing. I let go of people I loved, because staying meant stopping, and stopping is something I've never known how to do. I watched people cry over me without being able to cry myself — I haven't done it since I was a kid. I sat at dinner across from a woman, in silence, and felt that there was nothing inside, as if I had died in that silence. That's the real price. Not sleep, not money. The people. Yourself.

Because if the reward doesn't exist, then there's no longer any point in doing things to obtain it. Only one thing remains to love — the effort itself. Not the finish line. The climbing, not the having arrived. That's the thing to embrace, the only one they can't switch off with false promises.

You're right. And I'll say it plainly, without sugarcoating it — I see this as a curse. Because when I look around, I see almost everyone living in a kind of tranquility, a bubble so large they can't feel how fragile it is. And I find myself thinking that I, on the other hand, haven't enjoyed a single day in years. Not once.