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.

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.

It's not that you're always late — you're the one creating the delay, without realizing it, just to confirm that you're someone who runs late. It's not that people always leave you — you're the one who eventually makes the move that pushes them away, so the story you tell yourself stays true.

I just got back from Argentina, and I threw myself into work without even putting my suitcase down — two weeks in Caserta with the team, preparing something big that launches in a few days (maybe I'll tell you about it, not now).

There's a phrase that's been spinning in my head for years. I don't even know where I picked it up anymore — maybe I made it up myself one night in an airport.

I'm writing to you from Budapest — and more precisely, I'm writing from inside a sauna. Yes, I'm obsessed with saunas, in case you didn't know. I go in knowing I have fifteen minutes: either I use them to make a list of things, or to untangle a list of thoughts. And inside my head I tell myself: either I figure everything out right now, or I stay here and die from the heat.

Grab and go. I told myself that time too. And I went.

Because — the book explains — the body has two modes. One is where it feels safe: rest, long breath, guard down. It's only inside that mode that a new thought can take hold, that a new version of you can put down roots. The other is survival mode: alarm, danger scanner always on, all your energy thrown into monitoring what could go wrong. And in that mode, no bridges get crossed. You don't have the strength: you're using all of it to defend yourself. The trouble is that modern life, with all the stress we carry around, almost always leaves us stuck there, on high alert, without even realizing it.

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?

Last week I closed the letter by telling you that the only thing that really moves is the person carrying the suitcase. That everything else you can change indefinitely and stay exactly the same.

But I don't want to sell you the fairy tale of the man who rewrote himself and is now master of himself. Because it's not true, and I'll prove it with the most uncomfortable thing I have in my pocket.

She said it like an accusation. As if to say, you told yourself a story, you convinced yourself of something that doesn't apply to normal people, you're not one of us anymore.

And I, instead of taking offense, sat there with my fork suspended in midair thinking: that's the truest thing anyone has said to me in years.

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.

One evening in Amsterdam, two summers ago. I was having dinner alone on a hotel rooftop. I'd just closed something work-related, the kind of thing you're supposed to celebrate. And yet what I wrote down had nothing to do with work. It was this: "growing up means being at peace with yourself today. We are here, today, alive." Not tomorrow. Today.

I've spent my life wanting to improve myself. Grow, evolve, change, have more, become. The last few letters I've written you are about nothing else: changing who carries the suitcase, rewiring the brain, deciding to become someone else. I still believe in all of it, by the way. I'm not taking anything back.

And I think that's where everything is. Not the career, not the money, not the stuff I chased for twenty years. Understanding who you are and being that, in the best way you can. That's the art. It has nothing to do with knowing how to paint or play an instrument: your art is your particular way of being in the world, the one nobody else does the same way. And showing it isn't exhibitionism. It's the only serious form of self-love I know.

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.

Look at what we do when other people are around. We measure ourselves before speaking. We say the most acceptable version of what we actually think. We look around to figure out who's there, what they expect, whether we're too much or too little. We wait for the right moment — and the right moment is the one when we're sure it won't hurt us, which means never. We compare ourselves to that person over there who we think does it better, and we put it off until we're ready.