Nostalgia

It's not meant for you, really it's not meant for anyone. I've been writing this kind of stuff for years, in places where no one knows me, at tables where no one sits with me, in cities I change before I can call them home.

I've felt this distance for as long as I can remember.

Trading. Forex. A blog. Videos. Social media. Travel. Every time I saw the wave before others and every time I rode it I got off before it reached shore.

If you're not guided by your vision of the future, you stay clinging to the emotions of the past. And your personality, instead of pushing you forward, drags you back. To where you've already been. To where you don't want to return but where it feels safe, at home, in a familiar place.

Last week I told you about beginnings. About waves seen, caught, and let go before they ever reached shore. About the problem that's never outside.

And that's where I understood the first mistake. I wasn't competing with them. I was competing with my idea of them. So I was already defeated before I started.

And every time you choose that path, you'll wake up six months later in the same place as before. With the same hunger. With the same distance from what you want to become.

Do you know what compound interest is? It works like this: every difficult choice you make today doesn't pay you back just once — it multiplies. Today's pain becomes tomorrow's competence, which becomes the day after's advantage, which becomes an unbridgeable distance between you and those who chose the easy path. Those who postpone pay interest. Those who act collect it.

But it wasn't the growth that changed me. It was the awareness of something I had never seen before.

And every time I got there, happiness lasted three days. Then the emptiness returned. Then the hunger returned. Then that feeling in your chest returned, telling you "it's not enough, it's still not enough."

The day after the exit with NoLimits-Ad I worked all day. Because everything before that was just warm-up. But even after, the emptiness was there. Different, but there.

Same as yesterday ████████████████████░░░ ≈ 90%

One night, in a hotel in a city whose name I don't remember, I wrote a sentence in my notebook, in a single line.

Every morning, before taking my phone, I sit and ask myself two questions.

I opened my phone before I even put my feet on the ground.

I call it, for as long as I can remember, restlessness.

Once you've started asking why, life starts answering you.

One evening in a hotel, I don't even remember which city, and this already says something, I noticed something banal: I was living a life that from the outside seemed enormous and from the inside was generic.

Generic like a hotel room: clean, functional, identical to all the others. You sleep there and tomorrow you don't remember being there.

And if you really answer honestly — not with what you think you should say, but with what really concerns you, you realize that the important things are very few.

For those who've just started reading me, I'll say this once: I'm not here looking for anything. I'm here for work, and I ended up here by chance.

I was in a village up in the mountains, at the foot of the Himalayas, the greatest border that exists. (read the old letter if you don't remember what border means ;) )

If the answer is I don't remember, we're in the same column.

For those who've just started reading me, I'll say this only once: I'm not here looking for anything. I'm here for work, and I ended up here by chance.

I was in a village up in the mountains, at the foot of the Himalayas, the greatest boundary that exists. (read the previous letter here if you don't remember what boundary means ;) )

I remembered, while watching them, an eight-year-old boy.

▎ Richard Williams had written a seventy-eight-page plan for his daughters' lives before they were born.

Not when they were seven years old. Not when they were two years old. Before they were born.

They made them win the world before even bringing them into the world.

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.

He arrives before all the others. Always. At seven he's already on the roof — the roof of a building that doesn't exist yet, exposed rebar sticking out of concrete, wooden planks, no protection, as if he were immortal.

I remember when I used to do jobs like that. In Galluccio I picked hazelnuts, chestnuts, olives, mowed the lawn ten hours a day — in September, October, back bent for hours, hands that wouldn't close anymore at the end of the day, the dampness of five in the morning that would freeze on you.

I'm writing to you again from Buenos Aires, last week here, soon I'll return to Italy to the warmth (finally, because here it's winter).

Yesterday, while going to a little shop to buy mate, I crossed the street on red without thinking about it.

When I reached the sidewalk across, I started laughing, because I remembered how many times I'd been the one standing at a traffic light thinking too long about whether to wait for green or cross... until someone else gave me "the go-ahead."

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?

And usually there's only one way this ends. You open Instagram and scroll for an hour, until you fall asleep in worse shape than before.

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.

But when I got there, the morning after I woke up, like always, before everyone else, opened my laptop in a house where there was no one to wake, and worked. Like any other Tuesday.

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.

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.