Personal Growth

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.

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.

It was "the beginning" that was the drug. That feeling of newness and magic of being able to be or go anywhere you want. An evolution that I still didn't understand the exit signal, the escape.

But it wasn't true. I hadn't chosen any of it. I had only inherited it, piece by piece, without ever stopping to ask: do I still need this? Does it make me better? Does it take me where I want to go?

I wrote in my journal: "I always thought others were better than me. That they had something more. That they were more capable, more attractive, more performing."

That tension you feel in your chest, the one you don't know how to name, the one I talked about in the first letter — it's not stress. It's not anxiety. It's the distance between who you are and who you pretend to be. And the more that distance grows, the louder the noise it produces.

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

The brain is programmed to always choose the second. To push away pain. To avoid immediate conflict. To survive, not to grow.

The brain doesn't understand this. The brain only sees today. Only sees the immediate pain to avoid. It doesn't see that postponed pain changes your body, makes you bitter, keeps you sulking repeating "nothing lucky ever happens to me."

Then I understood something that changed everything: I wasn't unhappy because of what I was missing. I was unhappy because of how my mind worked.

If your thoughts today are the same as yesterday, if your reactions this week are the same as last year, what's left of your evolution?

It seems like little. But after a month, something changes. You start to see your patterns. You start to recognize when you're reacting instead of choosing. You start to put space between what happens and how you respond.

Wanting to be accepted by those I considered better than me.

And that's exactly how you survive as a child. You look at who knows and you learn. You look at who has and you understand that infinite possibilities exist. Without comparison, no learning. No culture. No progress. Just absorbing.

When everything changed I was in Bali, years later, traveling, alone, in a place where no one knew me.

And like everything else, the key result exists only in knowing how to change your point of view.

Fifty-four attempts to become better. This is the sixth. Best, Stefano.

Fifty-four attempts to become better. 54letter.com

Everything was debatable. Everything was movable. Everything I said could be changed if the other person had a strong enough opinion.

┌────────────────────────────────────────┬───────────────────────────────┐ │ Without perimeter │ With perimeter │ ├────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────┤ │ Everything is negotiable │ Some things are not │ ├────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────┤ │ Open to everyone │ Close to few │ ├────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────┤ │ Reactive │ Chosen │ ├────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────┤ │ Always available │ Available when I've decided │ ├────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────┤ │ I confuse curiosity with laziness │ Curious within an identity │ ├────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────┤ �� I feel everywhere │ I know where I am │ ├────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────┤ │ I grow noise │ I grow weight │ └────────────────────────────────────────┴───────────────────────────────┘

There's no absolutely right column. But for those who grow up in a life of too many possibilities, too many flights, too many people, too many tables, the right column is a form of survival.

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

He had grown up in a town of a thousand inhabitants, in Italy, and ran around the streets from morning to evening with another piece of tube.

I can't convince myself that staying would have been better.

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

He had grown up in a town of a thousand inhabitants, in Italy, and ran around the streets from morning to evening with another piece of pipe.

I can't convince myself that staying would have been better.

Those children too, in some way, are little Williams. Maybe without a written plan, but with direction anyway: in the village, everyone knows what they'll do when they grow up, because everyone does it, because their father does it, because their mother does it, because it's in the air.

I stopped at that phrase for days. While the plane took off, while I changed luggage, while I arrived here in São Paulo. It kept turning inside me.

Fifty-four attempts to become better. This is the ninth. Best, Stefano.

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.

The more I grow, the more I start to suspect something else.

Fifty-four attempts to become better. 54letter.com

Because when you live with the hunger to grow, to improve every day, you'll always build another traffic light ahead. You cross one and another pops up in front of you, wider, with more traffic. Always.

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

So don't feel stupid if you have a traffic light in front of you that you can't cross. You're not. You just have to accept the challenge, understand what your traffic light is, and start crossing it. Because everything changes with action. Only with that.

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.

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.

That's why the dumbest and most true piece of advice I can give you this week is this. Tonight, when you rest your head on the pillow and your hand moves on its own toward the phone — stop it. Instead of opening Instagram, open a book. It sounds like nothing, it sounds hard, and yet everything is right there: in that small gesture, ten centimeters, between one icon and another. You don't have to change your life tonight. You just have to change which screen you look at before you sleep.

Fifty-four attempts to become better. This is the thirteenth. Best, Stefano.

Fifty-four attempts to become better. 54letter.com