Personal growth is not a motivational podcast. It is pain, doubt, and uncomfortable choices. 54 reveals what it truly costs to become who you want to be.
From Letter 01 — Here we go again
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.
From Letter 02 — Choosing who to be
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.
From Letter 03 — The price no one wants to pay
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."
From Letter 04 — Week 4 of 54 — Happiness is a habit
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.
From Letter 05 — Week 5 of 54 — The real cancer
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.
From Letter 06 — Week 6 of 54 — Monkey mind
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
From Letter 07 — Week 7 of 54 — The art of defining your boundaries
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.
From Letter 08 — Week 8 of 54 — Those who don't come down from the mountain
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.
From Letter 09 — Week 8 of 54 — Those Who Don't Come Down from the Mountain
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.
From Letter 10 — Week 9 of 54 — The music we keep inside
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.
From Letter 11 — Week 10 of 54 — The Man on the Roof
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
From Letter 12 — Week 11 of 54 — The traffic light
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.
From Letter 13 — Week 12 of 54 — Head on the Pillow
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.
From Letter 14 — Week 13 of 54 — The Punishment
Fifty-four attempts to become better. This is the thirteenth. Best, Stefano.
Fifty-four attempts to become better. 54letter.com
From Letter 15 — Week 14 of 54 — Sliding Doors
And so I get to the point. (And it's not the one that's going to make you feel better.)
But when you manage to be consistent with the things you actually want to change: ahhh, that's when you feel at home with yourself and think "yes, this is right, now I'm really me."
Fifty-four attempts to become better. This is the fourteenth. Best, Stefano.
From Letter 16 — Week 15 of 54 — The Suitcase
For all this time, I tried to change the suitcase. I bought bigger ones, nicer ones, the kind people turn to look at in airports. I changed the clothes inside, made them cost more. I changed cities, beds, all those identical white ceilings. I changed everything that could be changed out there, convinced that eventually, by changing enough stuff, I'd finally feel ready to unpack it — that suitcase.
And it never worked. The suitcase changed, the clothes changed, and at the end of the day I was always the same. Same hunger, same fear, same emptiness in the room with the lights off.
Because the only thing that needed to change wasn't the suitcase. It was the one who carries it.
From Letter 17 — Week 16 of 54 — The Autopilot
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.
Fifty-four attempts to become better. This is the sixteenth. Best, Stefano.
Fifty-four attempts to become better. 54letter.com
From Letter 18 — Week 17 of 54 — The Brainwashing
And real growth goes like this: gradually, gradually, gradually. And then all at once. A flat line for a very long time, that at some point spikes upward. Except we can't sustain the flat line. We quit. And, statistically, we quit almost always at the flattest point on the curve — meaning the instant before it spikes.
▎ But how do you change an unconscious mind built over 28 years? One step at a time. And the first step is to stop wanting everything at once, to stop wanting to change everything together in a snap of the fingers.
But it's not circumstances that make you a better person. It's decisions.
From Letter 19 — Week 18 of 54 — You're Already Someone
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.
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.
Fifty-four attempts to become better. This is the 18th. Best, Stefano.
From Letter 20 — Week 19 of 54 — A Show Without an Audience Is Not a Show
The very act of looking changes the result.
This isn't theory: the experiment with electrons fired one at a time was carried out by three Italians, in Bologna, in 1974. And in 2002 physicists from around the world voted it the most beautiful experiment in the history of physics. If you want to check it's all there, and it's half an hour better spent than scrolling reels.
But it has never happened to anyone. It has never made someone cry at two in the morning, never changed anyone's mind, never been copied into a message by a guy who didn't know how else to say it. It just sits there, all possibilities at once, like those electrons before the measurement. Waiting for someone to touch it.