Week 12 of 54 — Head on the Pillow

I came back to Italy, and for a few days my body stayed in Argentina. Jet lag does that: you wake up at four in the morning with your eyes wide open and your mind already running. The other night I was exactly there — awake, dark, head on the pillow and the phone a hand's width from my face.

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.

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.)

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.

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?

Here it is: you raise it. Always.

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.

But the part that floored me, and that I want to leave you with, is something else. It's how a champion operates.

A champion doesn't wait to feel like it. They do what they need to do, for a precise number of hours every day, even when they don't feel like it, even when motivation is nowhere to be found — and it's almost never there, I'm telling you. They do it anyway. Because the goal is so clear, the image of the final result so sharp in front of their eyes, that nothing gets between them and that image anymore. Not tiredness, not a bad day, not "I'm just not feeling it today."

This is the thing nobody tells you when they talk about "raising your standards." They make it sound like a question of motivation, of waking up charged, of having the right energy. Nonsense. Motivation is a houseguest: it shows up when it feels like it and leaves when it feels like it. What remains, when it's gone, is discipline. The champion isn't the most motivated one. It's the one who shows up even without motivation.

And here I have to be honest with you, otherwise I become one of those videos myself. It's not like I wake up every morning and act like a champion. There are nights when I don't open the Kindle at all: I scroll like everyone else, I feel like crap, I fall asleep late and angry. Discipline isn't never falling. It's coming back. It's opening the book again the next morning anyway.

But there's one thing I've understood, and it's almost embarrassing how simple it is.

Life is easy when we act, instead of sitting there thinking about how to act.

We think too much. We wait for the perfect action, the right moment, the ideal conditions — and in the meantime we do nothing. The champion, simply put, does. And by doing, understands. We want to understand before we do, and that's exactly why we stay stuck.

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.

Because the bar doesn't get raised by a burst of motivation at three in the morning. It gets raised like this: one disciplined gesture at a time, done even without wanting to, because you know where you want to go.

I'll leave this week's question on your pillow, and it's a double one.

What's the one small action you know you need to take every day, and that you keep putting off while waiting to feel like doing it? And if that feeling never came — would you do it anyway?

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

Tonight, Kindle not Instagram. I'm trying too.

See you next week.

Fifty-four attempts to become better.
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