Week 7 of 54 — The art of defining your boundaries

There's a page from one of my notebooks, dated July 2nd, that I had forgotten until a few days ago.

I reopened it by chance.

It started like this:

▎ "The limit. The boundary line, the keystone. Everyone has one, but often it's not enough. Often it doesn't mark existence, it marks resistance."

I had written this sentence during a period when I thought I had understood it.

I hadn't understood it.

I had intuited it.

There's a huge difference between something you intuit, and something you put into your bones.

Between intuition and incarnation often pass years.

In between are the wrong cities, the people you drag along out of inertia, the meetings you accept because you don't have a specific reason to say no.

And that's exactly the problem.

---

These days I caught a phrase in passing, in a video that had nothing to do with what I'm trying to build.

It was a dry sentence, almost a blow:

▎ "I've never seen anyone dedicate themselves to something completely and not succeed."

I listened to it three times.

Not because it was true in the good sense of motivational poster phrases.

Because it cut in half a thought I'd been circling around for months.

Never. No one.

And I asked myself if I, in all these years, had ever really done it.

The honest answer, the kind you only give in taxis, at four in the morning, in a city where no one knows you, was no.

I had dedicated myself to a hundred things at 60%. Never to one thing at 100%.

And not for lack of strength.

For lack of a perimeter.

---

When you don't have a perimeter, you say yes by default.

Not because you're generous.

Because you don't have a trained no.

No is a muscle. Without internal boundaries that muscle is atrophied, and you end up seeming open to everything when you're really just incapable of choosing.

Open-to-everything is the adult version of the child who wants all the toys, and to have them leaves them all on the floor, and at the end of the day doesn't really play with any of them.

I'm a bit ashamed to write this, because for years I confused this thing with curiosity. With open-mindedness. With flexibility.

It was laziness of definition.

---

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.

I had become a hotel-room-man. Clean, functional, identical to himself in any city. But belonging to someone, to no one.

Generic because I hadn't decided anything non-negotiable.

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

I seemed very convinced. Actually I didn't have convictions, I had options.

And when you only have options, you're the sum of the pressures that hit you.

---

I made a stupid table that day. I keep it on my phone.

┌────────────────────────────────────────┬───────────────────────────────┐
│           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.

Without it, dispersion is inevitable.

---

In that July 2nd notebook I had also written another sentence I found again:

▎ "Also because we like to think there exists a world without boundaries, but it's precisely those boundaries that protect us. And usually if we can't manage alone, we hope there's someone else to protect them in our place."

That "someone else" never came.

Not because they weren't there, but because it wasn't their job.

Your boundaries can only be set by you. No one else knows exactly where you end, because very often you don't know it well yourself.

And until you wait for others to define you, you're interpreted. You don't exist.

---

I want to be honest about something.

For a long time I believed that setting boundaries was a kind of admission of weakness. Like: others can handle more, others are everywhere, others don't need a perimeter.

Bullshit.

Others do have a perimeter, they just don't talk about it. They protect it in silence. They protect it so well that from the outside it seems like they don't have one.

The people I envied for their ability to be everywhere, when I really got to know them, were those with the clearest boundaries.

They knew where they ended and where they began.

And precisely because of that they could afford openness.

Openness without form is dissolution. Openness with form is generosity.

It's not the same thing.

---

There's something I want to say quietly, because it's what took me the longest to understand.

When you hear the word boundary, or limit, or definition, almost always the mind receives it as a renunciation. I'm restricting myself. I'm closing myself. I'm giving up possibilities.

It's not like that.

A boundary is not a renunciation. It's a focus.

It's not less. It's more, of one thing.

What people call limiting yourself is actually verticalizing yourself. Going deep on one thing instead of surface on thirty.

And it's precisely going deep, not wide, that makes you make the leap.

All the people I see achieving what they want, did it by verticalizing.

All the people I see not achieving, myself included, for years, did the opposite. They dispersed in the name of openness. They confused themselves in the name of freedom. They refused to choose in the name of not missing anything.

And missing nothing, they lost everything.

Defining yourself is not limiting yourself. It's specializing in your own life.

Without specialization there's no excellence in anything. Let alone in yourself.

---

There was a phrase, caught in passing from a video I shouldn't have paid attention to, that stayed with me:

▎ "The only thing you can really control is your mind."

You don't control time. You don't control others. You don't control whether you're alive tomorrow. You don't control results, which depend on too many things.

You only control your actions and your behaviors.

Only those.

They're very few things. They seem like nothing.

They're everything.

Because on those, and only on those, you build the person you become.

---

I'll tell you something I noticed, and that's the real reason I arrived at the question I'll write to you shortly.

I looked, with attention, not in passing, at the people around me who really achieved what they wanted. Not those who seemed to achieve. Those who really did it, inside, with full presence, with full energy, with full attention.

They all had the same thing in common.

Not talent. Not luck. Not origins.

Total dedication.

They were dedicated to their goal 100%. Not 95%. Not 90%.

One hundred.

They didn't look left and right. They didn't have seven plan B's. They didn't keep an exit open in case it didn't work.

They had become one with what they did. Indistinguishable from their why.

And every time I crossed paths with them, I felt the contrast. I was everywhere at 60%. They were in one place at 100%.

At a certain point I stopped telling myself it was a matter of time or means.

It was a matter of boundaries.

They had decided what they were. I was still choosing.

And there, one evening, the question was born that since then I carry with me like a compass.

---

I spent months looking for it. The one that readjusts you. The one that's worth more than a thousand books.

I found it, and it's almost funny how simple it is. It changed my life, and I leave it here, at the end of this letter, because it's the most useful thing I have to give you this week.

What actions and behaviors do you want to demonstrate to yourself every day?

To you. Not to others.

The answers are your perimeter.

Everything that's inside, you defend. Everything that's outside, can wait.

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.

And that, for the first time in you don't know how long, you know where you are.

---

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

I don't know what the next one will be called or what it will contain, I'm in India at the moment, bye!

Fifty-four attempts to become better.
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