Week 9 of 54 — The music we keep inside

I'm writing to you from Brazil. São Paulo, though by the time you read this letter I'll already be in Buenos Aires for a month.

I came down from the mountain. That was last week's teaser.

I took a flight from India to Italy, two hours of switching luggage at the airport like doing grocery shopping, then another flight to Brazil. On the plane, when I can't sleep, I don't watch random movies. I choose. And that night I chose King Richard.

If you haven't seen it, it's the movie about Richard Williams. The father of Venus and Serena.

Those Williams, yes. The greatest tennis players in history.

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There's something that's never said enough about that story, and that the movie tells without fear.

▎ 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.

He and their mother decided they would have two daughters. That they would train them in tennis. That they would become number one in the world. That there would be two of them. And then they had them.

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

Literally.

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And here I have to stop for a second, because the first thing that came to mind wasn't what an incredible story.

It was: what about me? And others like me? And the children from last week's village?

Because Venus and Serena, when they were born, were born into a direction. Someone had already decided what they were going to be. They didn't have the capacity to understand, want, choose — they were just creatures, that's all, and someone pointed them.

Pointed. It's a word that carries more weight than it seems.

It means: someone put their finger on me and said, you are this thing here, and I'll guide you there. It means: I don't have to figure it out alone, I don't have to waste twenty-five years searching for myself, I don't have to fight against the culture surrounding me because the culture around me is already pre-aligned with what I'll become. It means: I have a track.

The rest of us — me, you, the children on the rooftops of Indian mountains, my mother, my grandfather, ninety out of a hundred people surrounding you right now — weren't pointed by anyone.

We were born free.

And on one hand it's the most beautiful thing in the world.

On the other hand it's exactly what ruins us.

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▎ Geniuses leave clues, I read somewhere.

Maybe it's true. Maybe we too, as children, left clues about who we were supposed to become. It's just that no one collected them. No one put them in a seventy-eight-page plan. No one pointed us.

And so the life of those born without direction becomes this: you spend half your time figuring out who you are, the other half fighting what you've been told you are.

Every now and then, in between, you have a free hour left to try to do something.

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Let me put it precisely, because this is the real point.

I know, it sounds like whining. It's not.

It's just that we have to be honest: we start at a disadvantage. Not everyone, but many. Many of us. Practically everyone reading this letter, probably.

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And then there's the worst trap of all.

While we're there trying to figure out who we are, our habits are building. Our fears are taking root. The noise in our head — that monkey mind I told you about a few weeks ago, remember? — is getting louder, not quieter. Internal dialogues carve themselves in like water drops on stone. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves solidify.

And when we finally reach the point where we understand what we really wanted to be, we discover that we've spent twenty years building a bunch of monsters inside ourselves that we now have to defeat before we can begin.

It's not enough to know what you are. You also have to uninstall everything that prevented you from being it.

And many people stop there.

They stop because uninstalling is more tiring than installing. They stop because life goes on anyway. They stop because at forty you have a mortgage, a family, a routine, and the price of redoing everything has become too high.

And those who don't stop often arrive too late. At fifty you start doing what you should have done at twenty, but you no longer have the energy, the time, the margin for error.

▎ This is the most silent condemnation that exists. And it's never talked about.

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So when I saw Richard Williams, on the plane, writing that plan for his not-yet-born daughters, I didn't think how lucky they are.

I thought what a starting tool.

Not a destiny. A tool. A track.

It was given to them for free. We have to build it ourselves. Ten years late. With monsters already installed.

But — and here I finally get to the only thing that keeps me attached to this letter — it can still be done.

Not like Richard Williams. Not with seventy-eight pages. Not starting from birth.

It can still be done, starting from where you are now, reading this thing, with coffee that's gone cold and a day that's already half over.

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Do you remember the village above the mountains, from last week? Those children with the piece of pipe.

While watching the movie, on the plane, that scene came back to mind.

And I had an uncomfortable thought.

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.

They're pointed by their environment. Not by an individual, but by context.

And we, who were born in contexts of do whatever you want, pay the price of that freedom that's never sufficiently acknowledged.

But we also pay to build our own direction. Late, laboriously, among a thousand false starts.

And when we manage to really build it — even just for a year, even just within a small area — that's the moment when we become Williams of our field. Not thanks to a father with a plan. Thanks to ourselves, late, with scars.

If your version of Williams is a well-tended garden, a well-written book, a family held together well, a neighborhood shop that becomes an institution — it's exactly the same thing. It's just that you had to point yourself there. It's harder. It's worth more.

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But there's something I want to tell you, and I want to close with this.

There's a phrase I heard some time ago on a podcast, of which I remember nothing — not the title, not the guest, not the date — except six words.

▎ Don't die with your music inside.

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.

And I think that's ultimately the real point.

Not becoming Williams. Not being recognized worldwide. Not making it.

Don't die with your music inside.

We all have music. Something we really are. A specific sound, made only by us, that no one else in the world can make in the same way. The Williams had theirs, and someone pulled it out of them early. We have ours, and to pull it out we have to fight, discover it, uninstall the monsters, and then finally play it.

People who tell you they lived well but who you know are lying don't die from illness.

They die from indecision.

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I want to close with the question I asked myself at 35,000 feet, while below me passed an ocean I've never really looked at.

What is the music you have inside?

The one that comes out only in moments when you're really yourself. The one that comes naturally to you and others can't do the same. The one you forget you have because you've been carrying it around all your life and no one ever told you it was music.

That one.

And now the second question, which is more uncomfortable.

Are you playing it?

If not, why.

If yes, loud enough to be heard?

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

Next week: I'll write to you from Buenos Aires, and tell you the first thing I learned here.

Fifty-four attempts to become better.
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