What I learned I didn’t learn it from studying only.

I learned from sweat, from pain, from being heartbroken, hopeless.

I didn’t learn it because I was gifted, I didn’t have an advantage. I learned the value of kindness because I got to see both side of the spectrum of the love-hate world.
I questioned. Is it good? Is it bad? On each side I doubted everything, because in some moments you think rage is the answer, in other love, and you might end up being disappointed in both cases.

I questioned again, because as you might know by now when you’re 15yo and you got your crush on a girl that rejects you or even worse cheat on you, those times you feel like loving is not a thing we, as humans, should do.
Too painful to withstand.

But I questioned. I questioned where the disappointment came from, and I learned from it.

When I was young I hold many values as set in stone. I looked up the older guys that were telling me “yeah, once you grow up you’ll understand”, and I thought “I’ll never be like them”.
Now you might even hear me saying “give it time and you’ll understand” and the values I loved are nowhere to be seen.

At first I wondered if I lost them, if I was less human because I lost those values, because I don’t follow them like I used to.
But then I questioned, what changed?
Values changed, they evolved, they grew with me and now they’re different. Now I know more, now I understand the complexity of relationship better than years ago and surely worse then the years to come. Now I know that life is all about trade offs, and they’re not born equal.

The spectrum of emotions and conditions is always there. We are always part of a spectrum led by two extremes.
The extremes do not equal to good or bad. They’re choices, conditions, results.
How can we know when something’s good or bad?
We question, we doubt even the best of the action or outcome.

Learning isn’t about being lucky, isn’t about having an outcome compatible with what we’ve learned.
It’s about questioning things even when they go well, because if you buy a house for a low price and you put a family homeless, yes, you bought a house for a low price, but you should at least question if it was really worth it.

Doubting, questioning, asking constantly where are we, in this spectrum, is a great way to learn.

Sometimes you learn through error, but we forget that we could learn something even when we’re the one leading, the winners.
Because learning shouldn’t be something exogenous, it can be endogenous too, and that’s where I got my best learning.