Category: Blog

Yesterday we were all reunited with my wife’s parents, watching videos of their youth.

Seeing people 10-20 years apart can make a big different. You get too see a visual change, you see them young and then you look at who you know now.

That snapshot in time takes many informations. You see a young girl playing, but more than that you see that playfulness, that will to play, to engage with others, to simply not care.

When we’re young we don’t care. But while we grow up something changes. We sacrifice part of that freedom, we put up a mask, a social mask. Partly because we got burnt many times, partly because we want to avoid getting burned again, and partly because that’s how the world works.

We can instantly see how time changes people. How many layers were put to become who they are now.

At the same time we know that there’s no turning back. Reverting a mask is no easy deal. It takes time, it takes humility and patience. More often than not we changed into something we partially like. What we don’t see is that the mask, or even the armor, we put on, can’t be easily removed. It is now part of who we are. In the new videos this will be our starting point and we can only add more masks to it, we will hardly remove them.

The question is: For what? Why do we do this, why do we care so much about appearance, fame, status when we were happier before?
To protect, to avoid being hurt. What if we took pride in who we are and took that risk, that chance, to simply be authentic, to go and show the world what we have for them, in full resolution and color?

What would happen then?

Today I decided to re-add some silicone to my bath, there were some angles that got mold too easily and I wanted to reinforce them.

I bought a tool that should ease things out so I started applying it. Line by line, row by row in my shower.

The result was… a mess. I’m not an expert but wanted to try anyway. I realized after doing the work that the applied given with this silicone paste was not ideal and I spread some of it over the shower walls.

The look was terrifying, but I thought “I can’t leave it like this”. So I started removing the excess for quite a long time until I decided to give up and let it harden a little bit, in the hopes of an easier removal.

I remember thinking “I did a mistake, it’ll leave the bathroom like shit forever”.

On the second round it was still a mess but removal was easier, while I was removing it I realized that there was hope.

On the third round the shower looked almost normal. Not quite right but not so bad either.

Tomorrow I’ll do the last round, but this reminded me of how miserable is a success when you look early, how distant the mountains are when you start trekking, how hard something is, so hard it seems impossible, until you do it.

For a while I was sure that the best way to achieve something was to do it with pleasure. When you take pleasure into doing things they come out better, more polished, more refined.

There’s a limit though: You can’t always be in that mood, in that passionate interest. So what will you do?

Will you surrender waiting for the next tide of passion to come or will you try anyway?

How do you know if you’re procrastinating? How do you know when you’re lying to yourself and you’re taking time to avoid the struggle?

How do you know if the tide of passion is mind trick?

We live in a social network world, and we tend to measure success by what we see.

If we see images of an happy family, we instantly think they are happy, even if they’re not.

Social networks give us the illusion that we have a window into other people lives, but we miss the fact that we see what _they_ want us to see.

But if you think about it: It has always been like this. Friendship, relationship, public figures. All showed to you what they wanted and hid what they didn’t want you to see.

It’s simply a stronger illusion, but it’s an illusione nonetheless.

A writer publish a books by himself on amazon, he’s the first in all sold books in amazon italy.
It’s amazing, it seems amazing and to be honest: It’s a exceptional result.
Even when I write this it seems such a big accomplishment, but then I look at the timing. He opened the pre-sale of the book right around december, which, presumably, is kind off-season.

He’s first with pre-sales only, but if you look at the list none of contenders announced the book this year, they are all old books, so why it does seem like he defeated goliath?

He didn’t, but what he did is an exceptional timing to know when to publish, to build an impressive following of people and, last but not least, to have all his social in place.

Could I do the same? Probably not. Could he beat some “star” of the books if they published in the same time? Probably not and that’s where the “illusion” lies.

Being first doesn’t mean that you are first among the best in class _always_. If you play your cards correctly you can be first in many things, are you the best of all, the _real_ first? Maybe not. You’re still one of the best, you’re still exceptional, but it’s like presenting numbers to change the perspective of the audience. With the right numbers and the right wording you can turn upside down many results and polls of the history of the world, and if you know where the truth lies you might even have a word for what you’re doing: Illusion.

Can we resist the illusion then? Not always and even if I framed everything in a cynical way I don’t think that’s the right approach. Be critic, understand that behind any result there’s some kind of effort directly or indirectly correlated.
Ask yourself some question, understand the context, do some guesswork and maybe after all this thinking you might have escaped part of this illusion.

Why only part? Because after watching others and finding the illusion in their photos, in their words, the biggest illusion of all is the one we have inside, our ego.

Every new year there’s a spike in divorces right after New Year’s Eve. It’s not because we cheat on dec 31st, it’s because we’re fooled again by the fact that we can seek a new start by changing the outside conditions.

A new watch, a new job, a new wife. They can change part of our surroundings but won’t change us. We will still be the same, with our problems and limits. And until we face and fix those limits, until we go above and beyond to believe that we, too, can be different, no, there won’t be any difference between what we were yesterday, and what we are today.

New Year’s Eve doesn’t change much until we do.