Searching for Fire

Notes on personal crisis, human essence and the last few months.

Today is my 28th birthday. I worked really hard to make sure I was able to finish this piece today since I want it to mark the beginning of a new era in my life—one where I turn backward to draw inspiration for what lies ahead.

---

“Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.”

Cormac Mcarthy - The Road

2 years ago, I remember sitting in a typical café in Lisbon.

Not those that you’ll see on blog posts about trendy places in the Portuguese capital, oh no. I’m talking about the typical “Tasca”, where you’ll find people drinking their beers at 7 am after having worked for the past 3 hours in construction. It's not the most beautiful place but you can get proper Portuguese coffee and that was exactly what I was doing, waiting for the bus that would drive me to my hometown.

Accompanying my coffee and, of course, a "Pastel de Nata", I had my Kindle with a book called "Thinking in Emergency", written by Elaine Scarry. After pushing through the first chapter, I decided to drop the book.

I've been trying to get into that book for over a week but I just couldn't do it. It focuses on how human beings make decisions during a crisis. It turns out that people tend to panic.

Thinking, argues Elaine, is directly connected with acting and, if you lack an external protocol to help you deal with an emergency, you'll default to acting based on whatever's happening in your mind (usually, in an emergency, not an example of critical thinking) and that leads to below-optimal outcomes.

My notes on the book

When I bought the book, I was looking for something that would help me on a more individual level, so, reading about emergency protocols at a societal level wasn’t something I was enjoying that much.

Now, you may ask:

João, why didn't you just adapt those principles to your individual life?

That’s a great question! I have no idea. Usually, that's something I do. I try to practice Lateral Thinking and adjusting whatever I'm learning to my own life but in this particular book, I didn't do it.

Maybe it was that we had gone through a very badly handled pandemic, making me question the usefulness of having social protocols. Or maybe it was just laziness. I don't know. What I do know is that a year after dropping that book, I was living through my own crisis, a build-up of smaller scattered ones and I was doing exactly what Elaine said humans do.

(I stand corrected Elaine, I’ve since then given your book a 5-star review on Amazon to compensate for my previous judgment)

This essay is the story of how I got into that crisis and what I've been doing ever since. So buckle up while I explain why I haven't published anything in a long time.

You can’t pinpoint a Catastrophe. Can you?

There are many things in our world that we can pinpoint, both in time and space.

I can know exactly the day I was born, the day that Google won the rush to online advertisement or where's my grandad's house. However, if you're trying to develop a complete understanding of what leads to the specific thing you're pointing at, that's slightly harder.

I know that Jeff Dean, a worker at Google, saw a Post-it on May 24th, 2002. It hung in Google's kitchen and it said the following:

THESE ADS SUCK

Larry Page, one of the co-founders of Google, had pasted it there, as a reminder for the whole team that their process of advertisement was...well, bad. Jeff saw the Post-it on a Friday and, at 05:05 am on Monday, 2 days afterward, he shipped what would become the basic foundation of the Google Ads system.

This tells us what happened, but not why it happened.

Why did Larry Page paste the Post-it? What made Jeff, a worker in the Search department, not the Ad department, feel compelled to solve that problem?

These are actual questions I’ve asked students during this last year, teaching at The Socratic Experience. The main conclusion is that we can’t know for sure.

We would jump into a deterministic rabbit hole to answer both of these questions, trying to understand what justified a given action. Even with interviews from both Larry and Jeff, it’s almost impossible to develop a sense of certainty about why things happened the way they did.

Just like trying to understand why Jeff did what he did and trying to pinpoint the beginning of a personal crisis share, then, this extreme hardship. Even more so since, a lot of the time, contrary to what happened in Google, you don’t tend to log all of your actions and incentives, justifying your motivation to act a certain way.

Nevertheless, in March of this year, I tried.

I wanted to understand why I was in the middle of a friendship crisis, a relationship, a professional crisis, and a meaning crisis. As I peeled back the veil of my own story, I ended up in the summer of 2022, which was the moment when it started.

Specifically, with the fall of my second company.

“What Drives You” to make a lousy decision?

After 3 years working on my first company, in 2021, I decided to start a new company, What Drives You, focused on high schoolers, which ended up failing. For the longest time, I told myself a story about why that had happened: we weren't able to find a product-market fit. This is true. But it's not the complete truth.

You see, for as long as I remember, I lived my life with a philosophy that can be described as “hopeless optimism”.

I believed that, no matter what things would work out.

I believed that some things just aligned themselves, unlocking a new set of possibilities.

I believed people were fundamentally good and that if you really believed in something you would be able to make it true.

That changed with the failure of the company. It made me more strategic and “down to earth”. At least, that’s what I thought and told everyone, including myself. However, as I looked back, reading notes, journals, emails, and discord messages, I uncovered something I had been too afraid to face until that moment.

What Drives You didn’t fail due to my hopeless optimism. It failed because I was scared to act upon it. The truth is that we had a chance to move forward with the company if I acted fast enough. But I panicked. There was always this part of me that doubted this way of living. “There’s no way I can build a company alone with this approach, right?”.

Living in a state of comfortable tension, I was just waiting for someone to show up and tell me something along the lines of: “That was good while it lasted, now it’s time to grow up”.

The truth was that it never came and because of it, I found myself lost, wondering what to do and doubting myself and my capacity to actually act upon the opportunities and lead What Drives You the proper way.

I didn’t realize that earlier, but that feeling, of personal betrayal, shook me to my core. I had let down the students working with us, the people working with me, and myself.

If I wasn’t this hopeless optimist, then, who was I?

This existential question completely changed the way I was living. I transformed myself into this different person, more“down to earth” and, dare I say, pessimist.

I lost my joyful essence but achieved a series of good things, which led to this correlation that the absence of that joy, that way of living, was the cause of the good things happening to me.

This was absolutely false.

Hard conversations lead to a better life

I arrived at this conclusion around 6 am, after talking with my girlfriend for hours on end about our relationship, the future we wanted, and everything else that was happening.

Losing that joy made me push away the people I cared about the most, by numbing me to everything around me. I was still performing well at everything that I did, I was just dissociated. And that took a toll on me and those around me. So many things decayed during these years and all because I couldn’t trust myself.

I always praised myself as being so aware of the “rat race” and yet, I abandoned pure joy and wonder by immersing myself in environments that stripped me away from what was once a fundamental aspect of my reality.

This was, I believe, an unconscious punishment, a fragment of my personal shadow. I didn’t trust myself when it mattered, hence, I was destined to undergo the troubles and pain necessary to “repent from my sins” (Yes, in case you’re wondering, I had a Catholic upbringing).

A lot of things I used to hold as pillars of my own self (spirituality, dialogue, love, Joy, curiosity, wonder, to name a few) perished, leaving space for a latent ressentiment towards what surrounded me, fuelled up by the environments and people I had chose to surround myself with.

Because of it, even though I was “doing better” than ever before, all my ambition, drive and wonder were nowhere to be found.

I had lost this extreme will to live.

I had lost my edge.

I had lost my fire.

Searching for the Fire

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been on a search for that fire.

Like so many growth processes, this one was also filled with small, illusive victories, making me believe “I had it”, when in fact, they meant nothing more than a step in the right direction.

Every week, I thought I had finally understood what needed to be done to get back. Every week I realized that wasn’t it.

I wrote thousand of words about it, trying to find a magic key that would unlock this feeling that was once so natural to me. And yet, even though people around me started to feel I was different, within me, I still felt the same.

The problem, I realized, is that we do not find fire. We ignite it through action.

It wasn’t so much about “thinking” in a certain way, at least at first. It was about acting a certain way. And so I did. I went against what I thought was “the proper thing to do”, and acted based on something that seemed to be beyond thought.

Things changed. They have been changing since then.

Every day, I see myself becoming more joyful and happy. My curiosity and wonder increasing…And I feel like I’m integrating that into some things I have learned during these last 2 years. I know now that I cannot take any of these things for granted and that I need to be thoughtful about the environment I choose to interact with.

It’s a process and it’s far from done. Especially because I see this as a life-long process.

But nothing could leave me more excited.

There’s a new era coming and I can’t wait to live it.

Thank you for being part of it.