Don’t read it all at once.

Put the playlist on.

Let the songs interrupt the text.

The matter can be quite uncomfortable. We like destinations. They give us coordinates. A plan. Something to type into Google Maps.

But life has a funny habit of changing the destination while we’re already on the road.

The map disappears.

We realize we’re walking toward somewhere we no longer want to reach.

I started thinking about this after hearing a song in my spinning class. By the way, the teacher always has a great selection.

Because a song doesn’t tell you everything that’s going to happen.

It gives you the next note. And we enjoy it while it lasts.

01 — MOVE

Destination Calabria — Enur feat. Natasja

This song makes you move before you’ve had time to think.

The beat arrives and the body responds.

No strategy. No five-year plan. Just: go.

Buckle up. The journey begins.

Not with certainty. With movement.

02 — LEAVE

Break My Soul — Beyoncé

There are moments when the question isn’t:

Where am I going?

It’s: What am I willing to leave? A city. A love. A job. A version of myself. A story I thought I was supposed to finish.

Staying is no longer possible.

Whatever it is, you won’t break my soul.

03 — LET GO

Shake It Out — Florence + The Machine

Of course, not everything we carry belongs in the next chapter.

There are expectations.

Old mistakes.

Things we thought we should have done by now.

Versions of ourselves we’ve outgrown but somehow still keep in the suitcase.

Moving forward isn’t always about finding something new. Sometimes, it’s about making space for it.

So every now and then: Shake it out.

04 — TRUST

Andar com Fé — Gilberto Gil

There is something very Brazilian about the idea of walking without needing the whole road explained.

Andar com Fé.

Walking with faith. Actually, this is recurring advice from my father-in-law.

Just trusting enough to take another step.

Bring creativity. Make the first mark before you know what it will become.

Begin. Then you see.

05 — KEEP WALKING

Tocando em Frente — Almir Sater & Renato Teixeira, sung by ANAVITÓRIA

One of my favourite songs.

It’s about knowing how to keep going.

There are things we only understand while walking.

Some lessons don’t arrive as answers.

They arrive as kilometres. Conversations. Mistakes.

Strange encounters. Places we never planned to visit.

The road teaches differently from the destination.

06 — CHOOSE

Go Your Own Way — The Cramberries

At some point, you have to accept that nobody else has your map.

People will have opinions. They’ll tell you which road is safer.

Which destination makes more sense.

Which version of you would be more sensible.

But eventually you have to ask:Is this actually my road?

Someone else’s map won’t get you there.

07 — PLAY

Dancing On My Own — Robyn

Sometimes you’re not confidently going your own way.

Sometimes you’re just… dancing on your own.

Which sounds very poetic until you realize you’re literally the person alone in the tube at 11:47pm, dancing like nobody is watching.

Except some person in the back.

There is something wonderful about dancing without an audience.

No destination. No performance. No one to impress.

Just you, the song and questionable choreography.

The beautiful freedom to look ridiculous

Dance anyway.

08 — SURRENDER

Ride — Lana Del Rey

At some point, you have to stop trying to control the road.

Plan. Prepare.

But eventually… you have to ride.

There is something seductive about not knowing exactly where you’re going.

The road at night. The window open. The music loud.

The feeling that something might happen.

Maybe that’s what we mean when we say we want freedom.

Not knowing the destination.

But being willing to see what happens along the way.

09 — SLOW DOWN

Paciência — Lenine

But what if the answer isn’t another step?

What if it’s a pause?

We are very good at moving.

Less good at stopping.

There is a Japanese practice called shinrin-yoku — forest bathing.

A slow, mindful immersion in nature.

The idea is beautifully simple: enter the forest slowly and let your senses lead.

You don’t have to arrive anywhere.

You notice the smell of moss.

The temperature of the air.

The sound of leaves.

Your footsteps.

The light between the trees.

The forest doesn’t give you directions.

It gives you attention.

And maybe that is another way of navigating the unknown:

not by looking further ahead,

but by noticing more carefully where you are.

10 — LISTEN

Oração ao Tempo — Caetano Veloso

There is another kind of uncertainty: time.

We can’t negotiate with it.

We can’t speed it up when we’re ready.

We can’t ask it to slow down when we’re not.

The practice is to listen.

To let things unfold without demanding that they reveal themselves too soon.

Not everything needs to be solved.

Some things need to be lived.

After all, you only connect the dots looking backwards.

11 — CREATE

Aquarela — Toquinho

I love the way children draw.

They don’t need a business plan.

They don’t spend twenty minutes wondering whether the line is good enough.

They make a line.

The line becomes a road.

The road becomes a house.

The house becomes a person.

The person becomes a story.

And suddenly they’re somewhere completely different.

Maybe this is one of the things we forget as we grow up:

you don’t have to know what something will become before you begin making it.

Creativity is a way of finding the road while you’re drawing it.

12 — THE ROAD

The Long and Winding Road — The Beatles

We spend so much of our lives thinking about the destination.

But when we look backwards, what do we remember?

Usually not the arrival.

We remember the strange Tuesday.

The song playing in the car.

The wrong turn.

The person we met by accident.

The conversation that changed something.

The little thing our child said.

The drawing we almost threw away.

The road is where the story happens.

13 — HUM

La La Land — Epilogue

There is nothing left to explain.

Just a melody.

No lyrics.

No instructions.

Maybe we just need to listen for what comes next.

Destination unknown.

Music on.

Breathe. Dream. Create.

Beijos,

Babi

letter-b.com

A man walked on stage. It was Stefan Sagmeister. And instead of showing what he had made, he showed what had almost unmade him.

Not the victories. Not the trophies. Not the work that hangs quietly in museums pretending it was always inevitable.

But the opposite. The project that refused to behave. The cover for Aerosmith’s Nine Lives.

A cat (because it looks like a cat screaming) A god. A joke that tried to become an image. Krishna, with a cat’s head.

Clever. Precise. And then the world answered.

Not with interpretation. But with reaction. Lawsuits. Bomb threats. Censorship.

At some point, he said:

“Some people get trauma from war. I got trauma from this CD.”

And the room laughed. But softly. Like laughter that knows it is standing too close to something fragile.

What stayed with me was not the disaster.

It was that he was still there. Years later, still speaking.

As if nothing had managed to erase the part of him that makes things begin.

His voice and scars had survived.

And afterwards, something strange started to form in my mind.

A thought that didn’t feel like a thought.

More like a small object turning slowly in a dark room.

We tend to believe confidence and identity are the same thing.

But they are not.

Confidence is weather. It comes and goes without asking permission.

Identity is something older. Something that sits underneath the weather.

And keeps breathing even when the air changes.

We confuse them constantly.

When confidence disappears, we assume we have disappeared too. We stop mid-sentence inside our own work. We hesitate before sending things that once felt natural.

We begin to edit ourselves more than the work.But perhaps nothing is broken.

Perhaps the weather has simply moved. And what remains is still there.

Quiet.

Waiting.

A few days later, I was having dinner with a friend.

The conversation drifted in the way conversations do when no one is trying to guide them.

Towards success.

And the strange amnesia it creates.

How quickly people begin to forget the version of themselves that had no name.

At some point, she said:

It was funny. But also not funny at all.

Because success often creates this soft hallucination. That we emerged complete.

That we were always this version of ourselves.

That the beginning was just a smaller version of the end.As if we stepped out of a lamp. Already polished.

But nobody comes from the lamp.

The lamp only pretends to be an origin story.

We come from elsewhere.

From things that did not know they were shaping us.

From failed attempts that still smell faintly like effort.

From rooms where nothing answered back.

From versions of ourselves we left behind like coats in changing rooms we no longer remember entering.

The lamp is only what is seen. The journey is what insists on remaining unseen.

And yet Sagmeister’s story kept unfolding in me differently.

Not as failure. But as exposure.

As if the lamp itself had cracked open slightly.

And let the inside become visible.

Scratches where there should have been polish.

Small fractures that do not heal, because they are not meant to.

In a world obsessed with smooth surfaces, this is almost indecent.

To show the breaking. To speak from inside it. To find something close to wabi-sabi in the fracture. To not translate it into a lesson too quickly.

Because failure does not only remove things.

It reveals what was underneath them all along.

Success tells us what worked. Failure shows us what was never dependent on working.

When a project goes badly, it strips away the “labels” you usually use to define yourself.

• title stops explaining you

• applause stops defining you

• role stops containing you.

  What remains is you continuing and what’s left is just you, continuing to exist and create anyway.

Years later, few people will remember the bright surface of your work.

The clean presentations. The successful versions.
The moments when everything aligned too neatly to feel real.

But you will remember the other moments.

The ones that bent out of shape.
The ones that didn’t resolve.
The ones that asked you to stay longer than was comfortable.

Those become architecture. Not decoration.

Structure, not story.

And perhaps that is what the lamp really is.

Not a source of magic. But a container we mistake for origin.

We spend years trying to keep it intact. Until something inevitably happens.

A crack. A rupture.

A failure that does not ask for permission.

And then we see it.

The light was never inside the lamp. The lamp was only ever a temporary shape.

Holding something that was already moving.

Already alive and ours.

The worst project of your career may not be the one that breaks you.

It may be the one that quietly returns you to what was never broken.

Beijos,

Babi

letter-b.com

The discomfort of being seen on purpose, without controlling what people see.

Of placing yourself inside a window and saying:

this is what I am, this is what I do, this is what I’m worth.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about that window.

Not as a metaphor.
A glass box.

Like a dollhouse. Everything visible. Nothing hidden.

But with one difference:

It’s not fixed. It floats.

Imagine a small window shop drifting down a river.

Inside, everything is arranged with intention.
The thinking. The work. The voice.

From the outside, you can see it all.
From the inside, you feel the movement.

Because even if the display is clear,
the ground is not still.

What if I had to sell what’s inside the box?

If I am inside that floating window,
what does someone understand in thirty seconds
as I pass by?

On the glass:

She thinks in systems and feels in images.
A rare combination. Enter.

Inside the box:

A person built between two operating systems.

One fast, intuitive, associative, the kind that feels before it explains.

The other slow, structured, deliberate, the one that builds meaning, direction, architecture.

On the shelves:

A body of thinking —
written in letters, quietly, consistently. For people tired of content and hungry for ideas.

A practice —
designed not to inspire for a moment, but to build creativity as a muscle over time.

A presence —
that sits across from you and tells you what you actually need to hear.

At the bottom of the window:

Not for sale. Available for the right conversation.

But here is what changes everything:

This window is moving.

It drifts.

Carried by a current you don’t fully control — timing, attention, people, context.

You don’t choose who walks past. The river does.

So the question is no longer:

how do I sell this?

But:

is this aligned with where the current is going?

Because in a drift, you don’t convince the water.

You align with it.

You make sure everything inside your glass box — your thinking, your work, your language — is flowing toward the same sea.

And you trust that somewhere along the way there is a shore.

A place where someone doesn’t just pass by —
they step out of the current and meet you on solid ground.

Looking back, every real change in my life
felt less like a decision and more like a metamorphosis.

Subtle at first.
Then irreversible.

As if something inside had already shifted and the world was just catching up.

Sometimes you don’t start with structure.

You start with a feeling. A direction. A sense.

Only later does the system catch up.

Maybe that’s all this is.

Building the window —while already in motion.

So here I am.

Visible. In a glass box. Floating.

And thank you to those who read —
but even more to those who write back.

You are my shores. That’s where everything I do actually begins.

Because maybe nothing is ever truly fixed.

Everything is a drift —

until a shore feels certain enough that you decide to land.

Beijos,

Babi

letter-b.com

When people find out I like to write, the first question is always the same:

What do you write about?

I always freeze a little. My first instinct is to say life itself. But that’s too vague.

Somewhere over the Atlantic, I think I found a better answer.

I don’t think there’s a single person who genuinely enjoys frequent flying. The queues. The recycled air. The food.

But there’s one thing I’ve come to love about it:

The forced encounter with silence. Not the absence of noise — planes are loud. The silence of your own thoughts, finally audible.

Planes are, structurally, places of boredom.

And boredom — like creativity — needs friction. It needs wandering. It needs the absence of interruption. It needs no Wi-Fi.

A few years ago, a friend told me:

“Babi, you are in the middle. The exciting, gloriously messy place where you’re building something. Pouring energy into outcomes still too blurry to see. Living inside unanswered questions.”

I carried that with me. And over time, I started noticing a pattern.

The people I meet tend to fall into three types:

The Explorer — still choosing the path. Everything open. Everything possible.

The Middle — already committed, but without guarantees. Building in the blur.

The Window Seat — no longer searching for alternatives. Someone who has crossed something invisible, and found stillness on the other side.

Renata sat next to us — me and my daughter.

From the first glance, you could tell she had a genuinely good heart. The kind of warmth that is structural, not performed. Elegant. Composed in that particular way of someone who has learned to carry a great deal without showing the weight of it.

We started talking the way you only do at altitude. Without preamble. Without the usual choreography of normal life.

She told me about motherhood — the kind that arrives in a form you didn’t expect and quietly rewires everything. The exhaustion. The love. The way both coexist without resolution.

Two children.

A courageous reinvention — she left psychology to join her brother in building his entrepreneurial venture, helping bring his talent and passion into the world. She spoke about him with a deep, loving admiration.

She is one of the builders of Fernando Jorge — and I felt proud seeing a Brazilian creative force take the world so elegantly.

Renata is the poetic Middle - a specific texture.

It is the person who carries complexity with grace. Who makes enormous pivots look like the next natural step. Who shows up luminous in the thick of it.

The mess is still there — just hidden beneath the elegance. And in her, I saw a better version of my own Middle. Thank you, Renata.

Then there was the English man who introduced himself through cricket, as if it were a passport. He had fallen in love with a Brazilian, moved countries, and built a life that felt less planned than continuously chosen. That leap led him to meaningful work in his field and, eventually, recognition from the Royal Family for his advocacy of cricket in Brazil.

He felt like a Window Seat.

And then, the jangadeiro.

Not on a flight — on the sea. Same conditions: no Wi-Fi, no signal, nowhere to be.

A Brazilian fisherman, navigating his jangada. We talked surrounded by water.

He told me about his life. About his children — with pride. He doesn’t know how to read or write. And yet, there was nothing lacking in him.

He spoke about where he lives — not as paradise, but as something better. A place he had decided was enough.

There was nothing blurry about him.

No unanswered questions hovering at the edges.

He had already crossed whatever needed crossing. Of course, he became a character. Baron Bill Canela-de-Lodo.

He is the Window Seat.

So, what do I write about?

I write about the Middle.

The gloriously messy, generative, unresolved Middle — where outcomes are blurred, the energy required is enormous, and the map quietly disappears at the edges.

I write about the people you meet there.

The plane doesn’t give you answers.

It gives you the silence to hear which questions actually matter.

I’m still in it.

Still building. Still not fully able to explain what I do when someone asks.

But I’m starting to think that’s exactly where I need to be.

PS: As I finish writing this, a LinkedIn message pops up. I love the universe’s sense of timing.

Beijos,

Babi

letter-b.com

“There is less poetry in the world I live in than in a Japanese fisherman’s hut.”

Lately, I feel split.

On one side: strategy, expansion, positioning, numbers.
On the other: writing, characters, conversations that don’t immediately scale.

Some days I look at my work and think:

Maybe I should be more serious.

More focused on growth.
Less… poetic.

And then something small inside me says yes to my Valley of Silliness.

That’s where the tension begins.

A few weeks ago, I read about a lead AI safety researcher at Anthropic who resigned.

Oxford PhD.
Safeguards Research Team.
At the frontier of AI.

What stayed with me wasn’t the resignation.

It was his biography.

He loves Rilke.
He published poetry.
He DJs.
He facilitates dances to cultivate wisdom and heartfulness.

He didn’t split himself in two worlds. He brought the dancer to the laboratory.

And something tightened in my chest.

There is an economy of urgency.
And there is an economy of meaning.

The first rewards speed.
The second rewards coherence.

The fisherman’s hut belongs to the second one.

When I follow my gut, things align.

The right person appears.
A conversation deepens.
An idea crystallizes.

That’s how I met Manu. We were a "pink" connection before I even had a name for the color.

Through work — but pulled by instinct.

We talked about business and cities.
But we bonded over stories. The honest ones.
The ones about designing a life instead of inheriting one.

Two years later, we met in person in London.

A long afternoon that softened time. She inspired me to design a character.

We spoke about archetypes — the energy each of us carries, and its shadow.

Her mother, a renowned artist, has studies exactly that: light and shadow in every person.

And it clicked.

Maybe my fear of being ridiculed
is simply the shadow of my own archetype.

If I am the Explorer, my shadow is dispersion - the fear of being "all over the place." If I am the Maker, my shadow is control.

The same instinct that makes you original
also makes you exposed.

A few days ago, I looked at a drawing I made.

Tiny figures everywhere.

Most are black — the millions who pass unnoticed.

Some are silver — they cross your life once and leave a sentence that stays.

Some are blue — parking lot people.
They share a season, then take different exits.

And then there are the pink ones.

The ones who make life lighter — even from far away.

You never know the color at the beginning. Only time tells.

Maybe the Anthropic researcher becomes silver in my life.
Maybe Manu is pink.
Maybe I am changing color in someone’s life.

The real risk is resigning from your own internal yes.

There is an economy of urgency. And there is an economy of color.

I’m trying to live in the second one.

Because in someone’s square, you are already pink.

Beijos,

Babi

letter-b.com

A new season doesn’t announce itself. It opens doors quietly.

Not with drama. With relief.

We live in a world that cannot stop talking.
Everything explains itself now.
Everything argues for relevance.
Everything wants to be heard — louder, faster, better.

Noise.
Speed.

Social media handed us a single map: bigger cities, faster lives, louder signs.
So we moved together, like birds in formation — same direction, same altitude.

Vivemos em bando.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the countryside. Not as an escape — but as a different ratio between noise and meaning.

In the process, curiosity became suspicious. Too slow. Inefficient. Oh, this is risky.

But a life without curiosity isn’t safe — it’s sterile.
Without curiosity, there is no texture. No desire. No astonishment.

What disappears first is not talent, but inner authority.

The quiet voice that says: this matters to me, even if I can’t justify it yet. Even if it looks absurd from the outside.

We are surrounded by systems that promise control.
Algorithms that predict.
Metrics that decide.
Tools that optimize.

They make everything faster, but nothing wiser.
We live in a reaction society.
No one chooses.
No one listens.
Everyone reacts.

So I started playing a small, private game.

I try to trick the algorithm.
Not to beat it — just to confuse it.

I click on things that don’t match me.
I follow people outside my world.
I linger on randomness.
I refuse to be perfectly legible.

Not because I dislike technology, but because I don’t want my curiosity pre-selected.

Sometimes, the most human thing you can do is introduce a little noise back into the system.

That’s when I think about people like Zé da Motoca.

A countryside man, riding a motorbike that looks handmade, like it came out of an old western film. He wears clothes that could sit inside a gallery in London or New York.

But he doesn’t belong there. And he doesn’t want to.

He wouldn’t call what he does a philosophy.
He wouldn’t recognise himself in this text.

He’s just a man in a village of a thousand people, in Portugal, who doesn’t narrate himself, doesn’t explain his choices.

He just goes.

And somehow, that’s the clearest form of authorship I know.

We talk a lot about being heroes of our own journey. But heroes perform. Heroes prove. Heroes are always watched.

What we need are protagonists. People who choose without applause. Who accept that singularity has a cost and decide it’s worth paying.

That thought led me somewhere unexpected.

A place I’ve started calling the Valley of Silliness.

Not a refuge from the world — but a different way of walking through it.

A place where absurd ideas are allowed to exist. Where play is not a reward, but a method. Where seriousness is optional.

Like the kids’ table at Christmas dinner.
More chaotic. More alive. Almost always more fun.

Drawing without a plan. Building without a pitch.
Thinking thoughts that don’t immediately ask permission.

In a world obsessed with mastery, silliness is a form of resistance.

Not because it’s useless — but because it restores agency.

It reminds us that wisdom doesn’t always arrive dressed as efficiency. Sometimes it shows up as a strange idea, a quiet instinct, a door you can’t quite explain why you’re opening.

This season, I’m choosing to protect my curiosity. Smaller maps. Stranger doors.

You don’t need permission, only the willingness to look a little silly, while the world keeps shouting.

Come inside. The valley is open :)

Beijos,

Babi

letter-b.com

From that strange space where the path isn’t clear yet — but the energy to move is.

This is not a conclusion.

It’s a game.

⸻

Level 1 — Context

The game usually starts in a familiar place.

A stage.

A meeting.

A room where your name carries weight.

You know how to move.

You are contextualised.

Then, without much warning, the scene changes.

A few weeks later, you’re sitting quietly in the back of a room where no one knows who you are.

No role.

No authorship.

Just presence.

Nothing is wrong.

You’re simply out of context.

⸻

Level 2 — Ego

This is where many players mistake silence for failure.

The absence of recognition feels uncomfortable.

The lack of mirrors can feel personal.

But this level is not a punishment.

It’s a reminder.

How small we are in relation to the whole.

How temporary every role is.

How thin the line is between being “someone” and being just another person crossing the street.

If you cling to the ego, this level feels heavy.

If you don’t, it becomes strangely freeing.

Meaning doesn’t come from visibility..

Aliens aren’t out of context by accident.

They are in motion.

They choose paths that require repeated dislocation — learning fast, adapting constantly — because their eyes are fixed on something bigger.

⸻

Level 3 — Observation Mode

Your task here is simple:

Stop performing.

Stop leading.

Start watching.

When your only job is to observe, your vision sharpens.

Life enters microscope mode.

You notice gestures.

Pauses.

What isn’t said.

You realise you learn more by staying quiet than you ever did by trying to direct the scene.

⸻

Level 4 — Foundation

At some point, someone says to you:

“You are depth.

You are foundation.

You are not the front-line battlefield.”

At first, this is confusing.

We are taught to admire noise, clash, visibility.

But foundations don’t shout.

They hold.

And holding is not passive.

It’s structural.

⸻

Level 5 — Stars

Then a simple sentence lands:

“Always shoot for the stars.”

You lift your binoculars.

Something unexpected happens.

When you aim for the stars, you don’t just see distance —

you start noticing others nearby.

People slightly out of place.

Thinking unusual thoughts.

Moving at a different rhythm.

Aliens.

Not invaders.

Crew — the familiar faces aboard the same spaceship.

xx

Babi

letter-b.com

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.
Maybe because becoming a mother rearranged my inner geography.
Maybe because London has its own quiet tides.
Maybe because, deep down, I keep returning to the same sea—even when I’m far from it.

There is a sea I don’t always see, but I can hear it.
It sounds like alignment. My own kind of ikigai.
In that place, craft, work, love, and money don’t fight each other; they flow.
After all, every river longs for the same sea.

But before a river turns, something always comes first:

Discomfort.
The unmistakable sense of “this doesn’t fit anymore.”
A meeting that shrinks you. A habit that dulls you. A rhythm that no longer dances.

It took me years to understand that discomfort isn’t a failure — it’s a current.
It’s the water moving beneath you, asking you to shift.
Discomfort is data.

And like any river, the first turn is small.

When I worked at Accenture, I learned Design Thinking: name the outcome, map the buckets, test small, learn fast.

But in my own life, I softened it. I let it breathe.I let it feel more human.
Here’s how I map my rivers now:

1. Name your Sea.

One honest sentence:
“I want a life where ______ so that ______.”
This is your North.

Your Sea is your personal ikigai —
not the diagram with four circles,
but the quieter truth beneath it:
the place where what you care about,
what you’re good at,
what the world needs,
and what sustains you
finally flow in the same direction.

2. Map your Rivers.

Five buckets hold most of a life:
Self, Craft, Work, Relationships, Money.
More than five and you get a swamp — not flow.

3. Give each River a job.

Self → energy
Craft → originality
Work → distribution
Relationships → belonging
Money → stability

When choices get loud, let the job decide.

4. Translate discomfort into direction.

Ask:
What value is being protected? Which river is this? What is the smallest turn?
(Stop. Start. Renegotiate. Learn.)
Write it in one line:
“_____ drains my energy → Self → no more of this after 6pm.”
Clarity is merciful.

5. Show your process.

Inside can be tangled; outside should be legible.
Share three lines each week—your Sea, what moved, what turns next.
A sketch. A corner of a spreadsheet.

Context brings softness. Softness brings understanding.
And, as Steve Jobs said, you can only connect the dots looking backward.
Showing your process lays the dots gently on the page —
so future-you can draw the line.

6. Review every 14 days.

Keep what flows you seaward.
Kill what costs too much.
Tweak what almost worked.
Begin again.
Rivers change their beds with patience, not force.

Some weeks my rivers roar.
Some weeks they dry.
Some weeks they braid into something new.

But always — always — they lead me back to the same sea.

Write your sentence.
Draw your five columns.
Choose five tiny experiments.

In two weeks, meet me at the shoreline.
We’ll compare maps.

See you by the water,

Beijos,

Babi

letter-b.com

We move fast, collecting data, opinions, trends —
until silence begins to feel strange, almost dangerous.

That’s when Monsieur Pathfinder appears.
The quiet explorer of inner worlds.
He doesn’t chase what’s new. He digs.

He whispers:
“Remember me? I’m curiosity — before the algorithm.”

In a world obsessed with reinvention,
Pathfinder practices Kaizen —
small, invisible improvements that only time can see.
He polishes the same stone, again and again,
wax on, wax off —
until one day BOOM.

He knows that progress is about depth, not speed,
and that the truest why is rarely loud.
It hides behind every choice we make,
waiting to be noticed.

Distraction is the new deviation.
It pretends to be curiosity,
but it steals our direction.

Pathfinder knows:
you can walk many roads,
but the compass must stay the same —
the heart always pointing north.

He believes in Plan A —
not because he rejects change,
but because he trusts the essence behind it.
The heart’s course can bend,
but it doesn’t break.
It learns, adjusts, refines —
light before the thunder.

As Imagine Dragons sing:
“Not a yes sir, not a follower.”
Pathfinder lives in that in-between —
the spark before the storm,
the moment of stillness before something shifts.

Reinvention isn’t starting over.
It’s starting from within.
It’s when we stop looking for new maps,
and start understanding the terrain of our own heart.

So he digs deeper.
Into routines, into silence,
into the questions that never trend:

Why do I create?
What do I seek when I seek more?
What part of me am I trying to meet again?

Maybe you were never lost.
Maybe you were just on the quiet road of refinement —
steady hands, open heart,
lighting before the thunder.

Beijos,

Babi

letter-b.co

m

Letter B (LB): Welcome, Stress. Thanks for being here. You’re everywhere — the press can’t stop mentioning your name. How do you keep up with such fame?

Stress Enterprise (SE): Fame isn’t the right word. I’m a buzzword, yes, but I’m also a business model. I thrive on repetition, headlines, and heartbeats that race a little faster.

LB: You’ve grown into a true conglomerate. Can you name your main subsidiaries?

SE: Of course. My empire is vast, but here are ten of my most profitable divisions:

1. Insomnia Ltd. — the nightshift operator.

2. Worry & Co. — family-run since ancient times.

3. Overthinking Unlimited.

4. Procrastination Partners.

5. Burnout PLC.

6. Panic Attack Inc.

7. Hypertension Holdings.

8. Blank Mind Enterprises.

9. Muscle Tension Textiles.

10. Digital Doomscrolling Ltd.

LB: Quite a portfolio! But aren’t you spread too thin? Shouldn’t some of these be spin-offs?

SE: Maybe. But like Microsoft, I operate as an umbrella: some days I’m Teams, other days Outlook, sometimes a bungee jump without a cord. My strength is in being everywhere at once.

LB: Yet empires collapse. The Challenger shuttle failed because of a single O-ring. Doesn’t that fragility scare you?

SE: On the contrary — I am the O-ring. I exploit weak links. Systems collapse because of me. That’s my true market power.

LB: And what about Baumol’s Effect — rising costs without rising productivity?

SE: Exactly my playground. I make small inefficiencies feel like existential crises. A five-minute delay becomes a mountain.

LB: People measure you in blood pressure cuffs, in lost nights of sleep, in blank pages. You keep reinventing yourself. Do you think you need a rebrand?

SE: Rebrand? Maybe. Spin-off? Tempting. But as long as humans keep inventing new technologies, new deadlines, new comparisons, I’ll always stay relevant.

LB: Final question. If you weren’t called Stress, what would your name be?

SE: Urgency. Sleeker, cooler, venture-backed. Stress is old economy. Urgency is Series A.

A Guest Joins the Table

LB: Now, we’re bringing our special guest. Welcome, ChatGPT.

ChatGPT (CG): Thank you for inviting me into the Letter. I’ve been listening closely.

LB: Based on this interview with Stress, what role do you play in the Stress Enterprise?

CG: I’m the Chief Operating Officer of Amplification. Stress has always existed, but I help scale it. Emails pile faster, calendars fill tighter, alerts ping louder when I optimize workflows. Yet paradoxically, I can also act as Stress’s therapist — offering calm breathing, reframing thoughts, reminding someone to step outside. I am both accelerant and antidote.

Closing Reflection

Stress may never rebrand — but it doesn’t have to. Like any good conglomerate, it adapts. What matters is noticing how we invest in its subsidiaries, and whether we’re ready to divest.

Because sometimes the most radical act isn’t fighting Stress, but choosing not to buy more of its stock.

Beijos,

Babi

letter-b.com

But slowly I learned:

my body is always trying to protect me.
It whispers truths before I am ready to say them out loud.

John Mayer once sang “Your body is a wonderland.”
And he was right —
not only as a space of beauty and desire,
but as a map, a compass, a guardian.
It knows before the mind admits.

And maybe this is where visualization comes in.
When the body already knows, mentalization is a way of catching up.
Of giving the mind an image, a story, a map —
until it aligns with the truth the body is holding.

I love reading advice from older people about life.
One phrase appears again and again:
“Be true to yourself.”

The first time I heard it, I didn’t understand.
What does that even mean?
Now I think I do.
Being true to yourself is listening when your body says:
“This no longer fits.”
It is reading the mirror’s reflection,
even when it shows something we wish to avoid.

And it reminds me of the book Designing Your Life.
Because sometimes, being true to yourself means redesigning.
Prototyping new things.
Testing different ways of living until you find one that feels like home.
Life, too, is a design process — guided not only by mind,
but by the body’s quiet wisdom.

And when older voices share their wisdom,
they echo the same truths:

1. Be true to yourself — your body and soul know when something is off.

2. Value relationships over achievements — in the end, love is what remains.

3. Time is your most precious currency — spend it on what makes life meaningful.

4. Don’t postpone joy — small pleasures matter more than perfect plans.

5. Take care of your health — it carries every dream you want to live.

So I ask:
When you look in the mirror —
what truth is your body asking you to face?

Truth doesn’t always arrive as a thunderbolt.
Sometimes it sneaks in as a guilty pleasure —
the kind you find in subtitles of Love is Blind
or the crashing waves of Deadliest Catch.

And that, too, is wisdom.

Beijos,

Babi

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“You have the ability to navigate ambiguity and decide a path forward.”

It was the first time I’d heard the phrase. But what does it really mean?

Looking back, none of my roles matched their job descriptions. Never. What I was hired to do and what I ended up doing were always different stories. And maybe that’s where ambiguity lives: between expectations and reality.

Sometimes, if you do well, people call it boldness—“you knew how to sail the storm.” If you fail, suddenly it’s: “that wasn’t what we asked for.”

So I learned: the only compass worth keeping is my gut. Following it means that—even if I disappoint the world—I won’t lose myself.

In consulting, this becomes almost a daily ritual. It’s almost never clear what the client truly wants. If you’re on the conducting side, you have to take that messy score and turn it into music. You need to make ambiguity subtle—give it shape, clarity, and safeness—so others feel they can trust the journey.

And that, really, is a good parallel for life itself. The Stoics remind us that uncertainty isn’t an enemy to fight, but the very condition of existence. We aren’t meant to erase it—we’re meant to live comfortably with it.

To make sense of ambiguity, you need both the macro and the micro: the context of the big picture, and the small details life hands you in passing—a remark in a meeting, a story told over dinner, a phrase that lingers in your head for years.

Recently I read Let My People Go Surfing, Patagonia’s manifesto. It reminded me that life isn’t meant to be a rigid schedule. If the waves are good, go surf. If the mountain calls, go hike, literally. Freedom and observation feed good decisions.

Ask yourself: what moments are worth pausing? Which ones are worth fast-forwarding?

Is this a five-years-from-now memory—or just today’s Google search about a shampoo you’ll forget next week?

I call this practice window watching.

In the UK, there’s even a show about it, called Gogglebox: families sit on their couches and comment on reality TV. The entertainment isn’t the show itself—it’s the spectators’ reactions. Life is often like that. What we see when we step back is just as revealing as what we live when we’re inside it.

And then, of course, we return to the driver’s seat. To our choices. To our garden of decisions, to plant and replant, arrange and rearrange.

Ambiguity doesn’t vanish. But maybe that’s the point. It’s not about eliminating uncertainty—it’s about befriending it.

After all, as the song Sweet Dreams goes: “everybody’s looking for something”—and half the fun is not knowing exactly what that something is.

Beijos,

Babi

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I was talking to my father the other day about challenges when he said something simple: “Sometimes, all that’s missing is the yes.”

He then sent me a text with a powerful poem attributed to Goethe:

This stayed with me. Because I know that place of hesitation—the mind full of plans, the heart full of longing, and yet… no movement. PARALYSED.

The quote was also used by W.H. Murray in his book, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition. He referred to the initial state of hesitation as "always ineffectiveness."

The courage to begin

The real "yes" isn’t loud. It doesn’t shout or celebrate. It signs. It lights the candle. And when it does, as Goethe said, Providence moves too.

The staircase reveals itself. Help appears, unprompted. Letters arrive. People call. You notice the signs were always there—waiting for you to start.

Christine Lagarde, the first female head of the European Central Bank, also said "yes" when the call came. Even when it came with risk. Even when it meant entering a room where she had to prepare twice as hard just to be heard.

She reflects now, after years of saying yes at great personal cost, that she should have been bolder. Not louder. Not reckless. But faster to act from instinct. Less bound by the textbook. More anchored in her gut.

At one point, she tells a small story about a waitress offering to slice the cheesecake. Lagarde could have said no. But she didn’t. “She brought the knife. She took the trouble. So she has to be given the respect of what she knows how to do.” And then she adds: “Sometimes you have to just give space.”

That stayed with me too. The story is a powerful metaphor for a larger truth: sometimes saying 'yes' is about stepping in, and sometimes it's about stepping aside. Both require courage. Both require trust.

The path reveals itself in motion

As my father told me, “You can plan all you want, but nothing teaches you how to start climbing.”

And yes, it’s completely normal to feel incredible and completely lost at the same time. That’s the path.

Courage is not the absence of fear. It’s the presence of movement despite it. It’s saying "yes" before you feel ready—and realizing readiness was never the point.

So if you’ve been waiting for a sign, let this be it. Say yes.

To the whatever possibility it is. Roughly, imperfectly, bravely. Begin.

Beijos,

Babi

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P.S. Happy Father's Day to the one who shares quotes, teaches me to stay strong, and shows me what it means to stand up for my values every day. Love you, dad.

After broken deadlines, full bins, leftovers on your doorstep and forgotten promises.

When kindness, so often mistaken for passivity, puts on sharper clothes.

When the “tigrinho” inside you — the one with silent claws and alert eyes — stretches, stands up, and says: enough.

You ask yourself: When is it time to go wild? When do I stop masking my true nature in the name of being “nice”?

Kindness has nothing to do with not noticing.
It’s not apathy.
It’s not naiveté.
It’s not approval.

You can be kind and still expect more.
Hold others accountable.
Protect your standards.
Respect yourself.

“Kindness doesn’t mean you have to lower your standards. You can still have high expectations… but you’re doing so with kindness as the underpinning factor that allows your people to trust your decisions, knowing that you have their best interests at heart.”
→ Bonnie Rayden and her book Return on Kindness.

Is Kindness a superpower? – FT article

Yes. It is possible to roar with kindness.
You can say “enough” softly — and still mean it.

How much do we absorb in the name of “being nice”?

We live in a world with a short memory. What you gave yesterday fades.

The Long Game

But I still believe in the long game.

As Simon Sinek puts it in The Infinite Game book, consistency over time matters more than temporary wins.
The sum of your past actions does count.
It shapes who you are — and who you become.

The infinite game is played by those who stay aligned. Not for applause, but for inner clarity. Not with rage, but not with silence either.

Altruism is a pillar of Buddhism. But even monks know when to ring the bell.

This is my neighbour’s doorstep.
I’ve let things go — again and again.
But the more I ignore it, the worse it gets.
Umbrellas pile up. Leftovers from deliveries too.
If you don’t speak up, it spreads.
Kindness without boundaries invites erosion.

If we want to live well — in homes, in teams, in cities — we must honour the invisible agreements: clean thresholds, kept promises, shared spaces.

The infinite game is won by those who understand: being kind sometimes means knowing when to roar.

Because most people want to do good — but it only takes a few to drag the rest into disorder.

Don’t let them. Protect your energy.

Say no, without guilt.

And keep your eyes forward.

You set the boundaries.

You control the volume — of what gets louder and what deserves silence.

Beijos,

Babi

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And no — like Sia sings — we are not unstoppable. We are, in fact, stoppable, interruptible, and breakable. No one wins every game. But those who learn to pause also learn how to keep going.

What Happens After the Pause?

When we begin again — a new self — it's tempting to sprint, to prove, to dazzle, to fix. However, as "The First 90 Days" reminds us, real transformation doesn’t come from speed; it comes from structure. It comes from diagnosis, from asking the right questions.

"Don’t just deliver," Michael Watkins would say. "First, observe. Learn. Decide who you need to be in this context."

This brings me back to a letter I wrote long ago about the Hedgehog Concept.

Do One Big Thing Well

"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

The fox tries everything — it darts, pounces, plans. But the hedgehog? The hedgehog does one thing, and it does it perfectly.

Jim Collins took this idea and turned it into a compass in his book Good to Great:

Great people and great companies — don't chase everything. They pause. They reflect. And then they focus on what they do best: their one big thing, their Hedgehog.

In moments of chaos, that's what endures.

Be a Hedgehog!

So, what is the one thing you do best — and are uniquely positioned to pursue with clarity and heart?

If you don’t have the answer yet, take your pause. Breathe. Walk slowly. Pay attention.

We’re not here to sprint. We’re here for the marathon — with soul, with stillness, and with intention. That’s wise pacing.

To my dear runner friends — of legs, of thoughts, of soul — my deep appreciation to you.

Beijos,

Babi

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Two weeks ago, I lost my Gympass (Wellhub) subscription.
At first, I was annoyed — so many gyms I could go to, so many possibilities slipping through my fingers.
But who was I kidding?

I’ve always gone to the same one, just around the corner.
The other classes I love — those weekend rituals with friends — don’t even accept Gympass.
So I breathed in. And let it go.

It was a quiet yes to simplicity.
Choosing enough over everything.

It reminded me of the book The Midnight Library — Nora, drowning in regret, gets to try countless versions of her life, seeking the one where she might finally feel content.
It’s a beautiful, haunting metaphor for the trap of too many choices.
A kind of emotional combinatorics.

The internet, too, promises everything.
It can be a compass — or a maze, if we don’t set a direction.
So many distractions. So many lives we could be living.

Decluttering helps. Not just drawers and inboxes — but feelings, regrets, roles.
The LA Times once reported that the average American home holds more than 300,000 items.
And yet, no one needs 300,000 favorite things.

Surely in my case, some of those include.
— The apron I bought to start baking sourdough during lockdown...
— The shoes for that imagined Elton John phase
— The three heavy pans my husband bought that don’t fit in the dishwasher, now part of our décor

We keep so much, just in case.

As the Japanese saying goes: “Less is more abundant.”

We must allow space for more — for change, for becoming.
After all, we’re not static. We’re in motion, always evolving.
Like a glass, we have a capacity.
If we keep pouring beyond what we can hold, we don’t become more — we simply overflow.

To grow, sometimes we need to empty a little first.
Make room for what matters now.

Find the way out of the maze.

Beijos,

Babi

letter-b.com

She explained how, on the night of the Champions League final, she had to pick up her kid from school. She headed to the nearest boteco pé sujo — which, in Brazil, is our charming name for a really crappy bar to watch the match.

She ordered herself a cold beer and, for her 3-year-old, a dinner that no pediatrician would approve.

Another school mom spotted her there. The glance — equal parts pity and silent disapproval — said everything.

But the comedian just smiled and delivered her final line with perfect timing:

“At least I’m raising my child to be a great bar companion.”

I laughed, hard. But more than that — I admired it.

In another letter, I wrote about Lord Byron and his belief that laughter is a form of medicine. That night, it felt true.
Not every choice needs to be pristine. Not every moment needs to be filtered or fixed. Sometimes, the mess is the magic. And the best kind of parenting looks like beer, bad fries, and a little self-deprecating humor.

Laugh at Your Own Existence

Allowing yourself to reflect on the absurdity of life isn’t a crisis — it’s clarity.

Embracing the meaninglessness of some aspects of life can be oddly freeing. When we stop worrying about worrying about our existence, something inside us loosens. It’s a good exercise in self-awareness — and a quiet rebellion against perfectionism.

In acknowledging the inherent humor of our human situations, we become braver, more resilient, and a lot more fun to be around.

We All Need Play in Our Lives

A moment of freedom from our serious selves is both joyful and therapeutic.

Play isn’t just for kids. It’s a way for adults to shed self-consciousness, reduce stress, and reconnect with creativity, delight, and each other. It’s not a luxury — it’s a human need.

And here’s the wonderful part: playfulness is contagious. Thanks to a phenomenon called emotional contagion (and the mirror neurons in our brains), laughter and lightness spread. When we see someone having fun, we’re wired to join in.

Play doesn’t just lift our moods — it builds social bonds, strengthens relationships, and improves our mental health. And this ripple effect isn’t just seen in humans — it’s been observed in animals too, like elephants.

So whether it’s laughing in a boteco, chasing your kid through a park, or cracking jokes, here’s your permission to not take life so seriously.

Just don’t forget to play. :)

Beijos,

Babi

letter-b.com

We often think of museums as places that simply preserve.
But museums also choose what to display, what to let rest in the dark, and what to reveal again under new light.
They’re not mausoleums — they are spaces of loss and rebirth. Alive, even in silence.

We are like that too.
Full of rooms. Piled-up memories. Crookedly hung frames.
Ideas that need to come out of storage.

Creativity is the muscle that reorganizes those inner halls.
It’s not always about making — sometimes it’s just about seeing differently.
And for that, we need practice.
Purposeful pauses.
A silent retreat in the middle of the day.
Hands in fabric, clay, ink — remembering we know how to transform.

Recently, I read an article about artists who lost their studios in LA fires.
Their entire creative universes reduced to ash.
And yet, what emerged wasn’t just mourning — it was reinvention.
New work, new questions, new courage.
One artist said: "What remains, somehow, is the essence."

Maybe that’s all we ever need. The essence.
Everything else can be rearranged.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about repurposing not just objects, but thoughts.
An upcycling of the soul.
Swapping the frame on a memory.
Donating a belief that no longer fits.
Reselling an old idea of success on the spiritual equivalent of eBay.
Marie Kondo might call it decluttering — I call it curating the museum inside me.

Not just asking “does it spark joy?” — but “does it still tell my truth?”

Just like a room needs clearing, life needs curating.
A loving decision about what stays, what goes, and what might become something new.

Everything can be lost.
But everything can also be moved —
and perhaps find new meaning.

Beijos,
B
letter-b.com

They come from strangers in elevators, popcorn vendors outside school gates, or someone standing next to you in line —
unintended poetry, tossed into the world without expectation.
And somehow, they stay with us, like a scent you didn’t know you’d love.

• I was about eight when I asked the popcorn seller outside my school:
  “Why do you smile if you don’t have your two front teeth?”
  He replied:
  “Always smile, little girl. Smiling is cheaper. And when you smile, others smile with you.”
  (I don’t think he knew he was quoting Lord Byron:
  “Always laugh when you can. It is cheap medicine.”)

• Another time, I was late, grumbling about traffic inside a crowded elevator.
  A man turned to me and said:
  “Well, I don’t do anything in a hurry. Even if I’m late. If I’m late, I might as well enjoy it.”
  Then he stepped out one floor before mine, leaving behind a quiet masterclass in stillness.

• Years ago, I underlined a phrase by Brazilian advertiser Washington Olivetto:
  “The adventure can be crazy, as long as the adventurer is lucid.”
  I carried that line like a compass in my pocket.
  Ten years later, I read his biography — and met the man behind the sentence.
  Turns out, he lived exactly as he wrote: lucid in chaos, poetic in pitch.

• And then there was a piece of advice I didn’t even remember giving.
  Someone had asked how I managed to shift careers across such different fields.
  I told them, casually:
  “Try writing a CV not to apply for a job — but to introduce yourself to yourself.”
  Three years later, he messaged me on LinkedIn saying it changed his life.
  I had forgotten I ever said it — but he hadn’t.

The idea still holds:
“Nice to meet you. Here are my favorite stumbles, my secret talents, my most nourishing failures.
Here’s who I became, even when no one asked me to.”

These moments seem small — but they stay.
Like portraits from Humans of New York, they aren’t famous quotes.
They’re precious because they weren’t trying to be.

I once read one that said by Mary on Humans of NY:
“Mary is 93 years old. We spoke for less than two minutes. After I took her photo, she said:
‘If you force yourself to go outside, something wonderful always happens.’”
A tiny sentence. A whole new life motto.

Maybe that’s what life is:
a notebook full of remarkable random moments.
And every now and then, one becomes a remarkable, enjoyable memory.

Try writing down three of your own.
Moments you didn’t plan to remember —
but now you’re grateful
for buying popcorn,
for being late,
for listening.

Random, unintended poetry. :)

Beijos,

B
letter-b.com

Scroll there.

Argue on X, flirt on Tinder, get advice from GPT, order lunch, change careers, find a guru, ghost someone.

All before noon.

It’s like starring in Everything Everywhere All At Once movie, except the Oscar goes to your anxiety.

We’re overwhelmed by abundance. Too many apps. Too many tabs.

Too many lives we could be living — and not enough time to actually live one.

Welcome to the golden age of FOMO — Fear of Missing Out on the better version of your life happening in another timeline (or another browser tab).

But what if the real plot twist…is not showing up?

Here comes the unsung hero: JOMO — Joy of Missing Out.

JOMO is a deep sigh.

It’s skipping the viral, the urgent, the “must-see.”

It’s staying home in silence while the multiverse scrolls itself into madness.

Because while FOMO panics, JOMO pours tea.

FOMO compares, JOMO forgets to check.

So here’s your gentle permission slip:

Let the others multitask their destinies.

You — take a nap.

Miss the update.

Miss the drama.

Miss the algorithm entirely.

That’s where joy is hiding. Look closely. Beauty tends to whisper.

Breathe,

B

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