O que mais importa para você?

* Texto original em inglês, que faz parte do meu processo de aplicação para tentar estudar na Universidade de Stanford.

When I was seven years old my mother picked me up at school and we went to the supermarket. While choosing some fruits, I found a wallet on the floor. And I was so excited! Finding a wallet! There was money inside. There was nobody around. Did somebody leave it there intentionally? How could I give it back if I didn’t know whom it belonged to? My mother realized my excitement and asked. I told her and she quickly took the wallet, asked where was it and said we were going to give it back to the administrators of the supermarket. And she started walking. It sounded so unfair! My glorious moment had gone so quickly. I remember walking beside her asking and telling all sorts of things. What if they can’t find the owner? What if they decide to stay with the wallet themselves? I even told her: Listen, mom, let’s go home with the wallet and we decide with dad what’s the best thing to do. When we approached the lost-and-found section, my mother gave me the wallet back and told me what was one of the most important things she had learned in life. “You came beside me thinking a lot of things, telling me what we should do, and what we should not. You can’t believe on how many great thinkers you’ll find in your life, or how many people will tell this and that. But I hope you never forget that is the doing part that makes the difference. Go there and give this wallet back”. This precept got deep in my mind and in many situations has been helping me. It is for me a guidance of extreme importance: You are what you do, not what you tell the others or what you think.


There’s something I love to do: competing. As an athlete I have always loved the excitement that precedes a competition. But for many years I have not been a great competitor. I was a bad loser. But all these losses have grown me more mature: I now have a strong belief that the worst feeling is that of regret. It’s terrible to lose and something inside you keeps yelling: “you could have done better”. I then realized there’s only one thing you can do to escape this feeling. It’s based on two assumptions I believe are two of the most important things I learned in life. Spend some time to discover, realize or think about what you really wish for your life. Something you really want. Something it gives your heart that same excitement that precedes a competition. Once you know it, give your very best for it. If you win, the fact that you gave your very best will make you so proud of yourself. But it’s when you lose that something big really happens. You then realize that all those blame feelings will be transformed in an amazed feeling of admiring. You become more willing to look all things with eyes of wonder. I truly believe that one of the most beautiful things in life is that that allows you to say: “I did the best I could, but this guy, this thing, or this happening, it’s better than the best I am”. 

The last is the one that makes the other two to have a meaning. It came to me when I was around 15, walking around the downtown area of my hometown in Brazil. I was buying videogames. Among the many sellers of all sorts of things, an old man came into my eyes selling cheap chewing gums. I was so touched, because he was so old and miserable that is sounded very wrong that he had to be there to live. It was the first time, I think, that I thought of the problems of the world as an adult. He was not only selling the gums: if you bought one, he would write a sentence with his own hands and give you as well. I still have it my wallet: “I wish you the best to be the change in the world”. These three teachings played a major role in my life. They are present to me everyday: “you are what you do”. “When you do something, give your very best”. And, finally, “give your very best for something worthwhile”. That’s what matters for me the most.