PARALLEL LIFE

Order is not important.

You don't have to finish one thing to start another.

These two points are the principles most drilled into us in traditional school: be orderly and wait your turn.

Be orderly and wait your turn... no, please.

Absorbing these fundamentals turns us into slow and insecure little people, as adults we have to go out into the real world to solve a thousand and one situations daily in a highly competitive world but we can't succeed because —guess what?— your mindset dictates its creed: don’t go fast, don’t do many things, be orderly, wait your turn…

Order is not that important. If it were, nature would be orderly. Trust me: it is not.

Not starting a book because you haven't finished the other one you bought seventeen months ago is intellectual masochism. The completion of almost everything is a human invention, not a rule of nature. University, your Udemy course, your certification, all those things do not end because it is written in an immutable law of physics but because someone decided that after a certain number of hours and topics that was "the end" of the matter. I dare say that almost every end —except death— is artificial.

Thinking and acting respecting order and waiting for the completion of things is leading a linear life.

Linear life is frustrating, because all the time you are waiting for the conclusion of something to have permission to start something else.

Linear life leaves you wishing for many things.

Linear life keeps you in the stands watching others go round and round the track.

If linear life is a problem, why do so many people follow it? Why does the world respect it? Why have we been taught from childhood to be like that?

Linear life gives us certainty. It makes us feel that we are in control of things. It allows us to feel calm because we understand everything we are doing and everything we are involved in.

Linear life is a kind of control measure, because orderly individuals and respectful of artificial completions are individuals who do not cause much trouble.

The alternative to linear life is parallel life.

In this type of life, you open several battle fronts all the time and you advance in them all the time.

Parallel life is tiring and stressful. Quite.

But this is exactly what all those people you admire and wonder where they find the time to execute all that: they do not wait for permissions to launch something until something else ends and they do not execute in order.

Now, in parallel life, launching several projects, what you do is keep moving forward in all of them week by week. Some will naturally lag behind others, but in all you sow. A meeting. A website. A book you buy or read. An idea you jot down. A prospect you attend to. Something. In all projects there must be some kind of advancement—even if it looks minuscule—every week.

It is the accumulation of all those micro-advancements that will make you look unstoppable after a few years. People will not understand how the hell you have managed to get in shape, raise children, go on vacation abroad, write your books, grow your companies, attend events, participate in courses, volunteer and more in the same period that they only focused on following the rules of order and patience.

To build a lot in parallel mode, I recommend having two or three empty spaces of at least a couple of hours each in your week to walk without noise, without headphones, without music and on these walks let your mind wander: there you will receive the next steps of concrete actions for each of your projects. You build more when it seems like you are building nothing than when you are glued to the phone barking orders as if you were an extreme stockbroker.

Parallel life—I inform you—will give you a lot of headaches and heartaches. It will hit you psychologically, intellectually, personally and professionally like nothing else has ever hit you. And this is because what you are trying to do, the way you are trying to advance, is a dare to the established standard of society. Don’t worry: absolutely all the people who build with this parallel life method get used to the pain of participating in this league. It comes to the point where it no longer bothers you. Consider it the price/filter of entry so that the faint of heart do not dare to get involved in this technique.

I discovered all this that I am telling you in my thirties. And that's how in less than ten years I managed to become a runner, entrepreneur, dad x3, consultant, podcaster, columnist, investor, author, speaker, negotiator and coach. Had I respected the linear life that was in front of me, in that same span of time I would simply have moved up in the company I was in or if anything, I would have changed jobs to another with a couple of better benefits and that's it.

Now, I don’t want to deceive you, so I’m going to repeat it: this parallel life thing is excruciating, it is a brutal emotional effort, it is not for the faint of heart, it will generate many stumbling blocks, you will feel weird, silly, clumsy, but when you manage to keep up with the matter, life changes and building here and there all the time becomes the most normal thing in the world. And that's where you find your kind, your tribe, the other crazy people who live like you. And that's where you realize that you haven't been wrong in your ideas all this time but that you were simply poorly positioned.

If we look at it with love, linear life is a kind of protection that we humans have invented so as not to expose ourselves to the inherent pains of our crazy nature that wants to get into various things. But we live—honestly—in the safest era in every way to try precisely that: to follow our crazy nature that wants to get into various things.

You will not succeed in all your parallel life projects. In fact, you will only succeed in very few, and that will be thanks to what you learned from the failures of others, because all of that are very powerful diplomas that graduate you quickly in understanding to build next steps or variants of your original ideas.

Critical elements for a successful parallel life: long-term vision, mental toughness, emotional discipline, execution, equanimity, intellectualism, personal energy. Let's talk about all this.

Personal energy is what you get through exercise, taking care of your personal performance. This is routines + food + rest. Wanting to lead a parallel life where everything tires you out, where you eat more junk than anything else all the time and where you stay up silly constantly is not the route. This is what dramatic movies make you think is necessary, but believe me, that is not the way to go.

Regarding intellectualism, well, you cannot execute parallel projects if your frame of reference is limited. You have to read, a lot, preferably what is not mainstream, directly in English, understand the game directly from those who have won it.

Equanimity, well, this is something that almost no one carries. At the time of writing this, they are announcing on the news a new war in the Middle East. The equanimity I am talking about is that yes, you find out about these things because you are not an ostrich with its head buried, but it does not distract you nor does it make you think dramatically that we are at the beginning of World War III and such things. Equanimity is staying stoic when everyone runs like headless chickens.

Execution is what differentiates the true players of this parallel life from those who just want to pretend. It's easy to talk about your projects, but it is something else to have the ability to execute on them in micro and macro mode all the time.

Emotional discipline is the set of internal tools you need to withstand the criticism that will inevitably come as the things you are proposing to the world delay, go wrong, make no sense and so on. If any bad comment, scolding or mockery from whoever unbalances you —be honest with yourself when evaluating this— you have a lot of personal work to do to succeed in parallel life.

Mental toughness is being stubborn, persistent, resilient. It's not easy at all. Remember that what you are trying to execute is not natural and will insult many people around you in many ways who will tell you —in a kind, educated, and sometimes not so kind manner— that you are wrong, that you should wait, that you should go slower, that you should finish this first and then do the other and so on. They are not really telling you: they are telling themselves as a way to excuse the fact that they decide to stay in linear life.

Long-term vision is what gives meaning to everything you are building. It's that visualization at least ten years ahead that helps you find logic in what you are building. Almost everyone has a short-term vision, where they only peek at the next weekend or, if anything, the next vacation period. Many get reflective at the end of the year and want to evaluate their progress like that, annually, but don’t play that game or you will get frustrated. Measure your progress decade by decade. This puts you in a natural advantageous position.

I like to tell people that it's okay to brag, it's okay to stand out, to be ambitious, to build transgenerational wealth, to strive to be high-performance individuals. And I like to talk about all this in hard terms because almost no one gives us “permission” for it. Almost everything we find around us is fear, prudence, the illusion of security, the theater of good parenting, the theater of formal education, the theater of many things that want to sell us as solutions and premium situations when in reality the elite, the exclusive, the cool is much higher up, where few find out about it and many fewer dare to go there.

You and I are those who dare and that's why we are gathered here.

Enjoy your parallel life.

Be bold.

And be so now.

—A.