Ball

My first word was "ball." Not "mom," not "dad," not "water." Ball. I was lazy to talk, I had no rush to say anything, but I was already obsessed with soccer, and I had a lot of balls around me.

That sounds like a tiny childhood detail, the kind of thing relatives repeat at lunch, but I do not think it is small at all. A first word is not a destiny, of course. But for me the ball was never just a toy. It was my first object of obsession, repetition, competition, coordination, and independence, all of it at once, before I had any of those words.

And while I was lazy to talk, I was in a hurry to walk and to do things myself. I was proud when I could reach the couch on my own to drink my baby bottle without anyone carrying me there. I liked the feeling of executing without waiting for someone to do it for me. That instinct never left.

I played soccer from my early years until I was 12, basically every single day. I also competed in futsal as a goalkeeper for many years, and since I lived two blocks from the beach I played on the sand all the time too. So soccer was not an activity I did sometimes after school. It was the environment I lived in.

Here is the thing about sports: they teach you in a way no lecture ever could. You learn fast that wanting to win is not enough, that the ball does not care about your excuses, that your body matters, that your teammates matter, and that pressure changes how you act whether you like it or not. You learn that losing hurts and is not the end. And you learn that sometimes the best thing you can do is not the beautiful thing, it is the useful one.

I was a goalkeeper, and goalkeepers have a strange relationship with mistakes. A striker can miss ten shots and still become the hero with one goal. A midfielder can give away three bad passes and just disappear back into the rhythm of the game. But when a goalkeeper makes a visible mistake, the punishment is instant: the ball goes in, and everyone saw it. That builds a specific kind of responsibility. When you are the last person before the goal, you cannot hide from reality for very long.

Playing with my father, who was a goalkeeper coach, was tough. He used to throw the ball at my face on purpose so I would not be afraid of it when I competed. It was not fun to get hit in the face, and honestly it still does not sound nice written cleanly on a page. But a lot of things in life are not easy and still teach you something real. The point was never cruelty, it was preparation. If fear made me turn my face away at the wrong moment, the ball would go in. Once I learned that getting hit was survivable, I could stay in the play.

And that lesson keeps coming back in adult life. A hard customer conversation is a ball coming at your face. A medical diagnosis is a ball coming at your face. A business risk is a ball coming at your face. A missed deadline, a painful negotiation, a team conflict, a financial decision, a personal loss, all of them are testing the same thing: do you turn away, or do you stay present?

Now, do not read this as me telling you to go look for pain. I am not. I do not believe suffering automatically makes people better, some suffering only damages, some pressure only breaks. But I do believe a person needs enough contact with reality to stop being fragile.

The ball taught me execution. Do the thing. Move. Decide. React. Try again.

The team taught me interdependence. You can be independent and still need other people. You can own your role without pretending the game is only about you.

Competition taught me feedback. The score is not the whole truth, but it is not nothing either. Results matter because they reveal something: sometimes skill, sometimes preparation, sometimes luck, sometimes that your strategy was just wrong.

The beach taught me adaptation. Sand changes how the ball moves, wind changes the game, uneven ground changes your balance. You do not get to demand perfect conditions before you play.

Looking back, the ball was probably my first mental model before I had any idea what a mental model was. It told me:

• Do not wait forever before acting.
• Reality gives feedback.
• Your body is part of your performance.
• Teams matter.
• Fear gets smaller when you face it enough times.
• Losing is information, not identity.
• The game continues.

That is why this chapter sits here, near the beginning. Before the companies, before the code, before the frameworks and repositories and investments, there was a ball. And with it, one simple lesson I still carry: life gets a lot easier to understand the moment you are willing to enter the game.

So go enter yours. Stop waiting on the sideline for perfect conditions, take the ball in the face once, and you will see it was survivable all along.