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Filipe Névola

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Voltar28/09/2025, 17:54

There are weeks when nothing happens

tl;dr: enjoy life and help others

Last week was not one of those. My last week was insane. I'll break it down between family and professional topics.

On the family side, I have great news to share with my friends reading here: Lu and I are adopting a child.

It's going to be a boy and he should come in a year or so. But sharing the news here is not my point. My point is to say that this is a really important milestone in our lives.

We never decided to not have a child or to have a child. Our default answer was always "we don't have a plan for that". Some people interpreted that as a "no" and others as "maybe later". Well, now looking at the new facts, that was a maybe later, but not at the time it was said.

Then I want to talk about how easy it is to connect the dots looking back. And also, how hard it is to connect the dots in the present or looking into the future.

You can be optimistic all the time and believe later everything will make sense, or pessimistic, saying all the time that a lot of things don't make sense. To be honest, I'm a realistic guy but leaning towards optimistic most of the time. But in this specific case, about connecting dots, I would prefer to think a lot of things don't make sense. I can explain why.

Let's replace connecting the dots with God's action. Ok, so now we are talking about religion and God acting on our behalf. Also, we are talking about God acting on our circumstances to help us.

All good, when it leads to a good ending. But as adults we know that's not always the case. So how do we explain to people who suffer when things go really bad and really don't make sense?

This is why I prefer to believe in the pessimistic approach, otherwise I would need to assign to God some bad effects we see in the real world. And yes, I'm a believer in God, the father of Jesus. So usually with close friends and family I always question the very common sentence in Portuguese "Thank God" (Graças a Deus) because I don't believe in a God that is acting all the time in our lives.

All that said to say: we are excited to be parents but I have no idea how this experience, for the rest of our lives, is going to be. But I have one certainty: we will love you so much, my son, with all our strength and heart. We are looking forward to having you here with us ASAP.

Now, let's talk about business: we are heading to the end of the year and I believe my professional life will be quite different next year.

Which is great. Many people see me as a robot, or someone that doesn't care to do the same thing every day, but actually I struggle with that. I love to code all the time but not the same thing, for instance.

I love diversity of work, including types of work and work domains. It's always nice to change, to refresh your mind and to bring concepts from one domain to another. For example, how to sell yerba mate online? I know a lot about logistics, demand supply, e-commerce, whitelabel solutions, influencers, but I never tried to sell (real, physical goods) online. This is just a silly example but I'm also indeed about to start selling high quality yerba mate online. Check this out.

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Last week I also gave a talk at a big event from Mercado Livre (aka Amazon of Brazil). I don't care about the status but I used the event to set my feeling to fun mode and it was indeed fun. If you are Brazilian I spoke on the same stage that Anitta spoke, and also Ronaldo Fenomeno, Neymar, Marcos Mion, Apolinário from Polishop and other celebrities, again, it was fun. I'm telling everybody about Anitta since I knew she was going to be there and she did her makeup 1 meter from me but I didn't see her doing it, behind closed doors with mad security protecting it.

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So, life is great and having different things to do is exciting.

To connect family and professional: these things are happening together not by luck or coincidence. They are happening together because on my side of the answer "no plans for that", it was a huge factor having a healthy work demand to have a child. I wouldn't support not having a great level of commitment with my son, today even when I postpone a walk with my dog, Mimosa, I feel bad, imagine with my son. So that's why last week was special.

And if you are my frequent reader, I wrote some time ago about not having a dream but I believe now I do have one. And it's a very simple one: to raise a child that enjoys living.

I don't care about him being successful in regular society terms, that doesn't matter. What matters is to live life on his own terms and enjoy it. Life should be lived with pleasure.

To wrap up about success, I would consider him a success in society or capitalist terms if he acts in the future showing that he learned that money is only useful for two things: to buy ice cream and to help others.

My son, if you read this in the future, just remember that you don't need to obey any expectations people will put on you, including me. Focus on enjoying your life and helping people.

Last tip: helping people is probably one of the most effective hacks to enjoy life.

That is it for today. Have a great week, and maybe, you could force this week that is starting to not be just another week where nothing happens.