Roar, p.1
Roar, page 1
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I will remain at the edge of this book until I see you roar.
Before you reign, you will eat dust, you will be sold out by your friends and relatives. You cannot fly with those who clip your wings, so stop sighing and start progressing, for dreams aren’t made of laziness or apathy.
Your glory will be seen as a failure by the mediocre, who will forgive anything but your success. Since happiness doesn’t tolerate cowardice, you will never see an impassive person make history. If you tenaciously persevere, you will remember the safe places of your childhood, and you will behold the most intense, powerful gaze you will ever see: your own.
Even when everything seems pointless, never give up. Let the impossible be your plaything. Instead of waiting for destiny, you must seize it.
Roar
or expect to be devoured.
Introduction
We live in a world that changes at breakneck speed. Competition is fierce and time waits for no one. But what if you feel like you just can’t keep up? What if you just don’t have the strength to fight for your place in the world? The universe’s response is swift and brutal: Stand up for your purpose or run the risk of being devoured. After the pandemic, that very message slapped me in the face. I felt the world was closing in on me, domesticating me. I felt my soul withering away and my strength and purpose slipping through my fingers. I had a pent-up scream clawing at my stifled throat, gagged by the oppressive censorship that I had imposed on it, silencing my dreams.
But as hopeless as things seemed, my soul’s message overcame my doubts. It demanded that I stop whispering. My soul told me it was time to shout. To release ourselves from the confines of our doubts and fears, demolish the walls and bend the bars that have been holding us back, we need to find the courage to take responsibility for our actions and decisions. We need to take initiative in the face of intimidating challenges. We need to take risks that aren’t always perfectly calculated and be okay if the results aren’t what we expected. Ultimately, we need to find the courage to Roar.
NO MORE SILENCE.
Roar is a manifesto for those who refuse to be victims of circumstance, for those who choose to roar with strength and claim their place in the world. This book is the result of keen observation and a profound understanding of modern society’s relentless nature. It represents our indomitable energy, the fierce determination that drives us to face our fears, to push our limits, and to fight for our dreams with courage and passion.
In these pages you will find three seemingly simple steps—inhale, inflame, and roar—filled with the tools and techniques you need to face adversity, embrace your purpose, become an effective leader, influence others positively, make decisions that benefit both you and your community, and emerge stronger and more determined than ever. Assuming leadership roles and exercising authority are acts of courage and conviction. It may all sound pretty simple, but the path of self-discovery is an internal battle with yourself. It requires a committed effort, the kind you must make within you.
As you take each of these three steps, you will begin to see your greatness unfold and your purest essence reveal itself. You will also wrestle with this question: Is it possible to bend without breaking in life? Figuring out when to be flexible and when to stand strong in your power will be essential as you face the relentless challenges on your journey. We’ve been raised to believe that strength and rigidity are symbols of power, resistance, and determination. And there will most definitely be moments in our lives when we will need this strength to overcome obstacles. Yet flexibility is an equally powerful quality because it allows us to adapt to changing circumstances in an ever-evolving world and navigate the storms of life without breaking.
Lao Tzu once said, “Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away the rock, which is rigid and cannot yield…. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.” Those who are rigid and resistant to change may find themselves worn down by circumstances. Are you overdoing it? Is it time to be more flexible and less unyielding? I’m not asking you to abandon your strength or set aside your convictions and simply go with the flow. Sometimes we need to be the strong and rigid rock to stay on our feet. But other times it’s best to be like water, navigating around obstacles and finding our way through narrow paths despite the barriers before us. This is the dichotomy between endurance and adaptability, rigor and fluidity. To roar we must recognize that sometimes true strength lies in the ability to bend without breaking.
The time has come to raise your voice, plunge into the storm with a boldness that does not fear failure, and emerge with scars that make you proud, for risk and failure are some of our wisest teachers. Join me as we challenge our self-imposed limits, break free from the chains of conformity, and dare to be different in a world that celebrates similarity. The greatest risk is to risk nothing at all.
FAILURE IS A THOUSAND TIMES BRAVER THAN NOT TRYING.
INHALE
Inhaling is the energetic charge that provides the opportunity for a profound revision of our beliefs and behaviors. It involves filling ourselves with the healing air of stillness. It defines us. In any attempt at a new beginning, we must first examine the pillars that support us. We must audit the flows of our emotional balance sheet to stop the transactions that bleed us dry and close the accounts with creditors who demand payments for bills we no longer owe. The fiercest debt collector is within us, with past-due statements of hurt and guilt. This accounting also records the wounds we have accumulated since our early childhood, and sums up our talents, values, convictions, and confidence, leading to a positive balance. We need to allow ourselves to evaluate our behaviors and tendencies, not to define who we are, but to have a starting point for our inner journey. Self-exploration is an urgent breath of fresh air when we have yet to emerge from the suffocation of everyday life.
First and foremost, we must confirm we are in a safe place. If we want our cries to be heard, we must find security and stability for our current murmurs. Who can we confide in about the shame caused by our shortcomings? Who can we fearlessly be ourselves with? That is what we need to determine to feel safe on this journey.
Self-exploration is accompanied by our environment, in other words, what we have chosen to include in our personal kingdom, such as money, relationships, and business. We grant these elements a power that is clearly manifested in our interactions with them, and the hierarchy and weight we give them modify certain conditions in our lives. Self-evaluation reveals who we honor: from the people we love or admire to the institutions, symbols, concepts, or ideologies we respect. This shapes our ideals. Honor exposes and largely tells us who we are and what defines us.
Of course, there is no way to fill ourselves if we remain empty of God. Even nonbelievers should find a connection within themselves between their physical reality and that dimension of mystery, which somehow is obsessively described by hundreds of theories, even though none allows us to fully understand it. Each new discovery related to the elementary aspects of physics brings us closer to God and moves us away from a mechanical understanding of the universe. The act of inhalation is therefore an appropriate time to quietly reflect on death itself and to remember our ability to conceive life.
In short, to inhale is to empty ourselves of ourselves and fill up with the eternal, with the imperishable, with the fabulous mystery that makes us who we are. In that mystery is where we will rediscover ourselves by asking the questions we know how to answer but find so hard to articulate. And that will prepare us to finally release the explosion within us.
INFLAME
Once we have filled our chest, we need to inflame it, gather those reflections of who we are, and create an action plan. To do this, we must first learn the most important skill: how to make intelligent decisions. This involves looking ahead without being obscured by the biases and fallacies that make up our mental models. There is no such thing as a perfect decision; you would only come to one by chance. Our job is to know the root causes of the distortions that repeatedly lead us to make the same mistakes.
LOVE IS NOT A MIRACLE, IT’S A DECISION; AND THE MIRACLE IS TO MAKE THAT DECISION EVERY DAY.
Then, we will traverse the storms of hatred and criticism that try to tear us away from who we are until we are stripped of the strength to move forward. Crossing them, even when we know we may be shipwrecked, will help replenish us and help us reach the calm and clear skies of trust and peace. We will review the opinions we receive and the reasons behind our reactions to them. If we ran a hundred-meter dash with our eyes locked on the crowd instead of the path ahead of us, we wouldn’t find our way to the finish line. Paying attention to those judgmental eyes forces us to lose our focus on succeeding. Just because some people come to a standstill to fixate on us doesn’t mean we should stop too.
Next, we’ll examine what we’re focusing on. Awareness is a talent that needs to be refined. Concentrating our entire attention on the present is a luxury that not everyone can afford in a world hung up on urgencies. Yet to move forward we must devote all our attention to our path and avoid getting caught up in resentment, guilt,
At a time when the noise around us is never silent, being able to focus on what’s right for us is one of our greatest virtues. Noise reaches us even in moments of rest. Pressing pause has gone from a fertilizer to a pollutant in our imagination. Resting is no longer an opportunity to be authentic, but an incentive to become a crude imitation of others.
To inflame also means to learn how to identify who has tied strings over our shoulders to manipulate us like puppets. Being aware of what influences us takes on transcendent weight in times when we have lost control of what we consume. Information overload, which our parents and grandparents were able to control to some degree, has become immeasurably powerful in our lives.
This situation actually raises the value of knowing how we can influence others. We’ve been taught that persuasion is a method that makes others comply with our will, even if they don’t want to. But that doesn’t work. We have been mistakenly looking for a magic lamp to fulfill our desire for mental control, when the right path is to understand how our ideas, with their strengths and weaknesses, are most conveniently and adequately examined.
IT’S NICE TO WAKE UP AND SEE THE REFLECTION OF A GOOD PERSON.
Persuasion is just a way of emphasizing your perspectives, making them heard, and getting your peers to feel comfortable with them, even if your vision doesn’t align with theirs. Getting people to do what you want, at whatever cost, means moving away from influence and into the dark realms of manipulation. That’s why we’ve devoted a section to techniques that will help us have a positive effect on others while we also learn to defend ourselves against manipulative schemes.
To turn the air’s stillness into a roar we need will power. In this step, we’ll be talking about this key tool, and we’ll dive into the struggle that takes place between two people living at different points in time: those who enjoy immediate pleasure and those who look to the future, with whom we don’t always identify. At this crossroads, we must choose between a short road to a guaranteed pleasure and a long and unpredictable one that will lead us to the destination of our dreams.
ROAR
This last step deals with the roar’s power, with facts, actions, and their meaning. It’s a beginning, a gamble that we can’t take back, where we must place a bet on the person we wish to become. And it all starts with self-control.
Understanding the importance of self-control will allow us to sophisticatedly navigate through time, choosing either to stay in the fleeting pleasure of the present or to focus on a prosperous future. The latter will be possible if we know how to invest in our ideals, desires, emotions, and behaviors. Every effort, every endeavor, every sacrifice increases the balance of our expected benefit.
To get there, we must trade silence for inner peace. Many times we remain silent because it’s an easy way out, but instead of lifting some of the weight off our shoulders, we only end up stockpiling even more anxieties, which continue to grow incessantly. Sometimes we stay silent to escape reality, and other times, even worse, we do it to let others deal with what we can’t face.
Surprisingly, one of the key steps to inflaming our confined power is abandonment: letting go of some learned things that we hold to be absolute truths. It can be strangely easy to stop doing things we like, but letting go of things that hurt us can be a real struggle. We want to be strong, but we don’t realize that it takes more strength to be vulnerable than to be brutal, because vulnerability is a way of being unbreakable. Learning to let go is a badge of courage and integrity: It’s brave to assume the consequences; it’s honorable to assume our responsibility.
YOU PRAY FOR GOD TO REMOVE YOUR BURDENS, BUT YOU CLING TO THEM.
This discussion questions how many mistakes we’re willing to process and how to make them work in our favor. We have borrowed the term resilience from materials science and applied it to describe our behavior. The results I’ve seen lead me to one of two possible conclusions: that we still have a lot to learn about engineering, or that we still don’t know how to decipher human behavior. We insist on confusing resilience with resistance, on giving the former the attributes of the latter, and neither gains value.
The more pressure you contain, the more you increase the power and volume of your roar. Yet this also comes with greater exhaustion, which makes succumbing to temptation and being swept away by the comfort of a liberatingly soft sigh quite a seductive option. Take a breath, hold it in your chest, and let out a powerful scream that empties the silences contained in your pains and fears. That’s what it means to roar: to ride wildly in the direction of your dreams. Some will call it a dust cloud; others will say it’s a trick, a circus; but blasting what you hold dear within you is instrumental.
Listen to yourself. Pay careful attention to what you have to say to yourself. Ignore the attacks and taunts before they muffle your voice. Determine exactly what the tone and boldness of your cry will be. And unleash that pent-up power.
Make them tremble.
Roar! May everyone hear what you have to say.
Roar! May you have nothing left inside.
Roar! May you end the tyranny of silence.
Step One
INHALE
In the prelude to great moments in your life, you prepared yourself for action. Remember? You stopped and expanded your chest with a breath that cleansed the fears embedded within you. That’s what happened seconds before you brushed across those lips: You paused to take in a long breath before attempting that kiss; you closed your eyes and expanded as if in a ritual encapsulating your fears.
The times you dared to pedal without help were wonderful, the first time you swam deep into the sea, the time you crossed the dark alley of so many nightmares alone. It happened just before the great moments—that inhalation announced you would say yes, you would initiate that change, you would finally decide to let go of the pain you were carrying. You inhaled to prepare yourself, and after you exhaled, you took the step that had been so hard to take.
Unfortunately, with the arrival of obligations to fulfill and bills to pay, the impulse that drove you to move forward with your dreams weakened. You began to distance yourself from what you wanted, passions disappeared, and suddenly you stopped recognizing yourself in the mirror. Audacious inspiration ceased to appear with the same frequency; your heart became constricted; your soul went silent; and the muffled roar in your throat began to wither.
To regain that breath you need to relearn how to fill your chest, to swell with courage, and this begins with the act of knowing yourself in depth. It is time to take back what belongs to you, to set aside time to talk with yourself, and to do so regarding who you are. We have spent a good part of our lives learning about numbers and doctrines, about the names of trees and literary devices, about the erosion of rocks and the heroes who wrote our past, but far less time has been taken to teach us how to get to know ourselves: to understand how we think or why we think the way we do.
Gathering the momentum to roar involves rediscovering ourselves, knowing our attachments, identifying our talents, and understanding why we carry wounds that condition our behaviors.
In the following pages, I will guide you through this process. It all begins with a deep breath that you can turn into a tornado.
THE BODY DANCES WITH ANYBODY, BUT THE SOUL DOES NOT LAUGH WITH ANYONE.
TALENTS
One of the reasons we are unable to pursue the activities we most enjoy is the burden of wondering if we have the right talents. Many people are unaware of their true skills, and they will never get to discover them if they remain where they never have the opportunity to put them into practice. This may be your case. We’ve been conditioned to ignore our talents because we’re still tied to an educational system that seems sometimes not only to hide them, but also to stifle their development. How can we know our talents if we’ve spent our lives surrounded by obstacles that prevent us from using them?
