Is Really About Something Else

In February 2018, I was getting ready for my trip to MWC in Barcelona, when the unexpected happened. My getting thinner despite my strong “healthy” eating (or not) fired an alarm that took me to my doctor and all of a sudden I woke up in a hospital bed with a 3 small scar and a big realization.

The doctor had just removed my gallbladder — a surgery I hadn’t seen coming, but one that forced me to see everything else more clearly.

Until that moment, I thought I understood success. I thought.
The chase. The goals. The next achievement. The relentless going forward, maybe for the right reasons but for the wrong cost.

But lying there, with my body reminding me of its limits, I understood something deeper: you can’t hack health (maybe in today’s terms you can, but not as a bargaining chip to reach results). You can’t outsource balance. You can’t negotiate with life’s basic laws.

That morning, I decided that success — the real kind — had to start from the inside out. Something I had started years ago (many, we go back to the time in Barcelona), meditation, mindfulness, looking inside to move forward in the outside.

When the Engine Outruns the Driver

We live in a world that rewards acceleration.
We glorify the sleepless, the “always on,” the ones who sprint faster than everyone else, here in Brazil the quick (almost automated response) when someone asks how you are doing you utter “correndo”, so to say “on the run”.

But what happens when the engine outruns the driver?

Today I saw a post of someone talking about Steve Jobs and how he changed the history of technology, yet couldn’t buy back the one thing his body demanded: time.
He connected innovation with aesthetics — but forgot to connect success with health.
That paradox is still defining, for many, our age: we build machines that never rest, while our bodies quietly beg for balance. So it is time.

Redefining Success:
From Performance to Presence

Months before my surgery I had already started the change without knowing what would come. But after my surgery, something really shifted.

My priorities reorganized themselves quietly, like files rearranging on a hard drive.
I began to invest not in more — but in better:

• Better thoughts.
• Better movement.
• Better food.
• And today, I am reaching better sleep.

I discovered that kindness — towards others, yes, but especially towards myself — is not weakness. It’s maintenance.

Kindness became my personal algorithm for balance. It grounded my mornings, softened my inner dialogue, and changed how I led teams and built projects at the time at RealNetworks.

It was back then when decided to build RTBK — Remember To Be Kind, a simple but powerful reminder of what I felt and wanted to share with the world.
It started as a whisper: a few words scribbled on my desk.
It grew into a principle — a kind of emotional protocol for life and work.
Because when you remember to be kind, you automatically choose connection over competition, empathy over ego, meaning over noise.

The Hidden ROI of Kindness

In business, we measure everything — time, growth, impact.
But there’s one metric we rarely track: how we feel. And boy, you do, its just we pretend to be deaf and numb sometimes.

Kindness, gratitude, and creative thinking are not just emotional luxuries.
They’re productivity enhancers. They shape the chemistry of our focus, the clarity of our vision, the tone of our relationships.

When we lead with kindness, we don’t just perform better — we become better, we are better.

And that’s where the equation of modern success needs rewriting:
Success = Performance × Wellbeing.

Success Without Health Is Just Noise

Steve Jobs once wrote that material things lose meaning when life is slipping away.
I didn’t need billions to understand that — just a gallbladder 🙂

Health is not a trophy we win after years of hard work.
I feel it’s the foundation that allows everything else to exist.
Because the success that costs your health isn’t success, its a bill you are paying for someone else, or something else.

Or in other words, tt’s just a very expensive form of emptiness.

The Quiet Revolution

We don’t need more hours. We need more awareness.
More time offline. More silence between the notifications.
More kindness — because kindness creates clarity.

My surgery in 2018 wasn’t just a medical event.
It was a sort of system reboot.
Since then, every meditation session, every minute at the gym, every mindful meal, every deep breath has been a line of code in a new operating system — one designed not for speed, but for sustainability of myself for the years to come.

And maybe that’s the next big innovation we all need.
Not a smarter phone.
But a smarter rhythm.
One where health is not the price of success — it’s the proof of it.