Only the disciplined ones are free in life. If you are undisciplined, you are a slave to your moods. You are a slave to your passions.
What advice would you give your twenty-year-old self, and what should they ignore?
Question
What are you still hoping to finish?
Death & what remains
Question
What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
Values & belief
Question
In the last five years, what new belief, behaviour, or habit has most improved your life?
Daily life
Question
What is the worst job you have done?
Craft & work
Question
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Values & belief
Question
What problem are you still trying to solve?
Craft & work
Primero, lanzarse, incluso sin tener todas las respuestas. Segundo, tener resiliencia y disciplina, porque los mercados son volátiles. Tercero, buscar grandes problemas del consumidor. Muchas oportunidades nacen de la frustración.
Alejandra Rico Muñoz, interview, La República, 25 March 2026 source ↗
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Eliud Kipchoge
Kenyan marathon runner
Recorded
Address at the Oxford Union Society, November 2017, Outside, 10 February 2018
source ↗
Yvon Chouinard
Founder of Patagonia
Invent your own game and that way you can always be a winner.
Jenny Diski
Novelist and essayist
One thing I state as soon as we’re out of the door: ‘Under no circumstances is anyone to say that I lost a battle with cancer. Or that I bore it bravely. I am not fighting, losing, winning or bearing.’ I will not personify the cancer cells inside me in any form. I reject all metaphors of attack or enmity in the midst, and will have nothing whatever to do with any notion of desert, punishment, fairness or unfairness, or any kind of moral causality.
David Hare
Playwright and screenwriter
Ask your parents questions straight away, or you’ll never know.
More from David Vélez
View profile →No, falta mucho por construir. Estoy muy contento con lo que hemos podido construir en Nubank en estos casi diez años. En lo personal, tengo una familia con cuatro niños chiquitos y eso es un desafío gigantesco, que crezcan, sean buenas personas y lleguen a ser buenos ciudadanos. Es un gran desafío en el que estoy muy enfocado.
Pix is probably the most successful payment infrastructure run by a government in history. I think Pix has been what has allowed a country like Brazil to leapfrog developed economies like the U.S. and in Europe, and has positioned Brazil today probably five years ahead of the U.S. I don't think anybody understands that, and probably in the U.S. they didn't really expect that.
Moving closer to work. I live in São Paulo, Brazil, and I used to spend an hour or more in traffic every day, just sitting in the car getting frustrated and anxious. It was a waste of my time.
Los diferentes trabajos en los que he estado, después de mi graduación, han sido de 100 y 120 horas a la semana, especialmente empezando con Nubank. Básicamente vivía en el lugar de trabajo. Empezamos la compañía en una casa de dos pisos. Mi cofundador vivía en el segundo piso. Yo básicamente dormía en el primer piso, o pasaba muchas noches en el primer piso. No salimos de esa casa por seis o 12 meses porque trabajábamos como locos.
Vicky, qué pregunta más difícil (risas). Voy a hablarle de los casos que nos han inspirado, como Charles Feeney, cofundador de los Duty Free Shop en los aeropuertos. Él hizo eso en los años ochenta. Se volvió uno de los hombres más ricos del mundo cuando vendió su compañía e inmediatamente se dedicó a la filantropía y gastó todo su dinero en metas sociales.
I think a lot of that first wave of entrepreneurship was missing the product of localization, and they weren't really asking the question, "What are the big, impactful products or problems that we got to solve locally, and forget about the U.S. or forget about Europe?"
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