Five lines of reading, from the cost of not deciding to a country that postpones. The text does not persuade, it organizes what you already sense.
The solitude of power is not born from the absence of people around you. It is born from the real boundary between advice and consequence. Partners, mentors, board members, friends, and specialists can help you think better, see risks, open up scenarios, and avoid decisions made on impulse. But none of them carries, in the owner's place, the weight of signing the decision when it touches cash, people, family, reputation, and the future.
That solitude shows up when the role stops being a position and becomes responsibility. Firing someone you trust. Taking on debt to grow. Pulling back when the market expects you to advance. Advancing when everyone would prefer safety. Saying no to a tempting opportunity because it threatens the company's focus. In those moments, leadership stops being a speech about courage and becomes the capacity to bear consequence without transferring blame.
For a long time, this subject was treated with an inspirational varnish. As if good advisors, a strong support network, emotional intelligence, and a few right books on the nightstand were enough to make leadership lighter. It does not. What those things do, when used well, is reduce the chance that the leader decides driven by fear, vanity, guilt, outside pressure, or the need for approval.
Knowledge thins the fog, but does not remove the weight. Knowing the business, the market, the numbers, the strategy, and the nuances of the sector deeply does not turn a hard decision into a comfortable one. It only keeps it from being made in the dark. The entrepreneurial literature, from Ben Horowitz to Uri Levine, has value when it confirms a truth that practice already imposes: many problems that look personal are, in fact, structural in the life of anyone building something that matters.
But knowledge without emotional command becomes a pile of information. Deciding well demands enduring discomfort without reaching for immediate relief. It demands understanding that not every tension needs to be resolved on the spot, not every disagreement is a sign of error, and not every correct decision will be understood by those who do not see the whole. The immature leader decides to be accepted. The mature leader decides to preserve what needs to keep existing.
And perhaps the most neglected skill is saying no. No to the project that distracts. No to the client who destroys margin. No to the hire that solves an urgency and creates a bigger problem. No to the growth that inflates revenue and erodes structure. William Ury drew attention to the positive no, but in business practice the point is even more direct: whoever cannot say no hands their agenda over to other people's pressure.
The solitude of power is not overcome. That is the part many people avoid saying. It is understood, structured, and matured. The goal is not to stop feeling it; it is to keep it from deciding for you. Because at the end of the day, many people can have an opinion about the decision.
But only one person answers for the consequence.
Bernardo Bardawil
Continue in this column · Not Deciding Costs More Than Deciding WrongThe Brazilian business owner is terrified of the wrong decision. He calculates, weighs it, asks around, sleeps on it. The decision that never gets made, no one fears. And that is the one that breaks more companies in this country than any error in the math.
I operated under pressure for more than twenty years, in an operation that reached ten thousand cars in a single month. The lesson I learned there is the one no one wants to face: the errors that cost the most were never the wrong decisions, they were the postponed ones. A wrong decision hurts fast and gets fixed the following week. A postponed one does not hurt. So it grows, quietly, until the day choosing is no longer an option.
Indecision is not caution. It is a decision made by omission, and you hand its outcome away for free: to the competitor, to the market, to time. None of the three works in your favor.
Want to watch the cost surface? An employee does what he should not, and you pretend not to see it. A manager steps over the rule, and you swallow it to avoid friction. That is not patience. It is an announcement. The whole team learns, without a single word, what the house tolerates. You built the company to be fair, and by postponing, you taught everyone that the rule is negotiable. That cost does not arrive on this month's invoice. It arrives three years later, in a culture you no longer control.
A hard decision is almost never between right and wrong. It is between the discomfort now and the cost later. Whoever postpones chooses the cost later, and pays interest on it. That is what leadership is, not the plaque on the wall: signing the discomfort before it becomes loss.
The rule is simple, and almost no one can hold it: decide, and correct fast. What separates those who operate from those who only occupy the chair is not being right every time. It is the time between the error and the correction. Hired the wrong person, let them go before they contaminate the team. Walked into a bad deal, walk out. A decided error can be repaired. Indecision cannot, because it never became a decision you could revisit.
Every owner chooses the same thing all day long, in the large calls and the small ones: hold the course or hand it over. To decide is to take on the consequence. Not to decide is to take on the consequence as well, decided by someone else, and more expensive.
A wrong decision costs once. Indecision costs every day, until the day the decision is no longer yours.
Bernardo Bardawil
Continue in this column · The Power of Saying NoEveryone praises the one who says yes. Yes to the client, yes to the project, yes to the opportunity that showed up. Yes is likable, it opens doors, it avoids friction. And that is exactly why it sinks so many companies: no one notices they are losing, they are just busy.
Anyone running a large operation finds out fast that the agenda is finite and the line of requests is not. The hardest decision I made in a restructuring was not what to add, it was what to cut: I trimmed a store of almost 30 people down to fewer than 10 and replaced half the mix, because keeping everything would have eaten the margin. Every yes to a new front is a silent no to the ones already holding the business up. The yes that looks like generosity is almost always a decision made without looking at the math.
Saying no is the most unpopular decision in leadership, and the most strategic. It is not refusing for the sake of refusing. It is protecting the operation from what weakens it disguised as opportunity: the big contract that pays little and occupies everything, the client who gives the work of three and the margin of half, the expansion that looks like growth and is only revenue swelling on a base that cannot hold it. Each one of them arrives dressed as a yes.
Whoever cannot say no has no agenda. They have the agenda that other people's pressure built for them. And the market reads that instantly: a company that accepts everything is good at nothing in particular, it is only available. Availability is not positioning, it is the absence of it.
No costs the friction of today. Yes to everything costs focus, margin, and structure, and that bill comes later, always larger. The difference between those who build and those who only chase is knowing which of the two costs they would rather pay, and having the coldness to pay today's.
The easy yes is the luxury of someone who has not yet understood the size of their own bill.
Bernardo Bardawil
Continue in this column · ProcrastinationProcrastination has become the lazy diagnosis of the moment. Every time something important does not get done, the blame falls on it, as if discipline were missing. In most cases, discipline is not what is missing. Structure is. And confusing the two makes the owner treat a management problem as a character flaw.
The distinction matters. Real procrastination is knowing what needs to be done and, by choice, not doing it: out of fear, out of inertia, out of plain laziness. That exists. But the business owner with thirty critical decisions on the table, no team, no support, plugging holes all day, who never reaches what is strategic, is not procrastinating. He is drowning. And drowning is not a problem of will, it is a problem of system.
I lived this firsthand. In an operation I ran, the strategic work kept getting pushed to later, not out of laziness, but because I was being swallowed by stock shortages and a purchasing process that kept jamming. It unlocked when I stopped demanding discipline from myself and built structure: a central purchasing unit that delivered the part in an hour and a half, and someone dedicated solely to resolving breakdowns. The important work moved again because something started protecting it, not because I became more disciplined. The urgent only stops eating the important when you build a fence around the important.
The cost does not show up right away. It shows up when the competitor closes the contract you postponed, when the year turns and the front that decided the future never left the page. While you chase the urgent, the market moves ahead, and it does not wait for you to get organized.
The way out is not more willpower, it is structure: defining what only you decide, shielding that time, and handing the rest to system, process, and people. Whoever wants to grow, organizes. Whoever wants to stay where they are, makes excuses.
Procrastination, most of the time, is just the pretty name given to a structure that was never built.
Bernardo Bardawil
Continue in this column · You Are Confusing Comfort With Strategy, and It Is Costing YouThe greatest risk is not leaving a structure. It is staying in it without questioning.
Five years ago, I made a decision that, to many, looked unlikely: leaving a path already laid out inside a family business. It was not an impulsive move. It was a conscious decision not to accept predictability with no meaning.
Since then, the journey stopped being about stability and became about building. What started as a search for space evolved into a partnership in a renewable energy company. Then, new fronts. And, over time, a clearer role: advisor, board member, someone called in when decisions need to be made with more lucidity.
There is a point few admit: the world outside the structure is harder. But it is where the game truly happens.
And there is a paradox in this process. Whoever cannot stop rarely builds anything consistent. Because growing is not about speed. It is about direction.
The market does not reward effort. It rewards clarity, consistency, and the capacity to sustain decisions when there is no guarantee at all.
My path is not linear. And it does not need to be. But it has something I consider essential: intention.
Today, more than building my own paths, I work helping companies and leaders make better decisions, especially when the scenario is not clear.
Because, in the end, it all starts there. In the decision.
Bernardo Bardawil
Continue in this column · The Decision Can Be Advised. The Consequence Cannot.Every company that lasts long enough reaches the point where the owner wakes up and asks whether it still makes sense. That is not weakness. It is the sign that either the company changed, or the owner changed, and the two stopped fitting in the same place.
I reached that point twice, and I answered in opposite ways. Both were decisions, not venting.
The first time, the family business was a tire shop. I did not fit there, and the obvious way out was to walk away. Before walking away, I stopped and asked what that business had that was worth gold. The answer was one thing: a base of customers who trusted it. I did not throw the history away, I gave it another chapter. I turned the tire shop into a repair shop, same space, another purpose. That single decision became half the group's retail revenue. Reframing was not sentiment. It was reading what already existed and deciding what to do with it.
The second time, reframing was not possible. It was twenty-five years of entrepreneurship, and what needed to change was not the company, it was me. The decision was the opposite: leave everything and start from zero, in another city, without the shield of the track record, with a new company that had no name, no history, no soul. Every brick again.
The difference between the two moments was never in the circumstance. It was in the decision. Reframing and starting over are opposite answers to the same question, and both demand courage. What is not an answer is to keep complaining, year after year, about a company you have, deep down, already decided not to change.
Starting over is brutal, reframing is thankless, but both have an owner. Paralysis has an owner too, it only pretends that life is deciding for it.
In the end, the word that holds all of this together is the most repeated and the most avoided word in business: decision.
Bernardo Bardawil
Continue in this column · Oficinas Gerardo Bastos: The Largest Repair Shop in BrazilThe largest repair shop in Brazil started with someone who walked in without a place.
Bernardo joined the Gerardo Bastos group in 1999. His own family's company, three stores, a large-scale tire shop that handled between 3,000 and 4,000 cars a month. He started by managing the smallest branch. When he moved to the headquarters, he found that no one had thought of a position for him. So he started from the bottom: warehouse, delivery counter, sales, the service floor, which back then was only tires, alignment, and balancing.
It was from the service floor that he saw the problem no one treated as a problem. More than three out of every ten cars came in and left without any service performed, not for lack of customers, but because they had a mechanical defect the store did not fix. The customer asked for speed because he still had to stop at the gas station to change the oil. The repair shop did not exist. The revenue drove away along with the car.
Bernardo took a project to the owner at the time, his grandfather: build a repair shop inside the store. The grandfather did not believe in the potential. He authorized it anyway. It was the end of 2002.
The operation began in 2003, and the read was right: services took off. To know what could and what needed to be done to a car, Bernardo went to learn mechanics. He became a mechanic. And understanding the car from the inside, he saw there was still a lot of money on the table. With the wheel off, came the brakes, the first add-on. Then the shock absorbers. Then it never stopped, until it reached what he himself named back then: serving a car from bumper to bumper.
In 2007 the grandfather began building the fourth unit: 10,000 square meters of service area, designed from scratch as a repair shop, no longer as a tire shop. That added another 2,500 cars a month. The group reached 8,000. The old stores went through their first retrofit. They stopped being tire shops and became repair shops.
And then the structure began to break. Logistics, inventory, service, the customer journey, machinery: everything that had been enough stopped supporting the volume. Even after years of improvement, growth had outrun the structure.
Bernardo went back to the drawing board. From zero.
He reviewed every process. He created a unified purchasing unit that delivered the part in an hour and a half, from approval to delivery. He set up an inventory control owned by the area, with its own KPIs now that purchasing was centralized, and a stock manager dedicated solely to resolving breakdowns. He rebuilt the entire service flow and cut the customer journey from 12 touchpoints to 7, bringing down the friction in communication. And he turned the supplier into a partner: he began studying Bosch's equipment before it became a project, so it would be born efficient for the demand only that operation had.
Because the demand was different. An ordinary repair shop in Brazil handles, on the high end, 200 cars a month. That one handled more than 10 times that. What for any store was an occasional problem, for that operation was a daily problem, and the response to those problems became standard. Models created there still run across the country today, without anyone realizing where they came from.
In 2011 came the biggest challenge. A store of 40,000 square meters, 15,000 of built area alone, not counting the second floor and the basement. All of it service. And a new question: how do you fill so much space?
Back to the drawing board.
The answer was to become a complete point: car, truck, tire retreading, distribution. ZF dealership, Bosch Steering dealership, Agrale authorized station, Vipal retreader, all on the same site. Forty cars and 30 trucks served at the same time. And with each brand, one more requirement: a high-performance lab, specialization taken to the limit, until they became the only ZF dealership approved to do all of the brand's transmissions in the Northeast, receiving work from the entire region.
And then the mark that was a dream: 10,000 cars served in a single month.
It was also from this period that the turn came which would give rise to the Bosch Car Center, the Bosch Technical Training Center, and the joint venture with Bosch Brazil and Mundial. But that is another story.
In 2015 the problem changed in nature. The country seized up. Unstable politics, saturated road networks, too many cars for too little street. The cars simply stopped arriving at the stores. Traffic became a barrier.
Once again, the drawing board.
The Concept Stores project was born: bring the store to where the customer was, instead of waiting for him to cross the city. The decision was to leave the main axis and go to the more distant neighborhoods, which forced a change of audience and, with it, everything else. The store rethought to be truly lean: from almost 30 people in a 1,200-square-meter store to fewer than 10 in a 900-square-meter one. A more dynamic, faster layout, the same services. A change of SKUs to keep quality and lower the price, after reading what kind of product fit that specific market.
And the construction: 30 days planned, 24 hours a day, each shift a different type of work so that one would not block the other. They delivered in 27. Soft opening. The first neighborhood store, outside the city core, opened operating at full capacity. Another came. And all the stores went through a retrofit to accommodate the new format.
In 2016 the challenge flipped again: instead of bringing the store close to the customer, go to where he already was. The mall. And not just any mall, the city's luxury mall. But that story, Via Mall, is also another one.
Seventeen years earlier, all of that was a tire shop. And at some point along that road, in a warehouse that did not have a spot for him, Bernardo started over from zero: warehouse, counter, service floor. The operation grew, broke, and went back to the drawing board as many times as it needed. The rest, the 10,000 cars, the dealerships, the models that run across the country, was a consequence.
Bernardo Bardawil
Continue in this column · Do You Want to Be a Brand or a Price Seller?There is a decision every owner postpones because it sounds philosophical and is the most concrete one there is: are you going to be a brand or a price seller? Whoever does not answer on purpose, the market answers for them. And the market's answer is always the cheapest one.
When I built one of the largest repair shops in the country, I did not sell oil changes. I sold trust, and I charged for it. It was expensive to maintain, because a reference is not made with equipment, it is made with positioning sustained every single day. But it was the only way not to become a hostage to the competitor's price list. A repair shop that fights on price dies at the first one that opens cheaper on the corner. A repair shop that becomes a reference sets the price.
Both choices are legitimate, and that is what almost no one understands. Being a brand is expensive: it demands consistency, identity, years sustaining the same promise. Being price is also a strategy, but it is a strategy of war: tight margin, aggressive scale, absolute cost control, surgical reading of timing. In the price game there is no almost right. There is the cheapest and there is the rest.
The problem is not choosing one of the two. It is not choosing. The company that wants to be a brand but charges like a commodity, or that fights on price while carrying a brand's structure, pays both costs and collects neither prize. It stays in the middle. And the middle is the only place in the market where no one is remembered.
Positioning is not a pretty speech. It is deciding where you accept losing so you can win somewhere else. Whoever does not decide that becomes a line in a spreadsheet comparison, and spreadsheets have no loyalty at all.
Define what you are, and stop letting the market define it for you. Because it does define it, and when it does, it is by the lowest number.
Bernardo Bardawil
Continue in this column · Does My Company Still Make Sense?The corporate market has a ruler, and it measures the wrong thing. It measures how easy you are to classify, not how capable you are. And confusing the two is a decision error the company pays for, not the candidate.
The specialist is easy to read: a director of a single box, a resume in a straight line. The market knows where to fit him and how much to pay. The entrepreneur who built from zero is the opposite. He spent years forced to understand finance, sales, operations, people, suppliers, and banks all at once, because he had no one to delegate to. He accumulated the whole view of the business. And it is exactly that breadth that jams the badge, because it does not fit in a box.
Then comes the usual verdict, said between the lines: too good for the role, too unspecific for the board. Translated: the ruler does not know how to measure you, so it discounts you. Whoever held an entire operation up is evaluated as if versatility were a flaw, and not the rarest competence there is in an environment that changes all the time.
I built from zero an operation that became the largest in its segment in the country, and then I sat on the other side, as a candidate in the corporate market, measured by a ruler that did not know where to place me. I lived both sides, and I learned that the ruler is not about talent. It is about legibility. The generalist loses not because he delivers less, but because he is harder to label, and the market prefers the clear label to the confusing value. That is the comfort of the one evaluating, paid for with the bill of the one being evaluated.
The error is not the entrepreneur's, for not fitting. It is the structure's, for measuring capability by ease of classification. The company that discards the generalist because it does not know where to put him is not being selective. It is giving up the only mind that sees the whole business, exactly when the whole business is what is at stake.
Whoever builds from zero does not need to fit the ruler. They need someone who decides to have the courage to change the ruler.
Bernardo Bardawil
Continue in this column · The Entrepreneur and the Fundamentals of His Own BusinessThere is a loss that does not appear in the cash flow: the one that comes from what you do not know you are losing. And it is always born in the same place, in the area the owner decided not to understand.
To be an entrepreneur is to take on several heads at once: sales, finance, operations, legal, suppliers, banks. No one masters all of them with technical depth, and no one needs to. But whoever does not understand the minimum of each is not delegating, he is blind. And the blind do not decide, they obey. They obey the accountant, the manager, the system, whatever the supplier says is normal.
The bill runs underneath. You install the first payment provider that shows up and pay 5% where you could pay 2%, and the difference eats your profit every month without you looking. You pick the wrong tax regime at the start and overpay tax for years. You buy badly because you did not negotiate, you sell on a thin margin, and you run out of breath without understanding where the money went. None of this explodes. All of it leaks slowly, and disappears into the result as if it were the market, when it was your lack of command.
I operated knowing how to read every pillar of the business, and the difference was not doing everything alone. It was knowing whether I was being well advised or strung along. Whoever can read their own income statement sees where they win, where they lose, and where there is room to grow. Whoever cannot hands that reading to a third party, and prays he is honest and competent at the same time.
It is not about becoming a specialist in everything. It is about never being a hostage to anyone inside your own company. Whoever does not master the fundamentals of their own business is governed by the failures they cannot see, and still calls it bad luck.
Bernardo Bardawil
Continue in this column · Entrepreneur or ExecutiveSome time ago I brought here the variables that lock up energy investment in Brazil: interest rates, the exchange rate, module prices, import tax, the Fio B grid fee, the tariff. The numbers. Today I return to the same subject without bringing a single new one, because the energy investor's problem in this country was never a lack of data. It was reading the wrong data.
Whoever waits for the scenario to clear before investing is reading the wrong variable. Interest and the exchange rate will never settle; oscillating is their nature, and waiting for them to stop is waiting for something that never comes. Meanwhile, the variable that actually weighs is already written: the Fio B grid fee already jumped to 60% in 2026 and reaches 90% in 2028. That is not uncertainty, it is a decision already made against the investor, with a date set. The amateur freezes on what oscillates. The operator acts on what is already locked.
I moved into energy on purpose, after more than two decades operating another sector. Today I own three plants in operation and I am already analyzing new acquisitions. The first thing this market teaches is the scale of time. A power plant is not a bet on a cycle, it is an asset of 25, 30 years. To look at an asset like that through the lens of this quarter's interest rate is to bring the wrong clock to the table.
Because energy is not just any asset. It is the asset the world is at war over, today, openly. Whoever controls generation controls what no country can outsource. That force does not fit in a payback spreadsheet, and it is exactly what sustains the thesis: the long-term value of an asset the entire planet disputes is not measured by the cost of capital of a single year.
The investor who understands this changes the ruler. He extends the project, accepts a leaner return at the start, and goes after the gain further ahead, where it actually lives. The math almost no one does: energy inflation in Brazil runs in the range of 8% to 10% a year. Capitalize that over 25 years and look at what is left. The return is not in the first cycle, it is in the whole curve, and the curve belongs to energy, not to the mood of the market.
Every serious strategist in Brazil knows the problem: the Brazilian is immediatist. He does not play the long game, because he distrusts everything, the change of government, the change of law, the usual. The distrust is real, but it is noise, and noise does not enter the calculation of a thirty-year asset. Take the noise off the table, and the real return remains. The Brazilian habit of only believing in the last-minute result is not prudence, it is surrender dressed up as caution.
Whoever quit this game forgot that the match does not end when the scoreboard tightens. It ends when the whistle blows. And that whistle, in energy, still has twenty years to sound. Whoever decides now will be on the field when it blows. The rest will be in the stands, explaining why they waited.
Bernardo Bardawil
Continue in this column · Brazilian Strategy Does Not Live in a ChairThere is a strategic decision sitting still right now in the head of some business owner in Brazil. Stalled for months. He calls it prudence. The 2029 balance sheet will call it something else.
I thought about this reading the CSO Brazil report, from STRATEGA.GLOBAL Brazil, coordinated by Tiago Grandi: more than a hundred strategists from the country's largest companies, heard one by one. It is the best portrait of the Brazilian strategist ever made. And it is precisely because it is the best that its blind spot matters.
The study interviewed those who have a chair. People with the word strategy in their title. But in the overwhelming majority of Brazilian companies that chair does not exist, and where it does not exist strategy does not disappear. It rises. It goes to live in the owner's head, squeezed between today's urgency and tomorrow's, decided in the hallway, between one fire and the next. The study itself touches this in a single line, when it admits that, without a CSO, the function falls to the board and to active advisors. One line. That line is Brazil.
I did not read this. I lived it. I was that strategist without a chair. Inside an operation of ten thousand cars a month, half the group's retail, I was the one playing the role the study describes: reading the scenario, connecting the areas, sustaining the long-term decision while everyone else put out the fire of the day. Without the title, without the area, without recognition of the function. Then I moved into energy and found the same architecture: someone always carries that role, and the company almost never knows who to name. The study confirms what I felt firsthand: the role exists in every organization that survives. What does not exist, in the vast majority of them, is the recognition that it is a function, and not an accident.
And it was performing that role that I learned to tell apart the two things every diagnosis confuses. The Brazilian business owner does not have an adaptation problem. He is the most versatile operator on the planet: he survives currency swings, interest rates, blackouts, reforms. His problem is another one. The operational decision he makes in minutes; the structural one, he postpones for years. And postponement has a cruel property: it appears in no report. There is no line on the balance sheet called the decision I did not make. There is only the symptom, three years later: the company that earned more and profited less. Revenue growth hiding an error being scaled.
A postponed decision is not prudence. It is accumulated cost.
In energy, that cost does not even wait for the balance sheet. Postponing the bet on infrastructure, on storage, on position, does not erode margin; it erodes relevance. The window closes and the cycle decides for you. A maturing market does not reward the one who adapted. It rewards the one who chose first.
The study ends optimistic: companies will build their areas, the career will take shape. For the large ones, perhaps. But that is the answer of those who already know they need strategy, and the Brazilian deficit is one floor above, in the owner who has no chair, does not miss it, and accumulates cost in silence. For that owner, the strategist who is missing will not come from the org chart. He already exists: he is the board member, the advisor, the outside mind who comes in when the fire grows too big for improvisation. I know because I held that place from inside before holding it from outside. The study mapped the strategist with a badge. The country bleeds on the decision that never had any chair at all.
The question, therefore, is not whether Brazil will train strategists. It is whether those who already decide will stop confusing postponing with thinking.
Because strategy was never a job title. It is the price you accept paying to decide before the comfortable hour.
Be comfortable in discomfort.
Bernardo Bardawil
In a world in constant evolution, the entrepreneur and the executive share a fundamental principle: the commitment to continuous learning. The concept of lifelong learning is not just a trend, it is a vital necessity to stand out in a competitive and unpredictable market.
Soft skills, hard skills, and natural abilities must be developed at every stage of the professional journey. Just as a researcher cannot abandon books, a professional must never drift away from learning. Whoever stops learning becomes obsolete, and the market does not forgive.
I am living proof of this. I worked for 21 years at the same company, my family's business. There was comfort, it is true. I knew I was unlikely to be fired, but something inside me cried out for more. The responsibility of staying ahead of my time in knowledge was not a requirement, but for me, it was a non-negotiable value.
Along my path, I invested in myself: short courses at renowned institutions like HSM, Franklin Covey, and Fundacao Dom Cabral; an MBA; and other programs that, at the time, seemed only like extra steps, but became the foundation for what was to come.
Then I made the most challenging decision of my life: I gave up the position of successor in the family business. I changed cities, changed industries, and started from zero. It was risky, it was hard, but it was liberating. I managed to win relevant positions and build a reputation of my own, detached from the past.
That journey brought me new calls. The market began to see me as a Mentor, Board Member, and Advisor. And, even without it being a mandatory requirement, I made the decision to specialize. I took a board member course and a specialization in Family Businesses. That was crucial to turn my experience into credibility and, above all, into concrete results.
And that is exactly where the main point of this text comes in: being strategic in your qualification choices.
It is not about accumulating diplomas or attending random courses. It is about choosing programs aligned with your moment in life, your trajectory, and your future aspirations. The market is not just looking for someone who has an MBA, but for someone who knows how to use the knowledge they gained to generate impact.
Choose renowned courses, aligned with your goals and with the current context. And, more importantly, when you invest in knowledge, give your best. Understand that a diploma is not enough. Respect and recognition come from results: be the best in the class, deliver excellence, earn the recognition.
And before you say it is not easy, know this: I am dyslexic and I have ADHD. I faced countless difficulties, but I overcame all of them with dedication and focus.
So my advice is simple: start today. Do not wait for the perfect moment, it will never come. Choose now a course, a mentor, or even a book, but take the first step. Today is the day you start building the trajectory you always wanted. Time will pass anyway, the difference will be in what you do with it.
You can transform your trajectory. It depends only on you.
Bernardo Bardawil
Continue in this column · How I Overcame Myself and My FearsFor 21 years, I built a safe career, working in the same place, with a well-defined succession plan and a salary that was comfortable for my reality. At 38, my life seemed set, with a relevant position that gave me status and access I had never imagined. In that context, there was no need to expose myself, to speak in public, to give talks, or to seek relevance on social media. I was already relevant in my own universe.
But the pandemic, or the famous midlife crisis, brought an unexpected turn. I made a radical decision: to abandon my comfortable life and start from zero. At 44, I came face to face with a frightening world. Suddenly, I was no longer relevant, I no longer had power or security, and, hardest of all, I was now constantly being evaluated.
Reality knocked at the door: I needed to expose myself in order to start again. Came the interviews, a psychological torture in which your future is analyzed in a few minutes under intense pressure. Then, networking, walking into rooms not to ask for something, but to show who I am and what I know. And finally, the understanding that the market is a bubble where getting in is only the first step.
Faced with that, I realized I needed to change my approach. I had always been an avid reader, but my passion was fiction, not technical books. Even so, I took ownership of my story. I decided to step even further out of my comfort zone, embracing the mantra: be comfortable in discomfort. I started saying yes to everything I used to say no to.
Want to give talks? Before, no. Now, yes.
Want to appear on social media? Before, no. Now, yes.
Want to write? Before, no. Now, yes, even being dyslexic and struggling to organize my ideas.
That was when artificial intelligence came into the picture, helping me structure my texts with clarity. Today, I have articles and texts that add value. I am not Cortella yet, but I will get there.
Summing up what I learned on this journey: continuous learning is mandatory. We must be comfortable in discomfort and learn to say yes to new opportunities. It is essential to have clarity in our goals and to deliver real value, avoiding doing things just to do them. Challenge yourself, grow daily, and never stop learning. Life will not let up.
If you follow me, you know my message is always the same: prepare yourself and never stop learning. That is the secret.
Bernardo Bardawil
Continue in this column · Fear of Failing or Fear of Giving Something Up?This subject was raised by a friend of mine, Gustavo Carriconde, and he had no idea how deep it really runs in my life. I told him I would write about it one day, but the topic stirred me more than he imagined. So I decided to bring this reflection to you.
Anyone who looks at my trajectory will see that I spent 21 years at the same company, always growing, taking on new challenges. But few know that, one day, I abandoned all that security to start from zero. I was young, I was 40. Today I am 44. It has not been that long.
What no one sees is that this was a choice with no way back. Beyond giving up a consolidated trajectory, I changed cities, from Fortaleza to Sao Paulo, in the middle of a pandemic. In other words, with no prospect in sight, in a hostile scenario. But I am not here to talk about victimhood, my history proves I never had reason for it.
Now, to the central point: when I made that decision, what weighed most on my mind? The fear of failing or giving up my security?
Fear is a strange force. It can paralyze you or warn you not to make mistakes. I was always a Formula 1 fan, and every great driver understands this. Senna used to say that the day he lost his fear would be the day to stop. Because fear kept him on the line.
So we already know the problem is not in fear itself, but in how we deal with it. The real question is: do you fear failing, or do you fear giving something up?
In the mentoring I do, I see that people do not freeze only from the fear of failing. What truly stops them from moving forward are the consequences of that failure. If you are over 40, you grew up in a time when mistakes had severe consequences. Wrote a word wrong? Redo the whole page. My nephew today has never been through that. The phone's autocorrect does the work for him. If he gets something wrong on his father's iPhone, he just reinstalls the system.
The real dilemma is in giving up. Every decision has a price. Many times, it means giving up a legacy, a position, money, your own ego. And that is the real cost of the decision we often do not want to face.
The price is not always too high. But it will always be proportional to the size of your choice. And that is where the fear of failing comes in: we can lose everything or, worse, lose what matters most to us. And not always, in fact most of the time, does that have anything to do with money.
To give up means letting go of stability, accepting that maybe you are not as capable as you imagined, losing credibility, comfort, security. And that is hard. That is why, often, avoiding a decision becomes a synonym for avoiding the sacrifice.
When we reach this point, fear returns to the scene. But now it has two paths: to paralyze you or to make you more attentive to the details. You can use it to be more strategic, more thorough, more prepared to make a conscious decision.
The question that remains is: will you accept security and give up your dream, or will you study and prepare as much as possible to reduce the chances of error?
Today, I live in Sao Paulo, with no connection to my old job. I am building my story. And you? What story will you want to tell?
Bernardo Bardawil
Continue in this column · Strategic Choices: The Transforming Power of Continuous EducationA direct reply from me. The ISD takes 3 minutes and guides our conversation.
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