# Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez — texto completo (en) > Texto das páginas públicas de https://bairogonzalez.com/ em English. A página de referência sobre a pessoa é https://bairogonzalez.com/en/about/. --- ## Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez — Founder URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ Idioma: en Descrição: Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez: a Colombian immigrant who fell, got back up and made every no the ground of a yes. The journey, the path, the ecosystem. ### Every no is the ground of a yes Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez lost everything more than once. He got back up every time. And he discovered that lifetime is the only thing that never comes back, so he decided to build in order to protect it. This is his story: a Colombian boy who announced Brazil before he knew it, arrived in 2002 with capoeira as his bridge, and heard "it can't be done" more times than he can count. He heard it when the floor gave way in a country that was not yet his. When he created a hair-treatment course before the market took the field seriously. When his partners pushed him out of his own idea. When he lost everything with many people depending on him. When the banks refused to integrate what he had built. Every no became a brick. On the seventh attempt, the house stood. ### Start where you are If you want to be inspired: The hero's journey (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-heros-journey/). His life in Joseph Campbell's twelve stages, from the ordinary world to the return, and what each fall teaches you. If you are going through pain: The path (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/). Questions people ask when the ground disappears: what to do when you go broke, how to get out of debt, how to start over after failure, how to find silence in the middle of the noise. Answered from what he lived through. If you want to understand what drives those who change history: Visionaries (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/). The ones who heard "it can't be done" and kept going, and the dates that link their story to this one. If you invest in people: For those who invest in people (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/for-those-who-invest-in-people/). Falls and comebacks, risky decisions, execution, and the thesis of lifetime as value. ### Who he is An entrepreneur born in Colombia and based in Brazil, Bairo is the founder of an ecosystem born from real pain: that of the producer without credit, of the patient far from an answer, of the food that is left over while others go without, of artificial intelligence too expensive for those who need it most. From there came CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness; Xperienc Global Labs, a biotechnology research company registered in London; BTZ Chain and its governance coin, BICOIN (BTZ); the AI orchestrator CLAIN; qrqbits; and Instituto CEASA, the humanitarian front. He describes all of it as a body: CLAIN is the brain, BTZ Chain the veins, BICOIN the blood, Xperienc the neural connection, qrqbits the external transmission. Explore the ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) ### Manifesto 14:20 On October 1, 2026, fifty-five years after the opening of Walt Disney World, Bairo marked the beginning of the ecosystem at 14:20, a tribute to the hydrogen frequency, 1420 MHz, the frequency of silence. For 8 p.m., he announced the first record of the manifesto on BTZ Chain: something written on the network, nothing emitted on air. Read the Manifesto 14:20 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/milestone-1420/) ### The story, in chapters - Fifty-five years later (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/): Disney, Ford, Jobs, Senna and the lineage of those who kept going. - Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/): a boyhood dream and the arrival in Brazil. - The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/): the salon, the daughter and the idea that came too early. - Every no is the ground of a yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/): natural cosmetics and the idea they took from him. - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/): the deepest fall and the decision to do what he didn't know how to do. - The coin and the road (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-coin-and-the-road/): the first yes, and the world. - The God of the impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/): faith, the inner search and the best self. - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/): 1420 MHz and the six months at home. - A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/): how the ecosystem was born. - The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/): what stopped being a no. - One name, four presences (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/one-name-four-presences/): the executive, the friend and the bro behind the name. - The plant and reconnection (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-plant-and-reconnection/): the silence, the reunion with himself and the bridge that is not a destination. - The voice he follows (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-voice-he-follows/): the faith of a man who sends God ahead of time. - Leaving the Matrix (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/leaving-the-matrix/): the most prosperous version that has not happened yet. The man who searched for his own best self now searches for the best in others. Start with chapter 1 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/) · The hero's journey (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-heros-journey/) · Who he is (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/about/) · The plant and the science (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-plant-and-the-science/) --- ## For those who invest in people — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/for-those-who-invest-in-people/ Idioma: en Descrição: Why bet on Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez: falls and comebacks, risky decisions, execution, and the thesis of lifetime as value. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez is the kind of founder who has lost everything more than once and, every time, went back to building. Anyone who invests in founders knows the plan changes. The market changes, the product changes, the round changes. The person stays. This page is about the person. ### Resilience is measured in falls and comebacks Anyone looks resilient in a pitch deck. The proof is in the track record. - He arrived in Brazil in 2002 and lost his footing. No documents in hand, far from home, afraid. He came back by starting from zero, with his partner and their newborn daughter. - He arrived too early with an idea, and gave up. Artificial intelligence and augmented reality applied to the business, years before it became a trend. He came back with a new rule: don't stop at the first answer. - His partners pushed him out of his own business. He came back reinvented, with events and digital printing, and built up capital. - He lost everything with many people depending on him. He came back by doing what he didn't know how to do. - He was left hanging by the people he had helped. He came back, he says, with a digital currency launched at the right time, a story told in The coin and the road (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-coin-and-the-road/). - He went broke again, after he had already known success. He came back with faith, with six months of work at home and with the foundation of an entire ecosystem. No one knows for sure how many times he tried. He doesn't keep that count either. The number he chose to tell his own story is seven: the seventh attempt, the one that worked, carried all the others inside it. ### The risky decisions What separates a founder from a dreamer are the decisions made when no one is watching. Investing instead of founding. With the capital from events, he decided to play a different position and joined a company as an investing partner. He lost. He learned to choose whom he builds with. Doing what he didn't know how to do. Broke, instead of going back to familiar ground, he decided to build a currency, a bank and a network. He didn't know how to do any of it. He learned by doing. Going back to the same ground. When the coin worked, he didn't pocket the money and walk away. He went back to building in the same field, now on a currency project of his own, with people around him who shared the same idea of the future. Six months without leaving the house. In front of a computer, without knowing how to code, he says, he built the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, on a company that had existed since 2019. It is the kind of risk that does not show up on a spreadsheet: the risk of giving everything you have, including your time, to an idea that does not exist yet. Turning refusal into infrastructure. The banks refused to integrate his solution. He didn't fight them. He went and built his own technology: artificial intelligence, financial messaging under the ISO 20022 standard, blockchain and tokenization of real-world assets. And he left the regulated part to those authorized to operate it. ### The thesis: lifetime as value All of Bairo's products rest on the same idea. Human life. Story. And the one thing that never comes back: time. In 1983, Steve Jobs asked the Macintosh team to shave ten seconds off the boot time, because ten seconds, multiplied by millions of people, added up to entire lifetimes. Bairo takes that arithmetic seriously. For him, lifetime is the most valuable energy there is, and every technology should be measured by the time it gives back to people. That is where the BTZ Chain yardstick comes from: 1 BTZ = 1 minute of human life. It is a yardstick of purpose, a way of remembering what the network exists to protect. It was never a price, nor a promise of value. The same thesis runs through every front. CEASA Bank exists so the producer doesn't lose days waiting for credit. Xperienc exists so the patient doesn't lose months waiting for a second opinion. CLAIN exists so that artificial intelligence isn't too expensive for those who need it most. Instituto CEASA exists because hunger does not wait. ### Execution Vision without execution is just talk. Bairo's track record has both. He says he built, on his own, the foundation of a financial platform for agribusiness, CEASA Bank, which in Brazil operates on the infrastructure of an authorized institution. The company that operates the brand has existed since 2019. In 2026, he set up in London Xperienc Global Labs, a biotechnology research and development company, and a related company of CEASA Bank, also registered in London. According to him, he works between Brazil, the United Kingdom, Bolivia and Dubai. After six months alone, he brought together three old acquaintances to finish the work. Someone who has been left hanging and still goes back to building as a team has made peace with the idea of partners. And he says in public what is not ready yet. The goal of reaching 142 niche artificial intelligences in 142 days, starting October 1, 2026, is treated as a goal, not a result. For those who invest in people, that is worth more than any number: it is the habit of calling things by their name. ### What he is willing to give Bairo has already given time, money, nights, years and his own reputation to ideas he believed in. Some went wrong, and they are all told here. He is willing to give his blood to create what, for him, is the most valuable thing: a way to protect people's lifetime. Not as a speech. Because he knows, firsthand, what it is to lose years that don't come back. ### What he asks He does not ask you to buy anything. There are no shares, no tokens and no promise of returns here: there is a person and the road he has traveled. What he is looking for are partners who believe in the person before the project. People who understand that a founder who fell so many times and got up every time knows something no school teaches: how to keep going. If that is the bet you make, the conversation starts here. Talk to Bairo (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/contact/) · The hero's journey (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-heros-journey/) · About Bairo (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/about/) · The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) --- ## About Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/about/ Idioma: en Descrição: Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez: a Colombian in Brazil since 2002 who fell, got back up and made human lifetime the measure of all he builds. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez is a Colombian entrepreneur, born in 1982 and based in Brazil since 2002, who lost everything more than once, got back up every time, and made human lifetime the measure of everything he builds. That is the short version. The long one begins with a boy. ### The boy who announced Brazil In Colombia, still a child, he told anyone who would listen that one day he would live in Brazil. Nobody took him seriously. There was no plan, no path, no one waiting for him on the other side. There was capoeira. Before the language, before the country, he learned Brazil with his body, to the rhythm of the berimbau. Capoeira was the bridge. In 2002, he crossed. He came to work for an education company, in a management position. The boyhood dream had become an address. He likes to say that there are no coincidences and no accidents. There are purposes, dreams and execution. ### What he learned by falling Almost everything Bairo knows, he learned on the ground. He learned what it is to have the floor give way in a country that was not yet his, far from home and afraid. From that time came a sentence: the sun is for everyone, but shade, in the heat, is for the few. He learned, with his newborn daughter in his arms, that a mistake no longer cost only him. He opened a salon with his partner. He created a hair-treatment course, which he called "Biomedicina Capilar", and taught trichology and scalp therapy when the field was still in its infancy in Brazil, with the hair strand and the scalp animated in 3D on screen. He wanted to go further and bring artificial intelligence and augmented reality into the business. He even recorded a sample of a 4D course. He heard that it would not work, and gave up. Years later, it became a trend. Arriving too early is also arriving alone. He learned not to stop at the first answer. He launched natural-based cosmetics under his own brand, Biomedhair, at a time when few people were betting on them. They said it would not work. It did. The brand came to bring together the cosmetics, the course and the scalp-therapy devices. He learned to choose whom he builds with. He says his own partners pushed him out of the business and kept the idea. He learned the weight of fifty lives. He invested as a partner in a company that was not what it seemed, and it did not hold up. He says fifty people depended on him. He did not complain. He decided to do what he did not know how to do. And he learned the hardest thing of all: that the decision to keep going cannot depend on anyone's gratitude. The same people he had helped left him stranded. From every fall, he brought back a brick. That is why he says, without hurry and without drama: Every no is the ground of a yes. ### What moves him Time. Money is lost and made again. A partner leaves and another arrives. A company closes, and another opens. Bairo lived through all of it. What he could never get back was time: the hours away from his daughter, the years in the shade, the months spent on ideas that others carried off. That is why everything he builds revolves around human life. The producer who wakes before dawn to sell what he grew. The patient waiting for an answer in a language she can understand. The family that needs food today, not a year from now. The minute that does not come back. When he says that lifetime is the most valuable energy there is, he is not making poetry. He is doing his own arithmetic. ### How he decides Bairo decides before he has the path. He says he learned that from Ayrton Senna: first the decision to be the best, then the victories. Courage and persistence come after the decision, never before. He starts with what he does not know. He did not know how to build a coin, or a bank, or how to code. He started anyway. He risks what is his. When he wanted to turn what he had seen into something real, he sat down in front of a computer and spent six months without leaving the house, building. He turns refusal into infrastructure. When the banks refused to integrate his solution, he went and built his own technology, and left the regulated part to those authorized to operate it. And he separates dream from fact. He calls ready what is ready, a goal what is a goal, and a vision what is still a vision. It is his way of honoring those who trust him. ### What he delivers From the seventh attempt, the one that worked, an ecosystem was born that he describes as a body. CLAIN is the brain, BTZ Chain is the veins, BICOIN (BTZ) is the blood, Xperienc Global Labs is the neural connection and qrqbits is the external transmission. Around that body stand CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness operating on the infrastructure of an authorized institution; Instituto CEASA, the humanitarian front for access to food; SOSPROCESSOS, legal analysis led by a lawyer; the triage system Hospital Triage, with a clinical assistant and human validation; Investment House, for the tokenization of real-world assets; and the channel 1420mhz.org. Hospital Granja Julieta, in São Paulo, is a separate company, with its own shareholders, that walks alongside Xperienc as a clinical partner. In 2026, he set up Xperienc Global Labs in London, along with a related company of CEASA Bank, also registered in London. According to him, he now works between Brazil, the United Kingdom, Bolivia, where a CEASA Bank operation is being set up, and Dubai, after having also built ventures in Portugal, the United States and Hong Kong. Each front was born from a pain he lived through or saw up close. They are told in The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/). ### Who he is to those close to him In the business world, he is Bairo. To those who saw him suffer, he is Leandro. Day to day, he is the brother, the friend, the bro. Under any of these names, there is one habit that does not change: he looks for the best version of people, sometimes before they see it themselves. It makes sense. For years, he was looking for his own. ### To keep going - The hero's journey (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-heros-journey/): his life in twelve stages, and what each one teaches you. - For those who invest in people (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/for-those-who-invest-in-people/): why bet on the founder. - The story in chapters (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/), from the beginning. - Talk to him (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/contact/). --- ## The hero's journey — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-heros-journey/ Idioma: en Descrição: The life of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez in the 12 stages of the hero's journey: from Colombia to the seventh attempt, and what each fall teaches you. The life of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez fits, stage by stage, into the hero's journey: the path Joseph Campbell found in myths from all over the world, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), and that Christopher Vogler organized into twelve stages. It is not a superhero story. It is the story of an ordinary man who fell many times and got up every time. That is why it works for you. In each stage, there is what he lived through, what it teaches you, and the chapter where the full story is told. ### 1. The ordinary world A boy in Colombia, born in 1982. Nothing special in sight: a house, a language, a country. And a sentence he kept repeating without anyone taking it seriously: "One day I'm going to live in Brazil." There was no plan and no money. There was a certainty spoken out loud, before there was any road leading to it. What it teaches you: every great road begins in a small place. The dream you don't yet know how to fulfill is already doing its job, which is to point the direction. Chapter: Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/) ### 2. The call to adventure The call came through a capoeira circle. Before he knew the country, he learned Brazil with his body, to the rhythm of the berimbau. And, in 2002, the door opened: an education company brought him over for a management position. The boyhood dream had become a ticket. What it teaches you: the call rarely arrives the way we imagine. Sometimes it is a song, an invitation, a side door. Pay attention to what keeps coming back. Chapter: Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/) ### 3. Refusal of the call One day he wanted to follow his own path and leave the company. He found himself without documents in hand, far from home, afraid. Years in the shade followed. And, when a new idea knocked on the door, bringing artificial intelligence and augmented reality into the business, to the point of recording a sample of a 4D course, he was told it wouldn't work. He believed in the idea, and gave up anyway. Years later, it became a trend. What it teaches you: fear is not a sign that you are wrong. Giving up on an idea you knew was good hurts more than trying and falling. Keep that pain: next time it turns into courage. Chapters: Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/) · The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) ### 4. Meeting the mentor His mentors were not in the same room. They were in the stories. Walt Disney, who saw the park before it existed. Henry Ford, who heard "impossible" and said keep going. Steve Jobs, who put human life inside ten seconds. Ayrton Senna, who decided to be the best before any victory. And there was a flesh-and-blood mentor, too small to speak: his daughter. When she was born, a mistake no longer cost only him. What it teaches you: you can learn from people you will never meet. Choose carefully the stories you let live in your head, because they become your yardstick. Chapters: Fifty-five years later (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/) · The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) ### 5. Crossing the threshold He moved to the city where his daughter was born and tried again. This time, he did not stop at the first answer. He began producing natural-based cosmetics under his own brand, Biomedhair, at a time when the market was looking the other way. People said it wouldn't work. It did. For the first time, he got there before the wave and stayed in the water. What it teaches you: the crossing happens when you do, again, what you once abandoned. You don't need to be ready. You need to not stop at the first answer. Chapter: Every no is the ground of a yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) ### 6. Tests, allies and enemies With the brand on its feet, he saw the next step, touchscreen technology for the business. The answer came from within: the partners pushed him out and kept the idea. He went to work in events and digital printing, built up capital and reinvented himself. That was where he discovered the sentence he still carries: every no is the ground of a yes. What it teaches you: not every ally stays to the end, and that is not the end. Every closed door leaves something in your hands. Learn to choose whom you build with. Chapter: Every no is the ground of a yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) ### 7. Approach to the inmost cave With the money from events, he decided to play a different position: to invest as a partner in a company. The business was not what it seemed. It did not hold. He lost everything again, and this time he was not alone in the fall: many people depended on him. Human lives, fifty of them by his own count. What it teaches you: there is a moment when the fall stops being yours alone. That is where you discover who you are. Complaining is the natural reaction. It is not the only one. Chapter: Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) ### 8. The ordeal Broke, he made the most unlikely decision: to do what he did not know how to do. Build a currency, a bank, a network. It went wrong, and not for lack of ideas. The very people he had helped left him hanging. It is the shortest sentence in this story, and the hardest. He kept going. What it teaches you: when the people you helped walk away, the question is not "why?". It is "do I keep going?". Your decision to go on cannot depend on anyone's gratitude. Chapter: Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) ### 9. The reward And, this time, it worked. Bairo says that a digital currency he launched at the right moment served as the foundation for an urban mobility app. For the first time, an idea of his was neither taken nor abandoned. Around it grew a community of people who shared the same idea of the future, and the immigrant who once lost his footing began, according to him, to build businesses in several countries. What it teaches you: the reward often comes through the same door where you took the most blows. Don't abandon the ground where you fell. Sometimes that is where your yes is. Chapter: The coin and the road (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-coin-and-the-road/) ### 10. The road back A beautiful map does not mean an easy road. At some point along the way, he was once again broke, broken and beaten. No plan left in the drawer. What remained was a flame of hope and faith. It was in a congregation, listening to stories of ordinary people who had crossed through the impossible, that he came to believe in the God of the impossible. And, in a search inward, he saw his best self: a prosperous man, not only in money, in peace. What it teaches you: when nothing is left on the outside, there is still the inside. Finding silence in the middle of the noise is not running from the problem. It is the first step toward seeing the way out. Chapter: The God of the impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/) ### 11. The resurrection He came out of that experience with an image and no map. He didn't know how to code. He asked for wisdom, understanding and courage to remember how to get there. He took as his symbol the hydrogen frequency, 1420 MHz, the band the world agreed to leave in silence. He sat down in front of a computer and spent six months without leaving the house. Out of that came the foundation of CEASA Bank's platform and artificial intelligence, built on a company he had had since 2019. The banks refused to integrate the solution. He used the no as ground and built his own infrastructure. What it teaches you: being reborn is not going back to who you were. It is building, with your own hands, the person you saw. Sometimes that takes six months of closed doors and no applause. Chapter: The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) ### 12. Return with the elixir After six months alone, he was no longer alone: three old acquaintances joined in to finish the work. The seventh attempt, the one that worked, carried all the others inside it. What he brought back is a body: CLAIN as the brain, BTZ Chain as the veins, BICOIN as the blood, Xperienc as the neural connection, qrqbits as the external transmission. And one idea that runs through it all: human lifetime is the most valuable thing there is, because it never comes back. The man who searched for his own best self now searches for the best in others. What it teaches you: the elixir is not success. It is what you do with what you learned by falling. Your whole story, falls included, is the most valuable thing you have to give others. Chapters: A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/) · The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) · One name, four presences (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/one-name-four-presences/) · Manifesto 14:20 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/milestone-1420/) ### And your journey? Everyone who has ever gone broke, been evicted, heard "it can't be done" or lost their footing is in one of these twelve stages. None of them is the end. If you are in the cave, know that it has a way out. If you are in the ordeal, know that many people have crossed it before you. If you have already come back, tell your story. It could be someone's bridge. For those who invest in people (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/for-those-who-invest-in-people/) · The story in chapters (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/) · About Bairo (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/about/) 1. The ordinary world: when the dream comes before the road (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/the-ordinary-world-when-the-dream-comes-before-the-road/): Stage 1 of the Hero's Journey: a boy in Colombia who said he would live in Brazil. How to recognize your starting point and the dream already inside it. 2. The call to adventure: when life asks for more (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/the-call-to-adventure-when-life-asks-for-more/): Stage 2 of the Hero's Journey: capoeira as a bridge and Bairo's arrival in Brazil in 2002. How to recognize the call in your life and take the first step. 3. Refusal of the call: when fear paralyzes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/refusal-of-the-call-when-fear-paralyzes/): Stage 3 of the Hero's Journey: without documents in hand, far from home and afraid, Bairo spent years in the shade. How to get through paralyzing fear. 4. Meeting the mentor: who inspires you to keep going (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/meeting-the-mentor-who-inspires-you-to-keep-going/): Stage 4 of the Hero's Journey: Disney, Ford, Jobs and Senna as Bairo's distant mentors. How to find someone who inspires you when no one believes. 5. Crossing the threshold: how to start from zero (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/crossing-the-threshold-how-to-start-from-zero/): Stage 5 of the Hero's Journey: his daughter is born, and Bairo opens a salon with his partner. How to take the step of no return and start from zero. 6. Tests, allies and enemies: when they say it can't be done (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/tests-allies-and-enemies-when-they-say-it-cant-be-done/): Stage 6 of the Hero's Journey: ideas too early, a brand that worked and partners who pushed Bairo out. How to turn every "no" into a foundation. 7. Approach to the inmost cave: the opportunity that deceives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/approach-to-the-inmost-cave-the-opportunity-that-deceives/): Stage 7 of the Hero's Journey: with capital from events, Bairo invests in a company that was not what it seemed. How to recognize the cave before entering. 8. The ordeal: when you lose everything (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/the-ordeal-when-you-lose-everything/): Stage 8 of the Hero's Journey: the business collapsed and many people depended on Bairo. What to do when you lose everything and still have to decide. 9. The reward: when it finally works (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/the-reward-when-it-finally-works/): Stage 9 of the Hero's Journey: the coin that, according to Bairo, became the base of a mobility app. What to do when your first victory arrives. 10. The road back: when success is not enough (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/the-road-back-when-success-is-not-enough/): Stage 10 of the Hero's Journey: from the road through six countries to a new fall, Bairo discovers the longest road led inward. And yours? 11. The resurrection: how to be reborn after rock bottom (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/the-resurrection-how-to-be-reborn-after-rock-bottom/): Stage 11 of the Hero's Journey: faith, silence and six months at home at a computer. How Bairo was reborn from rock bottom, and how to start yours. 12. Return with the elixir: turning pain into purpose (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/return-with-the-elixir-turning-pain-into-purpose/): Stage 12 of the Hero's Journey: the seventh attempt, three old acquaintances and an ecosystem. How to turn your pain into something that serves others. --- ## The Seventh Attempt Method: from no to yes in 7 steps URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/ Idioma: en Descrição: Seven steps to build a business after a no: say the dream, read the no, test small, choose partners, count the time, learn, and go back to the circle. No one knows for sure how many times Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez tried, thought about stopping and almost gave up. He tells his own story by a number: the seventh attempt, the one that worked. It didn't work by luck. It worked because it carried inside it everything the six before had taught. The Seventh Attempt Method is that baggage organized into seven steps. It is not a get-rich formula, it promises no results and it does not ask you to go broke six times before you get it right. It asks the opposite: that you learn from his falls so you need fewer of your own. Bairo likes to say there are no coincidences and no accidents, only purpose, dreams and execution. The method follows that order. Steps 1 and 2 take care of the dream and the purpose. Steps 3 and 4 put the dream to the test. Steps 5, 6 and 7 are execution. ### Step 1 — Say the dream out loud What it is: writing, in a single sentence, what you want to build, for whom and why. And saying that sentence to other people. From his life: ever since he was a boy, in Colombia, Bairo told anyone who would listen that one day he would live in Brazil. It wasn't a plan; it was a certainty spoken out loud before there was any road. The road came later, through capoeira, and in 2002 he arrived. A dream that stays in your head gets no help, no criticism and no customers. A dream said out loud starts finding people. Exercise: complete, in 25 words or fewer: "I will build ___ for , because ." Read it aloud to three people this week. Write down the first question each of them asks: that is where the doubt your business needs to answer lives. ### Step 2 — Ask what is inside the no What it is: treating every "no" as information, not as a verdict. Before reacting, classify the no. From his life: Bairo twice heard that an idea wouldn't work, and he reacted in different ways. When he wanted to bring artificial intelligence and augmented reality into the business, people said it couldn't be done. He believed in it, but gave up. Years later, it became a trend. When he decided to manufacture natural-based cosmetics, people said again that it wouldn't work. This time he didn't stop. It worked, and natural cosmetics became a trend too. That was when he put into words the sentence that became his rule: every no is the ground of a yes. Exercise: list the last five "nos" you heard about your project and classify each one: - A market no: nobody wants to pay for this. It is the only one that tells you to change the idea. - A timing no: the idea is good, but it arrived too early or too late. It calls for patience and a smaller format. - A person no: whoever said no is not your customer or has other interests. Note it and move on. - An execution no: the idea works, the way of doing it doesn't. It calls for adjustment, not giving up. ### Step 3 — Prove it small: the 14/20 rule What it is: before spending real money, test with real people. The rule is simple: in 14 days, 20 conversations with people who could pay for what you want to sell. Not with friends who want to please you. With potential customers. The numbers echo 14:20, the time at which Bairo marked the beginning of what he built, and they serve as a reminder: listen first, then build. From his life: the salon Bairo opened with his partner, when their daughter was born, did not work out as well as they wanted. But from inside it came an idea bigger than the salon: a course in hair treatments, in a field that only years later found its place in Brazil, trichology. The idea did not come from a spreadsheet. It came from daily life, from close to the people who were already there. Exercise: book 20 conversations in 14 days. In each one, ask how the person solves the problem today, how much it costs them and what annoys them. Don't sell anything. At the end, ask for a small commitment: a reservation, an order, a "let me know when you open" with a name and phone number. If none of the 20 commits to anything, go back to step 2. ### Step 4 — Choose whom you build with What it is: a partner is a decision as serious as the idea. And every agreement between partners is written before things work out, not after. From his life: with the cosmetics brand on its feet, Bairo saw the next step, a touchscreen solution. It was his idea. The partners pushed him out of the business, and the idea stayed with them. Years later, on the seventh attempt, he went back to building as a team, with three old acquaintances. For someone who had been left hanging, the word "together" stopped being a detail. Exercise: before signing any partnership, each of you answer in writing, alone, and then compare: how much money and how many hours does each one put in? Who decides what? How does someone leave, and for how much? What happens if one stops working? Who owns the brand and the ideas? If the answers don't match, the problem showed up in time. Take the answers to a lawyer and turn them into a partners' agreement. ### Step 5 — Count in lifetime What it is: measuring the business in time, not only in money. How many weeks can the cash hold out? How many people depend on this decision? How many hours of your life is it costing? From his life: with the capital built up in events and digital printing, Bairo joined a company as an investing partner. The business was not what it seemed and did not hold. He went broke again, and this time, he says, fifty people depended on him. Steve Jobs, as Andy Hertzfeld tells it, convinced an engineer to cut seconds from the Macintosh's boot time by showing that seconds, multiplied by millions of people, added up to entire lifetimes. Bairo thinks the same way: lifetime is the measure of everything. Exercise: today, build a cash flow for the next 13 weeks: what comes in, what goes out, week by week. Divide the money available by your monthly spending: that is your runway, in months. Also write down your red line, the point at which you stop, change course or ask for help, and decide it now, with a cool head. Before putting money into someone else's business, ask for the numbers and show them to an accountant. ### Step 6 — Learn what you don't know What it is: when the familiar road has run out, heading into the unknown on purpose, with the tools of your time. From his life: broke, Bairo made the most unlikely decision. Instead of going back to familiar ground, he decided to do what he didn't know how to do: build a currency, a bank, a network. It went wrong, and the very people he had helped left him hanging. He kept going. Later, without knowing how to code, he sat down at the computer and spent six months without leaving the house, learning and building. Out of those months came the foundation of the CEASA Bank platform, built on a company that had existed since 2019. Exercise: make three columns. In the first, what you need to know and don't. In the second, what you will learn on your own, in free courses such as those from Sebrae, Brazil's small-business support agency. In the third, what you will ask a partner for, hire out, or do with the help of artificial intelligence. Pick one thing from the second column and give it 30 days. ### Step 7 — Go quiet and return to the circle What it is: after the fall, stopping the noise before deciding, taking stock of what each attempt left behind, and getting back in the game. From his life: there was a moment when Bairo was broke, broken and beaten, but still had a flame of hope and faith. It was in silence, and in the faith he found, that he says he saw his best self. For him, the symbol of that silence is the 1420 MHz frequency, the hydrogen line, which countries agreed to keep free so that the universe can be heard. And there is capoeira, his first bridge to Brazil. In the circle, the ginga never stops: the body goes, comes back, and never stays still long enough to be taken down. Whoever stops, falls. Exercise: before any big decision, spend 20 minutes without screens and without conversation, just with paper. Then take stock: for every attempt you have made, write down what it left behind. In his story, the course left method, the idea that came too early left an eye for the future, the cosmetics left proof that he could create from nothing, the partners left the lesson about whom to build with. Your next attempt begins with that list in hand. If the weight is too much, don't carry it alone. In Brazil, CVV answers for free, 24 hours a day, at 188. ### What the method is not It is not a promise of money. It is not a shortcut. It does not replace an accountant, a lawyer or a doctor. It is a way to get through the "no" without throwing away what it teaches. Bairo sums it up like this: the seventh attempt carried all the others inside it. Yours can too. ### Read also - Every no is the ground of a yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) - The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) - I'm afraid to start a business: what do I do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/im-afraid-to-start-a-business/) - How to validate a business idea (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-validate-a-business-idea/) --- ## The ecosystem — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/ Idioma: en Descrição: Every front founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez was born from real pain: hunger, the producer without credit, distant health care, costly AI. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez did not build a list of companies. He built a body, and each part of it was born from a pain he lived through or saw up close. Anyone who has been at the bottom knows that pain is not only what hurts. It is also the exact place where something is missing. Bairo has spent his whole life looking at those places. ### A body, not a conglomerate Close your eyes and picture a human body. CLAIN is the brain. It thinks, organizes and coordinates the artificial intelligence agents that work for each front. BTZ Chain is the veins. It is where everything flows, with a record and proof that there is a real person on the other side. BICOIN (BTZ) is the blood. It is what runs through the veins and links one part to another, the network's governance coin. Xperienc is the neural connection. It is the nervous system that links patients, professionals and laboratories, from one country to another, from one language to another. qrqbits is the external transmission. Everything that leaves the body leaves protected. In a body, no part makes sense on its own. The brain without blood stops. Blood without veins is lost. That is how he sees what he has built: not as companies sharing a logo, but as an organism that only lives when whole. And, at the center of this body, one conviction: artificial intelligence is an extension of the human, not the problem. Bairo speaks of the last generation of humans meeting the first generation of AI, code 0.1, or 1.0. Zero and one. People and machines, working together. ### Born from real pain #### Hunger that does not wait: Instituto CEASA In the wholesale food markets, Bairo saw a scene that never leaves the mind of whoever sees it. On one side, good food left over at the end of the day. On the other, families who do not know what they will eat tomorrow. Instituto CEASA was born from that distance. The proposal is to turn the markets' surplus into food that lasts up to two years without refrigeration, so that it reaches those who need it. It is the group's humanitarian front, and perhaps the one most faithful to the man who once, as he tells it, had fifty people depending on him. → institutoceasa.org (site under construction) #### Intelligence that costs too much: CLAIN and 1420mhz.org While building everything he had seen, Bairo ran into a wall that everyone who works with AI knows. Artificial intelligence consumes tokens, and tokens are expensive. Those who most need help are precisely those who can least afford it. The answer was CLAIN, from the English claim: to stake a claim to what is yours. The idea behind the name is that anyone has the right to claim access to intelligence that used to be expensive. 1420mhz.org is the channel that connects the fronts, and it carries the name of the hydrogen frequency, the symbol of the silence he chose to listen to before building. On October 1, 2026, Bairo announced the CLAIN protocol with a public goal: to reach 142 niche artificial intelligences in 142 days. → 1420mhz.org (https://1420mhz.org) #### The producer without credit: CEASA Bank Those who feed the country wake before dawn, carry crates, haggle at the top of their lungs and, very often, remain outside the financial system. No account, no harvest credit, no way to prove what they sell every day. Bairo knows the closed door well. When he took his solution to the banks, he was told no. CEASA Bank is the answer to both refusals, the producer's and his own: a financial platform for agribusiness, operating on the infrastructure of an authorized institution, built to put those who produce, those who process, those who trade and those who buy in direct contact. → ceasabank.com.br (https://ceasabank.com.br) #### Health care that stays far away: Xperienc Global Labs There are patients who wait months for an answer. There are others who find the answer on the other side of the world, in a language they do not understand. Xperienc Global Labs, registered in London as a biotechnology research and development company, focused on medical cannabis, was born to shorten that distance. The proposal brings together laboratories, teleconsultation, an AI clinical assistant always validated by a health professional, and Global Language, an instant translator in which patient and specialist each speak in their own language. With it, a specialist in another country can give a clinical second opinion: a fresh look, not a medical report. Why the plant is at the center: The plant and the science (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-plant-and-the-science/). → xperienc.me (https://xperienc.me) Hospital Granja Julieta, in São Paulo, is a separate company, with its own shareholders, that walks alongside Xperienc as a clinical partner. → hospitalgranjajulieta.com.br (https://hospitalgranjajulieta.com.br) And the triage system Hospital Triage takes the same idea to the front door: a pre-consultation with a clinical assistant and human validation, so that no one is left lost before being seen. → hospitaltriage.ai (site under construction) #### The time no one gives back: BTZ Chain and BICOIN Of all the losses in his life, the only one that never came back was time. Money, he made again. Companies, he reopened. The years, no. BTZ Chain is the proposal of a hybrid blockchain that brings together artificial intelligence and human time, designed to validate what is true and to prove that there is a real person behind every interaction. BICOIN (BTZ) is the governance coin of that network. The project's yardstick, "1 BTZ = 1 minute of human life", is a yardstick of purpose: it is a reminder of what the network exists to protect. It is not a price or a promise. The network is in development and follows the rules that apply to it. → btzchain.org (https://btzchain.org) #### What must be kept safe: qrqbits A family photo, a medical exam, a contract, a recorded voice. Some things, once lost or exposed, do not come back. qrqbits protects files, images, audio and text with layered post-quantum cryptography. It is the part of the body that looks after what leaves it. → qrqbits.org (site under construction) #### Justice that seems too expensive: SOSPROCESSOS Anyone who has ever needed a lawyer and did not know where to begin knows the fear. SOSPROCESSOS is legal analysis supported by artificial intelligence, always led by a lawyer, so that the path of defense becomes clearer for whoever is on the weaker side. #### Ground that becomes value: Investment House An immigrant who has had the ground give way learns the value of an address. Investment House works with the tokenization of real-world assets and with A Mesa ("The Table"), an immersive network of business owners. What is told here is the idea; anyone who wants to know the company will find everything on its website. → investmenthouse.com.br (https://investmenthouse.com.br) ### What keeps the body standing A body does not stand because of one organ. It stands because the blood returns to the heart. That is what Bairo wants to happen here. That the value born from real work, from the producer selling before dawn, from the patient who finds an answer, from the food that no longer goes to waste, returns to people, and is not lost along the way. Part of this body is already walking. Part is still learning to walk, and each front tells, on its own website, where it stands. He prefers it that way: saying what is real, what is a goal and what is still a dream. Because it is the same story as always. First he saw it. Now he is building it. The hero's journey (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-heros-journey/) · For those who invest in people (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/for-those-who-invest-in-people/) · About Bairo (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/about/) --- ## Manifesto 14:20 — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/milestone-1420/ Idioma: en Descrição: Manifesto 14:20: on Oct. 1, 2026, Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez aligned his ecosystem with the hydrogen line. Faith, fight, grit and determination. On October 1, 2026, fifty-five years after the opening of Walt Disney World, Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez marked on the clock the beginning of what he has built. At 14:20 Brasília time (17:20 UTC), the milestone was lit. And at 8 p.m., the hour he calls "8 p.m. North Pole time", Bairo announced the sending of the first record of the manifesto to BTZ Chain. A digital record, on the network, that stays forever with the date and time it was made. The hydrogen frequency marks this record as a symbol, and only as a symbol: nothing is emitted on air, and no one transmits on 1420 MHz. Sent and recorded, here, means written on the network, in tribute to the frequency the world agreed to leave in silence. The time is no accident. For someone who believes, as he does, that there are no coincidences, only purpose, dreams and execution, 14:20 is the frequency of silence written on a clock. ### The frequency of silence 1420 MHz is the hydrogen line, the radio signal of the simplest and most abundant element in the universe (1420.405751768 MHz). Bairo calls it the most prosperous frequency, and also the frequency of silence. The band from 1400 to 1427 MHz is protected by international agreement, under the International Telecommunication Union: no country transmits on it, so that astronomers can listen to the sky. No one transmits there, not this project either. That is why the 14:20 milestone and the 8 p.m. record are symbolic. There is no signal, no radio, nothing that touches that frequency. The silence is the tribute. The number is the alignment. What is written stays on the network. ### Writing it first in the stars Ancient navigators crossed the sea looking at the sky. Not because the stars made the voyage for them, but because they gave direction when everything around was uncertain. That is how Bairo sees entrepreneurship: a sea of uncertainty, where giving up is not an option. In his words: "The new builders write history first in the stars, so they have a guide to navigate by." Writing it first in the stars means choosing the destination before you have the road. It is what Walt Disney did with a park he did not live to see open. It is what this story has done, chapter by chapter, with every no. ### The manifesto Faith, to trust in what cannot yet be seen. Fight, because nothing that matters ever came without it. Grit, to rise one more time than you have fallen. Determination, to keep going when everyone says it can't be done. For Bairo, this is a story any entrepreneur can apply to their own life. It is not a formula or a promise. It is a direction, and he sums it up in one sentence: "The impossible is just something that hasn't been done yet." ### What was announced on this day The activation of the CLAIN protocol. The announced goal is that, within 142 days, there will be a minimum of 142 niche artificial intelligences, each created to help people find their best self. Counting from October 1, 2026, the deadline closes on February 20, 2027. It is a public goal, and that is how it should be read: a commitment, not yet a result. → 1420mhz.org (https://1420mhz.org) A BICOIN (BTZ) transfer on BTZ Chain, announced as a test record of the network, not as a launch or an offer. The project reads it, symbolically, as a transfer of lifetime, because the BICOIN yardstick is "1 BTZ = 1 minute of human life." The idea of time as currency is an old one (Edgar Cahn's time banks have existed since 1980); BTZ Chain proposes a new chapter of it. It is a yardstick of purpose, not a price. The network is in development and subject to applicable regulation. The expansion of the ecosystem, announced the same day: all the ventures now move under the same milestone, 14:20. And there is a detail only number lovers will notice. Written in hertz, the hydrogen frequency is 1 420 405 751.768. The most abundant element in the universe fits inside a number no one is allowed to transmit on. ### What this moment means Fifty-five years ago, the story goes, someone lamented that Walt Disney had not lived to see the park, and heard: "He did see it. That's why it's here." Bairo does not ask for comparison. He asks only for the right to belong to the same family of the stubborn: those who heard "it can't be done" and kept going. At 14:20, he did not say he had arrived. He said he had begun. Nobody needs to buy anything to be part of this story. What is celebrated here is time, and time is not sold: it is lived. Read the story from the beginning (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/) · Explore the ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) --- ## Guided Journey — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/guided-journey/ Idioma: en Descrição: An interactive guide, inspired by Bairo's method and story, to look at your path, your patterns and your best self. Everything stays on your device. Need help right now? The Guided Journey needs JavaScript turned on. It runs only on your device and sends nothing out. --- ## Open data — Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/open-data/ Idioma: en Descrição: The files this site publishes for machines, search engines and AI assistants: texts, sitemap and structured data. These are the files the site publishes in open formats. All of them are generated from the same pages you read here. - llms.txt (https://bairogonzalez.com/llms.txt) — site summary for AI assistants - llms-nucleo.txt (https://bairogonzalez.com/llms-nucleo.txt) — the full text of the core: profile, story and ventures - llms-full-pt.txt (https://bairogonzalez.com/llms-full-pt.txt) — the full text of the pages in Portuguese - llms-full-en.txt (https://bairogonzalez.com/llms-full-en.txt) — the full text of the pages in English - llms-full-es.txt (https://bairogonzalez.com/llms-full-es.txt) — the full text of the pages in Spanish - llms-full-zh.txt (https://bairogonzalez.com/llms-full-zh.txt) — the full text of the pages in Chinese - sitemap.xml (https://bairogonzalez.com/sitemap.xml) — sitemap for search engines - bairo.jsonld (https://bairogonzalez.com/dados/bairo.jsonld) — structured data about Bairo (JSON-LD) - bairo.json (https://bairogonzalez.com/dados/bairo.json) — the same data as plain JSON - linha-do-tempo.json (https://bairogonzalez.com/dados/linha-do-tempo.json) — the timeline as JSON - dossie-fundador.jsonld (https://bairogonzalez.com/dados/dossie-fundador.jsonld) — founder dossier (JSON-LD) - organizacoes-papeis.jsonld (https://bairogonzalez.com/dados/organizacoes-papeis.jsonld) — roles in organizations (JSON-LD) - humans.txt (https://bairogonzalez.com/humans.txt) — who made the site --- ## The plant and the science — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-plant-and-the-science/ Idioma: en Descrição: Why cannabis sits at the center of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez's ecosystem: research, Anvisa rules and what science already knows. In the story of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, cannabis appears twice. The first time is personal: an inner, spiritual search, at rock bottom. That part is told in the chapter The God of the impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/), as a personal account, and only as a personal account. The second time is work. It is the decision to take the plant seriously: with research, with rules and with quality information. That is what this page is about. ### Experience is not evidence People who have lived something up close often want everyone else to live it the same way. Here the path runs the other way. One person's experience proves nothing for anyone else, and it is not used on this site as an argument. What the experience left behind was something else: the conviction that the plant deserves to be studied with the same rigor as any other field of medicine. Without prejudice, and without promises. That is how a personal experience became a mission: access, research and serious information. - Access to reliable information and to health professionals who know the subject and follow the rules. - Research done in the laboratory, with method, to separate what is already known from what is still a hypothesis. - Serious information, which states with equal clarity what works, what doesn't, and what no one knows yet. ### Why cannabis is at the center of the ecosystem In the way Bairo describes what he has built, as a body, Xperienc is the neural connection layer: the part that links patients, professionals and laboratories. Medical cannabis is the field where that link is most needed today. It is a subject where science moves fast, the rules change, and the patient almost always arrives with more questions than information. Bringing research, care and information together in one place is the proposal. The rest of the ecosystem provides the structure: the CLAIN artificial intelligence orchestrator, the verifiable record of BTZ Chain and the layered data protection of qrqbits. ### Xperienc Global Labs Xperienc Global Labs was born in London in 2026, created by Bairo to carry out experimental research and development in biotechnology. The focus is medical cannabis as a scientific field. Xperienc's proposal is to bring together, in a single environment, laboratories, teleconsultation, a clinical assistant powered by artificial intelligence, and the instant translator Global Language. Discover Xperienc: xperienc.me (https://xperienc.me) ### What science already knows, and what is still being studied In 2017, the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) published one of the most comprehensive reviews of the subject, The Health Effects of Cannabis and Cannabinoids. The report graded the evidence by level. It found conclusive or substantial evidence of an effect in three situations, at different levels: - chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting, with oral cannabinoids: conclusive evidence; - chronic pain in adults: substantial evidence; - multiple sclerosis spasticity, as reported by patients themselves, with oral cannabinoids: substantial evidence. For the vast majority of the other conditions studied, the evidence was graded as moderate, limited or insufficient. In other words, these are fields still under study, not ready-made answers. Not even the strongest evidence means an effect for everyone, or with any product: the studies measure specific products, doses and routes, in specific groups of patients. That space, between what is already known and what is not yet known, is exactly what research exists to fill. ### The rules in Brazil In Brazil, cannabis products for medical purposes are regulated by Anvisa, the national health regulatory agency. In 2026, resolutions RDC 1.013, 1.014 and 1.015 replaced the former RDC 327/2019. These products require a prescription from a licensed professional, and their advertising may only be directed at prescribers and pharmacists. That is why this site does not talk about products, brands, doses or indications. It talks about science, rules and the path forward. ### A second opinion, not a medical report With Global Language, patient and specialist each speak in their own language. The proposal is to allow a specialist in another country to give a clinical second opinion on a case: a new point of view for the professional who follows the patient. It is an opinion, not a medical report. It does not replace the consultation, the exam, or the patient's own physician. ### A clinical assistant, with human validation Artificial intelligence comes in as a clinical assistant: it organizes information, keeps track of the history and prepares the conversation. The one who assesses, decides and answers is always a licensed health professional, as required by Law 12.842/2013 and the rules of Brazil's Federal Council of Medicine. The machine helps. The person decides. ### The thread of the story Bairo went looking for silence and found a direction. What he does with it today is not to hold up his own experience as an example. It is to help build a place where cannabis is treated as it deserves: with science, with rules, and with respect for those looking for an answer. If medical cannabis is part of your question, the path begins with a consultation. In Brazil, it goes through a licensed professional, a prescription and Anvisa's rules. This text helps you understand; the one who guides you is the one who cares for you. The story in chapters (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/) · The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) · xperienc.me (https://xperienc.me) --- ## Press room — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/press/ Idioma: en Descrição: For anyone writing about Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez: short bios, facts on the record, a timeline and the ventures he founded. If you are going to write about Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, this page is for you. Here is who he is, what he has built, what is on the record and what is his own memory. The way he asked for it: without hiding the falls and without calling ready what is still a dream. ### In a few words In one line. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, a Colombian entrepreneur in Brazil since 2002, made every "no" the ground of an ecosystem of agribusiness, health, finance and AI. In one paragraph. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez is a Colombian entrepreneur, born in 1982 and based in Brazil since 2002. Capoeira, he says, was the bridge to the country he had said, since boyhood, would be his. His path is made of attempts: a salon, a hair-treatment course, natural cosmetics, events, partnerships that ended and falls that left him with nothing. He says the seventh one worked. He is the founder of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness, of Xperienc Global Labs, registered in London, and of CLAIN. His rule: every no is the ground of a yes. Short version. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez is a Colombian entrepreneur, born in 1982 and based in Brazil since 2002. He lost everything more than once and kept building. He founded an ecosystem linking agribusiness, health, finance, blockchain and artificial intelligence. His rule: every no is the ground of a yes. In Spanish. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez es un emprendedor colombiano, nacido en 1982 y radicado en Brasil desde 2002. Lo perdió todo más de una vez y volvió a construir. Fundó un ecosistema que une agro, salud, finanzas, blockchain e inteligencia artificial. Su regla: el no es la base del sí. ### What you can check He prefers that you check rather than simply believe. That is why the facts are here. - Origin. Colombian nationality, born in 1982, resident in Brazil, as the British public register shows. - Xperienc Global Labs. A biotechnology research and development company that Bairo set up in London in 2026. He is director and controlling owner. - CEASA Financial. The second company he set up in London that same year, linked to CEASA Bank. Bairo is director and controlling owner. - CEASA Bank. In Brazil, the brand is operated by a company opened in 2019, of which Bairo is administrator. These positions appear in the public records of the United Kingdom and Brazil, open to anyone. ### The story, as he tells it Part of this story has documents. Most of it is memory: his. When it is memory, we write "Bairo says that," and we ask you to do the same. Bairo says that, ever since he was a boy, in Colombia, he would say that one day he would live in Brazil, and that capoeira was the bridge. He arrived in 2002. The first years were hard, as they are for so many immigrants, and the sentence that sums up that time is his: the sun is for everyone, but shade, in the heat, is for the few. Then came the attempts. A salon opened with his partner when their daughter was born. A hair-treatment course. An artificial intelligence idea that came too early. A natural cosmetics brand that worked. Partners who pushed him out of a business. An investment that did not hold, with, he says, fifty people depending on him. He says he doesn't know how many times he tried. He knows the seventh one worked. At rock bottom, he says, he found faith. Then he spent six months at home, in front of a computer, building the foundation of what was to come. When the banks refused to integrate his solution, he went and built the pieces himself. The whole story is in The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) and begins in Fifty-five years later (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/). ### Timeline, in brief - 1982. Born in Colombia. - 2002. Arrives in Brazil, as he tells it. - The years that followed. Salon, course, cosmetics, events, partnerships, falls and new beginnings, with no confirmed dates: this is the part of the story he tells from memory. - 2019. Opens, in Brazil, the company that today operates the CEASA Bank brand. - 2026. Sets up Xperienc Global Labs in London. - 2026. Sets up CEASA Financial in London, his second British company. - October 1, 2026. Launches this site, 55 years after the opening of Walt Disney World, and announces a public goal: 142 niche artificial intelligences in 142 days. - February 20, 2027. The goal's deadline. ### The ventures he founded Each one is a separate company or project, with its own name and path. Some already operate, others are still being built, and each one tells, on its own website, where it stands. - CEASA Bank. A financial platform for agribusiness, for those who buy and sell at the wholesale food markets, operating on the infrastructure of an authorized institution. ceasabank.com.br (https://ceasabank.com.br) - Xperienc Global Labs. Research in biotechnology and medical cannabis, teleconsultation and clinical second opinions with instant translation, always validated by a health professional. An opinion, not a medical report. xperienc.me (https://xperienc.me) - BTZ Chain and BICOIN (BTZ). The proposal of a record network in which artificial intelligence checks and people confirm, in development. The yardstick "1 BTZ = 1 minute of human life" speaks of purpose, not price. btzchain.org (https://btzchain.org) - CLAIN and 1420mhz. An orchestrator of artificial intelligence agents, with human decision-making. The name 1420 comes from the hydrogen frequency, a symbol: no one transmits on it. 1420mhz.org (https://1420mhz.org) - qrqbits. Protection for files, images, audio and text with layered post-quantum cryptography. qrqbits.org (site under construction) - SOSPROCESSOS. Legal analysis supported by artificial intelligence, always led by a lawyer, in development. - Hospital Triage. A pre-consultation system with a clinical assistant and human validation, in development. hospitaltriage.ai (site under construction) - Investment House. A project for tokenizing real-world assets and a network of business owners, presented institutionally. investmenthouse.com.br (https://investmenthouse.com.br) - Instituto CEASA. The humanitarian front: the proposal to turn the surplus from the wholesale food markets into food that keeps without refrigeration. institutoceasa.org (site under construction) Hospital Granja Julieta, in São Paulo, is an independent company, with its own shareholders. Bairo is neither a partner nor a founder of the hospital. The full picture, with the idea that links the ventures, is in The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/). ### Before you write - The name. On first mention, Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, without accents on Gonzalez and Martinez, as in the records. - What is fact and what is memory. What is on the record is above. The rest is his account, and it is worth writing it that way. - What does not exist yet. Goals are goals. Projects in development are projects. He insists on that difference. - Health and money. Nothing on this page is a treatment recommendation, an investment offer or an invitation to buy anything. - The famous stories. The dates for Walt Disney, Henry Ford and Steve Jobs cited in his story have been checked. The correct versions, with who told each one, are in the first chapter, Fifty-five years later (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/). ### Talk to him For interviews, information requests, photos or corrections, write through the Contact (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/contact/) page. And if you find anything wrong about him, anywhere, including here, let us know. He would rather correct than repeat. --- ## The ordinary world: when the dream comes before the road URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/the-ordinary-world-when-the-dream-comes-before-the-road/ Idioma: en Descrição: Stage 1 of the Hero's Journey: a boy in Colombia who said he would live in Brazil. How to recognize your starting point and the dream already inside it. Colombia, the eighties. A boy repeats, to anyone who will listen, a sentence with no map behind it: one day I'm going to live in Brazil. There is no ticket bought. No relative waiting on the other side. No plan. There is only a certainty spoken out loud, like someone who has already seen what has not yet happened. The grown-ups smile the way people smile at a child. He keeps saying it. The country he announces is far away, speaks another language and does not know he exists. Even so, it is already the address of the dream. That boy is Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, born in 1982. And this is the first stage of his journey. ### What this stage is Every journey begins at home. The mythologist Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), showed that humanity's great stories, from ancient myths to folk tales, repeat the same shape: someone leaves the familiar, goes through trials, is transformed and comes back bringing something for others. Decades later, the screenwriter Christopher Vogler organized that shape into twelve stages, in The Writer's Journey (1992). It is the structure of this series. The first stage is called the ordinary world. It is life before: the rules of the house, the limits of the town, what everyone expects of you. Vogler explains why it matters so much: without knowing the starting point, no one can measure the size of the transformation. The ordinary world is not a bad place. It is often safe, familiar, even comfortable. What marks this stage is something else: a restlessness that does not fit into life as it is. A sentence, a desire, an image that keeps coming back, even without explanation. ### In Bairo's life Bairo's ordinary world was the Colombia of his childhood and youth. The detail that sets him apart is a contradiction: he lived in one country and dreamed of another. Many immigrant stories begin with an escape. His, as he tells it, begins with a desire. It was not about leaving a place. It was about reaching another. Brazil came into his life through the body, before it came through the language. It was through capoeira, the fight that is a dance and the dance that is a fight, that he began to know the country he was announcing. The sound of the berimbau arrived before any document, any job, any ticket. Seen from outside, nothing about that beginning looked extraordinary. An ordinary boy, in an ordinary place, with an unusual sentence on his lips. And that is exactly what makes this stage important for the reader: great journeys do not begin in great places. They begin with a sentence someone refuses to stop saying. Years later, Bairo would sum up the way he understands his own life in an idea he still repeats: there are no coincidences and no accidents. There are purpose, dreams and execution. The boy who talked about Brazil without knowing how he would get there already had the first two pieces. The third, execution, would take a lifetime to learn. What came next was anything but linear. There was arrival, shade, starting over, going broke, faith, the road and rebuilding. But none of it would make sense without that first picture: a boy, a certainty and a country on the other side of the map. ### In your life You may be in your ordinary world right now. And it can take many forms. If you are an entrepreneur who went broke, your ordinary world may be the routine of putting out fires, opening the bank app in fear, telling everyone everything is fine. If you are an immigrant, it may be life split between two homes, neither of them whole. If you are starting over, it may be the place where everyone has already decided who you are and how far you can go. Before thinking about leaving, it is worth seeing where you are. Some questions to ask yourself in silence: - What sentence have you been repeating forever, even without knowing how it will come true? - What in your life today is real comfort, and what is just habit? - If someone looked at your routine from outside, where would they notice the restlessness you hide? - Who set the limits of your ordinary world: you, your family, your town, or fear? #### Three steps for this week - Describe your ordinary world in five lines. Where you live, what you do, what you expect of yourself, what others expect of you, what you put up with. Writing takes life off autopilot. - Write your childhood sentence. That old certainty, even if it seems naive today. It doesn't need a plan underneath it. It just needs to exist on paper. - Say that sentence to someone you trust. Not to ask for approval, but to hear your own voice saying it. That is how Bairo's dream began: out loud, before there was a road. None of this changes your life overnight. But every journey begins the moment someone realizes they are at a starting point, not an end point. ### The line for this stage "There are no coincidences and no accidents. There are purpose, dreams and execution." Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez ### Next stage Stage 2: The call to adventure, when life asks for more (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/the-call-to-adventure-when-life-asks-for-more/) ### Read also - Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/) - Bairo's Hero's Journey, stage by stage (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-heros-journey/) - How to reinvent yourself professionally? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-reinvent-yourself-professionally/) --- ## The call to adventure: when life asks for more URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/the-call-to-adventure-when-life-asks-for-more/ Idioma: en Descrição: Stage 2 of the Hero's Journey: capoeira as a bridge and Bairo's arrival in Brazil in 2002. How to recognize the call in your life and take the first step. A circle. People around it, clapping. The berimbau keeps time, the pandeiro answers, someone leads a song in Portuguese. In the middle, two bodies move without stopping, one asking, the other answering. For most of the people there, it is practice. For a young Colombian, it is something else. It is proof that the country he has been announcing since boyhood already exists inside him, before he ever sets foot there. Capoeira was the bridge. And every bridge, sooner or later, asks to be crossed. ### What this stage is In the Hero's Journey, described by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) and organized into twelve stages by Christopher Vogler, the second stage is the call to adventure. It is the moment when something interrupts the ordinary world. It can be news, an invitation, a loss, a meeting, an opportunity that appears without warning. Sometimes the call is loud, like being laid off. Sometimes it is quiet, like a wish that won't go away. The call brings no guarantees. It doesn't say how it will end. It says only that life as it is is not the whole of life, and that there is somewhere to go. Vogler notes that the call usually arrives before the hero feels ready. That is precisely what makes it a call, and not a plan. ### In Bairo's life Bairo's call came in two beats. The first was internal: the dream of living in Brazil, which he had carried since boyhood. Capoeira gave that dream a body. The ginga, the movement that never stops, taught him something that would come back many times in his life: in the circle, whoever stops, falls. The second was concrete. In 2002, the road appeared. Bairo came to Brazil brought by an education company, and he did not come to fill just any post: he took on a management position. The boy's dream had come true. Brazil was real, and he was in it. Notice how the call presented itself. It was not a gift dropped from the sky, nor an isolated stroke of luck. It was a meeting between an old certainty and a concrete door. The certainty had trained the eye. The door only had to appear. That is what Bairo describes when he says he does not believe in coincidences, only in purpose, dreams and execution. The purpose had been there since childhood. The dream had the name of a country. What was missing was execution, and it began with a suitcase and a job. It would be nice to say that, from then on, everything went well. It didn't. The next stage of this journey tells of the fear that came right after. But the call had been answered, and no later fall would undo that fact: he went. ### In your life The call rarely arrives with fanfare. It often looks like an annoyance. If you are an entrepreneur who went broke, the call may be in the question you avoid: what if the next business is different from everything I've done before? If you are an immigrant, it may be the original reason you left, which routine has been erasing. If you are starting over, it may be the idea that came back right now, just when it seemed there was no more room for ideas. Questions to identify your call: - What has been showing up in your life again and again, in conversations, invitations, signs, without you paying attention? - Which door opened recently that you pretended not to see? - If you knew it couldn't go wrong, what would you do in the next twelve months? - What part of you does your daily life today not use? #### Three steps for this week - Name the call. Write it in a single sentence: "Life is calling me to…". If three sentences come out, choose the one that brings the most fear and the most desire at the same time. - Find your bridge. Bairo had capoeira. What activity, community, course or person already connects you to where you want to go? Give it one hour this week. - Look for a concrete door. A dream without a door becomes a sigh. List three real paths (a job opening, a contact, a public call for proposals, a client) and take a small step on one of them. Answering the call doesn't require dropping everything tomorrow. It requires no longer pretending it didn't call. ### The line for this stage "The call doesn't ask whether you're ready. It asks whether you'll go." A line written for this series, drawn from Bairo's story. ### Next stage Stage 3: Refusal of the call, when fear paralyzes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/refusal-of-the-call-when-fear-paralyzes/) ### Read also - Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/) - Bairo's Hero's Journey, stage by stage (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-heros-journey/) - How to find the courage to take risks? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-find-the-courage-to-take-risks/) --- ## Refusal of the call: when fear paralyzes — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/refusal-of-the-call-when-fear-paralyzes/ Idioma: en Descrição: Stage 3 of the Hero's Journey: without documents in hand, far from home and afraid, Bairo spent years in the shade. How to get through paralyzing fear. A young immigrant, in a country that is not yet entirely his, facing a decision: to leave the company that brought him and follow his own path. He decides to leave. And he discovers, all at once, what it is to lose the ground beneath you. No documents in hand, far from family, in a language that is not yet his. At night, the noise of the city stays the same. Inside, everything has stopped. Fear doesn't shout. It whispers: keep quiet, don't show yourself, wait. And he waited. For years. ### What this stage is In Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey (1949), organized into twelve stages by Christopher Vogler, the third stage is refusal of the call. After hearing the call, the hero hesitates. Pulls back. Finds reasons not to go, or is pushed back by circumstances. Campbell observes that almost every hero goes through this, and Vogler explains why: the refusal shows that the path has a real price. If it were easy, it wouldn't be a journey. Refusal is not always cowardice. Often it is protection. Fear shows up to guard a person from a real danger. The problem begins when fear, which should be a pause, becomes an address. ### In Bairo's life The call had been answered: in 2002, Bairo was in Brazil, in a management position at an education company. The boyhood dream had come true. Then he wanted to follow his own path and leave the company. That was when the journey changed key. He found himself without documents in hand, afraid and with no road ahead. In the words of his own account, he got lost in the shadows of life, like so many immigrants before and after him. It is a kind of refusal no one chooses. No one decides to stay in the shade. But whoever has lost their footing learns not to show themselves, not to take risks, to wait for something to change on its own. Hard years followed, with no direction and no safety net. From that time, Bairo kept a sentence he often repeats: the sun is for everyone, but shade, in the heat, is for the few. The sentence has two readings, and both are true. The first is harsh: the heat hits everyone, but relief is a privilege. The second is the one that kept him going: if the sun is for everyone, it is for him too. No one had the right to decide that his life would stay in the shade forever. Refusal would come back other times in his story, in different forms. Years later, he would have an idea involving artificial intelligence and augmented reality, be told it wouldn't work and, even believing in it, give up. Later still, the idea would become a trend. The lesson stuck: other people's fear, when we let it, becomes our own. But, in that first moment, what mattered was something else. The boy who had announced Brazil was in Brazil, with no footing and no one to ask. It would have been the natural place to give up. He didn't give up. It took time. And he started again from the only place left: close by, with the person standing beside him. ### In your life Refusal of the call wears many faces, and almost none of them introduces itself as fear. If you are an entrepreneur who went broke, it may show up as "now isn't the time," "the market is bad," "let me recover first." If you are an immigrant, it may be the silence of someone who doesn't want to draw attention, the shame of asking for help in a language you haven't mastered yet, the fear of going to a government office. If you are starting over, it may be the feeling that it's already too late. Questions to look your fear in the face: - What, exactly, are you afraid of? Write down the worst-case scenario in detail. On paper, it often shrinks. - Is this fear protecting you from a real danger, or only from discomfort? - How long have you been waiting for something to change on its own? - Who could help you, if you had the courage to ask? #### Three steps for this week - Separate real danger from imagined fear. Make two columns: what could actually happen and what you only fear. For the first column, look for concrete information. For the second, look for a conversation. - Ask for help from people who do this for a living. If your situation involves documents, migration or work, reach out to the Federal Public Defender's Office (DPU), the Federal Police, migrant service centers or organizations that support refugees and immigrants. If fear has turned into despair, call CVV at 188, free, at any hour. - Take a step small enough not to be scary. A phone call, an email, a form. Shade isn't crossed all at once. It is crossed one step a day, toward the sun. Hesitating doesn't take you off the journey. Standing still forever does. ### The line for this stage "Fear says 'not now.' It never said 'never.'" A line written for this series, drawn from Bairo's story. ### Next stage Stage 4: Meeting the mentor, who inspires you to keep going (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/meeting-the-mentor-who-inspires-you-to-keep-going/) ### Read also - Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/) - Bairo's Hero's Journey, stage by stage (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-heros-journey/) - How to overcome the fear of starting over? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-overcome-the-fear-of-starting-over-7-steps/) --- ## Meeting the mentor: who inspires you to keep going URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/meeting-the-mentor-who-inspires-you-to-keep-going/ Idioma: en Descrição: Stage 4 of the Hero's Journey: Disney, Ford, Jobs and Senna as Bairo's distant mentors. How to find someone who inspires you when no one believes. October 1. On that day in 1971, the gates of Walt Disney World opened in Florida. The man who had dreamed that place was not there: Walt Disney had died in December 1966. The story goes that, at the opening, someone lamented that Walt had not lived to see the park. And that Mike Vance, then creative director of the studios, answered in a few words: "He did see it. That's why it's here." Fifty-five years later, on October 1, 2026, Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez chose that date to tell his own story. If he could speak to Walt Disney, he says, he would tell him just one thing: your dreams inspired me. ### What this stage is In Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey (1949), organized by Christopher Vogler into twelve stages, the fourth stage is meeting the mentor. The mentor is the one who gives the hero what is missing to go on: advice, a tool, an example, courage. In myths, it is the wise old man. In films, the coach, the teacher, the master. Vogler makes a liberating observation: the mentor doesn't need to be a person who is present. It can be a book, a memory, an inner code, the story of someone who went through the same place before. The mentor doesn't walk the journey for the hero. The mentor shows that the journey is possible. The rest is up to the one who walks. ### In Bairo's life Bairo doesn't speak of having a sponsor who opened doors for him. The mentors he cites belong to another era, other countries, other industries. They are people who heard "it can't be done," "it isn't possible" and "you can't," and kept going. Walt Disney is the first, for the image of seeing it first. The park existed in his head before it existed on the ground. Henry Ford is the second. Napoleon Hill tells, in Think and Grow Rich, how Ford asked his engineers for an engine with all eight cylinders cast in a single block. They all said it was impossible. Ford told them to build it anyway. The scene with the engineers is Hill's; the rest is history: in 1932, the Ford V8 hit the streets. Steve Jobs is the third, for a different reason. In 1983, according to Andy Hertzfeld, who was on the Macintosh team, Jobs asked for the computer to boot ten seconds faster. And he explained it with arithmetic: ten seconds, times millions of people, every day, added up to entire lifetimes. He put human life inside a number. That idea, lifetime as a measure, would come back much later in Bairo's work. Ayrton Senna is the fourth. Before any victory, there was a decision: to be the best. After it, courage and persistence. A sentence of his from 1989, which the magazine Veja reproduced: "Every driver has his limit. Mine is a little above everyone else's." For Bairo, honor is something that outlasts time, and Senna is the proof. Bairo does not compare himself to them. He places himself in the same lineage, the way one pays tribute. What he learned from these distant mentors was not a technique. It was a stance: treating the limit as a starting line. There were also closer, less glamorous mentors. Pain itself, which he would learn to use as his foundation. And, years later, at rock bottom, the accounts and testimonies he heard in a Christian congregation, from ordinary people who had crossed through the impossible. Each mentor arrived at the moment he was able to hear them. ### In your life When you are on the ground, it is common to feel there is no one to guide you. But the mentor you need may already exist, just in another form. If you are an entrepreneur who went broke, look for people who went broke before you and got back up. Biographies, interviews, people in your neighborhood. If you are an immigrant, look for those who arrived before you: immigrant communities hold knowledge no manual has. If you are starting over, look at people who started over after forty, after fifty, after an illness or a loss. Questions to find your mentor: - Whose story do you most like to hear when you're discouraged? Why? - Who in your life has already been through something like what you're going through now? - What do you admire in someone that you haven't yet allowed yourself to practice? - What advice did you once receive, ignore, and understand today? #### Three steps for this week - Choose three distant mentors. People, living or not, famous or not, who heard "no" and kept going. For each one, write down one concrete lesson you can apply. - Find a mentor close by. Send a short, respectful message to someone who has already been through your challenge. Ask for twenty minutes, not a job or money. Most people like being useful. - Turn admiration into habit. Take one of the lessons and make it a daily practice for seven days. A mentor you only admire becomes decoration. No one walks your journey for you. But no one has to walk it alone. ### The line for this stage "Whoever saw it before you doesn't give you the road. They give you proof that it exists." A line written for this series, drawn from Bairo's story. ### Next stage Stage 5: Crossing the threshold, how to start from zero (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/crossing-the-threshold-how-to-start-from-zero/) ### Read also - Fifty-five years later (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/) - Bairo's Hero's Journey, stage by stage (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-heros-journey/) - How to stop feeling like a failure? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-stop-feeling-like-a-failure/) --- ## Crossing the threshold: how to start from zero URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/crossing-the-threshold-how-to-start-from-zero/ Idioma: en Descrição: Stage 5 of the Hero's Journey: his daughter is born, and Bairo opens a salon with his partner. How to take the step of no return and start from zero. A roll-up shop door rising in the morning. Chairs, mirrors, the smell of hair products. An immigrant and his partner opening a neighborhood salon. At home, a newborn daughter. There is no investor, no bound business plan, no safety net. There are two people, a storefront and a new reason not to fail. From here on, a mistake doesn't cost only him. ### What this stage is In Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey (1949), organized into twelve stages by Christopher Vogler, the fifth stage is crossing the first threshold. It is the moment when the hero stops thinking about the adventure and enters it. They cross the border between the known world and the unknown, and from there there is no simple way back. Campbell describes guardians at this threshold: forces that test whether the person is truly willing to pass. Vogler adds that the crossing usually comes from a commitment, a decision that turns intention into action. The threshold is not the end of fear. It is the point where fear stops deciding. ### In Bairo's life After the years in the shade, Bairo's new beginning had a neighborhood address. With his partner, when their daughter was born, he opened a salon. That was his threshold. Until then, Bairo had been an employee, a manager, an immigrant waiting. From then on, he became someone building his own path. It was not an empire. It was a salon. But a crossing is not measured by the size of the business. It is measured by the decision to stop waiting. The salon did not work out as well as they had hoped. But it worked out very well in another way. Out of the salon grew an idea bigger than the salon. Bairo created a course in hair treatments, on caring for the hair and the scalp. Years later, trichology found its place in Brazil, with graduate courses at health schools, and hair treatments became a market. Back then, it was an immigrant with a handout and a conviction. There is a calculation every immigrant father makes in silence. His daughter is born in a country that is not yet entirely his, in a language that is not yet entirely his. She will belong here. He has to make the journey worth it. That calculation changed Bairo's urgency. He did not shrink the size of his ideas because of it. He shrank the time he allowed himself to stay down after each fall. Notice what he carried to the other side of the threshold. It wasn't capital. It was what he already had: the management experience from the education company, the ginga of capoeira, the stubbornness of the boy who announced Brazil. Starting from zero, for him, was never starting from nothing. ### In your life The threshold almost never looks grand. It usually looks like something small: a first customer, a company registration filed, a resignation notice handed in, an enrollment completed. If you are an entrepreneur who went broke, your threshold may be selling again, even if it's something much smaller than the business you lost. If you are an immigrant, it may be your first self-employed work, your first course in the new language, your first document put in order. If you are starting over, it may simply be telling your family, out loud, that you're going to try again. Questions to find your threshold: - What is the smallest possible version of what you want to build? Something you can start this month, with what you already have. - Who depends on you and, for that very reason, deserves for you to try? - What do you know how to do today that someone would pay to learn? - What guardian stands at your door: money, shame, other people's opinions, fatigue? #### Three steps for this week - Take stock of what you already have. Skills, contacts, tools, a space, a phone, a story. Bairo started with a storefront and practical know-how. List everything, including what seems like little. - Sketch the small version. A service, a product, a course, a consulting offer. Set the price, who it's for and where you'll offer it. If it involves debt, do the math first; don't cross the threshold on expensive credit. - Set the date of the crossing. Pick a day, in the next thirty, when you make your first real offer. Tell someone. A date said out loud becomes a commitment. The first step doesn't need to be big. It needs to be a step of no return from a life of waiting. ### The line for this stage "Starting from zero isn't starting from nothing. You carry everything you've lived." A line written for this series, drawn from Bairo's story. ### Next stage Stage 6: Tests, allies and enemies, when they tell you it can't be done (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/tests-allies-and-enemies-when-they-say-it-cant-be-done/) ### Read also - The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) - Bairo's Hero's Journey, stage by stage (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-heros-journey/) - How to start over from zero? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-over-from-zero/) --- ## Tests, allies and enemies: when they say it can't be done URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/tests-allies-and-enemies-when-they-say-it-cant-be-done/ Idioma: en Descrição: Stage 6 of the Hero's Journey: ideas too early, a brand that worked and partners who pushed Bairo out. How to turn every "no" into a foundation. A meeting table. On the other side, the partners. The idea on the table is his: bringing touchscreen technology into the business he helped build. The answer does not come from outside. It comes from within. The partners push him out of the business, and the idea stays with them. He walks out the door empty-handed, with a pain that doesn't fit in a wallet. Some defeats cost money. This one cost something else. ### What this stage is In Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey (1949), organized into twelve stages by Christopher Vogler, the sixth stage is called tests, allies and enemies. After crossing the threshold, the hero enters a new world and has to learn its rules. A sequence of tests follows, some small, others hard. This is where they discover whom they can trust, who gets in the way and, above all, who they themselves are under pressure. Vogler notes that this stage is usually long. It is not one test: it is a whole season of attempts. And not every enemy is a villain. Sometimes it is a market that isn't ready yet, a partnership that goes wrong, your own haste. ### In Bairo's life Bairo's season of tests lasted years, and it came in waves. The first test was arriving too early. He wanted to bring artificial intelligence and augmented reality into the business. People said it wouldn't work. He believed in the idea and, even believing, gave up. Years later, the very same thing became a trend. Seen from afar, that is called vision. Lived up close, you learn that arriving too early also means arriving alone. The second test was staying in the water. Bairo moved to the city where his daughter was born and began producing cosmetics under his own natural-based brand. Once again, people said it wouldn't work. It did. And, years later, natural cosmetics became a trend. It was the second time he got there before the wave, and the first time he stayed in the water. The third test was the partners. The touchscreen idea, the door closed from the inside, the exit without his own creation. That was when Bairo made a discovery he still carries today. He found the pain and, instead of running from it, made it his foundation. Not as an open wound. As ground to stand on. And, deep down, he knew something he had not yet said out loud: every no is the ground of a yes. Every closed door had left something in his hands. The course left method. The idea that came too early left an eye for the future. The brand left proof that he could create from nothing. And the partners left the most expensive lesson of all: choosing whom you build with. The allies of this phase were few and quiet: his partner, his daughter as a reason, his own stubbornness. He didn't wait for the wound to close. He went to work in events and digital printing, reinvented himself once more and built up capital. ### In your life This is the stage where many people give up, because they mistake a test for a verdict. If you are an entrepreneur who went broke, you may already have heard "this won't work" from a bank, from family, from an investor. If you are an immigrant, you may also have heard "that's not how it works here" or "this isn't for people like you." If you are starting over, perhaps the voice that says "it can't be done" most often is your own. Questions to read your tests: - Of the "nos" you heard, which were about the idea, which were about the timing, and which were only the fear of the person who said them? - What idea did you abandon and later see someone else carry out? What does that say about your eye? - Who are your real allies today, the ones who stay when things go wrong? - Which partnership do you need to protect yourself from before you start? #### Three steps for this week - Map your nos. List every important "no" in your life and write beside it what it left in your hands: a lesson, a skill, a person. Notice how many became bricks. - Protect your next ideas. Before entering a partnership, put everything in writing: who brings what, who decides what, what happens if someone leaves. A simple contract, reviewed by a lawyer or by a university's free legal aid clinic, spares you the pain Bairo knew. - Choose an ally and look after them. One person who was with you at your worst moment. Thank them, ask how they are, offer something. An ally is not a contact: it is a relationship. There is no journey without tests. What changes is what you do with what each one leaves in your hands. ### The line for this stage "Every no is the ground of a yes." Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez ### Next stage Stage 7: Approach to the inmost cave, when the opportunity is a trap (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/approach-to-the-inmost-cave-the-opportunity-that-deceives/) ### Read also - Every no is the ground of a yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) - Bairo's Hero's Journey, stage by stage (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-heros-journey/) - How to deal with professional failure? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-deal-with-professional-failure/) --- ## Approach to the inmost cave: the opportunity that deceives URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/approach-to-the-inmost-cave-the-opportunity-that-deceives/ Idioma: en Descrição: Stage 7 of the Hero's Journey: with capital from events, Bairo invests in a company that was not what it seemed. How to recognize the cave before entering. After years of tests, at last a cushion. The capital saved from events and digital printing is in the account. For the first time, Bairo can choose instead of chasing. An opportunity arrives. A company, a partnership, a seat as an investing partner. This time he won't be founding from zero. He will invest in a business that, by all appearances, is already up and running. It looks like the well-earned rest of someone who has fought hard. The signature goes on the page. The money goes in. He doesn't know it yet, but he has just reached the mouth of the cave. ### What this stage is In Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey (1949), organized into twelve stages by Christopher Vogler, the seventh stage is the approach to the inmost cave. It is the stretch where the hero draws near the most dangerous place on the journey. In myths, it is the entrance to the labyrinth, the dark forest, the enemy's castle. In life, it is usually something less dramatic and more treacherous: an important decision made in a moment of confidence, a step that looks safe and isn't. Vogler describes this stage as preparation. Tension builds. Sometimes the hero notices the signs and gets ready; sometimes they only understand them later, looking back. The cave is not yet the fall. It is the road to it. ### In Bairo's life Bairo's approach looked like an opportunity. After the painful exit from the previous partnership, he had reinvented himself. Events and digital printing had worked well enough to generate capital. And, for the first time, he decided to play a different position: instead of founding, investing. He joined a company as an investing partner. The business was not what it seemed. In his account, the sentence is short: the business was not what it seemed. What presented itself as a going concern did not hold. This page does not say who, or how. The story is Bairo's, not that of whoever sat on the other side of the table. What matters here is something else, more useful to the reader: the cave rarely announces itself as a cave. It announces itself as relief. There is a hard irony in this stage. The man who had learned to distrust the "nos" found danger in a "yes" that came too easily. After so many closed doors, an open door can lower anyone's guard. Whoever has spent years hearing it won't work becomes vulnerable, precisely, to the first offer that says it will. And more people were involved than just him. The next stage tells how much was at stake: the many lives that depended on him. ### In your life Many people who are broke today did not fall out of laziness or lack of ideas. They fell into an opportunity that looked like the way out. If you are an entrepreneur who went broke, you may recognize this stage in the partner who arrived with everything ready, in the contract signed in a hurry, in the "investment" that promised too much. If you are an immigrant, you may recognize the job offer that was too good, the middleman asking for money up front, the document someone promises to sort out under the table. If you are starting over, you may be standing right now in front of a door that looks like relief. Questions to examine the door before going in: - Did this opportunity appear at a moment when you were tired, out of money or badly needing a win? - Can you explain, in one sentence, where the money in this business comes from? - Is anyone asking you for haste, secrecy or payment up front? - Who, outside the conversation, has reviewed the numbers and the documents? #### Three steps before signing anything - Check what can be checked. Look up the company's CNPJ with the Federal Revenue Service, its status at the Commercial Registry (Junta Comercial), lawsuits on the state court's website and complaints on public channels. If the proposal involves an investment offered to the public, check with the CVM, Brazil's securities regulator, whether the offer is authorized. Ten minutes of research are worth more than a good conversation. - Put a third party at the table. An accountant, a lawyer, a friend who knows the sector. If you can't pay, look for the Public Defender's Office or a university's legal aid clinic. The cave shows itself better to someone looking from outside. - Decide how much you can lose. Before going in, decide the maximum amount you accept to risk without endangering your home, your food and the people who depend on you. Never put everything that took you years to save behind a single door. Be wary of any promise of quick, safe gains. In finance, the word "guaranteed" is the first sign of the cave. None of this is retroactive blame for those who have already fallen. It is a map for not falling again. ### The line for this stage "Not every open door is a way in." A line written for this series, drawn from Bairo's story. ### Next stage Stage 8: The ordeal, when you lose everything (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/the-ordeal-when-you-lose-everything/) ### Read also - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) - Bairo's Hero's Journey, stage by stage (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-heros-journey/) - My company went bankrupt: now what? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/my-company-went-bankrupt-now-what/) --- ## The ordeal: when you lose everything — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/the-ordeal-when-you-lose-everything/ Idioma: en Descrição: Stage 8 of the Hero's Journey: the business collapsed and many people depended on Bairo. What to do when you lose everything and still have to decide. The money invested doesn't come back. The business that looked solid falls apart. And, when the dust settles, Bairo looks around and counts. They are not numbers on a spreadsheet. They are people. Fifty human lives, by his count, that depended on him. There is a natural reaction to a moment like that, and everyone knows it. To complain. About the partner, the system, the country, bad luck. No one would blame a man for it. Bairo didn't complain. ### What this stage is In Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey (1949), organized into twelve stages by Christopher Vogler, the eighth stage is the ordeal. It is the center of the story. The hero faces their greatest fear, their greatest loss, the moment when it seems everything is over. Campbell has an image for the one who is swallowed and disappears from the world before being reborn: the "belly of the whale." Vogler describes the ordeal as a kind of symbolic death. Something in the hero has to end so that something else can begin. The ordeal is not pretty. It has no soundtrack. But it is where it is decided who the person will be afterward. ### In Bairo's life The fall came after the investment that was not what it seemed. This time, it wasn't only his life at stake. He says there were fifty people depending on his decisions. The weight of this stage is not only the loss of money. It is the responsibility. Anyone who has had people depending on them knows: the sleepless night is not about your own plate, it is about other people's plates. And it was at that moment that he made the most unlikely decision a broke man can make. Instead of going back to familiar ground, he headed for the unknown. He decided to do something he didn't know how to do. Build a currency. Build a bank. Build a navigation network. To someone who had never done any of it, the list sounds like madness. To Bairo, it was the same logic as always: if no one is doing it, someone has to. It went wrong. And it didn't go wrong for lack of ideas. It went wrong because of people. The very ones he had helped left him hanging. Being abandoned by strangers teaches caution. Being abandoned by the people you helped teaches something else: that your decision cannot depend on anyone's gratitude. This is the belly of the whale in his story. Two falls in a row, one through deception, the other through abandonment. Anyone would have had more than enough reasons to stop there. It did not make him give up. He kept going. And that is why this story has a ninth stage. ### In your life If you are in this stage right now, you may be reading this in the middle of the night. You may have lost your company, your job, your home, your trust in someone. You may feel ashamed to look at the people who depended on you. Before any reflection, one practical thing: if the pain has turned into despair, call CVV at 188. It is free, it works 24 hours a day and no one will judge you. You can also go to your city's primary health unit (UBS) or psychosocial care center (CAPS). Asking for help is part of the road, not a detour from it. Now, the questions, for when your breath comes back: - What exactly did you lose? Separate what can be fixed (debt, business, income) from what is pain (pride, trust, image). - Who still depends on you, and what is the smallest thing you can guarantee those people this week? - What do you know today that you didn't know before the fall? - What new thing, something you've never done, could be your next step? #### Three steps to get through the ordeal - Stop the bleeding. Don't take out a new loan to cover the old one. List all your debts on paper, with whom, how much and at what interest. Check Registrato, the Central Bank's free service, to see what is recorded under your CPF. Protect housing, food, health and transportation first. - Be honest with those who depend on you. If there were employees, see an accountant and a lawyer to pay what is owed the right way. A frank conversation, early and in writing, is worth more than silence. If you can't afford a lawyer, go to the Public Defender's Office. - Choose something you don't know how to do and start learning. Not to get rich tomorrow, but to trade the energy of complaining for the energy of building. A free course, a book, a new skill. That was Bairo's choice: at bottom, he decided to learn. Going broke is a fact. It is not a verdict on who you are. ### The line for this stage "When nothing is left, the decision is still left." A line written for this series, drawn from Bairo's story. ### Next stage Stage 9: The reward, when it finally works (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/the-reward-when-it-finally-works/) ### Read also - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) - Bairo's Hero's Journey, stage by stage (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-heros-journey/) - What to do when you've gone broke? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/what-to-do-when-you-have-gone-broke/) --- ## The reward: when it finally works — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/the-reward-when-it-finally-works/ Idioma: en Descrição: Stage 9 of the Hero's Journey: the coin that, according to Bairo, became the base of a mobility app. What to do when your first victory arrives. After two falls in a row, a different kind of news. Bairo says the digital currency he launched, at the right time, became the foundation of an urban mobility app. For the first time, an idea of his had not been taken, copied or abandoned. It had found people to use it. There is no party described in his account. There is something else, quieter: the feeling that the road had existed after all. ### What this stage is In Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey (1949), organized into twelve stages by Christopher Vogler, the ninth stage is the reward. Campbell also calls it "seizing the sword." After surviving the ordeal, the hero receives something. It can be an object, a treasure, knowledge, a reconciliation. Vogler insists on one point: the true reward is rarely just the visible prize. It is what the hero now knows about themselves. Whoever went through the cave and came out of it is no longer the same person who went in. This stage also carries a quiet danger. Those who win after losing a lot tend to think the journey is over. It isn't. ### In Bairo's life Bairo's reward came from the same place where he had fallen. In the ordeal, he had decided to learn what he didn't know: currency, bank, network. That went wrong, and he was left hanging. But the knowledge stayed. And it was that knowledge, applied at the right moment, that produced the digital currency that served as the foundation for the mobility app. Notice the sequence. The earlier failure was not erased by the victory. It was its raw material. No one launches a digital currency at the right time without first getting it wrong by trying to launch one at the wrong time. With what he earned in that stage, Bairo did what few would do: he went back to building on the same ground, now on a currency of his own. And around it grew something money can't buy: a community of people who shared the same idea of the future. Not a client list. People brought together by a belief. That community taught him a lesson that runs through everything he would build afterward. Technology without people is just code. People without purpose are just a crowd. What brings the two together is a story in which people can see themselves. It also taught him the other side. A community makes demands. It demands consistency, presence and seriousness. That is why, in the ventures that came later, he carefully separates vision from fact, and purpose from price. The reward, then, was not only money. It was proof that the earlier falls had taught him something. The "no" had become ground. And the ground, at last, had held up a "yes." Anyone reading this stage looking for a coin to buy is on the wrong page: what is told here is the road, and no one needs to buy anything to walk their own. ### In your life If you are coming out of a hard phase and starting to see some results, this stage is yours. And it calls for celebration as much as care. If you are an entrepreneur who went broke, the first sale after the fall, the first month in the black, the first loyal customer are real rewards. If you are an immigrant, it may be the document that came through, the first job in your field, the first money sent home. If you are starting over, it may simply be a whole day without anxiety. Questions to receive the reward without losing it: - What exactly did you learn from the falls that made this victory possible? - Who was with you at the bottom and deserves to be part of this achievement? - Are you trying to win back everything you lost all at once? Is that strategy, or haste? - Which part of this result will you protect, and which part will you reinvest? #### Three steps for this phase - Write down what worked. While it's fresh, write what you did differently this time. That record is worth more than the money, because it's what you'll use on your next attempt. - Set aside a reserve before reinvesting. Anyone who has gone broke knows the value of a cushion. Decide on a portion of the result that doesn't go back into risk: it's for your home and for the people who depend on you. - Give thanks and include. Go back to the people who helped you at your worst. A conversation, an invitation, an opportunity. A shared reward becomes community, and community is what carries the next phase. Victory does not erase the falls. It shows what they were for. ### The line for this stage "The reward isn't the trophy. It's discovering that you can." A line written for this series, drawn from Bairo's story. ### Next stage Stage 10: The road back, when success isn't enough (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/the-road-back-when-success-is-not-enough/) ### Read also - The coin and the road (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-coin-and-the-road/) - Bairo's Hero's Journey, stage by stage (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-heros-journey/) - I've tried many times and nothing worked. Now what? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/i-tried-many-times-and-nothing-worked/) --- ## The road back: when success is not enough — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/the-road-back-when-success-is-not-enough/ Idioma: en Descrição: Stage 10 of the Hero's Journey: from the road through six countries to a new fall, Bairo discovers the longest road led inward. And yours? Airports. Mixed-up time zones. Meetings in different languages. Bairo says he built businesses in Portugal, the United States, London, Hong Kong, Bolivia and Dubai. The immigrant who once had no documents in hand now moves around the world. It wasn't a job title that took him. It was the road. And, at some point on that road, everything collapses again. Broke, broken and beaten. Those are his words. No money, no apparent way out, not a single plan left in the drawer. But still with a flame. Of hope, and of faith. ### What this stage is In Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey (1949), organized into twelve stages by Christopher Vogler, the tenth stage is the road back. After the reward, the hero has to decide whether to return to the world and do something with what was won. Vogler describes this stage as a moment of pursuit: the forces the hero faced have not disappeared, and they often come after them. A new setback is common here, one that tests whether the transformation was real or only passing. The road back is also a choice of direction. The hero realizes the adventure was not about the treasure. It was about what they will do with it, and for whom. ### In Bairo's life The reward of the coin and the community opened the road. Bairo began building businesses outside Brazil, in several countries, and seeing the world as his address. The man who had known the shade learned to walk in the sun of many places. A beautiful map, however, does not mean an easy road. No one knows for sure how many times, along that road, he tried, thought about stopping and almost gave up. Not even he keeps that count. What he does tell is that, at some point, he hit the ground again. This is the part of the journey most success stories hide. Success is not a line that only goes up. Some people lose everything after having already won, and that fall hurts in its own way, because it comes with a question: if I already knew, how did I fall again? Bairo's answer was not a new business strategy. It was a change of direction. He had already traveled the world on the outside. The road inward was what was missing. That is the turn that defines the rest of the story. The road back, for him, was not a return to a country, a company or a position. It was a return to himself. And it began with the only thing still whole: the flame of hope and faith. The next stage tells what happened when he followed that flame. ### In your life Maybe you've already had a good phase and are now back on the ground. Or maybe you're doing well on the outside and empty on the inside. Both situations are roads back. If you are an entrepreneur who went broke after things had already worked, the shame is usually greater than the first time. If you are an immigrant who has lived in several places, you may feel you belong to none. If you are starting over for the second, third or fourth time, you may be wondering whether it's worth trying again. Questions to find the direction: - What did you achieve on the outside that didn't fill you on the inside? - If the next attempt works, whom will it serve besides you? - What is still whole in you, even after everything? Faith, family, health, a skill, a friend? - Are you trying to get back to where you were, or to go where you need to go? #### Three steps for the road back - Stop running for a week. It's not giving up: it's listening. Cut the noise you can cut, like social media, news, conversations that only make things worse. Set aside some time each day to sit in silence with a sheet of paper. - Write down your flame. What still gets you up in the morning? It may be faith, a child, an idea. Write it in one sentence and keep it where you can see it. - Redefine the "what for." Before planning the next business, answer: whom will it help? Projects that serve someone besides their owner tend to find strength where others stop. Falling after having risen does not erase the climb. Sometimes it is the way life finds to change your direction. ### The line for this stage "Sometimes the road back doesn't lead to a place. It leads inward." A line written for this series, drawn from Bairo's story. ### Next stage Stage 11: The resurrection, how to be reborn after rock bottom (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/the-resurrection-how-to-be-reborn-after-rock-bottom/) ### Read also - The coin and the road (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-coin-and-the-road/) - Bairo's Hero's Journey, stage by stage (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-heros-journey/) - How to deal with the shame of going broke? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-deal-with-the-shame-of-going-broke/) --- ## The resurrection: how to be reborn after rock bottom URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/the-resurrection-how-to-be-reborn-after-rock-bottom/ Idioma: en Descrição: Stage 11 of the Hero's Journey: faith, silence and six months at home at a computer. How Bairo was reborn from rock bottom, and how to start yours. A room. A chair. A computer. Outside, life goes on. Inside, a man who didn't know how to code spends six months without leaving the house. Developing. Coding. Writing. Remembering. Shortly before, he was on the ground: broke, broken and beaten. Now, every day in front of the screen is a brick. He describes those months as a string of things even he can't explain. Anyone looking from outside sees something else, just as rare: discipline. ### What this stage is In Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey (1949), organized into twelve stages by Christopher Vogler, the eleventh stage is the resurrection. It is the last and deepest test. The hero faces symbolic death one final time and is reborn transformed. Campbell shows that, in myths, whoever returns from the world of the dead does not return the same: they bring another vision, another strength, sometimes another name. Vogler explains that the resurrection is proof that the change is real. The hero has to show, in action, that they have learned. Being reborn is not going back to who you were before the fall. It is becoming someone who only exists because of it. ### In Bairo's life Bairo's rebirth began with faith. At rock bottom, he found a door he had not been looking for: in a Christian congregation, he heard accounts and testimonies from ordinary people who had crossed through the impossible. Listening, he came to believe in the God of the impossible. Listening more, he came to trust in the God of love. Faith, for him, took on a simple definition: trusting in something you cannot see. There was also a road inward, separate from the congregation. Following his own intuition, Bairo says he allowed himself, in his personal search, experiences with cannabis oil, which he describes as a bridge to his innermost being. He wasn't looking for treatment. He was looking for silence. It is his experience, told the way he lived it, and not a recommendation to anyone. In that search, he says he saw his best self: a prosperous man, not only in money but in peace, living in the presence of the God he loves. He came out of it with an image and no map. So he asked for wisdom, understanding and courage to remember how to get there. He did not ask to learn the way. He asked to remember. The symbol of this phase came from the sky, literally. Hydrogen, the simplest and most abundant element in the universe, emits a radio signal at 1420 MHz. So that astronomers can hear it, that band is protected by international agreement: no one transmits on it. One only listens. For Bairo, it is the frequency of silence, the image of going quiet and listening before building. It is a symbol, not a device, and it is as a symbol that the number 1420 entered everything he did afterward. Out of the six months at home came the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, a company he had had since 2019: a financial platform for agribusiness, designed to put those who produce, those who process, those who trade and those who buy in direct connection. And then came the last test: the banks refused to integrate the solution. One more no. Bairo already knew what to do with it. He used it as ground, focused on the technology he could build with his own hands, and set about raising his own infrastructure. ### In your life You don't need Bairo's faith to live this stage. You need something to lean on when nothing else holds. For some, it is God. For others, it is family, community, a purpose, silence. All of these deserve respect. If you are an entrepreneur who went broke, your rebirth may begin with a simple, stubborn work routine. If you are an immigrant, it may begin with rebuilding a support network in the new place. If you are starting over, it may begin with an honest request for help, to God, to someone, or to yourself. Questions for the rebirth: - When you picture yourself as your best self, what do you see? How does that person wake up, work, treat others? - What do you need to "remember" about yourself that the fall made you forget? - Where do you find silence in the middle of the noise? - Which recent "no" could become the ground for your next step? #### Three steps to begin being reborn - Write down your best self. One page, in the first person and in the present tense. Not as a fantasy, but as a direction. Reread it every morning. - Create your building time. Bairo had six months. You may have one hour a day. Set the time, the place and what you're going to build. Protect that time the way you'd protect an appointment with someone else. - Seek silence and real support. Prayer, meditation, a walk, a faith or support community. If the anguish is great, see a health professional. Silence is for listening, not for isolating yourself. ### The line for this stage "The impossible is just something that hasn't been done yet." Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez ### Next stage Stage 12: Return with the elixir, turning pain into purpose (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/return-with-the-elixir-turning-pain-into-purpose/) ### Read also - The God of the impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/) - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) - Bairo's Hero's Journey, stage by stage (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-heros-journey/) - How to start over after losing everything? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-over-after-losing-everything/) --- ## Return with the elixir: turning pain into purpose URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/return-with-the-elixir-turning-pain-into-purpose/ Idioma: en Descrição: Stage 12 of the Hero's Journey: the seventh attempt, three old acquaintances and an ecosystem. How to turn your pain into something that serves others. After six months alone in front of a computer, the door opens and three old acquaintances walk in. They are not investors arriving in a hurry. They are people who already knew Bairo from other phases. The four sit at the same table to carry on, finish and elevate together what he had started. For someone who had been left hanging by the very people he helped, the word "together" is no small detail. It is a reconciliation with the idea of a team. ### What this stage is In Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey (1949), organized into twelve stages by Christopher Vogler, the last stage is the return with the elixir. The hero returns to the ordinary world, but not empty-handed. They bring something that serves others: a remedy, knowledge, a story, a freedom. Campbell insists on this point: the journey is only complete when what was won is shared. Vogler adds that the most powerful elixir is often simply experience, living proof that it is possible to get through. A hero who comes back and keeps everything for themselves has not completed the journey. They have only survived it. ### In Bairo's life No one knows for sure how many times Bairo tried, thought about stopping and almost gave up. The number he chose to tell his own story is seven. The seventh attempt, and the last, was the one that worked. The seventh didn't work by luck. It was the first that carried all the others inside it. The course left method. The idea that came too early left an eye for the future. The cosmetics brand left proof that he could create from nothing. The partners left the lesson about whom to build with. Going broke with many lives depending on him left the courage to do what he didn't know how to do. The road left the world as his address. And faith left the ground beneath his feet. Part of the elixir he brought back already has a name and a registration; the rest is under construction. Bairo is the founder of an ecosystem he describes as a body: CLAIN, an orchestrator of artificial intelligence agents, is the brain; BTZ Chain, a hybrid blockchain that proposes to integrate proof of humanity, is the veins; BICOIN (BTZ), the network's governance coin, is the blood; Xperienc Global Labs, a research and development company registered in London, is the neural connection layer; and qrqbits is the protection of what leaves the body. Alongside them, CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness, and Instituto CEASA, a humanitarian front whose proposal is to widen access to food. Xperienc Global Labs Ltd and CEASA Financial Database Technology Infrastructure and Digital Assets Ltd are registered at Companies House, in the United Kingdom, and he is listed as director of both. The difference between a dream and a story is the record. The name CLAIN comes from the English claim. For Bairo, anyone can claim a new beginning toward their best self. It is the same man who, broke and with many people depending on him, decided not to complain. He traded the complaint for the claim. The next step already has a date: on October 1, 2026, at 14:20, he marked with a symbolic act the start of the CLAIN protocol, and publicly took on a goal: at least 142 niche artificial intelligences in 142 days, to help people find their best self. It is a goal, not an achievement, and that is how it is told. For those close to him, the elixir also has a simpler form. For years, Bairo searched for his own best self. Today, he looks for the best in others. ### In your life Your elixir may not be a company. It may be a story told to someone who is where you were. Advice given at the right moment. A job offered to someone who needed a chance. A hand held out to someone who also lost their footing. If you are an entrepreneur who went broke and got back up, your elixir may be telling how it went, without shame. If you are an immigrant, it may be helping those who are arriving now. If you are starting over, the elixir may still be on its way, and that's fine: this stage also works as a direction. Questions for the return: - What did you learn on your journey that could spare someone else pain? - Who are your "old acquaintances," the people worth building the next phase with? - What is your seventh attempt: the project that only makes sense because of all the ones before it? - How can your pain become service? #### Three steps to give back what you brought - Tell your story to one person who needs to hear it. No embellishment and no drama. With the fall, the decision and the lesson. - Gather your three. Choose up to three people you trust, who already know you from other phases, and invite them to talk about the next step. No one completes the journey alone. - Do one thing for someone who is just starting out. A referral, an hour of mentoring, a résumé review, a coffee. The elixir only exists when it circulates. A story doesn't save anyone on its own. But it can show a road to someone who thought there was none. ### The line for this stage "The man who searched for his own best self now searches for the best in others." A line written for this series, drawn from Bairo's story. ### Next stage The journey begins again. Go back to stage 1: The ordinary world, when the dream comes before the road (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/journey/the-ordinary-world-when-the-dream-comes-before-the-road/), or see Bairo's whole Hero's Journey (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-heros-journey/). ### Read also - The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) - A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/) - Bairo's Hero's Journey, stage by stage (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-heros-journey/) - How to overcome failure? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-overcome-failure/) --- ## The story of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/ Idioma: en Descrição: From Colombia to Brazil, through failure and starting over: the journey of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, told in chapters. 1. Fifty-five years later (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/): Disney saw the park before it existed; Ford and Jobs heard "it can't be done." The story of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez begins in that lineage. 2. Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/): A Colombian boy who swore he would live in Brazil, capoeira as the bridge, and the arrival in 2002. The beginning of the story of Bairo Gonzalez. 3. The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/): With no footing in Brazil, Bairo started over with a salon, a newborn daughter and a hair-care course that came before trichology found its place. 4. Every no is the ground of a yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/): Natural cosmetics before the wave, and partners who pushed him out of his own idea: the pain that became the rule of Bairo Gonzalez's life. 5. Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/): Many people depending on him, a business that collapsed, and an unlikely choice: build a currency, a bank and a network without knowing how. 6. The coin and the road (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-coin-and-the-road/): A digital currency launched at the right time, a community around it, and the road that led Bairo Gonzalez to build businesses outside Brazil. 7. The God of the impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/): Broke, Bairo Gonzalez found faith and, on a personal inner search, the silence he was looking for. His path, told the way he lived it. 8. The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/): Why 1420 MHz, the hydrogen line no country uses, became a symbol for Bairo, and the six months at home that gave shape to CEASA Bank. 9. A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/): CLAIN, the brain; BTZ Chain, the veins; BICOIN, the blood; Xperienc, the neural link; qrqbits, the shield. How Bairo designed an organism. 10. The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/): Three old friends, two companies registered in London, and a dream that stopped being a no. Why Bairo's seventh attempt worked. 11. One name, four presences (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/one-name-four-presences/): Bairo, the executive. Leandro, the friend many saw suffer. The bro of everyday life. The presences behind Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez. 12. The plant and reconnection (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-plant-and-reconnection/): What changed inside Bairo after his inner search: the silence, finding who he was before the falls, and the plant as a bridge, not a destination. 13. The voice he follows (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-voice-he-follows/): Bairo sends his God ahead of time and follows, like a blind man, a voice he trusts. His faith, told with respect for believers and nonbelievers. 14. Leaving the Matrix (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/leaving-the-matrix/): Leaving the Matrix is not leaving the planet: it is changing your own reality. Bairo and the memory of a more prosperous version that hasn't happened yet. --- ## Fifty-five years later — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/ Idioma: en Descrição: Disney saw the park before it existed; Ford and Jobs heard "it can't be done." The story of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez begins in that lineage. On October 1, 1971, the gates of Walt Disney World opened in Florida. The man who had dreamed that place was not there. Walt Disney had died in December 1966, almost five years earlier. The story goes that, on opening day, someone remarked what a shame it was that Walt had not lived to see it. And that Mike Vance, then creative director of the Disney studios, answered in a few words: "He did see it. That's why it's here." On October 1, 2026, that opening turned fifty-five. It was the date Bairo chose to begin telling his own story. ### The engine that could not exist Napoleon Hill tells, in Think and Grow Rich, how Henry Ford asked his engineers for an engine with all eight cylinders cast in a single block. The engineers answered, every one of them, that it was impossible. Ford told them to build it anyway. Time passed, the answer stayed the same, and Ford told them to keep going. The scene with the engineers is Hill's. The rest is history: in 1932, the Ford V8 hit the streets, the first mass-produced single-block V8 engine. ### Ten seconds In 1983, Steve Jobs asked Larry Kenyon, an engineer on the Macintosh, to shave ten seconds off the time the computer took to boot. To explain why it mattered, he did the math. Ten seconds, times millions of people turning on a Mac every day, added up to entire lifetimes. The account comes from Andy Hertzfeld, who was on the team. No one told Jobs it couldn't be done. What makes the story unforgettable is something else: he put human life inside a number. Ten seconds stopped being machine time and became people time. Hold on to that idea. It comes back in this story. ### The decision Ayrton Senna decided to be the best. Before any victory, there was a decision, and after it came courage and persistence. A sentence of his from 1989, which the magazine Veja reproduced, sums up what he thought about limits: "Every driver has his limit. Mine is a little above everyone else's." For Bairo, honor is something that outlasts time. Senna is the proof. ### What binds them Set aside the eras, the countries and the industries, and one thing remains in common. For each of them, the limit was a starting line. One saw the park before it existed. Another heard "impossible" and said keep going. Another measured seconds in lifetimes. Another decided, before he ever raced, that his limit sat a little higher. This is the story of a man who heard "it can't be done," "it isn't possible" and "you can't" more times than he can count, and who turned those words into fuel. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez does not compare himself to them. He places himself in the same lineage, the way one pays tribute. If he could speak to Walt Disney, he says he would tell him just one thing: "Your dreams inspired me." What follows is the story of an immigrant who lost his footing, his income, his partners and very nearly his hope, and who learned, at the bottom of every fall, a sentence that became the rule of his life: Every no is the ground of a yes. It is also the story of a count. No one knows for sure how many times he tried, thought about stopping, and almost gave up. He says it was the seventh that worked. --- ## Capoeira was the bridge — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/ Idioma: en Descrição: A Colombian boy who swore he would live in Brazil, capoeira as the bridge, and the arrival in 2002. The beginning of the story of Bairo Gonzalez. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez was born in Colombia, in 1982. From the time he was a boy, he told anyone who would listen that one day he would live in Brazil. It wasn't a plan. It was a certainty spoken out loud, before there was any road leading to it. The road came through a circle. Capoeira, the fight that is a dance and the dance that is a fight, was the first thing from Brazil he learned with his body. Before the language, before the country, came the rhythm of the berimbau. Capoeira was the bridge. ### The ginga People who have never played capoeira tend to think it is made of strikes. People who play it know it is made of ginga. The ginga is the movement that never stops: the body sways to one side, comes back to the other, and never stays still long enough to be taken down. In the roda, whoever stops, falls. In 2014, UNESCO recognized the capoeira circle as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity. To a Colombian boy, it was something else: proof that Brazil already lived inside him before he ever set foot in the country. Much of what comes later in this story is ginga. Fall to one side, come back on the other, never stay still long enough to be taken down for good. ### No coincidences Bairo says there are no coincidences and no accidents. There are purpose, dreams and execution. That sentence explains the boy who announced Brazil before he knew it, and it explains everything that would come after. ### 2002 In 2002, he arrived. He came with an education company, and he did not come to sweep floors: he held a management position. He was young to be in charge of anyone, and he was in charge. The boyhood dream had come true. Brazil was real, and he was in it. ### The first no One day, Bairo wanted to follow his own path and leave the company. That was when he learned how an immigrant can lose the ground beneath him: no documents in hand, far from home, and afraid. Hard years followed, with no direction and no safety net, as for so many immigrants before and after him. It took time to get back on his feet. Anyone who has been through that learns something no school teaches. He likes to put it this way: the sun is for everyone, but shade, in the heat, is for the few. ### What remained The boy who had announced Brazil was in Brazil, with no footing, no direction and no one to ask. It would have been the natural place to give up. He didn't give up. He started over, from the only place left: from zero. And he started close to home, with the person standing beside him. --- ## The sun is for everyone — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/ Idioma: en Descrição: With no footing in Brazil, Bairo started over with a salon, a newborn daughter and a hair-care course that came before trichology found its place. After losing his footing in Brazil, Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez started over at a neighborhood address. With his partner, when their daughter was born, he opened a salon. It didn't work out as well as they had hoped. But it worked out very well in another way. ### The course that came before the name Out of the salon grew an idea bigger than the salon. Bairo created a course in hair treatments, on caring for the hair and the scalp, and gave it the name "Biomedicina Capilar". He brought together trichology, scalp therapy, visagism and a part on sales and self-knowledge for salon professionals. He taught with the hair strand and the scalp animated in 3D on screen, and made it clear to his students that none of it replaced the doctor: the two work together. The word trichology is old, but in Brazil the field only found its place years later: today it has graduate programs at respected health schools, and hair treatments have become a market. Back then, it was just an immigrant with a handout and a conviction. ### An immigrant father There is a calculation every immigrant father makes in silence. His daughter is born in a country that is not yet entirely his, in a language that is not yet entirely his. She will belong here. He has to make the journey worth it. That calculation changes a man's urgency. Before, a mistake cost him. Now, a mistake cost someone else too. Bairo did not shrink the size of his ideas because of it. He shrank the time he allowed himself to stay down after each fall. ### Too early Then came an idea that sounded like fiction. Bairo wanted to bring artificial intelligence and augmented reality into the business, starting with the classes. If students could already see the hair strand from the inside in an animation, why not step into it? He even recorded a sample of a 4D course. People said it wouldn't work. He believed. And, even believing, he gave up. Years later, the very same thing became a trend. Seen from afar, that is called vision. Lived up close, you learn that arriving too early also means arriving alone. ### The first lesson It wasn't a defeat. It was an expensive lesson. Being right ahead of time doesn't pay the bills, but it shows the eye is true. Bairo kept both: the pain of having given up, and the proof that he had seen far. Next time, he decided, he would not stop at the first answer. And the next time was waiting in another city, the city where his daughter had been born. --- ## Every no is the ground of a yes — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/ Idioma: en Descrição: Natural cosmetics before the wave, and partners who pushed him out of his own idea: the pain that became the rule of Bairo Gonzalez's life. Bairo Gonzalez moved to the city where his daughter was born and tried again. This time, he went into manufacturing. He began producing cosmetics under his own brand, Biomedhair: a line for use at home, a professional line for salons and even a line for pets. Over time, the brand came to bring together everything he had built up to then: the cosmetics, the "Biomedicina Capilar" course and the scalp-therapy devices. It was a Brazilian brand, with no connection to the clinic of the same name in Turkey. The bet was clear: natural-based cosmetics, at a time when few people were betting on them. Once again, people said it wouldn't work. It did. And, years later, natural cosmetics became a trend. The second time he got there before the wave. The first time he stayed in the water. ### The idea they took from him With the brand on its feet, Bairo saw the next step: touchscreen technology applied to the business. It was his idea. The answer did not come from outside. It came from within. According to him, his partners pushed him out of the business, and the idea stayed with them. Some defeats hurt the wallet. This one hurt somewhere else. ### The ground That was when Bairo made a discovery he still carries today. He found the pain and, instead of running from it, he made it his foundation. Not as an open wound. As ground to stand on. And, deep down, he knew something he had not yet said out loud: Every no is the ground of a yes. Every closed door had left something in his hands. The course had left method. The AI idea had left an eye for the future. The cosmetics brand had left proof that he could create from nothing. And the partners had left the most expensive lesson of all: choose carefully whom you build with. Every no had been a brick. ### Reinvent Bairo didn't wait for the wound to close. He went to work in events and digital printing. He reinvented himself once more, built up capital and, for the first time, decided to play a different position: instead of founding, investing. He did not yet know that the next fall would be the deepest of all. --- ## Fifty lives — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/ Idioma: en Descrição: Many people depending on him, a business that collapsed, and an unlikely choice: build a currency, a bank and a network without knowing how. With the capital from the events business, Bairo joined a company as an investing partner. The business was not what it seemed. It didn't hold. He went broke again. ### The weight This time the fall was not his alone. He says there were fifty people who depended on him. Fifty human lives, as he counts them, in a business he had trusted. There is a natural reaction to a moment like that, and everyone knows it. To complain. About the partner, the system, the country, bad luck. Bairo didn't complain. Years later, he would give an artificial intelligence a name that means to claim, the other side of the same word. That day was still far off. ### Doing what he didn't know how to do At that moment, he made the most unlikely decision a broke man can make. Instead of looking for familiar ground, he headed for the unknown. He decided to do something he did not know how to do. Build a currency. Build a bank. Build a navigation network. To someone who had never done any of it, the list sounds like madness. To Bairo, it was the same logic as always: if no one is doing it, it's because someone has to. ### Left hanging It went wrong. And it didn't go wrong for lack of ideas. It went wrong because of people. The very ones he had helped left him hanging. It is the shortest sentence in this story, and the hardest to write. Being abandoned by strangers teaches caution. Being abandoned by the people you helped teaches something else: that your decision cannot depend on anyone's gratitude. ### Keep going It did not make him give up. He kept going. And, this time, it worked. --- ## The coin and the road — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-coin-and-the-road/ Idioma: en Descrição: A digital currency launched at the right time, a community around it, and the road that led Bairo Gonzalez to build businesses outside Brazil. After so many falls, Bairo Gonzalez's first yes was a matter of timing. He says that, at the right moment, he launched a digital currency that served as the foundation for an urban mobility app. For the first time, he says, an idea of his had not been taken, copied or abandoned. It had found people to use it. ### Building again With what he earned in that stage, Bairo did what few would do: he went back to building on the same ground. This time, a currency project of his own. Around it grew something money can't buy: a community of people who shared the same idea of the future. Not a client list. People brought together by a belief. He tells of this coin as part of the road, not as an invitation: what it was worth to him was the journey, and nobody needs to buy anything to be part of this story. ### The map The immigrant who once lost his footing began to move around the world. Bairo says he has built businesses in Portugal, the United States, London, Hong Kong, Bolivia and Dubai. It wasn't a job title that took him abroad. It was the road. The man who had known the shade learned to walk in the sun of many countries. ### What the community taught A community does not form around a product. It forms around a belief. There, Bairo learned something he would carry into everything he built afterward: technology without people is just code, and people without purpose are just a crowd. What brings the two together is a story in which people can see themselves. He also learned the other side. A community makes demands. It demands consistency, it demands presence, it demands that the idea of the future be treated seriously. That is why, in the ventures that came later, he carefully separates vision from fact, and purpose from price. ### What the road doesn't tell A beautiful map does not mean an easy road. No one knows for sure how many times, along that road, he tried, wondered, and almost gave up. Not even he keeps that count. What he does tell is something else. At some point on the road, Bairo was broke, broken and beaten. No money, no apparent way out, not a single plan left in the drawer. But he still had a flame. Of hope, and of faith. That is where everything began. --- ## The God of the impossible — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/ Idioma: en Descrição: Broke, Bairo Gonzalez found faith and, on a personal inner search, the silence he was looking for. His path, told the way he lived it. Faith came to Bairo Gonzalez at rock bottom, when there was no plan left in the drawer. This is the most intimate part of the story, and he tells it as he lived it. ### The congregation At rock bottom, Bairo found a door he had not been looking for. In the Congregação Cristã no Brasil, he heard accounts, stories and testimonies from ordinary people who had crossed through the impossible. Listening, he came to believe in the God of the impossible. Listening more, he came to trust in the God of love. Faith, for him, took on a simple definition: trusting in something you cannot see. ### The road inward There is a second road in this story, and it is separate from the first. The congregation has nothing to do with it. Bairo searched within himself for what he had lost. Following his own senses and his own intuition, he allowed himself, in his personal search, experiences with cannabis oil. He was not looking for treatment for any illness. He was looking for silence. For him, the oil was a bridge inward. For him, it was a form of introspection: to stop searching outside for what was missing inside, and to listen to what the noise of the fall would not let him hear. At another point in that same search, Bairo took part in ayahuasca ceremonies, in a ritual setting. In Brazil, the religious use of ayahuasca is recognized, and it enters this story as a rite, not as consumption. The plants, for him, were bridges. The crossing was his own, and what he brought back from the other side was not a substance. It was a decision. ### What he saw Bairo describes what he lived through in that search as a journey beyond time. He says he saw his best self. A prosperous man. Not only in money: in peace. A man who trusted his God blindly, who lived in the presence of the God of creation, and in whom that God he loves dwelled, until the two became one. For him, that is where everything begins. ### Remembering the way Bairo came out of that experience with an image and no map. He knew where he wanted to arrive. He didn't know how. He says he didn't know how to code, or anything like it. So he did what the congregation had taught him. He asked. He asked for wisdom, understanding and courage to remember how to get there, to his best self. Notice the verb. He did not ask to learn the way. He asked to remember it. Because, for Bairo, he had already seen the end. All that was missing was to build the middle. It is the same logic as the line that opens this story. The story goes that Walt saw it first. That is why the park was there. Anyone who has come this far looking for a shortcut will not find one: what he lived was his own. If the plant enters your life as medicine, in Brazil that path begins in a doctor's office, with a prescription and within Anvisa's rules. What science already knows about the plant, and what is still being studied, is in The plant and the science (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-plant-and-the-science/). --- ## The frequency of silence — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/ Idioma: en Descrição: Why 1420 MHz, the hydrogen line no country uses, became a symbol for Bairo, and the six months at home that gave shape to CEASA Bank. There is a frequency the whole world has agreed to leave in silence. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. When its atoms change state, they emit a radio wave at an exact frequency: 1420.405751768 MHz. Astronomers call this signal the hydrogen line. It is how we listen to the universe and draw the map of the galaxies. So that this faint signal is not lost in human noise, the band from 1400 to 1427 MHz is protected by international agreement, under the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). No country transmits on it. There, one only listens. This signal has a history that seems written for this one. It was predicted on paper in 1944 by the Dutch astronomer Hendrik van de Hulst, in the middle of the war, when no one had a way to hear it. It was only detected in 1951, by Harold Ewen and Edward Purcell, at Harvard. Seven years between seeing it on paper and hearing it in the sky. First someone saw. Then the world confirmed. In 1959, two physicists, Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, went further. In a paper in the journal Nature, they suggested that if a civilization in some other corner of the universe wanted to be heard, it would choose precisely this frequency, because any being that studied the cosmos would know it. The frequency of the most common element of all became, for science, the natural candidate for a universal language. That is why, for Bairo, 1420 MHz is the frequency of silence. ### A symbol, not a device Bairo says it plainly: he understands the world as quantum, and he believes there is a frequency of connection. That is his spiritual reading, and that is how it appears here. For him, the hydrogen frequency is the best symbol there is for that idea. It is the simplest and most abundant element, one proton and one electron, formed just after the Big Bang. It is the signal every country agrees not to use. It is pure, clean silence. The place, in his words, where one can find one's God. He took that silence as his foundation. And the name stuck: 1420. No one transmits on 1420 MHz, not even him. The number is a symbol, and it is as a symbol that he carries it through everything he has built. ### Six months Then Bairo did the least glamorous thing in this story. He sat down in front of a computer and spent six months without leaving the house. Developing. Coding. Writing. Remembering. A man who, by his own account, didn't know how to code learned to build with the tools of his own time. He describes those months as a string of small miracles that even he can't explain. Anyone looking from outside sees something else, something just as rare: discipline. ### The foundation of CEASA Bank Bairo says those six months produced the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness, built on top of a company he already had. The idea was a niche artificial intelligence that puts those who produce, those who process, those who trade and those who buy in direct connection. The real agribusiness of the wholesale food markets, where food changes hands every day and where many people are still outside the financial system. ### One more no He went looking for answers and connections. Once again he heard that it wasn't possible. According to him, the banks refused to integrate his solution. Bairo already knew what to do with a no. He used it as ground. He focused on building his own technology, piece by piece: artificial intelligence; financial messaging under the international ISO 20022 standard; blockchain; tokenization of real-world assets, what the market calls RWA. Technology can be built without asking for a license; handling other people's money cannot. That is why the regulated part runs on the infrastructure of an authorized institution. The banks that didn't want to integrate his idea ended up teaching him to build his own infrastructure. --- ## A whole body — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/ Idioma: en Descrição: CLAIN, the brain; BTZ Chain, the veins; BICOIN, the blood; Xperienc, the neural link; qrqbits, the shield. How Bairo designed an organism. Bairo Gonzalez had not seen a company. He had seen a body. ### The message of Xperienc Along the way, Bairo trusted the plans of what he calls his guide. And he received, as he puts it, the message of Xperienc. Xperienc Global Labs was born in London, registered as a biotechnology research and development company, with the ambition of standing among the great medical cannabis labs of the world. The idea is to bring together in one place what is scattered today: laboratories, teleconsultation, a clinical assistant powered by artificial intelligence that follows up and organizes information, always validated by a health professional, and Global Language, an instant translator in which patient and doctor each speak in their own language. With it, a specialist in another country can give a clinical second opinion. An opinion, not a medical report. ### Why CLAIN While building all of this, Bairo ran into a problem everyone who works with AI knows. Artificial intelligence consumes tokens, and tokens are expensive. The answer was CLAIN. The name comes from claim: in Portuguese, the word reclamar means both to complain and to claim what is yours, and CLAIN takes the second sense. The idea behind the name is that anyone can claim a new download of their best self. Remember the broke man who, as he tells it, had fifty people depending on him, who decided not to complain? It's the same man. He traded one meaning of the word for the other. ### The institute and the channel Alongside came the Instituto CEASA, the humanitarian front, with a vision that fits on one line: a place where hunger stops being the problem and the pain. And, linked to the Institute, 1420mhz.org, which he defines as a channel of communication and elevation. Here lies one of Bairo's central ideas: artificial intelligence is an extension of the human, not the problem. He speaks of the last generation of humans integrated with the first generation of AI, code 0.1, or 1.0. ### The veins and the blood For humans and machines to work together, there has to be a place where truth can be verified. Bairo proposes BTZ Chain, a hybrid blockchain that brings together artificial intelligence and human time, designed to work as a validator of truthfulness and proof of humanity. The network's governance coin is BICOIN (BTZ), conceived as the currency of the many artificial intelligences in the ecosystem. In Bairo's vision, it is a network where time is the value, where truth is the validator, and where humans and machines work together. Remember Steve Jobs's ten seconds? For Bairo, lifetime is the measure of everything. The idea has distinguished relatives: since 1980, the time banks created by Edgar Cahn have exchanged one hour of service for one hour. BTZ Chain proposes a new chapter of that old idea: time as the measure, now with machines in the count. The project's yardstick is "1 BTZ = 1 minute of human life." It measures what the network wants to protect, not how much anyone will earn: it is purpose, not price. ### Solutions for anyone From the same trunk grew tools meant to be accessible to anyone. SOSPROCESSOS, for legal analysis led by a lawyer. The hospital triage system, a pre-consultation with a clinical assistant and human validation. ### The body Together, the pieces form the design Bairo has carried from the beginning: - CLAIN is the brain. - BTZ Chain is the veins. - BICOIN is the blood. - Xperienc is the neural connection layer. - qrqbits is the external transmission pathway, the protection of what leaves the body. It is not a conglomerate. It is an organism. Each part only makes sense because the others exist. --- ## The seventh attempt — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/ Idioma: en Descrição: Three old friends, two companies registered in London, and a dream that stopped being a no. Why Bairo's seventh attempt worked. After six months alone, Bairo was no longer alone. He found help and connection in three old acquaintances. The four joined forces to carry on, finish and elevate together what he had started. For someone who had been left hanging by the very people he helped, the word "together" is no small detail. It is a reconciliation with the idea of a team. ### The count no one kept How many times did he try? No one knows for sure. How many times did he think about stopping? No one knows that either. How many times did he almost give up? More than he likes to remember. What is known is the number he chose to tell his own story: seven. The seventh attempt, and the last, was the one that worked. Seven is often the number of completeness. In Bairo's life, it was the number of stubbornness. It is worth looking back to see what each attempt left behind. The course left method. The AI idea that came too early left an eye for the future. The cosmetics brand left proof that he could create from nothing. The partners who pushed him out left the lesson about whom to build with. The fall of the fifty lives left the courage to do what he didn't know how to do. The coin that took to the road left the world as his address. The seventh was not the first to work by luck. It was the first that carried all the others inside it. ### What is real The difference between a dream and a story is the record. And this one has a record. In 2026, Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez set up in London the two companies he runs: Xperienc Global Labs, in biotechnology research, and CEASA Financial. In both, he is director and controlling owner. In Brazil, he is the administrator of the company that operates the CEASA Bank brand. The agribusiness platform, the coin, the network, the lab and the work with the hospital stopped being a no. Each front is at a different stage, some moving, others under construction, and that is how they are told here, one by one. The dream took shape. The most prosperous version he had seen, Bairo says, was real, and it was just as he had seen it. ### Faith, with no owner Bairo insists on one thing. For him, whoever trusts in their God of creation is right, regardless of religious belief. The faith that saved him is not a faith that excludes. ### The horizon The road, for him, does not end in a company. Bairo speaks of the integration between humans and artificial intelligence as the next chapter of our species, and points toward a horizon the industry calls artificial general intelligence and superintelligence. It is a direction, not an achievement. ### He saw it The story goes that, at the opening of Walt Disney World, someone lamented that Walt had not lived to see the park, and heard in reply: "He did see it. That's why it's here." Bairo's story fits in the same sentence. He saw it first. That is why he is building it now. And, on October 1, 2026, at 14:20, he marked that moment with a symbol. Read the Manifesto 14:20 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/milestone-1420/) --- ## One name, four presences — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/one-name-four-presences/ Idioma: en Descrição: Bairo, the executive. Leandro, the friend many saw suffer. The bro of everyday life. The presences behind Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez. His full name is Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez. Those who spend time with him know that, inside that name, different presences live. They are not characters. They are the ways people meet him. ### Bairo Bairo is the executive. The one who sits at the table, reads the contract, designs the structure, answers for the companies at Companies House and in Brazil. It is the name on the record, and it is the name the market knows. ### Leandro Leandro is the friend. The one many saw suffer. The one from the hard years after he arrived, the one whose partners pushed him out of his own idea, the one with many people depending on him, the broke man who still had a flame. Those who call him Leandro, as a rule, were close by when there was nothing to celebrate. ### Omega To others, he is Omega. He says it is an affectionate nickname, given by people he helped, and not a title he uses for himself. These people see him as someone with an "expansion consciousness," in his words: someone who helps others see further than they are looking right now. ### The bro And, day to day, he is simply o mano, the bro. The friend, the brother. Or o senhor, sir, for those who prefer formality. He is the person who sees human beings before he sees titles, track records or bank balances. ### The same man Four names, one direction. The executive, the friend, the nickname and the bro share one habit: looking for the best version of others. It makes sense. For years, Bairo searched for his own best self. He went through the no, going broke, the abandonment and the silence to find it. The man who searched for his own best self now searches for the best in others. But to understand how he found it, we have to go back to the silence. To what was broken inside him, and to the bridge he crossed to find himself again. Continue to The plant and reconnection (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-plant-and-reconnection/) --- ## The plant and reconnection — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-plant-and-reconnection/ Idioma: en Descrição: What changed inside Bairo after his inner search: the silence, finding who he was before the falls, and the plant as a bridge, not a destination. There is a kind of noise that does not come from the street. It lives inside. It is made of overdue bills, of the names of partners who left, of sentences someone said years ago that keep playing like a badly tuned radio. Anyone who has lost everything knows that noise. It does not switch off at night. It does not switch off in the shower. It follows a person to the door of every new attempt and stays there, leaning on the frame, repeating that it won't work. Bairo lived for years with that noise on. On the outside, he kept going. He started over, set things up, reinvented. On the inside, the volume only rose. Every fall added a new station to the radio, and none of them played music. ### The man before the falls Before the documents he did not have in hand, before the salon, the partners, the fifty lives, there was another man. A boy, really. The one who swore he would live in Brazil with no road to get there. The one who learned the ginga before the language. The one who announced out loud things that did not yet exist and did not apologize for it. That boy had not died. He had been buried. Every fall left a layer on top of him. One of caution. Another of shame. Another of fatigue. One more of distrust, the one the partners left. None of these layers was a lie. All of them were defense. Whoever takes blows learns to protect himself, and protecting yourself is sensible. The problem is that the defense grew so thick that Bairo could no longer hear the voice of who he had been. That is what he means when he speaks of what was broken inside him. It was not the body. It was the connection. The thread between the man he was and the man he had become snapped somewhere along the road, and he could not say where. He only knew that, when he tried to dream, the image came without color. He was still able to work. He had lost the ability to desire. ### The bridge The chapter The God of the impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/) told how, at rock bottom, he went looking for silence, not for treatment, and how in that personal search cannabis oil was a bridge into himself. That chapter told the crossing as seen from outside. This one tells what happened on the inside. He describes it this way: the noise went down. It did not disappear. It went down. The bills were still there, the names too, the old sentences too. But, for the first time in a long while, there was space between one thought and the next. An interval. And, in that interval, something appeared that he had not gone looking for. It was not, yet, a vision of the future. It was a memory. The boy from the capoeira circle. Bairo says he remembered who he was before he was afraid. Not like someone looking at an old photograph, with longing and distance. Like someone who recognizes his own voice on a forgotten tape and thinks: that's me. It was always me. ### A bridge, not a destination There is a phrase he repeats when he talks about this period, and it is the most important one in this chapter: the plant was a bridge, not a destination. A bridge is for crossing. Nobody lives on a bridge. Whoever stops in the middle of one is nowhere: neither on the bank they left nor on the bank they were heading for. For Bairo, the value of the crossing was on the other bank, and the other bank was not the plant. It was himself. That is why he does not tell this part of his life as the discovery of a substance. He tells it as a reunion. What he brought back from the other side does not fit in a bottle. It fits in a simple sentence that took him years to be able to say: you can be in silence without being afraid of silence. He makes a point of being clear that this was his own path, and not a prescription for anyone: whoever is thinking about medical use starts with a consultation with a doctor, and what science already knows about the plant is in The plant and the science (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-plant-and-the-science/). ### What the silence gave back Reconnection is a word that sounds soft. In his life, it had hard, concrete consequences. The first was the time between the blow and the response. Before, every no arrived and left at once as a reaction: anger, haste, a decision made to silence the anguish. Afterward, between the no and the response, there came to be an interval. Capoeira calls that ginga. He learned to sway on the inside. The second was the question. The buried man gave answers, because answers protect. The man who found himself again went back to asking. What do I really want? Who am I building for? What would I do if I weren't afraid of falling again? The third was desire. The image that used to come without color came back in color. He went back to dreaming out loud, like the boy who announced Brazil, and this time without asking fear for permission. The fourth was the hardest for someone who had been left hanging: he went back to accepting help. Not from just anyone, and not without care. But the door that betrayal had locked from the inside opened a crack. It was through that crack that, later on, three old acquaintances came in, as The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) tells. ### The gold in the cracks In Japan there is an ancient art called kintsugi. When a ceramic bowl breaks, the craftsman does not hide the cracks. He joins the pieces with lacquer mixed with gold powder. The piece is usable again, and the lines of the break stay visible, shining. It does not go back to how it was. It becomes more whole than before, because now it carries its own story in its body. Bairo's new version did not erase the man of the falls. He still carries the caution, the memory of the partners, the weight of the fifty lives. Only now those marks are no longer layers that bury; they have become lines of gold that join. The boy from the circle and the man who fell many times came to share the same body, without a fight. That is what he calls his new version. It is not another person. It is the same person, whole again, with the cracks in plain sight. ### What did not change It would be prettier to say that, after this, everything became easy. It did not. The debts did not pay themselves. The market did not start saying yes. The banks kept refusing, as The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) told. What changed was not the world. It was the place from which he looked at the world. Before, he faced every no from inside the noise. Afterward, he began to face it from inside the silence. The no still hurt. It just no longer gave the orders. Perhaps that is the difference between recovering and finding yourself again. Recovering is getting back to functioning. Finding yourself again is getting back to being. Bairo had already recovered many times: he was an expert at getting up. What he did not know how to do was get up whole. ### The other bank On the other side of the bridge was a quiet man, with his head in order and a new question: and now, where to? He reached that bank by his own path. But the direction he took from there did not come from any plant. It came from a faith he had found somewhere else, listening to the stories of ordinary people who had crossed through the impossible, a faith that never depended on anything but trust. That faith has its own chapter. It does not mix with this crossing, and he makes a point of keeping it that way. It is about the voice he came to follow. ### Read also - The God of the impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/) - The plant and the science (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-plant-and-the-science/) - How to find silence in the middle of the noise? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-find-silence-in-the-noise-practical-guide/) - How do I discover my best self? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-discover-my-best-self/) --- ## The voice he follows — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-voice-he-follows/ Idioma: en Descrição: Bairo sends his God ahead of time and follows, like a blind man, a voice he trusts. His faith, told with respect for believers and nonbelievers. Picture an unfamiliar street, at night, in fog. A man walks down it with his eyes closed. He doesn't stumble, doesn't feel his way along the walls, doesn't stop at every corner to check the sign. He walks with a firm, almost calm step. Whoever watches from the sidewalk thinks he knows the way. He doesn't. He is listening. Somewhere ahead, a voice says: this way. And he goes. ### A blind man and a voice He likes to say he is like a blind man following a voice he trusts. The image is his, and it says a lot about the man who chose it. Bairo spent much of his life seeing far: the course before the field had found its place, natural cosmetics before the wave, artificial intelligence before it became a trend. A man who sees before others could describe his own faith as vision. He preferred to describe it as blindness. Not for lack of eyes. As a choice of trust. Whoever can see chooses the path by what they see, and so goes only as far as the eye can reach. Whoever follows a voice goes as far as the voice calls. For Bairo, faith begins exactly where sight ends. It is the definition he learned at rock bottom and never traded for another: trusting in something you cannot see. ### God up ahead Before any step, he does something he describes with a curious image. He sends his God ahead of time. Before a meeting, a trip, a decision that could change everything, he asks God to go first. To see the place where he has not yet arrived. To connect the people he does not yet know. To open the road that does not yet exist. Only then does he go. For a believer, it is a prayer. For a nonbeliever, perhaps it is the gesture of a man who refuses to walk alone into an unknown place. Either way, the consequence is the same: he never arrives anywhere as a stranger. In his faith, someone has already been there first and left the door ajar. And this from him, who was truly a foreigner. Who arrived in a country that was not yet his and knew, for years, what it is to be somewhere no one was expecting him. Perhaps that is why this image weighs so much for him. Sending God ahead is the certainty of never again arriving alone. ### Without fear The voice can lead him to many places. It already has. To a chair in front of a computer, for six months, building what he did not know how to build. To conversations with banks that said no. To countries where he knew no one. To new partners, after being abandoned by the old ones. To new beginnings that, seen from outside, looked like stubbornness. In none of those places, he says, did he feel fear. The sentence deserves care, because it is easy to misunderstand. He is not saying he never had misgivings, never hesitated, never lost sleep. He did, and this series tells of several of those nights. He is saying something else: that fear stopped being the one who decides. Apprehension shows up, as it does in anyone. It just no longer has the last word. The last word belongs to the voice. Whoever follows someone they trust does not need the map. They need the trust. ### No book says He lost There is a line of reasoning Bairo follows that says a lot about his faith. He recalls that humanity has written many sacred books, in many languages, over many centuries. Each people gave the Creator a name, a face, a way of being sought. Religions speak of that God in different ways, sometimes in ways that clash with one another. And yet, he says, in no book in the history of humanity is it written that this God of life, love and truth was defeated. He can be called by many names. He can be served in many ways. He can be denied, forgotten, argued about. But defeated, on none of those pages does he appear. For Bairo, that is one of the simplest reasons to go on without fear: whoever walks behind someone who has never lost need not fear the road's defeat. From there also comes a conviction he defends firmly. He found faith in a Christian congregation, listening to accounts from ordinary people who had crossed through the impossible. But the faith he carries does not belong to a building, a flag or one doctrine against another. For him, whoever trusts in the God of creation is right, whatever their belief. The faith that lifted him off the ground is not a faith that excludes. ### In the air we breathe Ask him where this God is, and the answer does not point upward. It points close by. For him, God is in the air we breathe. Every time the chest fills, it is presence. Every time it empties, it is presence too. And it points, curiously, to hydrogen. The chapter The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) told why that element became a symbol in his life: hydrogen is the simplest and most abundant element in the universe, it is in the water we drink and in the molecules of our own bodies, and it emits the signal the whole world agreed to leave in silence. Bairo looks at this and sees something else. He sees God in hydrogen. It is important to say clearly what this sentence is. It is his faith, spoken as poetry. It is not a scientific claim, and he does not present it as one. Chemistry explains what hydrogen is. What that element means to a man who found God at rock bottom is another conversation, and it belongs to him. But the image is beautiful, and it is not hard to understand why he chose it. If there is something that is everywhere, from the beginning, in every star and every drop, discreet, simple, almost invisible, it is a good portrait of what he calls God. ### All connected From there comes the last piece of Bairo's faith, the broadest one. If this God is in the air everyone breathes and in the element everyone is made of, then no one is beyond His reach. For Bairo, we are all, in some way, connected to a new reality where everything is possible. He does not say this as a promise that everything will work out for everyone. This whole series contradicts that promise: he himself fell far too many times. He says it like someone describing a door that is always open, even when no one walks through it. The impossible, for him, is not a wall. It is a place no one has reached yet. That is what he learned listening to those simple accounts, from people who had crossed what seemed to have no way out. The God of the impossible is not the God of those who never fall. He is the God of those who get back up. ### For those who do not believe This chapter was written with reverence for his faith, and with the same respect for those who have none. No one needs to believe what Bairo believes to understand what he did with that belief. You can read this story the way you read the travel diary of someone who has been to a country you do not know. You do not need to have gone there to recognize what the journey changed in the traveler. What faith changed in him is visible to anyone who cares to look: a man who lost almost everything and who, instead of closing himself off, went back to trusting. In God, first. Then in people. Then in his own ideas. If you do not believe, perhaps your voice has another name. Intuition. Conscience. The memory of someone who believed in you. What this story suggests is not that you adopt his faith. It is that you discover which voice deserves your trust, and start walking behind it with less fear. ### Eyes closed Go back to the street in the fog. The man is still walking with his eyes closed. Whoever is on the sidewalk still thinks he knows the way. Now you know that is not it. He does not know where the street ends. He knows who is up ahead. And, in his faith, the one up ahead has already seen where it ends. Has even seen a version of him that has not happened yet, waiting there at the end. That version is what the last chapter of this series is about. ### Read also - Having faith without religion (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/having-faith-without-religion/) - How to have faith when everything goes wrong? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-have-faith-when-everything-goes-wrong/) - How to listen to your own intuition? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-listen-to-your-own-intuition/) - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) --- ## Leaving the Matrix — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/leaving-the-matrix/ Idioma: en Descrição: Leaving the Matrix is not leaving the planet: it is changing your own reality. Bairo and the memory of a more prosperous version that hasn't happened yet. On March 31, 1999, a Wednesday, a film called The Matrix opened in movie theaters across the United States. Twenty-seven years ago, whole audiences watched, in silence, a scene that became part of the world's language. On a stormy night, in an old room, a man named Morpheus, seated in a leather armchair, holds out both hands to Neo. In one, a blue pill. In the other, a red one. With the blue one, Neo goes back to bed, wakes up the next day and goes on believing whatever he wants to believe. With the red one, he finds out how deep the rabbit hole goes. Neo takes the red one. And he discovers that the world he had lived in his whole life was a simulation. That his body was trapped in a pod, and his mind trapped in a dream that others had written for him. ### A prison without bars For Bairo, the film got one thing right, and another thing calls for care. It got it right in showing that the hardest prison to see is the one without bars. Neo's had no walls and no guards in sight. It had habits, routines, certainties. He did not know he was imprisoned because he had never seen anything beyond it. The care is with the hasty reading. Leaving the Matrix, for Bairo, is not leaving the planet. It is not fleeing the world, abandoning your family, quitting your job, going to live on a mountain. It is changing your reality, from the inside out, in the very place where you are. Because the prison, he says, is the mind. And the bricks of that prison have names: the limitations someone told you that you had, and the fears you accepted as if they were your own. They are not the ceiling of your life. They are the floor you stand on without noticing. Whoever never looks at the floor thinks the floor is the whole world. He knows this because he lived in one of those prisons. For years, his floor was the fear of falling again. Every decision was made standing on it, and that is why every decision was too small. ### The door There is a line of Morpheus's that Bairo likes to recall. It comes from a training scene, before Neo tries to jump from one building to another: "I'm trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You're the one that has to walk through it." That is Morpheus, in the original script of the film. This whole series is a door. No one walks through it for you. ### The salesman's no and the entrepreneur's yes There is a phrase that sums up how Bairo walked through the doors of his own life: the salesman's no and the entrepreneur's yes. The salesman lives on hearing no. He hears a hundred a week. And, when he hears it, the conversation is over: he picks up his briefcase, says thank you and goes to knock on the next door. The salesman's no is a period. The entrepreneur hears the same nos. The banks that refuse, the partners who leave, the technicians who say it can't be done. The difference is in what comes next. The entrepreneur answers with a yes that depends on no one: yes, I'll build it anyway. For him, the no is a comma. Bairo was both. For years, he carried every no as a period. Then he learned the sentence that became the rule of his life, the one this series has repeated since the first chapter: every no is the ground of a yes. At some point, the salesman who picked up his briefcase became the entrepreneur who said yes over the refusal. Leaving the Matrix, for him, was that. The refusal did not change. Who answered it did. ### In the quantum world He likes to say that, in the quantum world, nothing is decided ahead of time. Here two things need to be carefully separated: what physics says, and what Bairo does with it. Physics says this. In quantum mechanics, the theory that describes very small particles, a system such as an electron can be in a superposition of states: the theory describes it as a combination of possibilities, each with a probability. When it is measured, by an instrument, a single result appears. This has been tested in laboratories many times and holds for particles and microscopic systems. Physics does not say that a thought chooses that result, nor that anyone's mind changes the physical reality around them. This is where physics ends. What follows is metaphor. Bairo uses this image as a language for talking about possibility. For him, a person's future resembles that superposition: before you act, several versions of you are possible at the same time. The one who stays afraid and the one who crosses. The one who picks up the briefcase and the one who says yes. In his life, it was not the mind alone that chose between them. It was the decisions, the years of work, the nights in front of the computer. The choice does not happen in thought. It happens in the step. It is a metaphor, and he uses it as a metaphor. But it is a metaphor that helps us remember something true: as long as you have not given up, your story is not yet decided. ### Remembering the future The first chapter of this series begins in an amusement park its creator did not live to see. Walt Disney died before Walt Disney World opened its doors. And, on opening day, the story goes, someone lamented his absence and was told that he had seen it, yes. That is why the park was there. The story is in Fifty-five years later (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/). Bairo lived something similar. At rock bottom, he says, he saw his most prosperous version before it existed. A man at peace, with his life in order, building things that did not yet have names. And, when he came out of there, he did not ask to learn the way to it. He asked to remember. Remembering something that has not happened yet sounds like a contradiction. For him, it is the definition of vision. Whoever saw it first is not inventing the future. They are remembering it, and working until the rest of the world can see it too. The most prosperous version he remembers is not a bank balance. It is the version of someone who stopped living on top of fear. Nothing in this story is a promise of wealth, for him or for whoever reads it. It is the description of a direction. ### The path and the one who walks it The other line of Morpheus's that he keeps is said to Neo in a conversation between the two: "Sooner or later you're going to realize, just as I did, that there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path." Those are the film's own words. Reading a story of overcoming is knowing the path. No one changes their life because of it. They change it when they get up from the chair. ### For you You may never come to know this story, but, if you persist, you will live it. Not this one, exactly. You will not be a Colombian immigrant, you will not open a salon, you will not hear from the banks the same no he heard. But you will live your version of it. That of someone who was trapped on a floor of fears they didn't even know they had, heard no more times than they can count, and decided, on some ordinary day, that the no would be the ground of a yes. There is no pill in front of you. There is no shortcut, neither blue nor red. There is the same choice that existed for Neo, only without special effects: keep believing what you have always believed, or go and see how far the path goes. Bairo chose to go and see. It took seven attempts, by his count. No one knows how many yours will take. But your story is not yet decided. And, somewhere up ahead, there is a version of you that you have not met yet. It may be worth starting to remember it. If you want to see your own path in the stages every hero goes through, start with The hero's journey (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-heros-journey/). If you want to revisit this story from its first scene, go back to the beginning of the series (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/). ### Read also - Every no is the ground of a yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) - My dream seems impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/my-dream-seems-impossible/) - The hero's journey (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-heros-journey/) - Fifty-five years later: the beginning of the series (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/) --- ## The path: what to do when life says no URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/ Idioma: en Descrição: Bankruptcy, debt, eviction, failure, silence: what to do when everything says no, drawn from the journey of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez. ### Bankruptcy - What to do when you've gone broke? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/what-to-do-when-you-have-gone-broke/): Stop the bleeding, list what you owe, protect your household basics and negotiate calmly. Going broke is a fact, not a verdict on who you are. - My company went bankrupt: now what? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/my-company-went-bankrupt-now-what/): Before closing, see an accountant and a lawyer: judicial or out-of-court reorganization, or an orderly wind-down. Closing badly costs more. - How to close a company with debts? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-close-a-company-with-debts/): With an accountant: list the debts, tell your team, deregister formally, negotiate the rest. Closing with debt is possible; abandoning it is worse. - How to deal with the shame of going broke? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-deal-with-the-shame-of-going-broke/): Separate what you did from who you are, tell the truth to the people who matter and act again. Shame shrinks when the story is told with dignity. - The company went under: what about the employees? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/company-went-under-what-to-do-about-employees/): Speak early and truthfully, put wages and severance first and hand over the unemployment insurance documents. People come before suppliers. ### Eviction - How to face an eviction? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-face-an-eviction/): In Brazil, eviction only happens by court order. Talk to the landlord, keep your receipts, know your deadlines and go to the Public Defender now. - I received an eviction lawsuit: what do I do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/i-received-an-eviction-lawsuit-what-to-do/): Read the summons, note the date and see the Public Defender that same day. There are usually 15 days to pay the debt and stay, or to defend yourself. - I was evicted: where do I go and how do I start over? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/i-was-evicted-where-to-go-and-how-to-start-over/): Secure a place to sleep tonight, keep your documents, go to the CRAS and your support network, then think about the next rental. One step at a time. ### Failure - How to overcome failure? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-overcome-failure/): Grieve, write down the lesson, take one small concrete step and don't decide your whole life on your worst day. Failure is an event, not an identity. - How to deal with professional failure? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-deal-with-professional-failure/): Separate your career from your worth, take stock of what you can do and turn the experience into an argument. Every solid career has its falls. - I've tried many times and nothing worked. Now what? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/i-tried-many-times-and-nothing-worked/): See what each attempt left, change one variable at a time and spend less time on the ground. Many falls don't prove incapacity; they can be preparation. - How to stop feeling like a failure? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-stop-feeling-like-a-failure/): Distrust the voice that generalizes, note small wins, talk to someone and get help if the sadness doesn't pass. Feeling like a failure isn't being one. ### Debt - How to get out of debt? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-get-out-of-debt/): List all you owe, stop taking on new debt, tackle the highest interest first and accept only installments that fit. No shortcut, just method. - How to negotiate overdue debts? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-negotiate-overdue-debts/): Know what you can pay before calling, ask for a discount and time, compare offers, never accept an installment that doesn't fit, get it in writing. - I'm over-indebted: what does the law say? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/over-indebted-what-the-law-says/): Brazil's Law 14,181/2021 lets you gather creditors, set a plan of up to 5 years and keep the minimum to live on. Go to Procon or the Public Defender. - Debts keeping you up at night: what to do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/debts-keeping-you-up-at-night/): Get the debt out of your head and onto paper, pick one step for tomorrow, talk to someone, and get help if anguish turns to despair. You are not your debt. - How to get out of debt on a low income? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-get-out-of-debt-on-a-low-income/): Protect the essentials, claim the benefits you're entitled to, negotiate minimum installments and grow your income bit by bit. Slow still gets there. ### Starting over - How to start over from zero? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-over-from-zero/): Accept your starting point, secure the basics, start close to home with what you know and measure progress in weeks, not days. Zero is ground too. - Starting over after 40: work, family and money (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-life-over-after-40/): Starting over after 40 with bills and kids: new work, an age-proof résumé, savings and health. For starting a business at that age, see the other guide. - How to start over after losing everything? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-over-after-losing-everything/): First survive, then stabilize, only then rebuild. Separate what was lost from what remained, and count what remained: it is bigger than it looks. - How to reinvent yourself professionally? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-reinvent-yourself-professionally/): Find what you can do that's valuable elsewhere, test the new field small before you leap, and use each earlier phase as a tool. ### Fear - How to beat the fear of starting over: 7 practical steps (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-overcome-the-fear-of-starting-over-7-steps/): Name the fear, work out the real worst case, shrink the next step and act before you feel ready. Courage is acting while afraid. - How to deal with fear of the future? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-deal-with-fear-of-the-future/): Separate what depends on you from what doesn't, take care of today, build small reserves and limit the flood of news. The future is made now. - How to find the courage to take risks? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-find-the-courage-to-take-risks/): Risk what you can lose, not what you can't. Set the limit first, test small, decide with data and accept that courage is a decision, not a feeling. ### Loneliness - Loneliness in a crisis: what to do now (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-deal-with-loneliness-in-a-crisis/): Ask for help specifically, seek communities and services that welcome you, and keep a routine. Deep loneliness deserves care: no one gets through alone. - No one believes in me: what do I do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/no-one-believes-in-me-what-to-do/): Separate useful criticism from dismissal, prove it on a small scale, seek out people who know the field and don't let a lack of support become giving up. ### Immigration - How to start life over in another country? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-life-over-in-another-country/): Documents in order, the language, a support network and a job that pays the bills. In Brazil, the Migration Law guarantees rights to newcomers. - Undocumented in Brazil: how to get legal and find help (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/undocumented-immigrant-in-brazil-how-to-regularize/): Migrating is not a crime in Brazil. See the Federal Public Defender and the Federal Police to regularize; health care and school are rights before that. - The company kept my passport: what do I do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/employer-kept-my-passport-what-to-do/): Withholding a worker's documents is prohibited in Brazil. Ask for them back in writing; go to the Public Defender, the MPT, the Federal Police or Dial 100. ### Faith - How to have faith when everything goes wrong? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-have-faith-when-everything-goes-wrong/): Faith doesn't require feeling certain; it requires going on. Seek community, hear those who made it through, and pair faith with one practical step a day. - How to find hope at rock bottom? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-find-hope-at-rock-bottom/): Look for one small reason for today, talk to someone, remember what you've been through and ask for help if hope disappears. The bottom is ground too. - How to unite faith and work in a crisis? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-unite-faith-and-work-in-a-crisis/): Faith gives strength; work gives shape. Ask for wisdom, understanding and courage, then do your part with discipline, one day at a time. ### Purpose - How to find my purpose in life? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-find-my-purpose-in-life/): Purpose is found by doing: notice what moves you and which pain of others you understand, then test it small. It isn't a revelation; it's a direction. - How do I discover my best self? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-discover-my-best-self/): Picture in detail who you want to be, compare it with who you are today and choose one habit that closes the gap. Your best self is a path, not a product. - How to turn pain into purpose? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-turn-pain-into-purpose/): First tend the wound; then ask what it taught you and who still suffers the same pain. Purpose is born when your pain becomes service to others. ### Decision - How to make a difficult decision? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-make-a-difficult-decision/): Write down the options, the real cost of each and what you value; set a deadline, decide, then stand by the choice. Not deciding is a decision too. - Give up or keep going: how do you know? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/give-up-or-keep-going-how-to-know/): Keep going if there's progress and you learn each time; change if you repeat the same mistake. Sometimes giving up one way is persisting in the dream. - Drop everything and start over: how to decide? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/drop-everything-and-start-over-how-to-decide/): Before dropping everything, test the new life small, build a reserve and talk to those who depend on you. Big change needs a bridge, not a leap. ### Silence - How to find silence in the noise: a practical guide (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-find-silence-in-the-noise-practical-guide/): Create small islands of silence in your day: phone away, minutes without stimulus, a walk, prayer or slow breathing. Silence is a practice, not a place. - How to calm your mind in the middle of chaos? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-calm-your-mind-in-the-middle-of-chaos/): Breathe slowly, name what you feel, reduce stimuli and focus on the next step. If the anxiety doesn't pass, go to a UBS, a CAPS or call CVV at 188. - How to listen to your own intuition? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-listen-to-your-own-intuition/): Go quiet to listen, write down what you feel before deciding, check intuition against facts and track your hits. Intuition is experience speaking softly. - How to disconnect to think clearly? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-disconnect-to-think-clearly/): Block out screen-free time, tell those who need to know, keep a notebook handy and return with a written decision. Disconnecting clears the signal. ### Innovating through pain - How to innovate in the middle of pain and crisis? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-innovate-through-pain-and-crisis/): Pain shows you the problem no one has solved. Look at what hurt you, ask who else suffers from it and test a small solution. - How to turn a crisis into an opportunity? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-turn-a-crisis-into-an-opportunity/): Stabilize first; then notice what changed in the market, what people now need and what you learned. Opportunity is a way of looking, not luck. - Creating something new without money: idea to prototype (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-create-something-new-without-money/): To get a new idea off the ground without capital: a handmade version, a test with a few people, incubators and public grants you don't pay back. - They said my idea won't work: how to react to the no (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/they-said-my-idea-wont-work-how-to-react/): Just heard your idea won't work? What to do in the next 48 hours: write it down, don't react on impulse, ask for the reason and test it. ### Partnership and betrayal - My partner pushed me out of the company: what do I do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/my-partner-pushed-me-out-of-the-company/): Keep your documents, read the articles of association, sign nothing in the heat of the moment and see a corporate lawyer. You may be owed your share. - A partner's betrayal: the part the law can't fix (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-get-over-a-partners-betrayal/): A partner's betrayal hurts the cash flow and your trust. How to tend the hurt, stop replaying the scene and trust again; the legal steps are elsewhere. - How to choose a partner after a disappointment? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-choose-a-partner-after-a-disappointment/): Don't shut the door on partnerships: use the wound as a criterion. Shared values, a checked record, a small test and everything in writing, exit included. - I helped and they left me hanging: how to deal with it? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/i-helped-and-they-left-me-hanging/): Acknowledge the hurt, don't turn help into debt, adjust your limits and keep being who you are. Your decisions can't depend on anyone's gratitude. ### Family - How to support your family after going broke? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-support-your-family-after-going-broke/): Protect housing and food, find immediate income, use the social rights available and bring the family into the plan. Pride can wait; children can't. - How to tell your family you've gone broke? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-tell-your-family-you-went-broke/): Pick a calm moment, tell the facts without dressing them up, present the plan and ask for concrete help. The secret weighs more than the truth. - How to start life over with a young child? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-over-with-a-young-child/): Secure routine and care for the child, use your support network and social rights, and take smaller steps. A child is not a brake; it's a reason. ### Persistence - How not to give up on your dreams? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-not-to-give-up-on-your-dreams/): Give the dream a concrete shape, break it into weekly steps, shield it from the wrong opinions, and change the road without dropping the direction. - How many attempts until it works? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-many-attempts-until-it-works/): There's no magic number. Count what each attempt taught you, not how many failed. Stop when you repeat the same mistake; keep going while you're learning. ### Starting without knowing how - Starting a business with no experience when you must (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-a-business-with-no-experience-when-you-need-to/): Lost your job and must start a business now, with no experience? Start with what you know, sell before investing, mind your benefits and avoid costly debt. - How to learn technology from scratch after 30? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-learn-technology-from-scratch-after-30/): Pick a real problem to solve, study a little every day, use free courses and AI tools as a teacher. Adults learn best by doing. - How to open a business after going broke? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-open-a-business-after-going-broke/): Sort out old debts, understand what caused the fall, start smaller and with cash, formalize properly and choose partners well. The lesson is capital. ### Time - How to make up for lost time? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-make-up-for-lost-time/): The time that passed won't come back, but what it taught you stays. Stop counting lost years and protect the hours ahead as your most precious asset. - Is it too late to start over? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/is-it-too-late-to-start-over/): Almost never. The clock that scares you belongs to others. Look at the time you still have, not what's gone, and start with something that fits this week. --- ## What to do when you've gone broke? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/what-to-do-when-you-have-gone-broke/ Idioma: en Descrição: Stop the bleeding, list what you owe, protect your household basics and negotiate calmly. Going broke is a fact, not a verdict on who you are. Going broke hurts in places no spreadsheet shows. The shame comes, the sleepless nights, the feeling that everyone knows. Breathe: what happened is a fact of your life, not the definition of who you are. ### What to do now - Stop the bleeding before anything else. Don't take out a new loan to cover the old one, don't dip into your overdraft or revolving credit card balance to "hold on one more month." Expensive debt on top of expensive debt is the shortest road to falling deeper. - Write it all down on paper. For each debt: to whom, how much, the interest rate, whether there is collateral (house, car) and how long it has been overdue. To find out what you owe banks, check Registrato, the Central Bank's free service that shows the credit operations under your CPF (Brazil's individual taxpayer number). - Set aside the essentials. Housing, food, water, electricity, medicine and transportation to work come before everything. Brazilian law recognizes this: the Over-Indebtedness Law (Law 14,181/2021) speaks of preserving the debtor's "existential minimum." - Negotiate calmly, and in writing. Creditors prefer to receive something over nothing. Use official channels: the creditor's own website and app, Serasa Limpa Nome, consumidor.gov.br, and the federal renegotiation program whenever one is open. For businesses, the Novo Desenrola of Provisional Measure 1,355 lapsed on 08/09/2026; today the path is to negotiate directly with the creditor, look at Pronampe under its regular rules and ask Sebrae for guidance. For individuals, there is the Desenrola Brasil 3.0 (Provisional Measure 1,393, of 25/09/2026): check the conditions at gov.br and see whether your debt qualifies. Don't accept an installment you already know you won't be able to pay. - If the company is yours, call an accountant and a lawyer before closing the doors. Judicial and out-of-court reorganization exist (Law 11,101/2005), and there are specific rules for micro and small businesses. If you can't afford a lawyer, go to the Public Defender's Office or a law school's legal aid clinic. - Don't hide or transfer assets. Putting the house or car in a relative's name once the debts already exist can be voided as fraud against creditors (Civil Code, art. 158) or fraud on execution, and it turns a money problem into a legal one. The home where the family lives already has its own protection against seizure, with exceptions (Law 8,009/1990). Ask the public defender what is protected before touching any asset. - Take care of your mind. If the pain has turned into despair, call CVV at 188 (free, 24 hours a day), or go to your city's primary health unit (UBS) or psychosocial care center (CAPS). Asking for help is part of the plan, not a detour from it. Be wary of anyone who promises to "clear your name" for an upfront payment, or easy money to get out of the hole. People who go broke become targets. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he went broke more than once. The hardest fall came after he built up capital with events and digital printing and joined a company as an investing partner. The business was not what it seemed and did not hold. He says many people were depending on him at that moment. He describes himself, in that phase, as broke, broken and beaten, but still holding a flame of hope and faith. What he did next was not the obvious path. Instead of spending his energy looking for someone to blame, he decided to learn what he didn't know how to do. The next attempt also went wrong. He kept going. ### The path Going broke doesn't erase what you learned by building. Bairo sums up the lesson in a sentence that became the rule of his life: every no is the ground of a yes. Today, your "no" may be the empty account. It doesn't have to be the end of the sentence. Start with the sheet of debts, the food on the table and an honest conversation. The rest gets built on top of that, one brick at a time. ### Read also - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) - How to get out of debt? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-get-out-of-debt/) - My company went bankrupt: now what? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/my-company-went-bankrupt-now-what/) - How to start over after losing everything? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-over-after-losing-everything/) --- ## My company went bankrupt: now what? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/my-company-went-bankrupt-now-what/ Idioma: en Descrição: Before closing, see an accountant and a lawyer: judicial or out-of-court reorganization, or an orderly wind-down. Closing badly costs more. Watching the company you built stop breathing is a kind of grief. You know every chair, every customer, every night you thought it would work. Before you turn off the lights, it's worth knowing there is a right way to get through this moment. ### What to do now - Find out where the company really stands. Ask your accountant for an up-to-date picture: cash, accounts payable, accounts receivable, unpaid taxes, labor and bank debts. Without that picture, every decision is a guess. - Know the exits the law offers. Law 11,101/2005, amended by Law 14,112/2020, provides for out-of-court reorganization (an agreement with some of the creditors), judicial reorganization (a payment plan approved by the creditors, under a judge's supervision) and bankruptcy itself. Micro and small businesses can use a special plan, with installments over up to 36 months (art. 71). And there is a point few people know: a business with no way to recover must, under the law itself, file for bankruptcy (art. 105). In practice, many small businesses without assets close through an orderly wind-down, with agreements. Each path has costs and requirements; a lawyer decides it with you. - Don't close "in fact" without closing "in law." Abandoning the company while it is still registered, without formally closing it, keeps debts and fines growing. If you are going to close, do the formal deregistration with your accountant. In many cases it is possible to deregister even with outstanding debts, but the debts don't disappear: they may start being collected from the partners. - If you are an MEI (individual microentrepreneur), the company's debts travel with your CPF. Deregistration is done on the Entrepreneur Portal (Portal do Empreendedor), and any remaining debts are still yours. Negotiate them through the channels of the Federal Revenue Service and the Office of the Attorney General of the National Treasury (PGFN). - Take care of people first. Employees are entitled to their severance pay, and in bankruptcy labor claims have priority over almost all others. Talk to your team truthfully and with advance notice. - Ask for free guidance. Sebrae, Brazil's small-business support agency, serves small businesses (0800 570 0800); the Public Defender's Office and law schools' legal aid clinics help those who can't afford a lawyer. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo says he has seen businesses of his end in more than one way. A natural-based cosmetics brand he built worked, and even so he left: his partners pushed him out when he proposed bringing touchscreen technology into the business. Later, with capital from events and digital printing, he joined as an investing partner in a company that was not what it seemed and did not hold. He doesn't hide these falls. Whoever shows only success hides precisely what teaches the most. Every business that ended left something in his hands: method, an eye for the future, proof that he could create from nothing, the lesson about whom to build with. ### The path A company that closes is not a life that closes. What you learned by opening, hiring, selling and making mistakes stays with you, and it is the hardest capital to copy. Close with dignity, pay what you can in the right order, keep the lesson. For Bairo, the attempt that worked was the one that carried all the others inside it. Before any conversation with creditors, with your team or with your family, write on a sheet of paper what you want to happen in the next ninety days. Pay whom? Keep what? Close when? That sheet doesn't need to be right; it needs to exist. It is what keeps panic from making decisions for you. In the hard weeks, go back to it, correct what needs correcting, and keep going. ### Read also - Every no is the ground of a yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) - How to close a company with debts? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-close-a-company-with-debts/) - The company went under: what to do about the employees? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/company-went-under-what-to-do-about-employees/) --- ## How to close a company with debts? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-close-a-company-with-debts/ Idioma: en Descrição: With an accountant: list the debts, tell your team, deregister formally, negotiate the rest. Closing with debt is possible; abandoning it is worse. Sometimes the bravest decision isn't to insist, it's to close. Shutting down a company in debt feels like admitting defeat, but doing it the right way is what protects you, your family and the people who worked with you. ### What to do now - Take inventory. With your accountant, list everything the company owes (federal, state and municipal taxes, INSS social security and FGTS severance fund contributions, banks, suppliers, rent) and everything it has to collect or sell (inventory, equipment, receivables from customers). - Understand who answers for what. In a limited liability company, the rule is that the company's assets answer for its debts, but there are exceptions: tax debts with irregularities, improper closure, a personal guarantee on a loan. For an MEI or a sole proprietor, the business assets are practically the same as the person's. Ask your accountant and lawyer which case is yours. - Don't leave the company "abandoned." A company with no activity and no formal closure keeps generating obligations and fines, and improper closure can lead to the partners being charged directly. Formal deregistration is the way, and it doesn't depend on paying everything off first: Complementary Law 123/2006 (art. 9) allows deregistration with outstanding tax, social security or labor debts, but partners and managers remain liable for them. Close it on paper; negotiate what's left. - Assess whether closing really is the way out. If the business is viable but suffocating, out-of-court or judicial reorganization (Law 11,101/2005) can give it breathing room. If it isn't viable, an orderly wind-down stops the bleeding. - Negotiate the debts that remain. Federal debts can be negotiated on the Regularize portal of the Office of the Attorney General of the National Treasury (PGFN), which offers discounted settlements in some cases. States and municipalities usually have their own installment programs. - Close with your team paid up, as far as possible. Severance pay, FGTS forms and the documents for unemployment insurance. Each person leaves with a life of their own to reorganize. - Document everything. Keep contracts, agreements and receipts. They will be your protection in the years ahead. Sebrae (0800 570 0800) gives free guidance to small businesses, and the Public Defender's Office helps those who can't afford a lawyer. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo knows the feeling of watching the ground disappear from under a business. He says he joined as an investing partner in a company that was not what it seemed, and that it did not hold. Before that, he had already lost his place in a brand he helped create, when his partners pushed him out of the business. What his path shows is that the way you leave a business weighs as much as the way you came in. He carries each ending as a lesson, not as a secret: none of the falls was erased from the story. They were put to use. ### The path Closing responsibly is an act of respect, for yourself and for others. Closing one door properly is what lets you open the next with your head held high. Bairo calls the one that worked "the seventh attempt," and it only existed because the earlier ones had been lived through to the end. There is also a gain few people notice: whoever closes a company with the accounts organized and the paperwork in order leaves with their reputation intact. Suppliers, former employees and customers remember who closed with respect, and they are often the ones who open the door to the next business. A clean name in the market is worth more than any inventory left on the shelf. ### Read also - My company went bankrupt: now what? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/my-company-went-bankrupt-now-what/) - How to open a business after going broke? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-open-a-business-after-going-broke/) - The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) --- ## How to deal with the shame of going broke? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-deal-with-the-shame-of-going-broke/ Idioma: en Descrição: Separate what you did from who you are, tell the truth to the people who matter and act again. Shame shrinks when the story is told with dignity. The shame of going broke often weighs more than the debt itself. You avoid the phone, the family group chat, running into people at the bakery. It convinces you that everyone is judging, and that is exactly why it has to be faced head-on. ### What to do now - Separate the fact from your identity. "The business went under" is a fact. "I am a failure" is an interpretation. Write both sentences down and look at the difference. The first has a solution; the second only paralyzes. - Tell the truth to a few of the right people. Choose one or two people you trust and tell them what happened, without embellishing. Secrets grow in the dark. Said out loud, they lose half their weight. - Stop comparing yourself with other people's shop windows. Social media shows the grand opening, never the closing. Almost every entrepreneur you admire has a fall they didn't post. - Answer with facts, not excuses. When people ask, have a short, honest sentence: "The business didn't hold. I'm sorting out the accounts and already working on the next step." You don't need more than that. - Get back to doing something, even something small. A temporary job, a service, a course. Shame feeds on standing still; action, even modest, gives back dignity. - Watch for warning signs. If the shame has turned into total isolation, weeks of insomnia or thoughts that it would be better not to exist, get help right away: CVV at 188, free and 24 hours a day, or your city's primary health unit (UBS) or psychosocial care center (CAPS). In an emergency, SAMU at 192. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says that, among his longtime friends, he is Leandro, the friend many saw suffer: the one from the hard years after arriving in Brazil, the one whose partners pushed him out of his own idea, the one who went broke with many people depending on him, the broke man who still had a flame. There is a natural reaction to that moment, and everyone knows it: complaining. About the partner, the system, the country, bad luck. Bairo says he chose not to complain. Instead of hiding, he decided to do precisely what he didn't know how to do. Today, he doesn't erase the falls from his own story. They are in the chapters he himself chose to publish, with his name underneath. ### The path Shame says "hide." The experience of those who have been through it says "tell it, with dignity." A fall told truthfully becomes a lesson for you and for whoever is going through the same thing. Whoever looked for their own best self at rock bottom, as Bairo's story shows, comes out of there knowing how to look for the best in others. Notice, too, how you talk about yourself when no one is listening. If you wouldn't say to a friend who went broke the things you say to yourself, stop. Treat yourself with the same firmness and the same kindness you would show someone you love. Shame doesn't pay debts or open doors; dignity does. And it begins with the way you tell your own story, to yourself first. ### Read also - One name, four presences (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/one-name-four-presences/) - Has Bairo Gonzalez ever gone broke? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/has-bairo-gonzalez-ever-gone-broke/) - How to stop feeling like a failure? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-stop-feeling-like-a-failure/) --- ## The company went under: what about the employees? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/company-went-under-what-to-do-about-employees/ Idioma: en Descrição: Speak early and truthfully, put wages and severance first and hand over the unemployment insurance documents. People come before suppliers. When a company goes under, the weight isn't only yours. On the other side of the payroll are rent, groceries and school for other families' children. That responsibility hurts, and it is exactly what calls for clarity now. ### What to do now - Speak early and speak the truth. An employee who finds out about the closure from a locked door loses the chance to plan. Gather the team, explain the situation without drama and without promises you can't keep. - Know the order of priority. In bankruptcy, Law 11,101/2005 puts labor claims (up to 150 minimum wages per person) ahead of almost all others. Even outside a court process, treat wages and severance as the bills that come first in line. - Meet the termination deadlines. Brazil's labor code (CLT) allows up to 10 days after the end of the contract to pay what is owed and hand over the documents. If there isn't money for everything, see a lawyer before the deadline and propose a formal agreement, which can be ratified by the Labor Court. - Hand over the documents, even without money. The FGTS withdrawal key, the unemployment insurance forms and the update to the digital work record allow the person to receive what is theirs through other channels. Holding back documents only makes life worse for someone already losing their job. - Help them find new work. Reference letters, contacts, a message to partners asking whether they are hiring. It costs little and changes a lot. - Don't treat going under as "force majeure." A business's financial crisis is the employer's risk: the CLT says the employer's lack of foresight rules out force majeure (art. 501, §1) and that contractual rights remain in force even in bankruptcy or closure (art. 449). The half severance of art. 502 does not apply to an ordinary crisis; using it on your own usually turns into a court ruling against you later. - Take care of yourself too. Carrying the guilt for many families is heavy. If it becomes unbearable, CVV at 188, free and 24 hours a day. ### When it happened to Bairo The hardest chapter in Bairo's story is the fall in which other lives depended on him. He says that, when the business he had invested in did not hold, there were many people who depended on him. He speaks of them as human lives, not as lines on a spreadsheet. At that moment, he says, he made an unlikely decision. Instead of going back to familiar ground, he decided to do something he didn't know how to do and to build again. The next attempt also went wrong, and he was left hanging by people he had helped. He kept going anyway. Years later, the ventures he founded came to speak of human life and of lifetime as a measure. Anyone who knows the chapter of the fifty lives understands why this theme is so dear to him. ### The path Leadership doesn't end when the money does. That is exactly where leadership shows: in the honest conversation, in the document handed over, in the effort to make sure no one leaves worse off than necessary. People forget many things, but they remember how they were treated in the fall. If anything is left over, even a little, use it to settle what is owed to people before thinking about saving assets. An asset sold to pay severance is an asset well spent. And when you start a business again one day, those same people may come back to work with you, because they saw how you acted at the worst moment. A reputation for treating your team well in the fall is capital no creditor can take. ### Read also - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) - My company went bankrupt: now what? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/my-company-went-bankrupt-now-what/) - How to support your family after going broke? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-support-your-family-after-going-broke/) --- ## How to face an eviction? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-face-an-eviction/ Idioma: en Descrição: In Brazil, eviction only happens by court order. Talk to the landlord, keep your receipts, know your deadlines and go to the Public Defender now. The threat of losing your home shakes the most basic ground of life: where the family will sleep. The fear is legitimate. But fear makes bad decisions, and you need to decide well in the coming days. ### What to do now - Know the main thing: eviction is a judge's decision. In Brazil, a landlord cannot remove you from the property on their own. Changing the lock, removing your furniture or cutting off water and electricity to force you out is not allowed; it may amount to the crime of taking the law into one's own hands (Penal Code, art. 345). If it happens, call the police at 190 and file a police report. The legal route is an eviction lawsuit, provided for in the Tenancy Law (Law 8,245/1991, art. 5). A notice is not an eviction order. A letter from the landlord or the agency giving you a deadline to leave starts a period, but, if you don't leave, they still have to file the lawsuit. Only a court officer, with a warrant, carries out an eviction (art. 65). Don't rush out because of a letter: take it to the Public Defender's Office. - Talk before it becomes a lawsuit. Many landlords prefer an agreement to a long court case. Propose a realistic plan for the arrears, in writing, or an agreed move-out date if staying is not possible. - Organize your papers. Lease, receipts, proof of payment, messages exchanged with the landlord or the agency. Keep everything, preferably in more than one place. - Get free legal help. Your state's Public Defender's Office serves those who can't afford a lawyer. Law schools' legal aid clinics also help. Go soon; eviction deadlines are short. - Reach out to the social assistance network. Your city's CRAS (social assistance reference center) gives guidance on benefits and housing programs; many municipalities offer social rent assistance for vulnerable situations, with local rules. - Protect the most vulnerable. If there are children, elderly people or people with disabilities, tell the Public Defender and social services. It can change the way the case is handled. - Take care of your mind. If despair tightens its grip, call CVV at 188, free and 24 hours a day. Nothing on this page replaces the guidance of a public defender or lawyer who looks at your case. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez does not tell of an eviction in his own story. He tells of another way of losing the ground beneath you. He says he arrived in Brazil in 2002, brought by an education company, and that, when he decided to follow his own path, he found himself without documents in hand, far from home and afraid. Hard years followed, with no direction and no safety net, as for so many immigrants. He sums up that time in a sentence that became his own: the sun is for everyone, but shade, in the heat, is for the few. Later, he says, he went broke more than once. In each fall, what remained was the same: starting over from the only place left, zero, beginning with the person standing beside him. ### The path Losing your home is losing a place, not losing who you are. A roof can be rebuilt; what you carry from one home to the next is your family, your courage and what you have learned. Face the eviction with information, papers in hand and help by your side. Anyone who has been in the shade knows: it doesn't last forever. While everything is being resolved, keep the conversation with the landlord firm and polite, in writing whenever possible. Fights, threats and impulsive messages tend to make things worse and can be used in the lawsuit. Likewise, if the landlord acts outside the law, record everything with date and time and take it to the Public Defender. Calm, paper and deadlines are the three tools of anyone facing an eviction. ### Read also - Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/) - I received an eviction lawsuit: what do I do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/i-received-an-eviction-lawsuit-what-to-do/) - I was evicted: where do I go and how do I start over? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/i-was-evicted-where-to-go-and-how-to-start-over/) --- ## I received an eviction lawsuit: what do I do? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/i-received-an-eviction-lawsuit-what-to-do/ Idioma: en Descrição: Read the summons, note the date and see the Public Defender that same day. There are usually 15 days to pay the debt and stay, or to defend yourself. The court officer knocked on the door, or the letter arrived. Your heart races and the paper seems written in another language. Stay calm: this document is the beginning of a process, not the end of it, and it has deadlines that work in your favor if you act quickly. ### What to do now - Write down the date you received the summons. Deadlines run from it. Keep the whole document, without tearing or marking it. - Identify the reason for the lawsuit. Most lawsuits are for nonpayment, but there are others (end of the lease, owner's own use, breach of contract). The reason changes what you can do. - If it is for nonpayment, know you can settle the arrears. The Tenancy Law (Law 8,245/1991, art. 62) allows the tenant to avoid termination by depositing in court the full updated debt, with charges, within 15 days of the summons. This option is not available if you already used it in the 24 months before the lawsuit (art. 62, sole paragraph). The public defender or lawyer is the one who calculates the amount and makes the right request. - Know that injunctions exist. In some situations, such as a lease with no guarantee at all (no guarantor, deposit or insurance), the judge can order you to vacate within 15 days before the case ends, provided the landlord posts a bond of three months' rent (art. 59, §1, IX). Even then, depositing the full debt within those 15 days overturns the injunction (art. 59, §3). That is why you shouldn't wait: the response needs to be fast. - Go to the Public Defender's Office that same day. Bring the summons, the lease, receipts and proof of income. If you can't afford a lawyer, the Public Defender is your path. Law schools' legal aid clinics also help. - Even without money, don't ignore it. Whoever doesn't respond loses the chance to defend themselves, negotiate time or reach an agreement. A court-approved agreement can give you time to leave with dignity. - If the decision is that you must leave, know the deadline. The general rule is 30 days to vacate voluntarily, but the period drops to 15 days when the eviction is for nonpayment or breach of contract, or when more than four months passed between the summons and the judgment (Law 8,245/1991, art. 63). In practice, for an eviction over late rent, count on 15 days. Use that time to organize the move with your support network and the CRAS (social assistance reference center). The rules above are general; what applies to you is what the public defender or lawyer says after reading your case. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo does not tell of an eviction lawsuit in his own story. He does tell, however, of what comes with it: the fear of losing your footing and the need to act with a cool head. He says that, when he found himself without documents in hand in a country that was not yet entirely his, the natural reaction would have been to hide. It took time, but he went after it. Later, in the falls of his businesses, he learned something else: whatever you don't face on paper ends up facing you. ### The path A lawsuit is frightening because it seems bigger than we are. But it is made of deadlines, papers and people, and each of those can be faced one at a time. Bairo says every no is the ground of a yes. Sometimes the possible yes is a fair agreement, a little more time, an exit without humiliation. That is a victory too. ### Read also - How to face an eviction? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-face-an-eviction/) - How to negotiate overdue debts? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-negotiate-overdue-debts/) - Every no is the ground of a yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) --- ## I was evicted: where do I go and how do I start over? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/i-was-evicted-where-to-go-and-how-to-start-over/ Idioma: en Descrição: Secure a place to sleep tonight, keep your documents, go to the CRAS and your support network, then think about the next rental. One step at a time. Leaving home with your things in bags is one of the hardest experiences anyone can go through. No pretty sentence fixes that today. There is, however, an order of steps that keeps one bad day from becoming a bad life. ### What to do now - Sort out tonight. A relative's or friend's home, someone from church or the community. If there is no one, go to your city's CRAS or CREAS (social assistance centers), or call the municipal social assistance line, which refers people to temporary shelter. Where it exists, the Centro POP serves people left without housing, with showers, meals and an address to receive mail. - Protect your documents. ID card, CPF, certificates, work record booklet, SUS health card, your children's documents and receipts. Keep everything in one folder and photograph every page. Without documents, every new start is slower. - Store your belongings safely. If they don't fit with you, ask someone you trust to keep them, or look for temporary storage. Don't abandon furniture and objects at the property; arrange to remove them. If the eviction was carried out with your furniture still inside, it goes to a court-appointed custodian (Law 8,245/1991, art. 65, §1): ask in the case file, or at the Public Defender's Office, where it is and how to retrieve it. - Update your Cadastro Único. It is the gateway to many social programs, including housing, and in many municipalities to social rent assistance. The rules vary from city to city; the CRAS will tell you. - Keep the children in school. School is the routine that holds the little ones together when everything changes. Let the school know about the move, so they can support them. - Only then, look for the next place. With your income organized, look for a rental that fits your budget, even if it's smaller. A small roof that is paid for is better than a bigger one that turns into another arrears. - Don't carry it alone. If sadness turns into despair, CVV answers at 188, free, 24 hours a day. Primary health units (UBS) and psychosocial care centers (CAPS) also offer support. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez does not tell of an eviction in his own story. He tells of another way of being left without a place. He says he arrived in Brazil in 2002, with an education company, in a management position, and that, when he decided to leave it, he found himself without documents in hand, far from home, afraid and with no road ahead. They were hard years, in the shade, as for so many immigrants before and after him. The new beginning had a neighborhood address. With his partner, when their daughter was born, he opened a salon. It didn't work out as well as they wanted, but it worked out very well in another way: from it came a hair-treatment course and, later, a cosmetics brand of his own. ### The path Starting over without a home feels like starting below zero. But the story shows that zero is ground too. Bairo says the sun is for everyone, but shade, in the heat, is for the few. Anyone who has been without shade knows the value of every square meter of roof, and builds the next home with more care than the last. In the first days after leaving, allow yourself to feel the loss without making big decisions. The house is gone, but life still has an address in you and in the people beside you. When the dust settles, make a simple plan for the next three months: where to live, how much to save, which bill to negotiate. A short, doable plan is worth more than a huge dream that paralyzes. ### Read also - The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) - How to face an eviction? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-face-an-eviction/) - How to start over from zero? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-over-from-zero/) --- ## How to overcome failure? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-overcome-failure/ Idioma: en Descrição: Grieve, write down the lesson, take one small concrete step and don't decide your whole life on your worst day. Failure is an event, not an identity. Failing feels like the whole world watched you fall. But almost no one is watching as closely as you imagine, and almost everyone who has built something has fallen before. What defines the story is not the fall; it is what comes after it. ### What to do now - Name what happened. Write it in one sentence, without adjectives: "The project didn't sell enough." "I was fired." "The partnership ended." Failure described precisely shrinks to its real size. - Allow yourself to grieve, with a time limit. Being sad is natural. Give yourself a few days to feel it, without pretending everything is fine. Then get back to acting, even slowly. - Do an autopsy, not a trial. List three things that depended on you and went wrong, three that didn't depend on you, and three that went right. That list is raw material for the next attempt. - Don't make giant decisions on your worst day. Selling everything, dropping everything, moving to another city: decisions like these need a rested mind. At rock bottom, decide only the next step. - Choose one small step for today. A phone call, a résumé, a conversation with a creditor, a walk. Movement gives back the feeling of control. - Talk to people who have fallen. People who have been through failures help you see that there is another side. Support groups, mentors, longtime friends. - If the pain doesn't pass, get help. Sadness that lasts weeks, losing interest in everything, thoughts of death: that calls for professional care. CVV at 188, free, 24 hours a day; primary health units (UBS) and psychosocial care centers (CAPS) through SUS, Brazil's public health system. ### When it happened to Bairo The path of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez is a list of falls told without makeup. A salon that didn't work out as well as he and his partner wanted. An idea involving artificial intelligence and augmented reality that he himself gave up on after hearing it wouldn't work, and that years later became a trend. Partners who pushed him out of a business he helped create. An investment that didn't hold, with many people depending on him. A project in which he was left hanging by the very people he had helped. No one knows for sure how many times he tried, thought about stopping and almost gave up. Not even he keeps that count. The number he chose to tell his own story is another one: seven. It was the seventh attempt that worked. ### The path Bairo sums it all up in one sentence: every no is the ground of a yes. Each of his failures left a brick: the course left method, the early idea left an eye for the future, the partners left the lesson about whom to build with. The attempt that worked wasn't luck. It was the one that carried all the others inside it. Your failure today can be one of those bricks. Beware of the rush to prove you didn't fail. Many people, hurt, jump straight into the next bet just to erase the last one, and repeat the same mistakes. Give yourself time to learn the whole lesson before starting again. The next beginning will be stronger if it carries what this failure taught, and not just the wish to forget it. ### Read also - Every no is the ground of a yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) - The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) - I've tried many times and nothing worked. Now what? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/i-tried-many-times-and-nothing-worked/) --- ## How to deal with professional failure? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-deal-with-professional-failure/ Idioma: en Descrição: Separate your career from your worth, take stock of what you can do and turn the experience into an argument. Every solid career has its falls. A layoff, a lost position, a project that went wrong in front of everyone. Professional failure hits your pride and your bank account at the same time. But a career is not a straight line, and yours didn't end in this chapter. ### What to do now - Secure the basics. If you lost your job, check unemployment insurance, any FGTS withdrawal you are entitled to and your severance pay. Put together a transition budget for the coming months. - Take stock of what you know. List everything you've learned to do, including what isn't on your résumé: leading people, selling, handling a crisis, learning fast. Failure often hides skills you can't see. - Tell the story in an honest and useful way. In interviews, the question "what went wrong?" will come up. Answer with the fact, what you learned and what you would do differently. An experienced recruiter trusts someone who can explain a fall more than someone who says they never fell. - Ask for feedback from those who saw it up close. A former boss, a colleague, a client. Ask what could have been different. It hurts, but it saves years. - Try neighboring paths. Sometimes the next door is right beside you: another role, another sector, project-based work, a small business using what you already know. - Study what the market is asking for. Free courses from public institutions and from Brazil's "S System" training network (Senai, Senac, Sebrae) help you update what's missing. - Take care of your self-esteem. If the feeling of uselessness doesn't pass, seek support: CVV at 188, a primary health unit (UBS) or a psychosocial care center (CAPS). ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo says he arrived in Brazil in 2002, young, to take a management position at an education company. He was young to be in charge of anyone, and he was in charge. When he decided to leave to follow his own path, he lost much more than the position: he was left without documents in hand and without a network. After that, he reinvented his career several times. He created a hair-treatment course, in a field that only years later found its place in Brazil, trichology. He built a cosmetics brand. He worked in events and digital printing. Each change felt like starting from zero, and each one carried something from the one before. Years later, he says, without knowing how to code, he spent six months at home, in front of the computer, building the foundation of a financial platform for agribusiness. ### The path Professional failure doesn't erase competence; it tests it. Bairo's path shows that each lost role left a new tool in the box. In the capoeira circle, which was his bridge to Brazil, whoever stops, falls. In a career too: the ginga is to keep moving, changing sides, never standing still long enough to be knocked down for good. Look at professional failure with the distance of someone reading another person's biography. If it were a friend's career, would you say it was over? You would probably say it was a hard chapter, and ask what the next one is. Ask yourself that question. The answer is usually closer than it seems, in a skill you haven't valued yet. ### Read also - Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/) - How to reinvent yourself professionally? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-reinvent-yourself-professionally/) - How to overcome failure? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-overcome-failure/) --- ## I've tried many times and nothing worked. Now what? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/i-tried-many-times-and-nothing-worked/ Idioma: en Descrição: See what each attempt left, change one variable at a time and spend less time on the ground. Many falls don't prove incapacity; they can be preparation. Once is bad luck, twice is coincidence, and by the third time your head starts telling you that the problem is you. That weariness of trying is real and deserves respect. But it is not proof that the next attempt will fail. ### What to do now - Draw a timeline of your attempts. For each one: what you did, what went right, what went wrong, what changed between one and the next. Many people discover they repeated the same mistake in different clothes. - Change one thing at a time. If everything changes with every attempt, you don't learn what worked. Keep what went right and swap only what failed: the partner, the audience, the price, the channel. - Try smaller and faster. Instead of betting everything again, test the idea on a small scale. Sell before producing in quantity. Listen to the customer before investing. - Shorten your time on the ground. You can't avoid falls. You can get up faster. Set a deadline for grieving and another for getting back into action. - Protect the basics while you try. Don't bet the rent, your children's food or other people's money on a new attempt. A sustainable attempt is one that doesn't wreck the household if it goes wrong. - Seek out people who know the field. Sebrae, mentors, entrepreneur groups, people in the industry. A one-hour conversation can save you an entire attempt. - If weariness has become hopelessness, stop and ask for help. CVV at 188, free and 24 hours a day; primary health units (UBS) and psychosocial care centers (CAPS) through SUS. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez can't say how many times he tried. He says he tried, thought about stopping and almost gave up more times than he likes to remember. The number he chose to tell the story is seven: the seventh attempt, and the last, was the one that worked. Before it came the salon, the hair-treatment course, the AI and augmented reality idea that came too early, the cosmetics brand his partners pushed him out of, events and digital printing, the investment that didn't hold, the project in which he was left hanging. Looking back, he sees what each one left. Method. An eye for the future. Proof that he could create from nothing. The lesson about whom to build with. The courage to do what he didn't know how to do. ### The path Seven is often the number of completeness. In Bairo's life, it was the number of stubbornness. The attempt that worked wasn't the first lucky one; it was the first that carried all the others inside it. If you've already tried many times, maybe you aren't starting over from zero. Maybe you're starting over with everything the falls have taught you. Being tired of trying is not the same as lacking ability. Sometimes all you need is a planned pause, with an end date, to come back with a clear head. During that pause, rest, talk, study what went wrong. When you come back, come back with a smaller, cheaper, better-thought-out attempt. Intelligent persistence knows when to breathe. ### Read also - The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) - How many attempts until it works? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-many-attempts-until-it-works/) - What is the seventh attempt? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-the-seventh-attempt/) --- ## How to stop feeling like a failure? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-stop-feeling-like-a-failure/ Idioma: en Descrição: Distrust the voice that generalizes, note small wins, talk to someone and get help if the sadness doesn't pass. Feeling like a failure isn't being one. "I'm a failure." The sentence arrives at night, repeats in the morning and starts to feel true. It isn't. It is a strong feeling, and strong feelings deserve care, not obedience. ### What to do now - Catch the voice in the act. Notice when it uses "always," "never," "nothing" and "everything": "nothing works out," "I always ruin it." Ask: is that really true? There is almost always an exception the voice hides. - Write down three things a day. At night, write three things you did, however small: you got up, you took care of someone, you dealt with a bill. An exhausted brain only records what went wrong; paper balances it out. - Move your body. A short walk, morning sun, a regular bedtime. It doesn't fix your life, but it takes your head out of the loop. - Compare less. If social media makes you feel worse, limit your time on it. Other people's lives on a screen are edited; yours you see in full. - Talk to a real person. A friend, a family member, someone from your faith community, if you have one. Saying it out loud changes the weight of things. - Learn to recognize when it's more than sadness. If for weeks you've lost interest in everything, sleep too much or almost not at all, feel constant guilt or think it would be better not to exist, it may be depression, and depression can be treated. Go to your city's primary health unit (UBS) or psychosocial care center (CAPS). To talk right now, CVV answers at 188, free, 24 hours a day, and also by chat at cvv.org.br. If you are in immediate danger, SAMU at 192. - Choose one person you can call on bad days. Agree with them beforehand: "if I call saying I'm not okay, just listen to me." Knowing that door exists already lightens the night. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez knows the moment when everything seems to say you're worthless. He says he was broke, broken and beaten, with no money, no apparent way out, not a single plan left in the drawer. But he still had a flame, he says, of hope and of faith. In a Christian congregation, he heard accounts and testimonies from ordinary people who had crossed through the impossible. Listening, he came to believe that his story could go on too. He says that, among old friends, he is Leandro: the friend many saw suffer. Those who call him that were close by when there was nothing to celebrate. ### The path Feeling like a failure is different from being one. Bairo's story shows someone who found himself on the ground more than once and who, each time, found a small reason to get up: a sentence, a testimony, a faith, a decision. You don't need to find all the reasons today. You need just one, and someone beside you while you look. The feeling of failure tends to lie about time. It says it has always been like this and always will be. That's not true. You have felt good before, and you will again. Until that happens, do the minimum that takes care of you, ask for company, and let other people hold hope for you on the days it weighs too much. ### Read also - The God of the impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/) - How to deal with the shame of going broke? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-deal-with-the-shame-of-going-broke/) - How to find hope at rock bottom? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-find-hope-at-rock-bottom/) --- ## How to get out of debt? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-get-out-of-debt/ Idioma: en Descrição: List all you owe, stop taking on new debt, tackle the highest interest first and accept only installments that fit. No shortcut, just method. Debt doesn't weigh only on your wallet. It weighs on your sleep, your marriage, the way you answer the phone. If you've made it this far, you've already taken the hardest step: you decided to look at it. The rest is method, patience and honesty with your own numbers. ### What to do now - Find out exactly how much you owe. Gather bills, contracts and collection messages. Check Registrato, the Central Bank's free service that shows loans and financing under your CPF, and see on Serasa and Boa Vista what has been flagged as unpaid. Build a table: creditor, amount, monthly interest, how overdue, collateral. - Stop creating new debt. As long as there is a revolving credit card balance, an overdraft or a loan to pay a loan, the math won't work. Put the card away, agree on it with your family and use cash or debit for a while. - Make a wartime budget. Write down all your income and all your spending for the month. First housing, food, water, electricity, transportation and health. Whatever is left is what can go to your debts, and not a cent more. - Attack the most expensive interest first. Revolving credit card balances and overdrafts usually carry the highest interest rates on the market. Swapping those debts for one with lower interest can bring relief, as long as you don't go back to using the card. If it's a payroll-deductible loan, remember the installment comes out of your salary before any other bill: it's only worth it if it fits comfortably. - Negotiate through official channels. The creditor's app and website, Serasa Limpa Nome, consumidor.gov.br and Procon, the consumer protection agency. For individuals, there is the Desenrola Brasil 3.0 (Provisional Measure 1,393, of 25/09/2026), with its own rules: check the conditions at gov.br and see whether your debt qualifies. For businesses, the Novo Desenrola of Provisional Measure 1,355 lapsed on 08/09/2026. - Only accept what fits. An agreement you can't keep becomes new debt with higher interest. Ask for time, a discount, a grace period. Keep it in writing. - If the total no longer fits in your life, the law protects you. The Over-Indebtedness Law (Law 14,181/2021) allows you to bring your creditors together in a conciliation and put together a plan of up to five years that preserves the minimum you need to live. Go to Procon or the Public Defender's Office. - Be wary of easy promises. No serious person charges up front to "clear your name" or offers fast money without a credit check. An "unmissable" investment to pay off debt is the most common scam against people who are strapped for cash. And know this: your name comes off the delinquent-debtor lists after five years (Consumer Protection Code, art. 43, §1), but the debt doesn't disappear because of that; no one can sell you that deadline as a "cleanup." ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez knows what it's like when the math doesn't work. He says he went broke more than once. One of those times, after investing the capital he had built up with events and digital printing in a business that wasn't what it seemed, he was left without money and with many people depending on him. He describes that moment as being broke, broken and beaten. The way out was neither quick nor pretty. It was a sequence of decisions: not complaining, not looking for someone to blame, learning what he didn't know and trying again. The next attempt also went wrong. He kept going. ### The path Getting out of debt is rarely a leap; it's a staircase. Each step is small: a table, a cut expense, an agreement kept. Bairo says every no is the ground of a yes. Today, the "no" may be turning down one more easy loan. That no, repeated every month, is the ground for the yes of a clean name and a full night's sleep. ### Read also - How to negotiate overdue debts? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-negotiate-overdue-debts/) - I'm over-indebted: what does the law say? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/over-indebted-what-the-law-says/) - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) --- ## How to negotiate overdue debts? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-negotiate-overdue-debts/ Idioma: en Descrição: Know what you can pay before calling, ask for a discount and time, compare offers, never accept an installment that doesn't fit, get it in writing. Calling the creditor gives you butterflies. It feels like you'll be judged, pressured, humiliated. But negotiating is your right, and whoever comes to the conversation prepared leaves with a much better agreement. ### What to do now - Before calling, know how much you can pay. Add up your income, subtract essential expenses and see what is truly left. That number is your limit. Don't negotiate without it. - Start with the debts that grow fastest or threaten most. Revolving credit card balances and overdrafts grow fast. Rent, water, electricity and secured debts (house, car) can cost you your roof or your means of work. Prioritize. - Use official channels. The creditor's own website or app, Serasa Limpa Nome (which holds discount drives throughout the year), consumidor.gov.br and your city's Procon. For individuals, there is the Desenrola Brasil 3.0 (Provisional Measure 1,393, of 25/09/2026), with its own rules: check the conditions at gov.br and see whether your debt qualifies. For businesses, the Novo Desenrola of Provisional Measure 1,355 lapsed on 08/09/2026. - Ask for three things: a discount, time and a grace period. Old debts often come with big discounts for paying in full. If you can't pay in full, ask for smaller installments and a month's breathing room before the first one. Ask what the agreement's total effective cost is. - Compare before closing. Sometimes the same debt shows up with different offers on different channels. Don't close on the first call if the offer doesn't fit; ask to get back to them later. - Demand the agreement in writing. Amount, number of installments, dates, and that your name will be removed from the delinquent-debtor lists after payment (the creditor has up to five business days after payment, under Precedent 548 of the Superior Court of Justice, STJ). Keep receipts for everything. - Don't pay unknown middlemen to "clear your name." Scams with fake negotiators are common. Always confirm the channel on the creditor's official website. - If no negotiation fits, turn to the Over-Indebtedness Law. Law 14,181/2021 allows a conciliation with all your creditors together, at Procon, the Public Defender's Office or in court. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez learned to negotiate in the worst possible scenario: with the business collapsing and many people depending on him. At that moment, he says, there was an easy reaction at hand: complaining about the partner, the system, the country, bad luck. He chose something else. He sat down, faced the size of the problem and decided to do what he didn't yet know how to do. Years later, when, according to him, the banks refused to integrate the solution he had built for agribusiness, the lesson repeated itself: instead of arguing with the "no," he used the "no" as ground and went to build the road another way. ### The path Negotiating is not begging. It is talking with someone who also wants to resolve things, knowing your limit and unashamed to say it. Bairo learned that the other side's "no" is rarely the end; it is almost always the start of the real conversation. Prepare your numbers, take a deep breath and make the call. After closing an agreement, treat it as a budget priority. Paying the first installment on time rebuilds the creditor's trust and makes room to negotiate your other debts more calmly. If something goes wrong along the way, give notice before falling behind and propose an adjustment. A surprised creditor hardens; a creditor who was warned usually negotiates. ### Read also - How to get out of debt? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-get-out-of-debt/) - How to get out of debt on a low income? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-get-out-of-debt-on-a-low-income/) - Every no is the ground of a yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) --- ## I'm over-indebted: what does the law say? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/over-indebted-what-the-law-says/ Idioma: en Descrição: Brazil's Law 14,181/2021 lets you gather creditors, set a plan of up to 5 years and keep the minimum to live on. Go to Procon or the Public Defender. There is a point where debt stops being a problem of organization and becomes a problem of survival: your salary comes in and goes right back out, and still doesn't cover everything. If that's where you are, know there is a law made exactly for this moment. ### What to do now - Understand what over-indebtedness is. Law 14,181/2021 amended Brazil's Consumer Protection Code to protect individuals who, in good faith, can't pay their consumer debts without compromising the minimum they need to live (the "existential minimum": currently R$600 a month, under Decree 11,567/2023; in April 2026 the Supreme Federal Court, STF, ordered that amount to be reviewed every year, so check the current figure with Procon or the Public Defender's Office). - See which debts qualify. As a rule, loans, credit cards, overdrafts, store credit and utility bills qualify. Left out, for example, are loans secured by real collateral, mortgages, rural credit, debts taken on with the intention of not paying, and purchases of high-value luxury goods and services (Consumer Code, arts. 54-A, §3, and 104-A, §1). Child support and taxes follow their own rules. - Gather your documents. Contracts, statements, bills, proof of income and of essential expenses (rent, utilities, medicine, school). Registrato, from the Central Bank, helps you list your debts with banks. - Seek the right service. The law provides for joint conciliation: all creditors are called to a hearing to agree on a payment plan of up to five years. It can start at Procon, the Public Defender's Office or the CEJUSC (the state court's conciliation center). If there is no agreement, the judge can impose a court-ordered plan. - Don't miss the hearing and don't lie about your income. Good faith is a condition of the law. A creditor who fails to appear without justification may have collection suspended and be placed in the plan on terms less favorable to it. - Meanwhile, stop taking on new credit. The plan only works if the debt stops growing. - Take care of those around you. Over-indebtedness often comes with shame and fights at home. Talk with your family. If the anguish becomes too heavy, CVV answers at 188. This page is general guidance. Whoever assesses your case is Procon, the Public Defender's Office or a lawyer. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he reached the point where there was no plan left in the drawer: broke, broken and beaten, after an investment that didn't hold and with many people depending on him. What got him out wasn't a shortcut. It was the decision to face the real size of the problem, without looking for someone to blame, and to rebuild step by step. He still had, he says, a flame of hope and faith. And he used what he had: time, willingness to learn and the stubbornness of someone who had already heard "no" many times. ### The path No one chooses to become over-indebted. The law exists because the country recognized that it happens to honest people. Using that protection is not weakness; it is responsibility. Bairo says every no is the ground of a yes: sometimes the yes begins by admitting, in front of a conciliator, that you can't do it alone anymore. ### Read also - How to get out of debt? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-get-out-of-debt/) - Debts keeping you up at night: what to do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/debts-keeping-you-up-at-night/) - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) --- ## Debts keeping you up at night: what to do? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/debts-keeping-you-up-at-night/ Idioma: en Descrição: Get the debt out of your head and onto paper, pick one step for tomorrow, talk to someone, and get help if anguish turns to despair. You are not your debt. Three in the morning, eyes open, your head doing sums that don't add up. Debt has that power: it grows in the dark and shrinks in the light. This page is for the night when it seems bigger than you. ### What to do now - Get the debt out of your head and onto paper. Take a notebook and write everything down: creditor, amount, date. In your head, the debt is infinite; on paper, it has a size. And what has a size can be faced. - Choose just one step for tomorrow. Not "solve everything." One step: call a creditor, check the Central Bank's Registrato, book an appointment at Procon. Write down the step and the time. Then leave the notebook closed until morning. - Make the night work in your favor. Phone away from the bed, no opening banking apps after ten. If you can't sleep, get up, breathe slowly for a few minutes, drink some water and go back. The problem won't be solved in the middle of the night. - Talk to someone. A spouse, a friend, someone from your community. Hidden debt creates a second weight, the weight of the secret. Shared, the load gets lighter and ideas appear. - Use the help that exists. Procon, the Public Defender's Office and the over-indebtedness conciliation centers (Law 14,181/2021) serve you for free. Serasa Limpa Nome and consumidor.gov.br let you negotiate from your phone. - Protect your body. Eat at regular times, walk, get some sun. Someone exhausted decides worse, and you need to decide well. - Know when it's more than worry. If the anguish keeps you from working, if you haven't slept in weeks, if the thought comes that it would be better to disappear, get help now. CVV answers at 188, free, 24 hours a day, and by chat at cvv.org.br. Your city's primary health unit (UBS) and psychosocial care center (CAPS) provide care through SUS. If you are in immediate danger, SAMU at 192. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez knows what a night like that is like. He says that, after an investment that didn't hold, he was left without money and with many people depending on him. He speaks of those people as lives, not as numbers. What he found at that bottom was not an immediate financial solution. It was a flame, of hope and of faith, that he says never went out completely. In a Christian congregation, listening to testimonies from ordinary people who had crossed through the impossible, he came to believe again that the story could go on. With respect for those who don't believe, this is how he tells it: faith was what kept him standing until the next day. ### The path Debt can take your money, but it doesn't have to take your sleep, your health and your family with it. You are not what you owe. Bairo says every no is the ground of a yes: tonight, the "no" can be not solving anything in the middle of the night. Tomorrow, with the notebook in hand and someone by your side, the yes begins. If you share a bed with someone, make a simple agreement: debt is not discussed after the lights go out. Set a fixed time each week, in daylight, to look at the bills together. That protects both of your sleep and turns the debt into a problem for the couple, not a shadow each one carries in secret. Many families come out of the crisis more united precisely because they learned to talk about money. ### Read also - How to get out of debt? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-get-out-of-debt/) - How to calm your mind in the middle of chaos? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-calm-your-mind-in-the-middle-of-chaos/) - The God of the impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/) --- ## How to get out of debt on a low income? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-get-out-of-debt-on-a-low-income/ Idioma: en Descrição: Protect the essentials, claim the benefits you're entitled to, negotiate minimum installments and grow your income bit by bit. Slow still gets there. Personal finance advice tends to forget people who earn little. "Cut the extras" doesn't help when there are no extras. This page is for those who do the math every month and find it doesn't add up even before the debt. ### What to do now - Protect the essentials before paying any debt. Food, rent, water, electricity, gas, medicine, transportation to work. This isn't an excuse; it's the law recognizing the "existential minimum" (Law 14,181/2021). No creditor has a right to the food in your home. - Check that you're receiving everything you're entitled to. Update your Cadastro Único (the federal registry for social programs) at the CRAS. It gives access to programs such as Bolsa Família, the Social Electricity Tariff and other municipal and state benefits. Many people who are entitled don't receive them because they aren't registered. - List your debts by threat, not by size. Whatever can take away your roof or your work comes first (rent, the electricity bill, the payment on the motorbike of someone who works with it). Then the ones that grow fastest (credit card and overdraft). - Negotiate small, realistic installments. Creditors prefer to receive little over nothing. Say frankly how much you can pay. On Serasa Limpa Nome and at debt negotiation drives, old debts often come with steep discounts. For individuals, there is the Desenrola Brasil 3.0 (Provisional Measure 1,393, of 25/09/2026), with its own rules: check the conditions at gov.br and see whether your debt qualifies. For businesses, the Novo Desenrola of Provisional Measure 1,355 lapsed on 08/09/2026. - Grow your income little by little, without risking the little you have. A weekend job, selling something you already know how to make, a free course (Senai, Senac, Sebrae, federal institutes) that improves your next job. Avoid "opportunities" that ask for money up front. - Don't trade debt for more expensive debt. Stay away from easy loans through unknown apps and from loan sharks. What looks like relief becomes a trap. - Get free help. Procon and the Public Defender's Office give guidance and run over-indebtedness conciliations. If the anguish tightens, CVV at 188. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he started over with almost nothing. When he found himself without documents in hand, in his first years in Brazil, he lived in the shade, like so many immigrants, with no network and no direction. Then he started over with what he had: his partner, their newborn daughter and a neighborhood salon. It didn't work out as well as they wanted, but it worked out very well in another way. From the salon came a hair-treatment course; from the course, years later, a brand of his own. No one skipped steps. Each small step paid for the next. He sums up that time in one sentence: the sun is for everyone, but shade, in the heat, is for the few. ### The path Getting out of debt on a low income is slower, and no less dignified. It's like climbing a hill on foot: you can't see the top, but you can see the next step. Bairo's story begins at zero, with whatever was at hand. Yours can start over that way too: with the essentials protected, an agreement that fits and an income that grows a little at a time. ### Read also - The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) - How to negotiate overdue debts? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-negotiate-overdue-debts/) - How to create something new without money? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-create-something-new-without-money/) --- ## How to start over from zero? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-over-from-zero/ Idioma: en Descrição: Accept your starting point, secure the basics, start close to home with what you know and measure progress in weeks, not days. Zero is ground too. Starting over from zero is frightening because zero looks empty. But no one really starts over from nothing: you bring along what you've learned, the people who stayed and the courage of having decided to try again. That's what you start with. ### What to do now - Accept your starting point. Spending energy on "how did I let it come to this" delays the new start. Look at where you are, without makeup, and write down: what I have, what I owe, who is with me. - Secure the ground before building the house. Housing, food, documents, a minimum income, even a temporary one. With the basics protected, your head starts thinking again. - Start with what you already know how to do. A new start is not the time to learn everything from scratch at once. Use a skill you already have to generate transition income: a trade, a service, a sale. - Start close to home. The first opportunities usually come from people who already know you: neighbors, former colleagues, old customers, your community. Let them know you're starting over and what you can do. - Set up a simple routine. A time to wake up, a time to work, a time to look for opportunities, a time to rest. Routine protects against the discouragement of days without results. - Measure progress on the right timescale. In one day, almost nothing changes. In three months, a lot changes. Write down the week's wins so you can see how far you've come. - Accept help without shame. CRAS, Sebrae, the Public Defender's Office, free courses, friends. Whoever starts over alone takes longer. - Take care of your emotional health. If the weight gets too heavy, CVV answers at 188, free and 24 hours a day. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez started over from zero more than once. He says the first time was in his first years in Brazil. He had arrived in 2002, with an education company, in a management position. When he decided to leave, he found himself without documents in hand, far from home, afraid and with no road ahead. The boy who had been announcing Brazil since childhood was in Brazil, with no footing and no one to ask. It would have been the natural place to give up. He didn't give up. He started again from the only place left, zero, and he started close to home: with the partner who was by his side. When their daughter was born, the two of them opened a neighborhood salon. It didn't work out as well as they wanted. But it worked out very well in another way: from it came a hair-treatment course, in a field that years later got a name of its own. ### The path Zero is not the bottom; it is the ground. And from the ground you can get up. Bairo says there are no coincidences and no accidents, only purpose, dreams and execution. Starting over is exactly that: remembering the purpose, keeping the dream and executing the next small step, every day, until the new start becomes a road. Forgive the time it took to get here. People who start over tend to blame themselves for not noticing sooner, not acting sooner, not avoiding the fall. That blame doesn't change the past and gets in the way of the future. Keep the lesson, let go of the guilt and put whatever energy you have left into what is in front of you. The new start needs all of you. ### Read also - Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/) - The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) - How to start over after losing everything? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-over-after-losing-everything/) --- ## Starting over after 40: work, family and money URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-life-over-after-40/ Idioma: en Descrição: Starting over after 40 with bills and kids: new work, an age-proof résumé, savings and health. For starting a business at that age, see the other guide. After 40, starting over feels heavier: there are bills, children, health, sometimes a layoff or a separation along the way, and the feeling that the time for making mistakes has run out. This page is about starting over in life and work. If your question is about opening a business at that age, the data are in Starting a business after 40 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/starting-a-business-after-40/). Here, the point is different: you have something you didn't have at 20, experience, a network and the clarity of someone who already knows what they don't want. ### What to do now - Stop comparing yourself with other people's timelines. There is no official age to start a business, change careers or go back to school. Many people found their life's work after 40. - Take stock of your experience. List everything you've already handled in life: teams you led, crises you got through, customers you won, children you raised. That is competence, and the market pays for it. - Update one skill at a time. You don't need to become someone else. Pick a missing tool (technology, a language, management) and study it for a few months. There are free courses at federal institutes, Senai, Senac, Sebrae and public platforms. - Use the network you already have. At 40, you know a lot of people. Tell them what you're looking for. Good opportunities rarely show up in ads; they show up in conversations. - Take age out of your résumé's way. When looking for work, age bias exists. Don't include your date of birth or a photo; show the achievements of the last ten years with numbers and keep the start of your career to a single line. In interviews, talk about what you've learned recently, not only about what you did long ago. - Protect your family during the crossing. Talk with those who depend on you, build a minimum reserve if you can, and don't bet the essentials on a leap without a net. - Take care of your body. Sleep, exercise and health checkups through SUS or your health plan. Starting over takes stamina. - Think in decades, not months. Whoever starts over at 40 still has, with luck and health, more than twenty years of work ahead. That is time to build something whole. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez was born in 1982. The attempt he calls the seventh, the one that worked, did not come in his youth. Before it, he had already opened a salon, created a course and a cosmetics brand, worked in events and digital printing, and gone broke more than once. He says that, in that phase, without knowing how to code, he sat down in front of a computer and spent six months without leaving the house: developing, writing, learning with the tools of his own time. Out of that came the foundation of a financial platform for agribusiness. The two companies he directs in the United Kingdom, Xperienc Global Labs Ltd and CEASA Financial Database Technology Infrastructure and Digital Assets Ltd, were registered at Companies House in 2026, when he was already past 40. ### The path Starting over after 40 isn't starting over late. It's starting over with baggage. Bairo's story shows that each earlier attempt left a tool: method, an eye for the future, the lesson about whom to build with. At 40, you haven't lost the time that has passed. You carry it with you. Use it. One rarely mentioned advantage of starting over later is clarity about what you don't want. At 20, we say yes to almost everything. At 40, we already know which environments, partners and routines are bad for us. Use that in your favor: calmly turn down what has already proven wrong and focus your energy on the few bets that fit the person you've become. ### Read also - The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) - Is it too late to start over? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/is-it-too-late-to-start-over/) - How to learn technology from scratch after 30? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-learn-technology-from-scratch-after-30/) - Starting a business after 40: the founder's age (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/starting-a-business-after-40/) --- ## How to start over after losing everything? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-over-after-losing-everything/ Idioma: en Descrição: First survive, then stabilize, only then rebuild. Separate what was lost from what remained, and count what remained: it is bigger than it looks. Losing everything is a phrase only those who have lived it understand. Money, business, home, sometimes people. It feels as if nothing is left. But you are left, and that is where everything starts again. ### What to do now - Respect the order: survive, stabilize, rebuild. In the first weeks, the goal is only to get through: a roof, food, documents, health. Big plans come later. - Make two lists. In the first, what was lost. In the second, what remained: skills, people, health, faith, experience, contacts, reputation. The second list is usually longer than it seems on the first day. - Sort out what's pending from what was lost. Debts, contracts, lawsuits. List everything and get free help: Procon, the Public Defender's Office, Sebrae, law schools' legal aid clinics. A problem kept in a drawer grows. - Find transition income. Any honest work that pays the bills while you think about the next step. It's not a step back; it's a bridge. - Choose your company carefully. In a fall, those who help show up, and so do those who offer shortcuts. Run from promises of fast money and from "opportunities" that ask for the little you have left. - Make room for grief. Losing everything hurts like losing someone. Crying, being angry, missing things: all of it is part of it. What you can't do is stay there forever. - Get professional help if you need it. If the pain won't let you get out of bed, if thoughts of giving up on life appear, call CVV at 188, free and 24 hours a day, or go to your city's primary health unit (UBS) or psychosocial care center (CAPS). In an emergency, SAMU at 192. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says that, at some point along the road, he was broke, broken and beaten. No money, no apparent way out, not a single plan left in the drawer. He had lost before: his footing, in his first years in Brazil; his place in a business he helped create; the capital invested in a company that didn't hold. But he says he still had a flame, of hope and of faith. That, he says, is where everything began. In a Christian congregation, listening to testimonies, he came to believe again. And, in a time of faith and silence, he says he saw his best self: a prosperous man, not only in money but in peace. He came out of it with an image and no map. He knew where he wanted to arrive; he didn't know how. He started building anyway. ### The path Whoever loses everything discovers what cannot be taken away. For Bairo, it was faith, decision and the memory of everything he had already learned. For you, it may be something else: your children, a trade, a friendship, your own stubbornness. Start with what remained. That is what the rest is built on, and often it is built better than before. When you are on firmer ground, look back carefully and write down what led to the loss. Not to punish yourself, but so that the next construction has stronger foundations. Many people lose everything twice because they start over in a rush, without understanding what happened. Give the lesson time. It will protect what you are still going to build. ### Read also - The coin and the road (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-coin-and-the-road/) - The God of the impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/) - What to do when you've gone broke? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/what-to-do-when-you-have-gone-broke/) --- ## How to reinvent yourself professionally? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-reinvent-yourself-professionally/ Idioma: en Descrição: Find what you can do that's valuable elsewhere, test the new field small before you leap, and use each earlier phase as a tool. Sometimes the market changes, sometimes you change, sometimes both. Reinventing yourself is not throwing away who you were; it's taking what you learned to a new place. And that can be done with method, not just courage. ### What to do now - Find the skills that travel. Selling, serving customers, organizing, teaching, leading, solving problems, learning fast: these competencies are valuable in almost any field. List yours, with concrete examples. - Look at problems, not job titles. Ask: what problem do I know how to solve that someone would pay to see solved? The answer usually points to the next phase. - Test before you leap. Do a small job in the new field, a side project, a short course, a conversation with someone who already works there. That way you find out whether you like it before betting everything. - Study the essentials, not everything. Choose the minimum the new field requires and start there. Free courses from federal institutes, Senai, Senac and Sebrae help a lot. - Tell the new story. Update your résumé and professional profile to show the thread that connects what you did to what you want to do. A well-told reinvention becomes an edge. - Build up capital for the crossing. If you can, save a few months of expenses before switching for good. If you can't, make the transition gradually, keeping an income. - Accept the apprentice period. For a while, you'll know less than you knew in your old field. That's normal and it passes. ### When it happened to Bairo The path of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, as he tells it, is made of reinventions. He came to Brazil for a management position at an education company. Then he opened a salon with his partner. From the salon came a hair-treatment course, in a field now called trichology. Then came a natural-based cosmetics brand of his own, which worked. When his partners pushed him out of that business, he didn't wait for the wound to close. He went to work in events and digital printing. He reinvented himself once more, built up capital and decided to play a different position: instead of founding, investing. Later, without knowing how to code, he spent six months in front of the computer and built the foundation of a financial platform for agribusiness. He says each phase left a tool for the next. ### The path In capoeira, which was Bairo's bridge to Brazil, there is the ginga: the body goes to one side, comes back to the other and never stays still long enough to be knocked down. Reinventing yourself is swaying with your career. It's not running from the blow; it's turning the blow into movement. Whoever sways doesn't stop, and whoever doesn't stop doesn't fall for good. Reinvention doesn't happen on one brave day. It is made of small, repeated choices: the course you finish, the contact you get back in touch with, the offer you accept even though you're afraid. Seen from outside, it looks like a leap. Lived from inside, it's a staircase. Climb one step a week and, in a few months, you'll be in a place that seems far away today. ### Read also - Every no is the ground of a yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) - How to deal with professional failure? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-deal-with-professional-failure/) - How to start a business with no experience? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-a-business-with-no-experience-when-you-need-to/) --- ## How to beat the fear of starting over: 7 practical steps URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-overcome-the-fear-of-starting-over-7-steps/ Idioma: en Descrição: Name the fear, work out the real worst case, shrink the next step and act before you feel ready. Courage is acting while afraid. The fear of starting over is usually the fear of suffering again what already hurt once. It makes sense: you know exactly what falling is like. But the fear that protects can also imprison, and you need to learn to tell one from the other. This page is the practical guide; the short story about the same fear is in How to overcome the fear of starting over (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-gray-dog/). ### What to do now - Name the fear. "I'm afraid" is vague. "I'm afraid of losing the family's money again" or "I'm afraid of what people will say" is concrete. A fear with a name gets smaller and shows you where to act. - Work out the real worst case. Write it down: if it goes wrong, what actually happens? Most of the time, the worst case is survivable and, with some care, avoidable. Fear works with the worst imaginable, not the worst likely. - Shrink the size of the step. If the leap seems too big, break it into steps you can take while afraid. A phone call, a small test, a conversation. No one has to jump the abyss in one go. - Protect what can't be lost. Decide in advance what stays out of the bet: the rent, the food, your health. With the essentials protected, fear loses strength. - Act before you feel ready. The feeling of readiness almost never comes before action. It comes afterward, with practice. Courage is not the absence of fear; it's acting in spite of it. - Surround yourself with people who have started over. Real stories of people who made it through help you see that there is another side. - If fear has turned into panic or paralysis, seek help. Intense, persistent anxiety can be treated. Your city's primary health unit (UBS) and psychosocial care center (CAPS) provide care through SUS. To talk right now, CVV at 188, free and 24 hours a day. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he knew fear up close. In his first years in Brazil, when he decided to leave the company that had brought him, he found himself without documents in hand, far from home and afraid. He describes that time as walking in the shadows of life. Other fears followed: the fear of making mistakes when his daughter was born and a mistake started costing someone else too; the fear of hearing one more "it can't be done"; the fear of once again seeing many people depending on him. There was even an idea, involving artificial intelligence and augmented reality, that he gave up on after hearing it wouldn't work, and that years later became a trend. He learned from it. Next time, he decided, he would not stop at the first answer. ### The path Fear doesn't disappear; it moves. In Bairo's story, the fear of the shadows became care, and the fear of "no" became fuel. He says every no is the ground of a yes. The fear of starting over can be ground too: it's what makes you plan better, protect the essentials and choose more carefully. Use fear as a compass, not as a wall. A useful practice: write a letter to yourself one year from now, telling how the new start went, the one you haven't even begun yet. Describe the difficulties, the small wins, the people who helped. It sounds strange, but it helps your mind see the road as something possible, not only as a threat. Fear shrinks when the future takes concrete shape. ### Read also - Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/) - How to find the courage to take risks? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-find-the-courage-to-take-risks/) - How to start over from zero? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-over-from-zero/) - How to overcome the fear of starting over (short story) (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-gray-dog/) --- ## How to deal with fear of the future? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-deal-with-fear-of-the-future/ Idioma: en Descrição: Separate what depends on you from what doesn't, take care of today, build small reserves and limit the flood of news. The future is made now. The future is frightening when the present is already hard. The economy, jobs, health, family, technology changing everything. Your mind races ahead and comes back with dark scenarios. You can bring that mind back to the place where it is able to act: today. ### What to do now - Make two columns. On one side, what depends on you (your routine, your spending, your studies, your relationships). On the other, what doesn't (the economy, other people's decisions). Put your energy into the first column. - Turn worry into a plan. For each fear in the first column, write a small action. Afraid of losing your job? Update your résumé and take a course. Afraid of running out of money? Start a reserve, even of a few reais a month. - Limit the flood of news and social media. Information matters; an avalanche of bad news doesn't. Choose set times to catch up and reliable sources. - Take care of your body, which calms your mind. Regular sleep, food, walking, sunlight. Anxiety feeds on exhaustion. - Stay close to people. Fear grows in isolation. Talk, take part in your community, ask for and offer help. - Learn something about what scares you. Many people fear artificial intelligence, for example. Learning the basics about it usually turns fear into a tool. - If anxiety won't let you live, seek treatment. Panic attacks, persistent insomnia, worry that won't switch off: there is care for this through SUS, at primary health units (UBS) and psychosocial care centers (CAPS). To talk right now, CVV at 188. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez built much of his life facing futures others thought impossible. He says he heard "it won't work" about natural-based cosmetics and about artificial intelligence applied to business. Later, he says, the banks refused to integrate the platform he had built for agribusiness. He says faith played a central role in how he came to look at the future. In a time of faith and silence, he says he saw his best self, and came out of it with an image and no map. He asked, in his words, for wisdom, understanding and courage to remember how to get there. Not to learn the way: to remember it. Today he speaks of artificial intelligence not as a threat, but as an extension of the human. ### The path The story goes that, at the opening of Walt Disney World, in 1971, someone lamented that Walt had not lived to see the park, and heard: "He did see it. That's why it's here." The future is less frightening when you see it first and start building it today, with whatever is at hand. For Bairo, whoever has seen the end only needs to build the middle. Notice: the future that frightens is almost always one in which you are alone and without resources. In real life, it is almost never like that. There are people, public services, communities and skills you have yet to develop. Fear erases all of that from the picture. Put it back, one thing at a time, and the future stops looking like a cliff. ### Read also - Fifty-five years later (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/) - Why does Bairo say AI is an extension of the human? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/ai-as-an-extension-of-the-human/) - How to calm your mind in the middle of chaos? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-calm-your-mind-in-the-middle-of-chaos/) --- ## How to find the courage to take risks? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-find-the-courage-to-take-risks/ Idioma: en Descrição: Risk what you can lose, not what you can't. Set the limit first, test small, decide with data and accept that courage is a decision, not a feeling. Every life that changed direction had a moment when someone took a risk. And every risk has two sides: what can go wrong, and what will never happen if you don't try. Having courage is not ignoring the first side; it's looking at both. ### What to do now - Separate risk from recklessness. Risk is betting something you can lose to gain something worthwhile. Recklessness is betting what can't be lost: your home, food, health, other people's money without their knowledge. - Set the limit before you start. How much time, how much money, how much energy are you willing to invest before reassessing? Write it down. That turns a leap in the dark into a controlled experiment. - Test small. Sell before producing in quantity. Run a pilot project. Work part-time in the new field. Small tests generate data, and data reduce fear. - Listen to those who know, but decide yourself. Ask the opinion of people who understand the subject. Then remember: many people will say "it can't be done" just because they've never tried. Tell a technical warning apart from someone else's fear. - Be wary of "risk-free" risk. Promises of certain gains, easy money and "today only" opportunities are not courage; they are traps. - Commit publicly to someone you trust. Telling one person your plan increases the chance you'll follow through. - Decide, even without certainty. Courage is a decision, made before the feeling arrives. - Prepare plan B before you start. Knowing what you'll do if it goes wrong takes away much of the fear and lets you take the risk with a cool head. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez took risks many times, and didn't always win. He took a risk when he left the company that brought him to Brazil. He took a risk when he created a course in a field that had not yet found its place. He took a risk when he joined, as an investing partner, a business that was not what it seemed, and he lost. The most unlikely risk, he says, came after that loss. With many people depending on him, he decided to do something he didn't know how to do: build a currency, a bank and a navigation network. It went wrong; the people he had helped left him hanging. He kept going. He admires Ayrton Senna for this: before any victory, there was a decision, and after it came courage and persistence. ### The path Courage is not having no fear. It's deciding that fear won't be the one who decides. In Bairo's story, not every risk paid off, but each one taught him to take risks better. Take risks with limits, with tests and with your eyes open. And remember that, sometimes, the biggest risk is going through your whole life without trying. After taking a risk, celebrate the courage, not only the result. If it works, great. If it goes wrong, you'll have learned something that can only be learned by taking risks, and you'll know how to take them better next time. Whoever never takes risks never makes mistakes, but never finds out what they are capable of either. Courage is a muscle: it grows with use and withers with fear. ### Read also - What does Ayrton Senna inspire in Bairo Gonzalez? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/ayrton-senna-in-bairos-story/) - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) - How to make a difficult decision? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-make-a-difficult-decision/) --- ## Loneliness in a crisis: what to do now — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-deal-with-loneliness-in-a-crisis/ Idioma: en Descrição: Ask for help specifically, seek communities and services that welcome you, and keep a routine. Deep loneliness deserves care: no one gets through alone. In a crisis, the phone rings less. Some people pull away because they don't know what to say, others for fear your pain is contagious. The loneliness that comes with the fall can hurt as much as the fall itself. It's real, and there is a way out. This page brings the practical steps; if you want the same pain told as a story, read the short story How to deal with loneliness (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/corn-for-the-pigeons/). ### What to do now - Ask for help specifically. "I'm not okay" scares people; "can you listen to me for half an hour on Saturday?" or "do you know anyone who's hiring?" is easy to answer. Concrete requests get concrete answers. - Reconnect with one person a week. An old friend, a relative, a former colleague. A simple message is enough. Relationships are rebuilt little by little. - Look for communities. Support groups, neighborhood associations, faith communities, entrepreneur groups, volunteer projects. Being among people with a shared goal eases the feeling of isolation. - Use the services that welcome people. Your city's CRAS knows about groups and community services. Primary health units (UBS) and psychosocial care centers (CAPS) provide care through SUS for people in emotional distress. - Help someone. It sounds contradictory, but helping another person is one of the fastest ways to break isolation. You feel useful and connected again. - Keep a minimum routine. Wake up at the same time, leave the house every day, even if only for a walk. Loneliness deepens in a shapeless day. - Know when it's urgent. If loneliness comes with thoughts that it would be better not to be alive, call CVV now at 188, free, 24 hours a day, or use the chat at cvv.org.br. In immediate danger, SAMU at 192. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he knew the loneliness of the immigrant. In his first years in Brazil, without documents in hand, he lived, in his words, in the shadows of life, with no direction and no network, far from home. Later, he knew another loneliness, that of someone who sees things first. When he wanted to bring artificial intelligence and augmented reality into the business, he was told it wouldn't work. Years later, the very same thing became a trend. Anyone who lives that up close knows that arriving too early also means arriving alone. And there was the hardest loneliness: being left hanging by people he had helped. After it came six months alone at home, in front of the computer, building. Only then did he stop being alone: he found help and connection in three old acquaintances. ### The path The loneliness of a crisis is usually a season, not an address. In Bairo's story, it ended with the word "together": for someone who had been left hanging, going back to building as a team was a reconciliation with the idea of trusting. Open a door, even a small one. Someone on the other side may be waiting for it too. If you live far from your family or have only recently arrived in your city, loneliness can run even deeper. Look for regular meeting places: the same square, the same community, the same group. Bonds are born of repetition, not of a single encounter. In a few months, familiar faces start to become names, and names start to become friends. ### Read also - The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) - No one believes in me: what do I do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/no-one-believes-in-me-what-to-do/) - One name, four presences (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/one-name-four-presences/) - How to deal with loneliness (short story) (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/corn-for-the-pigeons/) --- ## No one believes in me: what do I do? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/no-one-believes-in-me-what-to-do/ Idioma: en Descrição: Separate useful criticism from dismissal, prove it on a small scale, seek out people who know the field and don't let a lack of support become giving up. You share the idea and see the polite smile. You talk about the plan and hear "keep your feet on the ground." Even the people who love you seem to doubt. Other people's lack of belief hurts, but it doesn't decide your life, unless you let it. ### What to do now - Separate criticism from dismissal. Some objections are useful: they point to a forgotten cost, a real risk, a customer who doesn't exist. Write those down and answer them. Others are just other people's fear. Say thank you and move on. - Ask why. When someone says "it won't work," ask for the reason. Sometimes the answer improves your plan. Sometimes it shows the person has simply never seen anything like it. - Prove it small. Talk convinces few people; results convince many. One paying customer, a working prototype, a sale. A small proof is worth more than a big promise. - Seek out people who know the field. Family and friends love you, but they don't always know the industry. Look for mentors, people in the field, entrepreneur groups, Sebrae. - Don't ask permission for everything. Some decisions need your family's agreement, especially when they involve the household's money. Others are yours. Know which is which. - Nurture self-confidence without sliding into arrogance. Believing in yourself isn't ignoring the data. Keep listening, testing and adjusting. - If the lack of support has become constant sadness, take care of yourself. Talk to someone you trust. CVV answers at 188. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez's story is made of "it can't be done." He wanted to bring artificial intelligence and augmented reality into the business; people said it wouldn't work. He believed in it, and gave up anyway. Years later, it became a trend. The next time, with a natural-based cosmetics brand of his own, people said again it wouldn't work. This time he didn't stop. It worked, and natural cosmetics became a trend too. Later, he says, when he built the foundation of a financial platform for agribusiness, the banks refused to integrate his solution. He used the "no" as ground and went on to build his own infrastructure. He often recalls that, according to Napoleon Hill, Henry Ford's engineers said the single-block V8 engine was impossible. Ford told them to keep going. In 1932, the car hit the streets. ### The path No one has to believe in you for you to start. People tend to believe afterward, when they see. Bairo learned, the one time he gave up too early, that being right ahead of time doesn't pay the bills, but it shows the eye is true. Keep the useful criticism, prove it small and keep going. Other people's yes usually comes after yours. Don't let other people's lack of belief become your own. Their opinion is about what they can imagine; your decision is about what you're willing to build. Often the very people who doubted are the ones who later say they always knew it would work. Let them. What matters is that you kept going. ### Read also - The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) - The V8 engine that was impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/henry-ford-impossible-v8-engine/) - They said my idea won't work. Now what? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/they-said-my-idea-wont-work-how-to-react/) --- ## How to start life over in another country? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-life-over-in-another-country/ Idioma: en Descrição: Documents in order, the language, a support network and a job that pays the bills. In Brazil, the Migration Law guarantees rights to newcomers. Moving to another country is starting everything over at once: language, documents, work, friends, even the way you order a coffee. There are days of excitement and days of homesickness that squeeze your chest. Both are normal, and both become part of who you are. ### What to do now - Get your documents in order before anything else. In Brazil, the Migration Law (Law 13,445/2017) guarantees migrants rights such as access to health care, education, the courts and work. Regularization is done with the Federal Police, which issues the residence authorization and the National Migration Registry Card (CRNM). If you are from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru or Uruguay, the Mercosur Residence Agreement opens a simpler path: two-year temporary residence, requested from the Federal Police. Keep copies of everything, on paper and on your phone. - Get your CPF and open an account. The CPF is the key to working, renting and opening a bank account. The Federal Revenue Service issues it to foreigners. - Make learning the language a priority. Public universities, NGOs and churches often offer free Portuguese courses for migrants. The sooner you start, the more doors open. - Find the support network. Migrant associations, reception centers, the Catholic migrant ministry and organizations such as Caritas give guidance on documents, work and housing. SUS, the public health system, serves migrants, documented or not. - Start with the work that's possible. Many migrants start below their qualifications. It's not defeat; it's a bridge. Meanwhile, look into getting your diplomas recognized and showing what you know. - Know your labor rights. A foreigner with regular documentation has the same labor rights as a Brazilian. Be wary of anyone who offers off-the-books work and insists on keeping your documents. - Take care of the homesickness. Keep in touch with those who stayed behind, meet people from your country and build new bonds. If sadness weighs too much, CVV answers at 188, in Portuguese, free of charge. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez was born in Colombia in 1982 and said from boyhood that one day he would live in Brazil. Capoeira was the bridge: before the language, before the country, came the rhythm of the berimbau. He says he arrived in 2002, with an education company, in a management position. The boyhood dream had come true. But when he decided to follow his own path and leave the company, he found himself without documents in hand, far from home and afraid. Hard years followed, with no direction and no network. He started over with what he had: his partner, the daughter who was born here and a neighborhood salon. Today, he runs companies in Brazil and in the United Kingdom. ### The path Bairo says the sun is for everyone, but shade, in the heat, is for the few. Migrants know the strong sun and the lack of shade. But they also learn something people who have never left home don't know: that it is possible to build a whole home with your own hands, in a language that at first wasn't yours. The new country can become your country. Keep your origins with pride. The language, the food, the music and the customs you brought are part of what you have to offer the new country. Many immigrant businesses start right there, with what people knew how to do back home. Your arrival story, told truthfully, is capital too: it builds trust and connection with those who went through the same. ### Read also - Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/) - Undocumented immigrant in Brazil: what to do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/undocumented-immigrant-in-brazil-how-to-regularize/) - When did Bairo Gonzalez arrive in Brazil? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/when-did-bairo-gonzalez-arrive-in-brazil/) --- ## Undocumented in Brazil: how to get legal and find help URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/undocumented-immigrant-in-brazil-how-to-regularize/ Idioma: en Descrição: Migrating is not a crime in Brazil. See the Federal Public Defender and the Federal Police to regularize; health care and school are rights before that. Being in a country without documents means living in fear of every police stop, every form, every request for ID. Many people spend years like that, in silence. But Brazil has a law that treats migrants as people with rights, and there is a way out of the shadows. ### What to do now - Know that migrating is not a crime. Among the principles of the Migration Law (Law 13,445/2017) are the non-criminalization of migration and humanitarian reception. Being in an irregular migration situation is an administrative matter, and it can be resolved. - Go to the Federal Public Defender's Office (DPU). It provides free legal assistance to migrants and can advise on the most suitable path to regularization in your case. Support organizations, such as Caritas and migrant reception centers, also give guidance. - Know the paths to regularization. Residence authorization is requested from the Federal Police, and the law provides several grounds (work, family reunion, humanitarian reception, regional agreements such as Mercosur's, among others). Those who fear persecution in their country of origin can apply for refugee status, which is assessed by Conare, the national refugee committee. For people from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru or Uruguay, the Mercosur Residence Agreement allows a request for two-year temporary residence even for those who entered irregularly or overstayed. The DPU or a lawyer will tell you which applies to you. - Replace your passport or ID. If you lost your document or are without it, go to your country's consulate. It can issue a new passport or a travel document. - Use the services that are yours by right. SUS serves anyone on Brazilian territory. Children have the right to go to school, regardless of their parents' migration status. - Don't accept offers that make things worse. Be wary of anyone selling "quick documents," charging to "sort it out" without a receipt or demanding that you hand over your papers. A fake document turns an administrative problem into a crime. - If you are being exploited, report it. Unpaid work, exhausting hours or documents withheld by an employer may amount to a crime. Dial 100 (the human rights hotline) and the Labor Prosecutor's Office receive reports. This page is general guidance; the path for your case is defined with the DPU, a lawyer or the Federal Police. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he knows this fear. He arrived in Brazil in 2002, with an education company, in a management position. When he decided to leave it, he found himself without documents in hand, far from home, afraid and with no road ahead. He describes those years as living in the shadows of life, like so many immigrants before and after him. It took time to get back on his feet. Today, he is the administrator of a Brazilian company and director of two companies registered in the United Kingdom. ### The path The shadows are not your final place. Bairo's story shows someone who went through hard years without documents in hand and then built a whole life in broad daylight. The first step is the hardest: going to those who can help, with the truth. Brazilian law was written to receive that step. While your regularization process moves forward, keep copies of every filing receipt, proof of address and work document. They show your presence and your good faith in the country. Avoid international travel without guidance, because it can complicate the application. And keep studying, working honestly and building bonds: life doesn't have to wait for the document to start being rebuilt. ### Read also - How to start life over in another country? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-life-over-in-another-country/) - The company kept my passport: what do I do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/employer-kept-my-passport-what-to-do/) - Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/) - Undocumented immigrant: what to do with the fear (short story) (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/undocumented-immigrant-what-to-do/) --- ## The company kept my passport: what do I do? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/employer-kept-my-passport-what-to-do/ Idioma: en Descrição: Withholding a worker's documents is prohibited in Brazil. Ask for them back in writing; go to the Public Defender, the MPT, the Federal Police or Dial 100. Being without your own passport in a foreign country feels like someone is keeping your freedom in a drawer. The fear of losing your job, your visa and your dignity makes many people accept it in silence. You don't have to accept it. ### What to do now - Know that this is not allowed. In Brazil, withholding someone's identity document is prohibited (Law 5,553/1968), and the Penal Code (art. 149, §1, II) sets penalties for anyone who takes a worker's documents to keep them at the workplace; art. 203, §1, II, punishes anyone who prevents someone from leaving a job by withholding their documents. You are the victim, not the offender, whatever your migration status. - Ask for it back in writing. Send a message or letter asking for the document back and keep the reply, or the lack of one. That becomes evidence. - Gather evidence carefully. Messages, witnesses, contracts, receipts, photos. Don't put yourself at risk to get them. - Seek specialized help. - Federal Public Defender's Office (DPU): free legal assistance to migrants. - Labor Prosecutor's Office (MPT): receives reports of labor rights violations, including confidentially. - Dial 100: the national human rights hotline, free of charge. - Federal Police: to report the situation and handle your migration documents. - Talk to your country's consulate. It can issue a new passport or a travel document and advise you on your rights. - If you are in danger, call 190. Threats, confinement or violence are a police matter, immediately. - Seek shelter and support. Migrant support organizations, such as Caritas and the Catholic migrant ministries, help with shelter, food and guidance while the case is resolved. This page is general guidance. The Public Defender or a lawyer will assess your case. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he arrived in Brazil in 2002, brought by an education company, to take a management position. One day, he wanted to follow his own path and leave the company. That was when he discovered how an immigrant can lose the ground beneath him: without documents in hand, far from home and afraid. Hard years followed, with no direction and no network, as for so many immigrants. He sums up that time in one sentence: the sun is for everyone, but shade, in the heat, is for the few. He didn't give up. He started over from zero, with his partner by his side, and built, step by step, the life he has today. ### The path No one has the right to hold on to your identity. The document is yours, the story is yours, and the law is on your side. Bairo's path shows it is possible to come out of the shadows and build in broad daylight. The first step is telling the truth to those who can help. Do it today. If you're afraid to report because you have no documents, know that the Federal Public Defender's Office serves migrants in any situation, and that the channels for reporting rights violations exist precisely to protect the victim. Don't wait for things to get worse. The sooner you seek help, the easier it is to get your document back, receive what is yours and move on safely. ### Read also - Undocumented immigrant in Brazil: what to do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/undocumented-immigrant-in-brazil-how-to-regularize/) - Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/) - How to overcome the fear of starting over? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-overcome-the-fear-of-starting-over-7-steps/) --- ## How to have faith when everything goes wrong? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-have-faith-when-everything-goes-wrong/ Idioma: en Descrição: Faith doesn't require feeling certain; it requires going on. Seek community, hear those who made it through, and pair faith with one practical step a day. When everything goes wrong, faith is often the first thing to waver. Prayer seems to go unanswered, and the question "why me?" keeps hammering. This page speaks of faith with respect for those who believe, those who doubt and those who don't believe. ### What to do now - Accept that doubt is part of it. Many religious traditions tell stories of people of faith who went through periods of silence and doubt. Doubting isn't ceasing to believe; it is often the beginning of a more mature faith. - Go back to your community. Faith lived alone dries up fast. If you have a religious community, go back to it, even if only to listen. If you don't, look for a place where you feel respected. - Listen to stories of people who made it through. Testimonies from ordinary people who went through the impossible have a power no speech has. They remind you that rock bottom is not the end of the story. - Pair faith with one practical step a day. Faith sustains; the step builds. Pray, meditate or reflect, and then do one concrete thing: a call, a visit, a bill sorted out. - Take care of the person beside you. Serving others is one of faith's oldest practices, and also one of the most effective ways out of your own hole. - Don't trade faith for easy promises. Be wary of anyone who charges to "fix" your life, promises prosperity in exchange for money or uses faith to sell products and investments. - Faith and care go together. If sadness has turned into hopelessness, seeking professional help is not a lack of faith. CVV at 188, free and 24 hours a day; primary health units (UBS) and psychosocial care centers (CAPS) through SUS. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he reached rock bottom broke, broken and beaten, but still with a flame of hope and faith. There he found a door he hadn't been looking for. In a Christian congregation, he heard accounts, stories and testimonies from ordinary people who had crossed through the impossible. Listening, he came to believe in the God of the impossible. Listening more, he came to trust in the God of love. Faith, for him, took on a simple definition: trusting in something you cannot see. And he insists on one thing: for Bairo, whoever trusts in their God of creation is right, regardless of religious belief. The faith that held him up is not a faith that excludes. ### The path Bairo's faith didn't appear when everything was going well; it appeared when nothing was. It didn't pay the bills for him, but it gave him the strength to get up and work the next day. If you believe, let faith be the ground and work be the building. If you don't, the lesson still holds: trust in what can't yet be seen enough to take the next step. There is also a quiet faith that needs no fine words: getting out of bed, taking care of those who depend on you and doing what needs doing even without seeing results. Many people who say they've lost their faith are actually living that discreet faith every day. Recognize it in yourself. Sometimes, carrying on is already the most sincere prayer. ### Read also - The God of the impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/) - How to find hope at rock bottom? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-find-hope-at-rock-bottom/) - How to unite faith and work in a crisis? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-unite-faith-and-work-in-a-crisis/) --- ## How to find hope at rock bottom? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-find-hope-at-rock-bottom/ Idioma: en Descrição: Look for one small reason for today, talk to someone, remember what you've been through and ask for help if hope disappears. The bottom is ground too. Rock bottom has a silence of its own. It feels as if nothing will change, as if every door has closed. If you're there right now, the first thing to know is this: many people who are standing today were once exactly where you are. ### What to do now - If hope is completely gone, ask for help now. If you are thinking about taking your own life, call CVV at 188, free, 24 hours a day, or talk by chat at cvv.org.br. If you are in immediate danger, call 192 (SAMU) or go to an emergency room. You don't need to solve everything today; you need to get through today. - Look for one small reason. It doesn't have to be a great meaning of life. It can be a child, a pet, a person, a task, the curiosity to see how things will turn out. Hope starts small. - Remember what you've already been through. Make a list of the times you thought you wouldn't make it and did. Rock bottom has a short memory; you need to remind it. - Talk to someone today. A friend, a relative, a leader in your community, a health professional. Hope often arrives in someone else's voice. - Take care of your body the way you would care for a loved one who is ill. Water, food, a shower, sunlight, a few hours of sleep. These are small acts of hope. - Seek ongoing support. Persistent hopelessness can be a sign of depression, which can be treated. Your city's primary health unit (UBS) and psychosocial care center (CAPS) provide care through SUS. - Listen to stories of people who got out. Real testimonies show that there is another side to the pit. - Go back to the basics of routine. Waking up and going to bed at similar times, leaving the house a little every day, eating at regular hours. Routine holds life together while hope rebuilds. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez describes his own rock bottom without embellishment: broke, broken and beaten. No money, no apparent way out, not a single plan left in the drawer. But, he says, there was still a flame. Of hope and of faith. It was by listening to testimonies in a Christian congregation that it began to grow again: ordinary people telling how they had crossed through the impossible. In a time of faith and silence, he says he saw his best self: a prosperous man, not only in money, in peace. He came out of it with an image and no map. But for someone at the bottom, an image was already a lot. For him, that is where everything began. ### The path Hope isn't being sure everything will work out. It's believing it's still worth trying. Bairo found his in a small flame that didn't go out. Yours may be in a conversation, a memory, a person. Protect that flame. It doesn't have to be big today; it has to stay lit until tomorrow. If you are with someone who is at rock bottom, your presence counts more than any advice. You don't need to have the right answer. It's enough to be close, listen without judging, help with the basics and, if you sense risk, help the person call CVV or seek health services. Hope often arrives on loan, in the hands of someone who stayed. ### Read also - The God of the impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/) - The coin and the road (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-coin-and-the-road/) - How to stop feeling like a failure? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-stop-feeling-like-a-failure/) --- ## How to unite faith and work in a crisis? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-unite-faith-and-work-in-a-crisis/ Idioma: en Descrição: Faith gives strength; work gives shape. Ask for wisdom, understanding and courage, then do your part with discipline, one day at a time. In a crisis, some people say "just have faith" and others say "faith doesn't pay the bills." Both sentences hold a piece of truth. For many people who have been through the worst, faith was what kept them standing, and work was what got them moving. ### What to do now - Ask, and then act. If you pray, ask for clarity, strength and courage. Then turn the request into a task: faith that asks for wisdom needs someone willing to study; faith that asks for a door needs someone willing to knock. - Create a routine that unites the two. A time of prayer, meditation or silence in the morning; then the day's work with small, clear goals. Routine gives shape to hope. - Do your part with discipline. Discipline is faith in the form of habit: showing up every day, even when the result hasn't come yet. - Use your faith community as a network. Religious communities often have people willing to point you to work, help with the basics and simply listen. Ask. - Keep faith apart from financial promises. No serious faith requires you to hand over the family's money in exchange for blessings or to invest in "opportunities" sold in God's name. Be wary. - Respect those who believe differently. In a crisis, you'll work alongside people with other beliefs or none. The faith that builds is the faith that welcomes. - Don't mistake faith for an excuse to skip care. Seeing a doctor, psychologist, lawyer or the Public Defender is not a lack of faith. If the anguish tightens, CVV at 188. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says that, after finding faith again, he came away with an image of his best self and no map. He knew where he wanted to arrive; he didn't know how. He didn't know how to code, or anything like it. So he did what the congregation had taught him: he asked. He asked for wisdom, understanding and courage to remember how to get there. And then he went to work. He sat down in front of a computer and spent six months without leaving the house, developing, coding, writing. He describes those months as something even he can't explain. Anyone looking from outside sees something else, just as rare: discipline. Out of those six months came the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, focused on agribusiness. ### The path For Bairo, faith didn't replace work; it gave it meaning. Faith is trusting in something you cannot see, he says. And work is what slowly brings into view what couldn't be seen before. If you believe, unite the two. If you don't, the lesson remains: trust in what doesn't exist yet, plus daily effort, is what turns an image into reality. A simple practice helps bring the two together: at the end of each day, write down three pieces of work you did and one thing you're grateful for. The work shows what you built; the gratitude reminds you of what you received. Over time, that list becomes a record that the crossing is happening, even on days when it seems nothing has changed. ### Read also - The God of the impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/) - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) - How to have faith when everything goes wrong? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-have-faith-when-everything-goes-wrong/) --- ## How to find my purpose in life? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-find-my-purpose-in-life/ Idioma: en Descrição: Purpose is found by doing: notice what moves you and which pain of others you understand, then test it small. It isn't a revelation; it's a direction. The question "what is my purpose?" usually comes up when something falls apart. The job ended, the business closed, life lost its script. It's a big question, and it deserves practical answers, not catchphrases. ### What to do now - Look at what you already do without being asked. What subject do you study on your own? Which of other people's problems do you solve without charging? There is usually a clue there. - Look at the pain you know. Many people find purpose precisely in the pain they went through: someone who went hungry fights hunger, someone who was left without documents helps migrants. Your scar may be your map. - Bring three circles together. What you like to do, what you're good at and what someone needs. Where all three meet, there's a good candidate for purpose. If you can make a living from it, even better; if not yet, start on the side. - Test it small. Volunteering, a weekend project, a course, a conversation with someone who works in that field. Purpose is confirmed in practice, not in theory. - Accept that it changes shape. Purpose is not a job title; it's a direction. It can show up as a salon, then as a course, then as a company, always pointing to the same place. - Take care of your livelihood while you search. Purpose doesn't pay the rent in the first month. Keep an income and build the new direction little by little. - Don't let the search turn into anguish. If the feeling of emptiness is deep and constant, it may be more than existential doubt. Talk to someone; CVV answers at 188. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says there are no coincidences and no accidents. There are purpose, dreams and execution. The sentence explains the Colombian boy who announced, before any road existed, that one day he would live in Brazil, and who got here across the bridge of capoeira. His purpose changed shape many times. It was a salon, a hair-treatment course, a cosmetics brand, events. After going broke with many people depending on him, he began aiming at something he hadn't done before: building infrastructure for those left outside the system, such as the producers and traders at the wholesale food markets. Today, the thread he sees in everything is human life: lifetime as a measure, the idea that every person can seek their best self, and a humanitarian front, Instituto CEASA, with the proposal of widening access to food. ### The path Purpose isn't something that falls from the sky ready-made; it's a direction you recognize by looking back and confirm by walking forward. In Bairo's life, every attempt pointed to the same place, even when it seemed like a detour. Start with what moves you and with what hurts in you. Carry it out small. Purpose usually shows up along the way. Perhaps the most useful question isn't "what is my purpose?" but "whom do I want to serve?". Purpose tends to appear when life stops revolving only around ourselves. A person, a community, a problem you can no longer bear to see unsolved. When you find that someone or that problem, the rest of the answer starts to fall into place. ### Read also - What does "purpose, dreams and execution" mean? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/purpose-dreams-and-execution/) - How do I discover my best self? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-discover-my-best-self/) - A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/) --- ## How do I discover my best self? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-discover-my-best-self/ Idioma: en Descrição: Picture in detail who you want to be, compare it with who you are today and choose one habit that closes the gap. Your best self is a path, not a product. "Be your best self" has become a poster slogan. But to someone on the ground, it can sound like pressure. Here, best self means something simpler and more honest: the person you would be if fear, fatigue and wounds didn't decide for you. ### What to do now - Picture it in detail. Close your eyes and describe an ordinary day of your best self a few years from now. Where you wake up, whom you talk to, what you do, how you treat people, how you feel. Write it down. - Compare it with today, without cruelty. Where is the biggest gap? Health, relationships, work, faith, peace? Choose just one area to start. - Turn the image into a habit. Your best self doesn't arrive in one leap; it arrives through repetition. If that person takes care of their body, start with a walk. If they study, start with half an hour a day. - Ask for help from those who have come close. Mentors, friends, people you admire. Ask how they did it. The answer is almost always less glamorous and more practical than you'd imagine. - Forgive your earlier versions. The versions of you that made mistakes also taught you. You don't need to erase them to grow. - Look for the best version of others. By seeing the best in people, you train your eye to see the best in yourself. - Take care of your mental health. If the gap between who you are and who you wanted to be causes intense suffering, seek support. CVV at 188; primary health units (UBS) and psychosocial care centers (CAPS) through SUS. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he saw his best self in a time of faith and silence, after reaching rock bottom. He describes it this way: a prosperous man, not only in money, in peace. A man who trusted his God blindly. He came out of that experience with an image and no map. He didn't know how to code. So he asked, in his words, for wisdom, understanding and courage to remember how to get there. Notice the verb: he didn't ask to learn the way. He asked to remember. For him, he had already seen the end; what was missing was building the middle. He built it: six months at home, in front of the computer, and then, together with others, the steps he calls the seventh attempt. ### The path Bairo says that today he cultivates one habit: looking for the best version of each person. It makes sense. For years, he searched for his own, going through the no, going broke, abandonment and silence. Whoever has searched for their own best self learns to look for other people's. Start with the image. Then, one habit at a time, build the middle. Be careful not to turn your best self into one more source of pressure. It's not a goal you must reach to deserve respect; it's a direction you choose to follow. Some days you'll be closer to it; other days, further away. What matters is returning to the direction, again and again. That is what, little by little, turns the image into reality. ### Read also - The God of the impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/) - One name, four presences (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/one-name-four-presences/) - How to find my purpose in life? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-find-my-purpose-in-life/) --- ## How to turn pain into purpose? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-turn-pain-into-purpose/ Idioma: en Descrição: First tend the wound; then ask what it taught you and who still suffers the same pain. Purpose is born when your pain becomes service to others. Some pains can't be explained and can't be forgotten. No one has to be grateful for them. But many people discover, over time, that the pain they went through can become what gives their life the most meaning: the ability to help those going through the same thing. ### What to do now - Tend the wound before using it. Purpose is not a shortcut to skip grief. If the pain is still open, take care of it: talk, seek support, give it time. An untreated wound turns into anger, not purpose. - Write down what the pain taught you. About yourself, about people, about what matters. Concrete lessons: "I learned to choose partners," "I learned what it is to go hungry," "I learned to ask for help." - Ask: who still suffers from this? Your pain has an address in other lives. People in debt, undocumented migrants, families who lost their homes, entrepreneurs who went broke. Your purpose may be there. - Start by serving in small ways. Advice to someone starting out, an hour of volunteering, a support group. You don't need to found an organization on day one. - Turn the lesson into a craft, if it makes sense. Sometimes pain becomes a profession: someone who went broke becomes a small-business consultant, someone who migrated works in refugee and migrant reception. Study and prepare to do it well. - Protect yourself from reliving the pain endlessly. Helping people go through what you went through can reopen wounds. Have support for yourself too. - If the pain still dominates, get help. CVV at 188, free and 24 hours a day; primary health units (UBS) and psychosocial care centers (CAPS) through SUS. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez speaks of pain as the foundation of his own story. When his partners pushed him out of a business he had helped create, he made a discovery he still carries today: he found the pain and, instead of running from it, made it his foundation. Not as an open wound. As ground to stand on. The pains that followed also went into the work. Anyone who knows the chapter of the fifty lives understands why he talks so much about human life and lifetime. The banks' refusal to integrate the platform he built for agribusiness became the decision to raise his own infrastructure, designed for the producers and traders still outside the system. And, alongside the companies, he founded a humanitarian front, Instituto CEASA, with the proposal of widening access to food. ### The path "Every no is the ground of a yes," Bairo says. Pain can be ground too: not at the size it is today, but for what you build on top of it. No one chooses pain. But you can choose what it will teach, and whom you will serve after getting through it. There is one important caution on this path: don't turn your pain into a ruler for measuring other people's pain. Each person goes through their own story with the resources they have. Whoever serves from the pain they lived needs to listen before advising, and respect that the other person's path may differ from theirs. That listening is what turns experience into real help. ### Read also - Every no is the ground of a yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) - How to innovate in the middle of pain and crisis? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-innovate-through-pain-and-crisis/) - What is Instituto CEASA? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-instituto-ceasa/) --- ## How to make a difficult decision? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-make-a-difficult-decision/ Idioma: en Descrição: Write down the options, the real cost of each and what you value; set a deadline, decide, then stand by the choice. Not deciding is a decision too. Some decisions keep you up for weeks: close or keep going, stay or leave, accept or refuse. Your head goes round in circles and gets nowhere. Deciding doesn't get easy, but it gets clearer when you take the decision out of your head and put it on paper. ### What to do now - Write down the real options. There are almost always more than two. Between "close everything" and "carry on as is," there may be "scale down," "pause," "change partners," "sell part of it." List them all. - For each option, write the real cost. In money, time, health, relationships. And write down what happens in the best, the worst and the most likely scenario. - Go back to your values. What is non-negotiable for you? Family, honesty, health, faith, freedom? The option that violates a core value usually charges a high price later, even if it looks advantageous now. - Listen to two or three of the right people. Someone who knows the subject, someone who loves you and someone who disagrees with you. Then decide on your own. Advice is input, not a verdict. - Set a deadline. A decision without a deadline becomes endless anguish. Pick a date. Until then, gather information. On that date, decide with what you have. - Don't decide on your worst day. Fatigue, anger and despair distort everything. If you can, sleep on it, take a walk, wait for the peak of emotion to pass. - Once you decide, stand by it. Reassess on scheduled dates, not with every doubt. Revisiting the decision every day eats up the energy needed to carry it out. Remember: not deciding is also a decision, and often the most expensive one. ### When it happened to Bairo What Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez admires in Ayrton Senna, above all, is a decision: the decision to be the best. Before any victory, he says, there was a decision, and after it came courage and persistence. For Bairo, these became personal values. The hardest decisions of his life came in moments of loss. When he decided to leave the company that brought him to Brazil, knowing it had a cost. And, above all, when the business he had invested in did not hold, with many people depending on him. There was the obvious decision: complain and retreat. He made the unlikely one: to do something he didn't know how to do and build again. Not every decision of his worked out. But he says each one left a lesson for the next. ### The path In a sentence from 1989, which the magazine Veja reproduced, Senna said: "Every driver has his limit. Mine is a little above everyone else's." Before the limit comes the decision to test it. Deciding is choosing which cost you accept to pay. Make the choice with your eyes open, honor your values and stand by the path. Courage comes after the decision, not before. A simple tool: imagine yourself five years from now looking back at this decision. Which choice would you be proud of having made, even if it had gone wrong? That question shifts the focus from immediate fear to the kind of person you want to be. Often, the right decision is the one you could calmly explain to the person you respect most. ### Read also - What does Ayrton Senna inspire in Bairo Gonzalez? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/ayrton-senna-in-bairos-story/) - Give up or keep going: how do you know? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/give-up-or-keep-going-how-to-know/) - Fifty-five years later (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/) --- ## Give up or keep going: how do you know? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/give-up-or-keep-going-how-to-know/ Idioma: en Descrição: Keep going if there's progress and you learn each time; change if you repeat the same mistake. Sometimes giving up one way is persisting in the dream. There are moments when insisting looks like stubbornness and giving up looks like cowardice. No one wants to quit too early, or to spend years on a dead-end road. The good news is that there are signs that help tell the two apart. ### What to do now - Separate the dream from the method. Sometimes the dream is right and the road is wrong. Giving up a method, a partner or a product is not giving up the dream; often it's what saves it. - Look for signs of progress. Did a customer come back? Did someone pay? Did you learn something new on the last attempt? Slow progress is still progress. A total absence of signs, for a long time, deserves attention. - See whether you're repeating the same mistake. Persistence is trying again with what you learned. Repeating the same thing expecting a different result is something else. - Calculate the cost of continuing. How much money, health and family time does each extra month consume? If the cost is destroying the essentials, it's time to change something, even if it isn't giving up. - Listen to those who know the field, not only those who love you. People in the industry, mentors and customers give signals that family, out of affection, sometimes hides. - Set a review point. "If I haven't reached such-and-such a result by such-and-such a date, I'll change the plan." That avoids deciding on the impulse of a bad day. - Take care of exhaustion. Much of the urge to give up is actually fatigue. Rest before deciding. If the fatigue comes with deep hopelessness, CVV at 188. - Talk with those who depend on the outcome. Family, team and partners feel the effects of the decision. Listening to them doesn't take the choice away from you, but it often reveals costs and support you hadn't seen. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez has given up too early before. He wanted to bring artificial intelligence and augmented reality into the business, was told it wouldn't work and, even believing in it, gave up. Years later, the very same thing became a trend. He kept two things from that time: the pain of having stopped and the proof that he had seen far. Next time, he decided, he wouldn't stop at the first answer. With the natural-based cosmetics brand, he heard once again that it wouldn't work. He kept going. It worked. No one knows for sure how many times he tried, thought about stopping and almost gave up. What is known, as he tells it, is that the seventh attempt was the one that worked. ### The path Giving up and keeping going are not absolute opposites. Bairo gave up several businesses, but never the direction. Each change of road carried something from the one before, until the attempt that held all the others inside it. If you're at that crossroads, ask: am I giving up the dream, or just one way of getting there? The answer usually shows the next step. There's one more honest test: ask yourself whether, knowing what you know today, you would start this project again. If the answer is yes, it's probably worth continuing, adjusting what needs adjusting. If it's no, it may be time to close with dignity and carry the lesson into the next step. Neither answer is failure; both are conscious choices. ### Read also - The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) - How many attempts until it works? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-many-attempts-until-it-works/) - How not to give up on your dreams? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-not-to-give-up-on-your-dreams/) --- ## Drop everything and start over: how to decide? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/drop-everything-and-start-over-how-to-decide/ Idioma: en Descrição: Before dropping everything, test the new life small, build a reserve and talk to those who depend on you. Big change needs a bridge, not a leap. Sometimes you just want to throw it all away: the job, the city, your whole life, and start again somewhere else. That urge can be an important warning that something needs to change. But it deserves to be heard calmly, not obeyed on impulse. ### What to do now - Figure out what you want to escape and where you want to go. "Dropping everything" can be an escape from a problem that will travel with you anywhere. Write down exactly what you want to leave behind and exactly what you want to find. - Test the new life before moving for good. Spend a few days in the city you dream of, do a small job in the new field, talk to people who already live that life. The fantasy is usually different from the routine. - Build a financial bridge. If possible, save a few months of expenses before moving. If not, make the transition gradually, keeping some income. - Talk with those who depend on you. Spouse, children, parents. A big decision made alone usually costs relationships. Made together, it gains allies. - Settle what's pending before you go. Debts, contracts, documents. A problem left behind tends to catch up with you at your new address. - Take what's worth taking. Skills, contacts, reputation, lessons. Starting over isn't erasing; it's transplanting what has good roots. - Choose a date and a plan for coming back. Knowing there's a way out, in case it doesn't work, takes weight off the decision. - Talk to people who have made the same change. Ask what was hardest, what surprised them and what they would do differently. An hour of that conversation can save years of trial and error. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez has dropped everything more than once. The first time, while still a boy, was a dream said out loud: to live in Brazil. When he arrived, in 2002, he says, with an education company, the dream had come true. Shortly afterward, he decided to leave that company to follow his own path, and paid dearly: he found himself without documents in hand, far from home and afraid. Later, he moved with his family to the city where his daughter had been born and tried again, with a cosmetics brand of his own. There, it worked. The most radical new start came after he went broke: six months at home, in front of the computer, learning to build with the tools of his own time. ### The path Not every change in Bairo's life was planned; some were forced on him by life. But in all of them, he carried along what he had learned. He says there are no coincidences, only purpose, dreams and execution. Dropping everything can be the beginning of a better life, as long as the purpose is clear and the execution is done with a bridge, not a leap in the dark. And if you decide to stay, let that be a conscious choice too, not a surrender. Sometimes the change you need isn't of city or career, but of routine, priorities or company. Before dropping everything, try changing one important thing where you are. If the urge to leave stays strong, it will have passed the test, and the decision will be more solid. ### Read also - Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/) - Every no is the ground of a yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) - How to overcome the fear of starting over? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-overcome-the-fear-of-starting-over-7-steps/) --- ## How to find silence in the noise: a practical guide URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-find-silence-in-the-noise-practical-guide/ Idioma: en Descrição: Create small islands of silence in your day: phone away, minutes without stimulus, a walk, prayer or slow breathing. Silence is a practice, not a place. Notifications, bills, news, opinions, car horns, the family group chat. Some days your head feels like a radio station playing every frequency at once. When life is in crisis, the noise gets louder, and that is precisely when you most need to hear clearly. This page is the practical guide; the short story with the same name is in How to find silence in the middle of the noise (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-silence-in-the-middle-of-the-noise/). ### What to do now - Start with five minutes. Silence doesn't need to be a retreat. Five minutes sitting down, no phone, no music, looking out the window or with your eyes closed, already makes a difference. Increase it little by little. - Get the phone out of the bedroom. The first and last hours of the day are the ones that shape your mind the most. Don't start or end the day with a screen. - Turn off notifications that aren't urgent. Almost nothing needs an immediate reply. Choose set times to check messages and email. - Walk without earphones. A short walk, ideally near trees or water, helps turn down the inner volume. - Use your breath. Breathe in counting to four, breathe out counting to six, for a few minutes. It's simple and helps the body leave alarm mode. - If you have faith, use its practices. Prayer, reading, meditation, song: many traditions have ancient paths to inner silence. If you don't have faith, contemplating nature, writing and calm music play a similar role. - Write down what the noise is saying. Sometimes the noise is a list of worries that just needs to get out of your head and onto paper. - Know when the noise is suffering. If your mind won't switch off, if there are anxiety attacks or persistent insomnia, go to a primary health unit (UBS) or psychosocial care center (CAPS). To talk right now, CVV at 188. ### When it happened to Bairo For Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, silence has a number: 1420. Hydrogen, the simplest and most abundant element in the universe, emits a radio signal at an exact frequency, about 1420 MHz. It is with this signal that astronomers map the galaxies. So that this faint signal is not lost in human noise, the band from 1400 to 1427 MHz is protected by international agreement, under the International Telecommunication Union. There, no one transmits. One only listens. Bairo calls this band the frequency of silence. It is not a device or a technique: it is a symbol. He says it was in a time of faith and silence, after reaching rock bottom, that he saw clearly what he wanted to build. And he took that silence as the foundation of everything that came after. ### The path The whole world agreed to leave one band of the spectrum in silence so that the universe can be heard. You can do the same with your day: protect a small band of time in which nothing transmits, so you can hear what matters. Bairo found there the image of who he wanted to be. Maybe you'll find your next decision there. Over time, you'll notice that silence isn't just the absence of noise; it is presence. In the quiet minutes, you start hearing your own breath, your own ideas, your own questions again. That is where many important decisions ripen. Protect it the way one protects a band of the spectrum: with clear rules, every day, without negotiating. ### Read also - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) - What is the frequency of silence? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-the-frequency-of-silence/) - How to calm your mind in the middle of chaos? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-calm-your-mind-in-the-middle-of-chaos/) - How to find silence in the middle of the noise (short story) (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-silence-in-the-middle-of-the-noise/) --- ## How to calm your mind in the middle of chaos? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-calm-your-mind-in-the-middle-of-chaos/ Idioma: en Descrição: Breathe slowly, name what you feel, reduce stimuli and focus on the next step. If the anxiety doesn't pass, go to a UBS, a CAPS or call CVV at 188. When everything falls apart at once, the mind speeds up: thoughts tripping over each other, a racing heart, trouble breathing deeply. It's the body in alarm mode. You can help it out of that state, and this page shows how, honestly, about what works and about when help is needed. ### What to do now - Breathe more slowly than the anxiety wants. Breathe in through your nose counting to four and out through your mouth counting to six, for two or three minutes. A long exhale helps the body slow down. - Come back to the present through your senses. Name to yourself five things you see, four you can touch, three you hear, two you smell, one you taste. It pulls your mind out of the storm of the future. - Name what you feel. "I'm afraid of losing the house." "I'm angry at my partner." Naming the emotion reduces its intensity. - Reduce stimuli. Close the message group, turn off the news, step out of the noisy room for a while. - Choose only the next step. Chaos makes it seem as if everything has to be solved now. It doesn't. Write down the next concrete step and do only that. - Take care of the basics. Water, food, sleep, movement. Too much coffee, alcohol and sleepless nights feed anxiety. - Talk to someone. Saying out loud what is happening, to someone you trust, usually turns down the inner volume. - Recognize when it's time for treatment. Frequent panic attacks, anxiety that keeps you from working or sleeping, thoughts of death: these are signs that you need professional care, and it exists in SUS, through primary health units (UBS) and psychosocial care centers (CAPS). To talk right now, CVV at 188, free and 24 hours a day. In an emergency, SAMU at 192. Don't use alcohol or other substances to "calm down"; they usually make things worse. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez went through phases of complete chaos: a business collapsing, many people depending on him, people he had helped walking away. He says what helped him get through was a combination of faith and silence. In a Christian congregation, he found the strength of testimonies from ordinary people. And in silence he found a symbol he still carries: 1420 MHz, the hydrogen frequency, protected by international agreement so that no one transmits on it. For him, it is the image of a place inside himself where the noise doesn't get in. That is where, he says, he came away with enough clarity to start over. ### The path The chaos outside doesn't always depend on you. The rhythm of your breathing, the next step and asking for help do. Bairo found his own silence in the middle of the worst phase of his life. It didn't erase the problems; it gave him the clarity to face them. Start with the next minute. Then with the next step. After the crisis passes, think about what helped and what made it worse. Maybe the walk worked, or the conversation with a friend, or turning off the phone. Write it down. That record becomes your first-aid kit for next time. No one escapes chaotic days, but whoever knows their own resources gets through those days with less suffering. ### Read also - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) - How to find silence in the middle of the noise? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-find-silence-in-the-noise-practical-guide/) - Debts keeping you up at night: what to do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/debts-keeping-you-up-at-night/) --- ## How to listen to your own intuition? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-listen-to-your-own-intuition/ Idioma: en Descrição: Go quiet to listen, write down what you feel before deciding, check intuition against facts and track your hits. Intuition is experience speaking softly. Everyone has had the feeling of knowing something before being able to explain it: a deal that "doesn't smell right," an idea that won't leave your head, a person you don't trust. Sometimes we're right, sometimes not. Learning to listen to intuition is learning to give it its proper place. ### What to do now - Go quiet so you can hear. Intuition speaks softly. Amid notifications and opinions, it gets lost. Set aside moments without stimuli, especially before important decisions. - Write down what you feel before deciding. Write your first impression of the decision before researching and asking for opinions. Then compare it with what you found out. - Notice your body. A tight chest, relief, fatigue, excitement. The body usually reacts before reason does. It isn't proof, but it is information. - Check intuition against facts. Intuition is a starting point, not a finish line, especially in decisions about money, health and contracts. Research, ask for documents, listen to specialists. - Tell intuition apart from fear and desire. Fear shouts "no" to everything new; desire shouts "yes" to whatever is easy. Intuition tends to be calmer and more persistent. - Review your hits and misses. From time to time, reread your notes. You'll discover in which kinds of matters your intuition tends to be right. - When many people say "no," ask why. Sometimes they're right. Sometimes they've just never seen anything like it. The reason behind the "no" helps you decide whether to follow your intuition. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says that many of his choices followed his own senses and his own intuition, including in the spiritual search he went through after reaching rock bottom. His intuition was right early on a few times. He wanted to bring artificial intelligence and augmented reality into the business when no one was talking about it; years later, it became a trend. He bet on natural-based cosmetics at a time when few people were betting on them; it worked and became a trend too. But there was one time when he heard other people's "no" louder than his own intuition, and he gave up. He kept the lesson: being right ahead of time doesn't pay the bills, but it shows the eye is true. The next time, he didn't stop at the first answer. ### The path Intuition is accumulated experience speaking in a low voice. It needs silence to be heard and facts to be confirmed. Bairo learned both in practice: to follow what he felt and to build carefully what he saw before others. Listen. Check. And, if the voice keeps insisting, test it small. Intuition can also be educated. The more you study a subject, talk with experienced people and watch the results of your own decisions, the sharper it gets. That's why a farmer's intuition about the weather or a salesperson's about a customer is so often right: it is made of years of attention. Feed yours with experience, and it will speak more clearly. ### Read also - The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) - How to find silence in the middle of the noise? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-find-silence-in-the-noise-practical-guide/) - They said my idea won't work. Now what? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/they-said-my-idea-wont-work-how-to-react/) --- ## How to disconnect to think clearly? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-disconnect-to-think-clearly/ Idioma: en Descrição: Block out screen-free time, tell those who need to know, keep a notebook handy and return with a written decision. Disconnecting clears the signal. Some problems aren't solved by answering more messages. They call for the opposite: time away from the noise to think things through, without interruption. In a world that demands an immediate reply, disconnecting looks like a luxury. In a crisis, it's a necessity. ### What to do now - Block out screen-free time. One or two hours a day, or one morning a week, with no phone, no email, no news. Put it in your calendar, like an appointment. - Tell those who need to know. Family, partner, team: "I'll be off messages from such-and-such a time to such-and-such a time; if it's urgent, call." That reduces guilt and anxiety. - Bring a question, not a list. Choose one question to think about: "do I close or keep going?", "what's the next product?", "how do I pay this debt?". Thinking about everything is thinking about nothing. - Keep paper at hand. Ideas show up in silence. Write, draw, scribble. Paper frees your head to keep thinking. - Change your surroundings. A square, a church pew, a library, a walk. New places help you see the problem from another angle. - Come back with a written decision. The point of disconnected time is to come back with something: a decision, a plan, a better question. - Repeat. Clarity is a habit. Once helps; every week transforms. - Watch out for isolation. Disconnecting from screens is not isolating yourself from people. If the urge to vanish from everything is constant and comes with deep sadness, seek help: CVV at 188. - Start small, but start today. If a whole morning seems impossible, turn off your phone for thirty minutes after lunch. The habit grows when the mind notices the relief it brings. After a few weeks, you'll want more time like that, and you'll find where to put it. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says the foundation of what he built was born from a long period of concentration. After reaching rock bottom and finding faith again, he sat down in front of a computer and spent six months without leaving the house. Developing. Coding. Writing. Remembering. He says he didn't know how to code; he learned to build with the tools of his own time. Out of that came the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, focused on agribusiness. It wasn't an escape from the world. It was a way of turning off the noise to hear what needed to be done, like the 1420 MHz band the whole world keeps free of transmissions so it can listen to the universe. ### The path Disconnecting isn't abandoning your responsibilities. It's clearing the signal so you can meet them better. Bairo turned months of silence and focus into the foundation of a new life. You don't need six months. You need one protected hour, a clear question and a notebook. Start tomorrow. If you work somewhere that demands answers all the time, negotiate that space frankly. Explain that you need a few hours of focus to solve an important problem and agree on how you can be reached in an emergency. Most people understand, and many start doing the same. Clarity is contagious: when you think better, everyone around you benefits. ### Read also - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) - How was CEASA Bank born? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/how-ceasa-bank-was-born/) - How to listen to your own intuition? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-listen-to-your-own-intuition/) --- ## How to innovate in the middle of pain and crisis? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-innovate-through-pain-and-crisis/ Idioma: en Descrição: Pain shows you the problem no one has solved. Look at what hurt you, ask who else suffers from it and test a small solution. In a crisis, the natural urge is to shrink, cut everything and wait for it to pass. But many solutions that seem obvious today were born from someone who was in a tight spot and had no way out other than to invent. Pain, when it doesn't paralyze, points to what needs to exist. ### What to do now - Start with the pain, not the idea. Write down precisely what hurts: "the bank won't serve me," "I can't sell without a middleman," "I have no access to credit." A well-described problem is half of innovation. - Ask who else suffers from it. If you feel it, others do too. Talk to those people. They'll tell you what they tried, what failed and what they would pay to solve it. - Use what's at hand. A crisis isn't the time for big investments. What cheap or free tools exist today? Artificial intelligence, spreadsheets, social networks, messaging apps. A lot can be built with little. - Make a minimum version. A prototype, a service done by hand, a test with ten people. The goal is to learn fast while spending little. - Listen carefully to the "no." When people say it can't be done, ask why. Sometimes the answer shows a real flaw. Sometimes it shows no one has tried it your way. - Protect the essentials while you innovate. Don't bet the household's food or other people's money. Sustainable innovation is the kind that doesn't wreck your life if it goes wrong. - Take care of your mind. Innovating in a crisis takes energy. If the suffering is too great, seek support: CVV at 188; primary health units (UBS) and psychosocial care centers (CAPS) through SUS. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez likes to say he found the pain and, instead of running from it, made it his foundation. That happened after his partners pushed him out of a business over an idea for touchscreen technology. That was when he realized, he says, something he had always known deep down: every no is the ground of a yes. The clearest example came years later. In six months in front of the computer, he built the foundation of a financial platform for agribusiness, a niche artificial intelligence to connect those who produce, those who trade and those who buy. He says the banks refused to integrate the solution. Instead of stopping, he focused on the pieces he could build without waiting for a bank to integrate them: artificial intelligence, financial messaging under the international ISO 20022 standard, blockchain and tokenization of real-world assets. Building is not the same as operating with the public: for that, each of these fronts has its own rules and authorizations. The banks that didn't want to integrate the idea ended up teaching him to build his own infrastructure. ### The path Innovating through pain is turning "it can't be done" into "then I'll do it another way." Bairo did it so many times that it became a method: every refusal pointed to a road no one was taking. Your pain today may be the map of the problem that you, better than anyone, know how to solve. Don't confuse innovating with doing something huge. Most innovations start as a small adjustment to a process everyone accepted as it was. A simpler way to deliver, to charge, to serve. If you're going through pain, you're in a privileged position to see that adjustment. Write the idea down today, before routine erases it. ### Read also - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) - Every no is the ground of a yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) - How to turn a crisis into an opportunity? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-turn-a-crisis-into-an-opportunity/) - How to turn pain into purpose? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-turn-pain-into-purpose/) --- ## How to turn a crisis into an opportunity? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-turn-a-crisis-into-an-opportunity/ Idioma: en Descrição: Stabilize first; then notice what changed in the market, what people now need and what you learned. Opportunity is a way of looking, not luck. "Crisis is opportunity" is a phrase that annoys anyone in the middle of one. When there isn't enough money for the month, no one wants to hear about opportunities. And rightly so: before seeing any door, you need to be able to breathe. After that, yes, it's worth looking with different eyes. ### What to do now - Stabilize before seizing opportunities. Secure the basics: a minimum income, essential bills, health. No one can see an opportunity while drowning. - Ask what has changed. Crises change habits. Are people buying differently? Needing something they didn't need before? Distrusting something they used to trust? A change of habit is room for something new. - Look at what has been left without an owner. When companies close or pull back, customers are left unserved, regions are left without services, problems are left unsolved. Someone will take that space. - List what the crisis taught you. Negotiating with creditors, cutting costs, selling in hard times, leading under pressure. These skills are worth a lot, and few people have them. - Test cheaply. Before investing, sell the idea to a few people. Offer the service, run the pilot, listen to the reaction. - Be wary of "opportunities" that come looking for you. In a crisis, promises of easy money, "can't-lose" investments and referral schemes appear. A real opportunity usually takes work and doesn't ask for money up front. - Get support. Sebrae, business associations, free courses and entrepreneur groups help turn a hunch into a plan. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez's path has a turning point that was born of crisis. He says that, after going broke, with many people depending on him, he decided to do something he didn't know how to do: build a currency, a bank and a network. It went wrong. He kept going. What he takes from it is a lesson about timing. The artificial intelligence idea he had abandoned years earlier showed what happens to those who arrive too early: they end up alone. The crisis, for him, taught him to watch the market's clock, and not only his own will. In his telling, the word that explains the turning points is not luck. It is timing. ### The path Opportunity is rarely a stroke of luck. It's an eye trained by pain. In Bairo's story, the eye came from the falls. The crisis you're going through is training your eye too. When the worst is over, use what you learned to see what no one else is seeing. It doesn't need to be a big turnaround. Sometimes the opportunity a crisis offers is small: a new customer left without a supplier, a skill you learned the hard way, a partnership that only came about because everyone was in the same squeeze. Add up those small opportunities over months, and they can change the whole course of a life. ### Read also - The coin and the road (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-coin-and-the-road/) - How to innovate in the middle of pain and crisis? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-innovate-through-pain-and-crisis/) - How to create something new without money? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-create-something-new-without-money/) --- ## Creating something new without money: idea to prototype URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-create-something-new-without-money/ Idioma: en Descrição: To get a new idea off the ground without capital: a handmade version, a test with a few people, incubators and public grants you don't pay back. This page is for those who have a new idea, a product, a service or a solution that doesn't exist yet, and no money to get it off the ground. If what you want is to open an ordinary business with little capital, the path is in How to start a business without money (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-start-a-business-without-money/). Here the challenge is different: proving that something new works before you have the means to pay for it. Lack of money weighs, and there's no point pretending it doesn't. When it's missing, other forms of capital have to work harder. ### What to do now - Count the capital that isn't money. Time, knowledge, skills, contacts, reputation, a space at home, an idle piece of equipment. List it all. That is your initial investment. - Make the first version by hand. Before any app, machine or factory, deliver what the idea promises manually, to a few people: a spreadsheet instead of the system, a custom order instead of the production line. If it works by hand, it's worth building. - Sell before you produce. Offer it, take the order, then make it. Pre-sales, custom orders, deposits: honest ways to finance the start with the customer's own money. - Use free tools. Social media, messaging apps, spreadsheets, simple websites and artificial intelligence tools with free versions. Today you can build a lot without spending. - Look for those who back new ideas without charging interest. Incubators at public universities and federal institutes offer space, mentoring and sometimes lab access. The Centelha Program, from the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI) and Finep together with the state research foundations, provides funding that doesn't need to be repaid to get innovative ideas off the ground; calls open state by state, so check programacentelha.com.br for an open one in yours. To learn what you're missing, Sebrae, Senai, Senac and federal institutes offer free courses. - Join forces. Partner with people who have what you don't: a space, an audience, a skill. Make clear agreements, in writing. - Reinvest what comes in. The first earnings aren't a salary; they're fuel. Set aside the minimum to live on and reinvest the rest. - Stay away from expensive credit to get started. Opening a business on a revolving credit card balance usually sinks it before it's born. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez started over from zero several times. The first was with a neighborhood salon, opened with his partner when their daughter was born. From it came a hair-treatment course: knowledge turned into a product, in a field that had not yet found its place. The most striking time came after he went broke. Broke, with no plan left in the drawer, he had what many people have at that point: time, a computer and the will to learn. He says that, without knowing how to code, he spent six months at home in front of the screen, learning to build with the tools of his own time. Out of that came the foundation of a financial platform for agribusiness. He also tells the other side: years later, he realized that artificial intelligence consumes tokens, and tokens are expensive. The answer was to create CLAIN, an orchestrator of AI agents whose name comes from the English claim. ### The path Without money, you build with time, brains and people. It's slower, but it tends to be more solid: every real that comes in was validated by someone who paid. Bairo built the foundation of his own turnaround with a computer and six months of discipline. What you have at hand today is already enough for the first step. Starting without money forces a discipline that later becomes an advantage. Whoever learns to solve things with little spends better when the money arrives. Many businesses that started with plenty went under through waste; many that started in a squeeze stayed standing because they learned early to look after every real. Today's lack can be tomorrow's school. ### Read also - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) - What is CLAIN? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-clain/) - How to start a business with no experience? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-a-business-with-no-experience-when-you-need-to/) - How to start a business without money (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-start-a-business-without-money/) --- ## They said my idea won't work: how to react to the no URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/they-said-my-idea-wont-work-how-to-react/ Idioma: en Descrição: Just heard your idea won't work? What to do in the next 48 hours: write it down, don't react on impulse, ask for the reason and test it. You showed your idea with a gleam in your eye and got back a "that's not going to work." It hurts, and it plants a doubt that stays in your head for days. Maybe it came from someone you respect: your father, your boss, a friend who knows the business. This page is about that moment, right after the no. If the problem is a different one, and no one around you has believed in the project for months, see No one believes in my idea (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/no-one-believes-in-my-idea/), which teaches you to sort the nos. This "no" right now may be a useful warning, or just the fear of someone who has never seen anything like it. ### What to do now - Wait 48 hours, then ask why. Write down the exact sentence you heard and who said it. During those two days, don't argue back, don't give up and don't announce anything: a no heard in the heat of the moment seems bigger than it is. Then go back to the person and ask for the reason. "It won't work" isn't an argument; it's a conclusion. Ask for the reason. Too expensive? No one would buy it? It already exists? The law doesn't allow it? Each answer is different. - Take technical and legal objections seriously. If the idea runs into regulation, safety or health, stop and study before going on. That "no" protects you. - Separate it from other people's fear. When the objection is "nobody does that," "it's risky," "what if it goes wrong," it may just be discomfort with the new. - Test it with whoever would be the customer. The opinion that matters most is that of the person who would use the solution. Show it, offer it, ask them to pay. If no one wants it, learn; if some do, keep going. - Adjust instead of abandoning. Criticism often knocks down the form, not the essence. Change the price, the audience, the channel, and keep the core. - Watch the timing. Right ideas arrive too early. Notice whether the market is ready. Sometimes the answer is "not yet," not "never." - Don't let one "no" become automatic surrender. Decide in advance how many tests you'll run and which signals will make you stop. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez heard "it won't work" so many times that he turned the sentence into a method. The first lesson was painful: he wanted to bring artificial intelligence and augmented reality into the business, was told it wouldn't work, believed in the idea and gave up anyway. Years later, it became a trend. With his own natural-based cosmetics brand, people again said it wouldn't work. This time, he didn't stop. It worked, and natural cosmetics became a trend too. It was the second time he got there before the wave, and the first time he stayed in the water. He relishes recalling a scene told by Napoleon Hill: Henry Ford's engineers said, every one of them, that a V8 engine with all eight cylinders in a single block was impossible. Ford told them to keep going. In 1932, the Ford V8 hit the streets. ### The path "Every no is the ground of a yes," Bairo says. Not every "no" is wrong; some save you from an expensive mistake. But many only mean that no one has tried it your way. Ask for the reason, test it with the people who matter and adjust. And, if the idea survives the test, keep going, even if the chorus keeps saying it can't be done. Almost every innovation went through a phase in which it looked strange, expensive or unnecessary. That doesn't prove every strange idea is good, but it shows that strangeness alone is no argument against it. The real argument lies in testing it with the people who would use the solution. Take the idea to them and let them answer. ### Read also - The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) - Every no is the ground of a yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) - The V8 engine that was impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/henry-ford-impossible-v8-engine/) - No one believes in my idea: now what? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/no-one-believes-in-my-idea/) --- ## My partner pushed me out of the company: what do I do? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/my-partner-pushed-me-out-of-the-company/ Idioma: en Descrição: Keep your documents, read the articles of association, sign nothing in the heat of the moment and see a corporate lawyer. You may be owed your share. Being pushed out of a business you helped create mixes two pains: the loss and the betrayal. The urge is to react right away, by message, out loud, on social media. Hold on. What you do in the next few days can protect or compromise your rights. ### What to do now - Don't sign anything in the heat of the moment. An amendment to the articles of association, a termination agreement, a release, an exit agreement: read it calmly and show it to a lawyer first. A hasty signature can mean giving up what is yours. - Gather your documents. Articles of association and amendments, partners' agreement (if any), proof of what you invested, emails, messages, minutes, statements. Make copies and keep them somewhere safe. - Read the articles of association. They say how a partner can leave or be expelled, how the departing partner's share is calculated and when it is paid. Brazil's Civil Code also has rules, and they protect you: without a clause in the articles allowing expulsion for just cause, the majority cannot expel a partner by simply amending the articles. Expulsion outside the courts requires that clause, acts of undeniable seriousness and a meeting called for that purpose, with you notified in time to attend and defend yourself (art. 1,085; the meeting is waived only when the company has just two partners). Otherwise, expulsion has to go through the courts (art. 1,030). If any requirement was missing, the expulsion can be challenged. - Know that the valuation of your share exists. As a rule, a partner who leaves or is expelled is entitled to the value of their stake, calculated according to the articles and the law, and paid in cash within 90 days, unless there is an agreement or a different rule in the articles (art. 1,031, §2). If there is no agreement, it can be disputed in court, including through a lawsuit for partial dissolution of the company. - See a business law attorney. If you can't afford one, the Public Defender's Office or a law school's legal aid clinic can advise you. - Don't expose or attack anyone publicly. Accusations on social media can lead to lawsuits against you and weaken your position. Keep the dispute in the proper channels. - Protect your health and your income. Partnership disputes take a long time. Line up a source of income while the case runs, and seek support if anger or sadness takes over. CVV at 188. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he lived exactly this. With a natural-based cosmetics brand of his own up and running, he saw the next step: touchscreen technology applied to the business. It was his idea. The answer didn't come from outside. It came from within. The partners pushed him out of the business, and the idea stayed with them. Some defeats hurt the wallet; that one hurt somewhere else. He has never named those people, and his story isn't about them. It's about what he did next: he found the pain and, instead of running from it, made it his foundation. Not as an open wound. As ground to stand on. ### The path Bairo says that was where he truly understood the sentence that guides his life: every no is the ground of a yes. The partners left him the most expensive lesson of all: choosing whom you build with. Protect your rights calmly and with the right professionals. And keep the lesson. It will be worth more than any share when you build again. While the legal side moves along, start thinking about your next professional step. Partnership disputes can last years, and you don't need to stand still waiting for the ruling. What you know how to do stays with you: the experience, the contacts, the ability to build. Use all of it to move forward, more carefully and with better contracts. ### Read also - Every no is the ground of a yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) - How to get over a partner's betrayal? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-get-over-a-partners-betrayal/) - How to choose a partner after a disappointment? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-choose-a-partner-after-a-disappointment/) --- ## A partner's betrayal: the part the law can't fix URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-get-over-a-partners-betrayal/ Idioma: en Descrição: A partner's betrayal hurts the cash flow and your trust. How to tend the hurt, stop replaying the scene and trust again; the legal steps are elsewhere. Being betrayed by a partner is losing the business and your trust at the same time. You share dreams, nights and money with someone, and discover that person was playing another game. The wound is deep. But it doesn't have to define how you build from here on. This page tends the wound. The legal steps (evidence, formal notice, valuation of your share) are in My partner cheated me: what do I do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/my-partner-cheated-me-what-to-do/). ### What to do now - Separate the two fronts: legal and emotional. The legal one (rights, your share, evidence, deadlines) belongs to a business law attorney or the Public Defender's Office. The emotional one belongs to you and the people who support you. Mixing the two usually harms both. - Feel the anger, but don't act on it. Anger is natural. Late-night messages, social media exposure and public confrontations are not. They can lead to lawsuits and weaken your position. - Stop replaying the scene. Going over a thousand times what you should have noticed only deepens the wound. Write down once everything that happened, with dates. Then put it away. - Acknowledge your part, without guilt. Were there signs you ignored? Agreements that weren't written down? Not to blame yourself, but so you don't repeat it. - Don't generalize. One betrayal doesn't prove every partner betrays. Whoever stops trusting everyone ends up building alone, and alone you get less far. - Talk to people who have been through it. Experienced entrepreneurs almost always have a similar story and a way they moved on. - Take care of your emotional health. If the hurt turns into obsession, insomnia or deep sadness, seek support: a psychologist, a primary health unit (UBS), a psychosocial care center (CAPS), or CVV at 188. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez has known twice, in different ways, the pain of being shut out by the people who were on his side. He has never named anyone or used adjectives about those people. The first time, his partners pushed him out of a cosmetics brand when he proposed bringing touchscreen technology into the business, and the idea stayed with them. The second hurt more. After going broke, with many people depending on him, he decided to build a currency, a bank and a network. It went wrong, and not for lack of ideas. It went wrong because of people: the very ones he had helped left him hanging. He sums up the difference this way: being abandoned by strangers teaches caution; being abandoned by people you helped teaches that your decision can't depend on anyone's gratitude. It didn't make him give up. And, years later, he went back to building as a team, with three old acquaintances. ### The path Bairo's story attacks no one, and that is part of the lesson: the story is yours, not that of whoever left it. He turned the pain into a criterion for choosing whom to build with, not into an excuse to build alone. For someone who has been left hanging, saying "together" again is a kind of victory. And one day you may notice you don't think about that person so much anymore. That's the sign the wound is closing. It doesn't mean forgetting or justifying what happened; it means it no longer occupies the center of your life. That day comes sooner for those busy building than for those busy brooding. ### Read also - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) - I helped and they left me hanging: how to deal with it? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/i-helped-and-they-left-me-hanging/) - The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) - My partner cheated me: what do I do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/my-partner-cheated-me-what-to-do/) --- ## How to choose a partner after a disappointment? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-choose-a-partner-after-a-disappointment/ Idioma: en Descrição: Don't shut the door on partnerships: use the wound as a criterion. Shared values, a checked record, a small test and everything in writing, exit included. After being let down by a partner, the temptation is to swear you'll never share a business with anyone again. That's understandable. But building alone has its limits, and disappointment, used well, is the best filter you'll ever have for choosing whom to go on with. ### What to do now - Look for shared values and different skills. You need to agree on ethics, money, work pace and what to do in a crisis. And you need to complement each other in what you know how to do. Two partners alike in everything double the blind spots. - Know the person's history. How did they behave in previous partnerships? How do they treat employees, suppliers, former partners? Talk to people who have worked with them. - Test it small before you commit. A short project together, a one-off partnership, a few months working side by side. Routine shows what conversation hides. - Write everything down before you start. Well-drafted articles of association and, if possible, a partners' agreement that defines: who does what, how much each one invests, how withdrawals work, who decides what, how a deadlock is resolved and, above all, how someone leaves. - Define the exit while everyone is still friends. It's much easier to agree on the divorce on the wedding day. Exit rules, how a departing partner's share is calculated and non-compete clauses prevent future wars. - Separate friendship from partnership. Friends can be great partners, as long as they treat the partnership with the same seriousness they would with a stranger. - Consult a lawyer and an accountant. The cost of a good contract is small next to the cost of a lawsuit. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez's path holds two expensive lessons about partners. In the first, his partners pushed him out of a cosmetics brand he helped build, when he wanted to bring touchscreen technology into the business. In the second, he says, he joined as an investing partner in a company that was not what it seemed, and it didn't hold. He says that, looking back, each attempt left something behind. The partners left the most expensive lesson: choosing whom you build with. Years later, after six months building alone, he went back to building as a team. He found help and connection in three old acquaintances, and the four joined forces to carry on, finish and elevate together what he had started. People he had known for a long time. ### The path For Bairo, the word "together" is no small detail. It is a reconciliation with the idea of a team. Choose partners the way you'd choose whom to go through the worst storm of your life with, because that is exactly what will happen. Values, history, test, contract. In that order. Trusting again isn't closing your eyes; it's opening them wider. Disappointment taught you where to look: at the track record, at how the person handles money, at what they do when things get tight. Use that eye calmly, without paranoid distrust. Healthy partnerships exist, and many of the best are born after someone has learned, the hard way, what not to accept. ### Read also - The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) - My partner pushed me out of the company: what do I do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/my-partner-pushed-me-out-of-the-company/) - How to start a business with no experience? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-a-business-with-no-experience-when-you-need-to/) --- ## I helped and they left me hanging: how to deal with it? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/i-helped-and-they-left-me-hanging/ Idioma: en Descrição: Acknowledge the hurt, don't turn help into debt, adjust your limits and keep being who you are. Your decisions can't depend on anyone's gratitude. Few pains compare to being abandoned by the very people you helped. You opened the door, lent, recommended, supported, and when you needed it, no one showed up. The hurt is legitimate. The question is what to do with it so that it doesn't harden you. ### What to do now - Acknowledge the hurt. Pretending it didn't hurt only postpones the pain. Say to yourself, or to someone you trust: "that hurt me." - Separate help from contracts. If money was lent, or there was a partnership or agreement, handle that formally and, if needed, with a lawyer. But help given from the heart creates no debt of gratitude. Expecting a return on it usually breeds bitterness. - Adjust your limits, not your character. Staying generous doesn't mean being naive. From now on, put agreements in writing, lend what you can afford to lose and watch how people treat others before you trust them. - Don't let a few define everyone. Some people failed you; others were probably by your side. Look at them too. - Avoid revenge and public exposure. Public messages and accusations tend to backfire on whoever makes them. Move on with your story, not with theirs. - Use the pain as a criterion. Choose better whom to build with, whom to trust with decisions and whom to bet on. - Take care of yourself. If the hurt turns into resentment that eats up your days, or into deep sadness, seek support: a psychologist, a primary health unit (UBS), a psychosocial care center (CAPS), or CVV at 188. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez tells this episode as the shortest and hardest sentence of his own story. After going broke, with many people depending on him, he decided to build a currency, a bank and a network. It went wrong. And it didn't go wrong for lack of ideas. It went wrong because of people: the very ones he had helped left him hanging. He drew from it a lesson he still repeats: being abandoned by strangers teaches caution; being abandoned by people you helped teaches that your decision can't depend on anyone's gratitude. It didn't make him give up. He kept going. And he didn't stop helping: he says the habit he cultivates most is looking for the best version of each person. ### The path Other people's ingratitude doesn't change who you are, unless you let it. Bairo could have shut his doors forever. He chose something else: to decide for himself, without waiting for recognition, and to keep seeing people before titles and bank balances. Help because that's who you are. And decide because it's your path, not because someone will thank you. If the person who left you hanging comes back one day asking for help, you're not obliged to help, nor forbidden from helping. Decide calmly, from who you are today, with the limits you've learned. Helping again can be an act of greatness; refusing can be an act of self-care. Both answers are legitimate when they come from peace, not from hurt. ### Read also - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) - One name, four presences (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/one-name-four-presences/) - How to get over a partner's betrayal? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-get-over-a-partners-betrayal/) --- ## How to support your family after going broke? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-support-your-family-after-going-broke/ Idioma: en Descrição: Protect housing and food, find immediate income, use the social rights available and bring the family into the plan. Pride can wait; children can't. Going broke alone is already heavy. Going broke with a family looking at you is something else: every bill has a face, every cut in spending has a name. The pressure to fix everything fast is enormous. Breathe: what matters now is securing the essentials and building a realistic path. ### What to do now - Protect the essentials. Housing, food, water, electricity, gas, medicine and school. These come before any debt. The law recognizes this with the idea of the "existential minimum" (Law 14,181/2021). - Find immediate income, even if temporary. Any honest work that pays the month's bills: odd jobs, self-employed services, temporary work. It's not a step down; it's a bridge. Pride can wait; the children can't. - Use your social rights. Update your Cadastro Único at the CRAS. It gives access to programs such as Bolsa Família and the Social Electricity Tariff. If you lost your job, check the unemployment insurance and FGTS you're entitled to. - Talk with your family, in the right measure. Your spouse and older children need to know that money is tight and what the plan is. Small children need security, not details. Speaking truthfully prevents distrust and turns the family into a team. - Cut with judgment. First what won't be missed, then what will be missed little. If possible, keep something that brings cheap joy: a walk in the park, a meal together. - Negotiate debts without sacrificing the basics. Procon, the Public Defender's Office, Serasa Limpa Nome and consumidor.gov.br help you negotiate. Don't accept an installment that takes food off the table. - Take care of the caregiver. Whoever supports the household needs support too. If the pressure turns into despair, call CVV at 188. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he did the calculation every immigrant father makes in silence. His daughter was born in a country that was not yet entirely his, in a language that was not yet entirely his. She would belong here. He had to make the journey worth it. That calculation changed his urgency. Before, a mistake cost only him; now, it cost someone else too. He didn't shrink the size of his ideas because of it. He shrank the time he allowed himself to stay down after each fall. The new beginning of that phase was a salon opened with his partner, when their daughter was born. It didn't work out as well as they wanted, but it worked out very well in another way: from it came a course and, later, a brand of his own. ### The path Supporting your family after going broke doesn't require being a hero. It requires being steady: making sure of the food, the school and the hug, every day, while you rebuild the rest. Bairo discovered that family doesn't shrink courage; it shrinks the time we allow ourselves to stay down. Get up for them. And let them help you get up too. When things start to improve, resist the temptation to go straight back to the old standard of living. Keep for a while the habits that saved the family in the crisis: the written budget, the frank conversations, the minimum reserve. They are your protection for the next storm. And celebrate small wins together. The children will remember the tight times less, and how the family got through them more. ### Read also - The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) - How to tell your family you've gone broke? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-tell-your-family-you-went-broke/) - How to get out of debt on a low income? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-get-out-of-debt-on-a-low-income/) --- ## How to tell your family you've gone broke? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-tell-your-family-you-went-broke/ Idioma: en Descrição: Pick a calm moment, tell the facts without dressing them up, present the plan and ask for concrete help. The secret weighs more than the truth. Many people hide going broke from their families for weeks or months: they make up excuses, leave the house as if going to work, take collection calls in secret. The secret wears you out, makes you sick and, when it comes out, hurts more than the truth would have. Telling is hard, but it's the beginning of the way out. ### What to do now - Choose the moment and the place. A calm hour, unhurried, with no small children nearby and no phone ringing. Don't tell them in the middle of a fight or by text message. - Tell the facts, without dressing them up or dramatizing. What happened, how much is owed, what changes day to day. Clear numbers frighten less than doubt does. - Own your part without tearing yourself apart. "I made mistakes in this and that" is honest. "I'm a failure" helps no one and shifts onto others the weight of comforting you. - Present a plan, even a preliminary one. Which expenses will be cut, which debts will be negotiated, what income you're looking for. A family that sees a plan feels there is a way. - Ask for concrete help. Say what each person can do: help cut spending, support your job search, be patient with your moods. People feel better when they know how to help. - Leave room for the reaction. There may be tears, anger, silence. Don't defend yourself the whole time. Listen. The first reaction isn't the final word. - With children, speak in a way that fits their age. They need to know the family will be okay and that it isn't their fault. Financial details stay among the adults. - If the conversation seems impossible, ask for help. A trusted friend, a leader in your community or a psychologist can help mediate. And if the anguish tightens, CVV answers at 188. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez doesn't hide his falls. He tells, in chapters he chose to publish under his own name, that he went broke more than once, one time with many people depending on him. He says that, among longtime friends, he is Leandro: the friend many saw suffer. The one from the hard years after arriving, the one whose partners pushed him out of his own idea, the broke man who still had a flame. Those who call him Leandro, as a rule, were close by when there was nothing to celebrate. He started over more than once with his family at his side: the neighborhood salon opened with his partner when their daughter was born, the move to the city where she had been born, the brand of his own that came later. ### The path The truth, told with care, turns the family from an audience into a team. Bairo chose to tell his own falls in public because, for him, whoever shows only success hides what teaches the most. At home, the rule is the same, with even more tenderness: tell it, present the plan and let those who love you help carry it. After the conversation, keep the family informed from time to time, without turning the house into a place of constant tension. Tell them when an agreement is closed, when a job comes up, when things get a little better. Good news, even small, renews everyone's hope and shows the plan is moving. The truth that brought the shock can also bring relief. ### Read also - One name, four presences (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/one-name-four-presences/) - How to deal with the shame of going broke? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-deal-with-the-shame-of-going-broke/) - How to support your family after going broke? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-support-your-family-after-going-broke/) --- ## How to start life over with a young child? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-over-with-a-young-child/ Idioma: en Descrição: Secure routine and care for the child, use your support network and social rights, and take smaller steps. A child is not a brake; it's a reason. Starting over with a baby in your arms or a young child at home changes every calculation. Time shrinks, fatigue grows and the fear of making mistakes takes on another size. But many people discover, precisely in this phase, a strength they didn't know they had. ### What to do now - Secure the child's routine first. Sleep, food, vaccines, checkups. Young children feel safe with predictability, even when the adults feel insecure. Primary health units (UBS) follow their development through SUS. - Build a care network. Grandparents, neighbors, friends, daycare. Apply for a place in public daycare through your municipality's education department: it is the child's right and it frees up hours for work or study. - Access social rights. The Cadastro Único at the CRAS opens doors to programs such as Bolsa Família. If you have a formal job, find out about leave and the family allowance (salário-família). - Choose work that fits this phase. Shifts, project work, a job close to home, a business that starts small. Something sustainable is better than a bet that requires being away all the time. - Take smaller, safer steps. With a young child, mistakes cost more. Test ideas on a small scale and don't risk the household's essentials. - Share the load. If there's another caregiver, agree on roles clearly. If you're on your own, ask for help without shame and look for support groups for mothers and fathers. - Take care of your mental health. Extreme exhaustion, persistent sadness or the feeling of not coping are common and can be treated. Go to a primary health unit (UBS) or psychosocial care center (CAPS). To talk right now, CVV at 188. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez started over from zero exactly when his daughter was born. He was coming out of hard years in Brazil, without documents in hand and without a network. With his partner, he opened a neighborhood salon. There is a calculation, his story says, that every immigrant father makes in silence. His daughter is born in a country that is not yet entirely his. She will belong here. He has to make the journey worth it. The salon didn't work out as well as they wanted, but from it came a hair-treatment course. Later, the family moved to the city where their daughter had been born, and there he tried again, with a cosmetics brand of his own, which worked. ### The path Having a young child didn't shrink Bairo's ideas. It changed his urgency: before, a mistake cost only him; afterward, it cost someone else too. That's why he began allowing himself less time on the ground after each fall. A child is not a brake. It is the reason to get up faster, more carefully and with your eyes on the long term. Children learn more from what they see than from what they hear. A child who sees a father or mother starting over with dignity learns, without anyone having to explain, that falling is part of life and so is getting up. That may be the most valuable legacy a hard phase can leave: a lesson in resilience lived inside the home. ### Read also - The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) - How to support your family after going broke? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-support-your-family-after-going-broke/) - How to start over from zero? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-over-from-zero/) --- ## How not to give up on your dreams? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-not-to-give-up-on-your-dreams/ Idioma: en Descrição: Give the dream a concrete shape, break it into weekly steps, shield it from the wrong opinions, and change the road without dropping the direction. A dream seems fragile when life gets tight. Bills, fatigue, opinions, falls: everything conspires to make you put it away in a drawer "for later." But a dream kept away too long becomes a memory. You can keep it alive without losing your footing. ### What to do now - Give the dream a shape. "Being happy" or "being successful" can't be executed. Write down exactly what you want to build, for whom and why. A dream with an outline withstands bad days better. - Break it into weekly steps. What can you do this week that brings you closer to the dream? A class, a conversation, a test, some savings. Small steps keep the dream moving. - Say it out loud to the right people. Telling your dream to people who support you creates commitment. Telling it to people who only discourage you drains energy. Choose your audience. - Separate the dream from the road. The road can change ten times; the dream can stay the same. Changing routes isn't giving up. - Protect the dream from haste. Big things usually take years. Compare your progress with your own starting point, not with other people's shop windows. - Keep life going while you dream. Having a job that pays the bills doesn't betray the dream; it funds the time until it happens. - Rest when you're tired; don't give up. There's a difference between stopping to breathe and abandoning. If the fatigue comes with deep sadness and hopelessness, seek support: CVV at 188. - Keep evidence of the road. Photos, notes, messages from people you helped. On days when the dream seems far away, they remind you how far you've already come. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez's first dream was said out loud when he was still a boy, in Colombia: one day he would live in Brazil. It wasn't a plan; it was a certainty announced before any road existed. Capoeira was the bridge. In 2002, he says, the dream came true. What came next tested that dream in every way: years without documents in hand, businesses that closed, partners who pushed him out, an investment that didn't hold, people he helped who left him hanging. He says he tried, thought about stopping and almost gave up more times than he likes to remember. But he didn't give up the direction. He changed business, city, method. And, on the seventh attempt, he says, it worked. ### The path Bairo says there are no coincidences and no accidents: there are purpose, dreams and execution. The dream gives the direction; execution, every day, is what keeps it from becoming just a memory. And, if he could speak to Walt Disney, he says he would tell him just one thing: "Your dreams inspired me." May your dream, carried out with patience, inspire someone one day too. Don't be ashamed to adjust the dream over time. Dreams mature, like people do. What you wanted at 20 may take another shape at 40, more realistic and often more beautiful. That isn't giving up; it's growing alongside it. What matters is that the flame stays lit and that, every day, you do something small to keep it alive. ### Read also - Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/) - Fifty-five years later (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/) - Give up or keep going: how do you know? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/give-up-or-keep-going-how-to-know/) --- ## How many attempts until it works? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-many-attempts-until-it-works/ Idioma: en Descrição: There's no magic number. Count what each attempt taught you, not how many failed. Stop when you repeat the same mistake; keep going while you're learning. Everyone who has fallen a few times asks this question: how many more attempts, three, five, ten? It would be nice to have a number, but there isn't one. There is, however, a better way of counting, and it changes the answer. ### What to do now - Count lessons, not falls. Instead of "I failed five times," write down what each attempt taught you. If the list is growing, you're moving forward, even without results yet. - Watch whether the mistake repeats. Trying again with what you learned is persistence. Repeating the same mistake under another name is stubbornness. If the same problem knocked you down three times, it needs solving before the fourth. - Set limits before you start. How much time and money are you willing to put into this attempt? What minimum result do you need to see, and by when? A limit agreed in advance prevents decisions made in desperation. - Make each attempt shorter. Smaller, faster attempts cost less and teach more. Test ideas before betting everything on them. - Protect the essentials between attempts. Housing, food, health and other people's money stay out of the bet. That way, a fall doesn't become a disaster. - Ask for an outside view. A mentor, Sebrae, someone in the industry. Sometimes the answer to "do I keep going or stop?" is "keep going, but change this." - Respect fatigue. A pause isn't giving up. If discouragement has turned into hopelessness, seek support: CVV at 188; primary health units (UBS) and psychosocial care centers (CAPS) through SUS. - Write down what changed since the last attempt. If nothing changed in the method, the partners or the audience, the next attempt is likely to repeat the result. Change at least one important thing. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez can't say how many times he tried. He says he tried, thought about stopping and almost gave up more times than he can count. The number he chose to tell the story is seven: the seventh attempt was the one that worked. Looking back, he sees what each one left. The hair-treatment course left method. The artificial intelligence idea that came too early left an eye for the future. The cosmetics brand left proof that he could create from nothing. The partners who pushed him out left the lesson about whom to build with. Going broke with many people depending on him left the courage to do what he didn't know how to do. The coin that formed a community, he says, left the road as his address. ### The path In Bairo's life, seven isn't a magic number: it's the name he gave to the attempt that brought together what the earlier ones taught. It didn't work by luck; it was the first that carried all the others inside it. Perhaps the right question isn't "how many times should I try," but "what will this attempt teach me for the next one." Celebrate the attempts, not only the successes. Every time you try again, you're exercising one of the rarest qualities there is: the ability to get up. Record it. A few years from now, looking back, you may find that the attempts that didn't work were precisely the ones that prepared the one that did. ### Read also - The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) - What is the seventh attempt? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-the-seventh-attempt/) - I've tried many times and nothing worked. Now what? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/i-tried-many-times-and-nothing-worked/) --- ## Starting a business with no experience when you must URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-a-business-with-no-experience-when-you-need-to/ Idioma: en Descrição: Lost your job and must start a business now, with no experience? Start with what you know, sell before investing, mind your benefits and avoid costly debt. Many people start a business not by choice but out of necessity: the job ended, age weighed against them, the income doesn't cover the bills. And then comes the fear of knowing nothing about business. This page is for those who have no time to prepare first: the bills arrive next month. If you still have an income and can study the field before taking a risk, the path is another one: How to start a business from scratch with no experience (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-start-a-business-from-scratch-with-no-experience/). For those in a hurry, the truth is that every entrepreneur started with no experience. What sets apart those who last is learning fast and making cheap mistakes. ### What to do now - Solve a real, nearby problem. Start with something you understand and that the people around you need: a service, a simple product, a skill you already have. A business is a solution to someone's problem. - Sell before investing. Offer it to people you know, take orders, do the first job. Only invest in structure once you see that someone pays. - Formalize early. The MEI (individual microentrepreneur) is simple, cheap and gives you a CNPJ, the ability to issue invoices and social security benefits, within the category's limits. Find out more on the federal government's Entrepreneur Portal. One caution for those who have just lost their job: an active MEI registration can lead to unemployment insurance being suspended, since it suggests you have your own income. You can appeal by proving there's no revenue, but check the rules on gov.br before registering. - Separate household money from business money. Even if it's small, have an account, or at least a notebook, just for the business. Mixing the two is the cause of many failures. - Learn the basics of management. Price, cost, cash flow, customer service. Sebrae offers free courses and support at 0800 570 0800. - Surround yourself with people who know. Mentors, other entrepreneurs, an accountant you trust. Ask a lot. - Be careful with debt to get started. An expensive loan before you have customers usually sinks the business. Start with what you have. - Accept making small mistakes. Small mistakes teach. Big mistakes, when all the money is on the line, knock you down. Test, adjust, grow little by little. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez started businesses many times without knowing exactly how. After hard years, he started over with a neighborhood salon, opened with his partner. From it he created a hair-treatment course, in a field that had not yet found its place. Then a cosmetics brand of his own. But the moment he most embraced "I don't know," he says, came after going broke. With many people depending on him, he made the most unlikely decision a broke man can make: instead of going back to familiar ground, he headed for the unknown. He decided to do something he didn't know how to do: build a currency, a bank and a navigation network. To someone who had never done any of it, the list sounds like madness. To him, it was the same logic as always: if no one is doing it, someone has to. It went wrong the first time. He kept going. ### The path No one is born knowing how to start a business. Bairo learned by doing, getting it wrong and coming back. He says every no is the ground of a yes: so is every "I don't know." It's from there that you ask, study and test. Start small, formal and honest. The experience you lack today is exactly what you'll have a year from now, if you start. Experience isn't only what you've learned in business. Anyone who has raised children, run a home on little money, worked in customer service or solved problems in their community is far better prepared to start a business than they think. Make a list of those experiences and see how they apply to the business. You probably know more than you think you do. ### Read also - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) - How to create something new without money? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-create-something-new-without-money/) - How to open a business after going broke? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-open-a-business-after-going-broke/) - How to start a business from scratch with no experience (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-start-a-business-from-scratch-with-no-experience/) --- ## How to learn technology from scratch after 30? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-learn-technology-from-scratch-after-30/ Idioma: en Descrição: Pick a real problem to solve, study a little every day, use free courses and AI tools as a teacher. Adults learn best by doing. Many people think technology is for those who started as children. Coding, using artificial intelligence, building a system: it seems like another language. But adults have something most young people don't: real problems to solve and the discipline of someone who has already been through a lot. ### What to do now - Start with a problem of your own. Don't study "technology" in general. Pick something concrete: organizing your sales, automating a spreadsheet, building a website for your service. A real problem gives your studies direction. - Study a little every day. Thirty minutes a day is worth more than eight hours on a Saturday and nothing the rest of the week. Consistency beats talent. - Use free, reliable courses. Federal institutes, Senai, Senac, Sebrae, public universities with open courses and reputable platforms offer content at no cost. - Use artificial intelligence as a teacher. AI tools explain concepts, correct mistakes and answer questions at any hour. Ask them to explain step by step and check the answers, because they make mistakes too. - Build something small as soon as possible. The first web page, the first automation, the first simple app. Doing teaches more than watching. - Join a community. Study groups, forums and beginner meetups help you not give up during the hard parts. - Be patient with frustration. Everyone gets stuck. Getting stuck is part of learning. Stop, breathe, come back the next day. - Show what you made. Publish the small project, show it to a friend, use it in your own work. Showing creates commitment and brings feedback from those who use it, and that feedback teaches more than any class. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says that, after reaching rock bottom, he came away with a clear image of what he wanted to build and no map at all. He didn't know how to code, or anything like it. He asked, in his words, for wisdom, understanding and courage. And he sat down in front of a computer for six months, without leaving the house. Developing. Coding. Writing. A man who, by his own account, didn't know how to code learned to build with the tools of his own time. Out of that came the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, focused on agribusiness. And out of that came an idea he repeats: artificial intelligence is an extension of the human, not the problem. He speaks of the last generation of humans integrated with the first generation of AI. ### The path Bairo says he began building technology as an adult, without knowing how to code, out of necessity and conviction. You don't need to start early; you need to start. Today's tools make learning more accessible than ever. Pick a problem, study a little every day and build the first small thing. The rest comes with time. Don't compare yourself to people who have been learning technology since childhood. You're not competing with them; you're solving your own problems with the tools now within your reach. Many people who started as adults became excellent precisely because they knew exactly what they wanted to learn for. That clear purpose is an advantage no course can teach. ### Read also - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) - Why does Bairo say AI is an extension of the human? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/ai-as-an-extension-of-the-human/) - How to start life over after 40? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-life-over-after-40/) --- ## How to open a business after going broke? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-open-a-business-after-going-broke/ Idioma: en Descrição: Sort out old debts, understand what caused the fall, start smaller and with cash, formalize properly and choose partners well. The lesson is capital. After going broke, opening another business looks like madness to those watching from outside and like too much courage to those inside. The fear of repeating the story is great. But whoever has gone broke knows things no course teaches. The secret is to use that knowledge, not run from it. ### What to do now - Put the past in order before the future. List the debts of the previous company and your personal ones. Negotiate whatever you can through official channels (creditors, Serasa Limpa Nome, the Regularize portal of the Office of the Attorney General of the National Treasury, Procon). Open issues can block credit, accounts and contracts for the new business. - Do an honest autopsy of the fall. What really caused it? Lack of cash, wrong pricing, the wrong partner, a market that changed, growing too fast? Write it down. It's your manual of what not to repeat. - Start smaller than you'd like. A lean structure, low fixed costs, few long-term commitments. Grow with the money the business itself generates. - Sell before investing. Test demand with real customers before renting, hiring or stocking up. - Formalize the right way. Talk to an accountant about the best format (MEI, sole proprietorship, limited liability company) and about how old issues may affect the new company registration. If the fall was a bankruptcy declared by a court, you are barred from running a business until the ruling that extinguishes your obligations (Law 11,101/2005, art. 102); see Can I open another company with a bad credit record? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/can-i-open-another-company-with-bad-credit/). - Choose partners more carefully than last time. Values, track record and everything in writing, including how someone leaves. - Keep a reserve, even a small one. Running out of cash is one of the most common causes of going broke. Protect a cushion for the bad months. - Get free guidance. Sebrae (0800 570 0800) and entrepreneur groups. And, if fear turns into anguish that won't pass, CVV at 188. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he opened a business after going broke more than once. After his partners pushed him out of the cosmetics brand, he went to work in events and digital printing, reinvented himself and built up capital. After the next investment didn't hold, with many people depending on him, he decided to build again, this time something he didn't know how to do. The first attempt on that new road went wrong. He stayed on the same ground. Today, he is director of two companies registered in the United Kingdom in 2026 and administrator of the Brazilian company that operates the CEASA Bank brand. ### The path Going broke teaches what no success teaches: where the holes are. Bairo turned each fall into a criterion for the next thing he built. The attempt that worked, he says, was the one that carried all the others inside it. Your next business can be like that: smaller at first, wiser from day one. Be transparent, too, with the people who will work with you in the new business. Telling them you've gone broke before, and what you learned from it, usually builds more trust than hiding it. Serious partners, customers and investors know that falls are part of business life. What they want to know is whether you learned from them. Show that you did, with facts and with care in every decision. ### Read also - The coin and the road (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-coin-and-the-road/) - How to close a company with debts? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-close-a-company-with-debts/) - How to choose a partner after a disappointment? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-choose-a-partner-after-a-disappointment/) --- ## How to make up for lost time? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-make-up-for-lost-time/ Idioma: en Descrição: The time that passed won't come back, but what it taught you stays. Stop counting lost years and protect the hours ahead as your most precious asset. Years in the wrong job, in a business that didn't work, in a relationship that ended, in a dark period of life. Looking back and seeing "lost" time hurts, because time is the one thing you can't buy back. But there is a way of looking at it that gives the power back to you. ### What to do now - Accept that the past won't come back, and that it wasn't entirely lost. Make a list of what those years taught you: skills, people, what you no longer want. Almost no time is completely lost; it usually turns into experience. - Stop counting what has passed. "I lost ten years" is a sentence that also robs the present. Swap it for: "what will I do with the next ten?" - Find out where your hours go today. For one week, write down how you spend your time. Many people are surprised by how many hours go to screens, worry and tasks that don't matter. - Choose one priority. Whoever tries to recover everything at once recovers nothing. Choose the area that matters most right now (health, family, work, study) and give it the best hours of your day. - Protect your time the way you protect your money. Say no to what doesn't matter, make appointments with yourself and keep them. - Use what experience has given you. Those who have lived longer make fewer mistakes in certain things. That's the shortcut the "lost" years offer. - Beware of regret that turns into permanent sadness. If the feeling of having wasted your life weighs on you every day, talk to someone; go to a primary health unit (UBS) or psychosocial care center (CAPS). CVV answers at 188. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez went through years he could call lost: the time in the shadows, without documents in hand, in his first years in Brazil; the artificial intelligence idea he gave up on too early; the businesses he was pushed out of; the investment that didn't hold. He doesn't call them that. He says each attempt left something: method, an eye for the future, proof that he could create from nothing, the lesson about whom to build with, the courage to do what he didn't know how to do. The attempt that worked, he says, was the one that carried all the others inside it. And time became the center of what he builds. Bairo likes to recall a story told by Andy Hertzfeld, a Macintosh engineer: in 1983, Steve Jobs asked for the computer to boot faster and did the math. Ten seconds less, times millions of people turning on a Mac every day, added up to entire lifetimes. For Bairo, lifetime is the measure of everything. ### The path You can't recover the hours that have passed. You can make the next ones worth more, precisely because of the ones that passed. Bairo turned hard years into raw material. You can do the same: accept what was, make use of what remains and protect, as the most precious asset there is, the time still ahead of you. ### Read also - What does Steve Jobs have to do with lifetime? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/steve-jobs-macintosh-boot-time/) - A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/) - Is it too late to start over? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/is-it-too-late-to-start-over/) --- ## Is it too late to start over? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/is-it-too-late-to-start-over/ Idioma: en Descrição: Almost never. The clock that scares you belongs to others. Look at the time you still have, not what's gone, and start with something that fits this week. "I'm past the age." "It's too late now." "If only it were ten years ago..." These sentences sound realistic, but they are often just fear speaking in the voice of common sense. The question "is it too late?" deserves an honest answer, and the honest answer, most of the time, is no. ### What to do now - Ask: too late for what, exactly? Some things have real limits (certain physical careers, certain civil service exams with a maximum age). Most don't. Separate the real limit from the imagined one. - Look at the time you have ahead. Instead of counting the years that have passed, count the ones you still have to work, learn and live. It's usually far more than it seems. - Stop using other people's clocks. Every life has its own rhythm. Comparing your timeline with that of colleagues, siblings or strangers online only leads to paralysis. - Start with something that fits into this week. An application, a class, a conversation, a first customer. Big new starts are made of small beginnings. - Use the advantage of age. Experience, patience, a network of contacts and the clarity of someone who already knows what they don't want. These shorten the road. - Take care of your health so you have stamina. Exercise, sleep, medical follow-up through SUS or your health plan. Starting over takes energy, and energy can be cultivated. - If "too late" comes with deep sadness, seek help. The feeling that life is over can be a sign of depression, which can be treated. A primary health unit (UBS), a psychosocial care center (CAPS) or CVV at 188. ### When it happened to Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez was born in 1982. Many would have said it was already too late for him to start over so many times: after the hard years of arriving, after the businesses that closed, after going broke with many people depending on him. No one knows for sure how many times he tried and almost gave up. The attempt he calls the seventh came many years after the first. The two companies he directs in the United Kingdom, Xperienc Global Labs Ltd and CEASA Financial Database Technology Infrastructure and Digital Assets Ltd, were registered at Companies House in 2026, when he was already past 40. He often recalls the sentence told about the opening of Walt Disney World, on October 1, 1971, almost five years after Walt's death. Someone lamented that he had not lived to see the park, and heard in reply, attributed to Mike Vance: "He did see it. That's why it's here." ### The path For Bairo, time isn't a deadline running out; it's the raw material of what gets built. Whoever has seen in advance what they want to build isn't late; they're halfway there. Today is the earliest day you have from here on. Start with it. If doubt remains, try a simple experiment: choose a small beginning and practice it for ninety days. A course, a project, a weekend business. At the end of that period, assess it honestly. Most of the time, whoever thought it was too late discovers that what was missing wasn't time, it was the first step. And that step fits into your next week. ### Read also - Fifty-five years later (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/) - Who said "he did see it" about Walt Disney? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/who-said-he-did-see-it-about-walt-disney/) - How to start life over after 40? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-life-over-after-40/) --- ## Entrepreneurs: lessons from someone who failed and started over URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/ Idioma: en Descrição: For entrepreneurs: deciding, risking, failing, getting up and investing, with lessons from the journey of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez. ### Fear of taking risks - I'm afraid to start a business: what do I do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/im-afraid-to-start-a-business/): Fear is normal: more than half of Brazilians feel it. Don't try to eliminate it. Shrink the size of the risk: test small, with a deadline and a loss limit. - Is it worth starting a business in Brazil? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/is-it-worth-starting-a-business-in-brazil/): It can be, if you go in knowing the numbers: 29% of MEIs close within 5 years, most often from lack of planning and of cash control. - Leaving a salaried job to start a business, safely (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-leave-a-salaried-job-and-start-a-business/): Don't quit on impulse. Test the business on the side, save 6 to 12 months of living costs and leave only once the new income is already showing up. ### AI for business - How to use AI in my small business? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-use-ai-in-my-small-business/): Start with what eats your time: answering customers, writing posts, organizing spreadsheets. Use AI as an assistant, review it all, protect personal data. - Will AI replace my business? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/will-ai-replace-my-business/): AI changes tasks; it doesn't erase trust between people. Businesses at risk only repeat tasks; those using AI to serve better gain time. ### Validating the idea - How to validate a business idea before investing (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-validate-a-business-idea/): Talk to people who would pay, without selling; then ask for a real commitment, like a reservation or pre-sale. Invest only when someone agrees to pay. - How to protect my business idea? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-protect-my-business-idea/): An idea alone can't be patented in Brazil. Protect the brand at INPI, register what is an invention, use a confidentiality agreement and execute fast. - No one believes in my idea: now what? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/no-one-believes-in-my-idea/): Sort out who said no: customer, investor or relative. Only the no of those who'd pay calls for change. The others call for a small proof, not giving up. - Did my idea come too early? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/did-my-idea-come-too-early/): Maybe. The sign of too early: the problem exists, but customers don't feel the pain yet. Keep the idea alive in a smaller version and watch the signals. ### Capital - How to get money to start a business? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-get-money-to-start-a-business/): Start with the minimum, using your own or customers' money (pre-sales). Credit only with a plan, from official sources, with payments that fit. - What is working capital and how much do I need? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/what-is-working-capital-and-how-much-do-i-need/): The money that pays the bills between buying and getting paid. Add up a month of costs and the time until you're paid; lacking it closes companies. - Is a loan for an MEI worth it? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/is-a-loan-for-an-mei-worth-it/): Worth it when it funds something that earns revenue and the payment fits your worst month. Prefer official lines like Pronampe; compare the CET. - Can a company with bad credit get a loan? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/can-a-company-with-bad-credit-get-a-loan/): It's harder, but there are ways: negotiate and clear the company's record first, credit unions, collateral, receivables. An upfront fee means a scam. ### Partners - How to choose a business partner without regret (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-choose-a-business-partner/): Choose for values and skills that complement yours, not for friendship. Test working together and sign a partners' agreement before things work out. - How to leave a business partnership (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-leave-a-business-partnership/): Read the articles and partners' agreement, give notice in writing, get the balance sheet to value your share and register your exit at the Junta Comercial. - My partner cheated me: what do I do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/my-partner-cheated-me-what-to-do/): Don't react on impulse. Gather evidence, ask for access to the company's accounts, give written notice and see a business lawyer before acting. ### The first customer - How to get your first customer (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-get-your-first-customer/): Start with your network, offer something small and specific, ask for referrals and real testimonials. The first customer comes from a talk, not an ad. - How to price a product or service (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-price-a-product-or-service/): Add direct cost, your share of fixed costs, taxes and fees, and the margin you want. Then compare with the market. A wrong price sinks even big sellers. - My business isn't selling: what do I do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/my-business-isnt-selling/): Find where the sale stalls: no one sees it, they see but don't get it, get it but don't trust you, or trust you but find it pricey. Each has its own fix. ### Cash flow - How to build a simple cash flow (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-build-a-simple-cash-flow/): Write down all money in and out, with dates, in a weekly sheet. Project the next 13 weeks and see where the balance turns negative before it happens. - How to separate personal money from the company's (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-separate-personal-and-business-money/): Have an account just for the company, set a fixed monthly owner's draw and never pay household bills with business money. Profit is withdrawn separately. - My company is in debt: what do I do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/my-company-is-in-debt-what-to-do/): Stop taking on costly debt, list all you owe, prioritize taxes, wages and secured debts, negotiate in writing and fix the cause. See an accountant early. ### Quit or keep going - When to give up on a business? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/when-to-give-up-on-a-business/): Give up the format, not yourself, when no one pays after honest tests, the cash has crossed the red line you set, or your health is at stake. - How not to give up on starting a business (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-not-to-give-up-on-entrepreneurship/): Persistence isn't stubbornness: keep the purpose and change the method. Short goals, small wins written down, people around you and real rest. - How to change your business's course without giving up (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-change-your-business-course-without-giving-up/): Pivoting is keeping what works (customer, skill, asset) and swapping what doesn't (product, channel, model). Test the new route small. ### Innovating without money - How to start a business without money (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-start-a-business-without-money/): Start by selling what you know how to do: a service, made-to-order resale or work using someone else's setup. Use profit from the first sales to grow. - How to innovate in a small business without money (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-innovate-in-a-small-business-without-money/): Innovating is solving a customer's problem better, not buying costly tech. Listen to complaints, change one detail at a time, check if customers noticed. - What business to open with little money? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/what-business-to-open-with-little-money/): The best one combines three things: something you know how to do, a problem people near you pay to solve, and a low cost to test. ### Starting without knowing how - How to create an app without knowing how to code (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-create-an-app-without-knowing-how-to-code/): Validate first without any app. Then use no-code or AI tools for a simple prototype, and bring in a professional for security and data. - How to start a business from scratch with no experience (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-start-a-business-from-scratch-with-no-experience/): Gain experience before taking risks: work or intern in the field, take free courses, start with a small version and keep a mentor close. - How to open a company step by step (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-open-a-company-in-brazil-step-by-step/): Define the activity and type (MEI, ME, LTDA or SLU), choose the tax regime with an accountant, register at the Junta or gov.br and get your licenses. ### Immigrants - Can a foreigner open an MEI in Brazil? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/can-a-foreigner-open-an-mei-in-brazil/): Yes, if you live in Brazil legally, with a CPF and a residence authorization (CRNM). Registration is free on the Entrepreneur Portal. - How to open a company in Brazil as a foreigner (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-open-a-company-in-brazil-as-a-foreigner/): A foreigner can be a partner in a Brazilian company. You need a CPF; to manage it, you generally must live here. Non-residents act through a proxy. - Starting a business in another country: where to begin (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-start-a-business-in-another-country/): First get a visa that lets you run a business, then study the local market, open the company with a local accountant and start with a community you know. ### Burnout - Entrepreneur burnout: signs and what to do (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/entrepreneur-burnout-signs-and-what-to-do/): Exhaustion that rest doesn't fix, cynicism and falling performance are signs. See a health professional and reduce the load. In Brazil, CVV: 188. - Entrepreneur loneliness: how to cope (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/entrepreneur-loneliness-how-to-cope/): Almost every founder feels they carry it all alone. Build a network of peers, have an outsider to decide with and tell the truth to those close to you. ### Investors - How to find an investor for my company (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-find-an-investor-for-my-company/): First, prove traction with customers. Then seek the right investor for your stage (angel, accelerator, fund, regulated crowdfunding) through referrals. - How to make a business pitch that convinces (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-make-a-convincing-business-pitch/): In a few minutes: the problem, for whom, your solution, proof it works, how it makes money, who the team is and what you're asking for. No promises. ### Starting over - How to restart a business after going broke (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-restart-a-business-after-going-broke/): Close what ended properly, take stock of the lessons, restart smaller with better partners and contracts. The law offers a fresh start after bankruptcy. - Can I open another company with a bad credit record? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/can-i-open-another-company-with-bad-credit/): Generally yes: a bad credit record doesn't stop you opening a company. A bankrupt not yet discharged and certain convictions can. Credit gets harder. --- ## I'm afraid to start a business: what do I do? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/im-afraid-to-start-a-business/ Idioma: en Descrição: Fear is normal: more than half of Brazilians feel it. Don't try to eliminate it. Shrink the size of the risk: test small, with a deadline and a loss limit. Being afraid to start a business is not a sign that you're not cut out for it. It's a sign that you understand something is at stake. According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2024, conducted in Brazil with Sebrae, 51.8% of Brazilian adults say fear of failure would stop them from starting a business. You're in the majority. Fear doesn't disappear with a motivational quote. It shrinks when the risk is the size you can afford to lose. ### The practical path - Name the fear. "Fear of starting a business" is too vague to face. Write down exactly what scares you: losing your savings, your family not approving, embarrassing yourself, being without a salary, not knowing how to sell. Each one has a different remedy. - Calculate the maximum acceptable loss. Decide, before you start, how much money and time you're willing to lose on the test. That number has to fit into your life without putting housing, food and basic bills at risk. Your emergency fund stays out of it. - Start smaller than you'd like. Sell before opening a shop. Serve five customers before renting an office. Build a simple version at night or on weekends, if you still have a job. Sebrae offers free courses and its "Sebrae Aqui" service for those just starting out. - Put a deadline on the test. Fear without a deadline becomes paralysis. Decide: "in 90 days, with up to so many reais, I'll see whether at least X people pay." At the end of the deadline, you decide with data, not with anxiety. - Formalize the simple way. For many activities, the MEI (individual microentrepreneur, Complementary Law 128/2008) lets you start with a CNPJ, issue invoices and contribute to social security (INSS) at a low monthly cost. Check on the Entrepreneur Portal (gov.br) whether your activity is allowed. - Have someone to talk to. A mentor, a group of entrepreneurs, a friend who has tried. Fear grows in isolation. Watch out for people selling "courage" in the form of expensive courses with promises of revenue. Courage can't be bought: it is built, one small step at a time. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez knows this fear up close. He says he came to Brazil in 2002, from Colombia, with an education company. When he decided to follow his own path and leave it, he found himself without documents in hand, far from home and afraid. He lived through hard years, with no network. The first business he opened was small and close to home: a salon, with his partner, when their daughter was born. It didn't work out as well as they wanted, but from inside it came a hair-treatment course. He didn't wait for the fear to pass before starting. He started at the size he could manage. Bairo sums up what he learned in one sentence: every no is the ground of a yes. Fear is a "no" that comes from inside, and it can be ground too. ### The Method step This is the territory of step 1 of the Seventh Attempt Method: say the dream out loud. Write in one sentence what you want to build, for whom and why, and say it to three people. A dream said out loud stops being a lonely fear and becomes a project that can receive help. Then move on to step 3, the 14/20 rule: 20 conversations in 14 days before spending. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - Is it worth starting a business in Brazil? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/is-it-worth-starting-a-business-in-brazil/) - How to leave a salaried job and start a business (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-leave-a-salaried-job-and-start-a-business/) - Every no is the ground of a yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) --- ## Is it worth starting a business in Brazil? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/is-it-worth-starting-a-business-in-brazil/ Idioma: en Descrição: It can be, if you go in knowing the numbers: 29% of MEIs close within 5 years, most often from lack of planning and of cash control. It's worth it for those who go in knowing where the holes are. Brazil has bureaucracy, high interest rates and many people going under. It also has a huge market, support programs and one of the most entrepreneurial populations in the world. The right question isn't "is it worth it?", but "is it worth it the way I'm planning it?". The numbers help answer. According to Sebrae's "Business Survival" study, about 29% of MEIs (individual microentrepreneurs) close within five years; among microenterprises, 21.6%; among small businesses, 17%. In other words: most survive. And among those that closed, Sebrae found more people who had opened because they were unemployed and had less experience in the field. ### The practical path - Know why companies close. In Sebrae surveys, the most cited villains are lack of planning, not knowing how much working capital is needed or who the customer is, and poor cash control. None of these is bad luck: all can be worked on before opening. - Write a simple business plan. It doesn't need a hundred pages. It needs to answer: who buys, for how much, how much it costs to deliver, how much you need to get through the first months. Sebrae has free templates. - Choose the right format. MEI, microenterprise or limited liability company have different costs and limits. Talk to an accountant before opening, not after. - Consider the timing. In 2026, business delinquency hit a record: Serasa Experian recorded more than 9.1 million companies with defaulted debts in June, most of them micro and small businesses. That calls for caution with expensive credit and with selling on installment. - Use the support that exists. Free Sebrae courses, credit programs such as Pronampe (for those who already have a company with a track record), city halls' entrepreneur service desks. - Also decide what not to do. Don't take an expensive personal loan to open. Don't use your emergency fund. Don't quit your job without a few months of breathing room. No one can promise it will work. Whoever promises is selling something. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez chose Brazil before he knew it: ever since he was a boy, in Colombia, he said he would live here. He says he built businesses in the country with a salon, a hair-treatment course, a cosmetics brand, events and digital printing. Some worked, others didn't. A partnership pushed him out of his own business. An investment in someone else's company, he says, left him broke. Even so, he never answered "it isn't worth it." His answer was to learn what each attempt left behind, until he reached the one he calls the seventh, the one that worked. ### The Method step Before deciding whether it's worth it, apply step 3 of the Seventh Attempt Method: prove it small, with the 14/20 rule. In 14 days, have 20 conversations with people who could pay for what you want to sell. If no one commits to anything, you've saved money and gained information. If commitments appear, the answer to the question starts coming from customers, not from the news. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - I'm afraid to start a business: what do I do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/im-afraid-to-start-a-business/) - How to validate a business idea (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-validate-a-business-idea/) - What is working capital? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/what-is-working-capital-and-how-much-do-i-need/) - Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/) --- ## Leaving a salaried job to start a business, safely URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-leave-a-salaried-job-and-start-a-business/ Idioma: en Descrição: Don't quit on impulse. Test the business on the side, save 6 to 12 months of living costs and leave only once the new income is already showing up. Leaving a formal salaried job (in Brazil, a CLT job) to start a business is one of the fastest-growing searches among people with a signed work card, and it makes sense: the desire for autonomy is real. But a safe transition isn't a leap. It's a bridge, crossed little by little, with the salary still paying the bills while the business proves it can sustain itself. ### The practical path - Start on the side, if your contract allows it. Read your contract and your company's policies: some prohibit competing activities. Beyond that, nothing stops you from testing a business at night or on weekends. Being an MEI is generally not prohibited for someone with a formal job, but check with an accountant how it affects benefits such as unemployment insurance. - Build your transition reserve. Before leaving, save the equivalent of 6 to 12 months of your cost of living, separate from the money going into the business. That reserve is what keeps a bad month from turning into a desperate decision. - Set your exit trigger with numbers. For example: "I'll leave when the business pays, for three months in a row, at least half of my salary." A trigger decided with a cool head avoids quitting on the day you're angry. - Test the sale, not just the idea. What proves a business works is people paying, repeatedly. Likes and compliments don't pay the rent. - Plan your departure carefully. Resigning and being dismissed have different effects on your FGTS, the termination fine and unemployment insurance. Get informed on gov.br or with your union before deciding. Leave on good terms: your former boss may become a customer. - Prepare your family. Income will fluctuate. Agree in advance on what changes in the household budget. An honest reminder: starting a business isn't the opposite of having a job, and going back to formal employment isn't failure. Many people build their business in stages, moving in and out of the job market according to the phase of their life. What hurts isn't going back; it's leaving without a plan. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez's first big decision in Brazil was precisely to leave a job. He says he had arrived in 2002 for a management position at an education company. When he wanted to follow his own path, leaving was hard: he found himself without documents in hand, without a network and afraid. It took him years to get back on his feet. He doesn't advise anyone to leave the way he did. What he carries from that phase is something else: the certainty that the decision to change was right, and the lesson that courage without a safety net is expensive. After that, every business of his started at the size life allowed, beginning with a neighborhood salon. ### The Method step This is where step 5 of the Seventh Attempt Method: count in lifetime comes in. Before leaving, calculate your runway: how many months can you hold out without a salary? How many people depend on your income? Also write down your red line, the point at which you go back to the job market without any shame. Deciding that now protects the people you love. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - I'm afraid to start a business: what do I do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/im-afraid-to-start-a-business/) - How to start a business without money (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-start-a-business-without-money/) - How to build a simple cash flow (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-build-a-simple-cash-flow/) - Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/) --- ## How to use AI in my small business? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-use-ai-in-my-small-business/ Idioma: en Descrição: Start with what eats your time: answering customers, writing posts, organizing spreadsheets. Use AI as an assistant, review it all, protect personal data. Artificial intelligence is no longer just for big companies. According to Sebrae's "Digital Transformation in Small Businesses 2025" survey, 44% of small business owners were already using some AI solution. The good news: you don't need to know how to code. The bad news: using it badly means twice the work. The secret is to start with the repetitive tasks that steal your time, and keep yourself in control. ### The practical path - List the tasks you hate. Answering the same questions on WhatsApp, writing Instagram captions, putting together quotes, organizing the expense spreadsheet, translating a message. That's where AI helps first. - Choose one tool and learn it well. Free or low-cost chat assistants handle most text tasks. Better to master one than to test ten. - Give context, not just orders. Instead of "write a post," write: "I'm a neighborhood bakery in Campinas, my customer is a mother buying a birthday cake, write three short captions, warm tone, no exaggeration." The more context, the better the answer. - Always review. AI makes mistakes with confidence: it invents data, prices, laws. Everything that goes to the customer passes before your eyes. On matters of health, law or finance, the final word belongs to a professional. - Protect data. Don't paste customers' CPF numbers, health data or sensitive information into open tools. Brazil's General Data Protection Law (LGPD, Law 13,709/2018) applies to small businesses too. - Measure the gain. Write down how long a task used to take and how long it takes now. If it didn't save time or improve the result, switch tasks. - Learn for free. Sebrae has free content and courses on AI for small businesses. Three uses that tend to pay off quickly in a small business: a script of answers to customers' most common questions, reviewed by you; a content calendar for the whole month, written in one afternoon; and reading your own spreadsheets, asking the AI to point out where money is slipping away. None of them requires coding. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he tried to bring artificial intelligence and augmented reality into a business years before it was a topic. People said it wouldn't work, and he gave up. Years later, the technology became a trend. Later, without knowing how to code, he spent six months in front of the computer learning and building with the tools of his own time. Out of that came the foundation of the CEASA Bank platform. While building it, he ran into a problem every AI user knows: it consumes tokens, and tokens are expensive. That is how CLAIN, the ecosystem's agent orchestrator, was born. For him, artificial intelligence is an extension of the human, not the problem. ### The Method step This is step 6 of the Seventh Attempt Method: learn what you don't know. Make three columns: what you need to know, what you'll learn on your own and what you'll do with the help of a partner or AI. Choose one task from your routine and give it a 30-day test with AI. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - Will AI replace my business? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/will-ai-replace-my-business/) - How to create an app without knowing how to code (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-create-an-app-without-knowing-how-to-code/) - How to innovate in a small business (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-innovate-in-a-small-business-without-money/) - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) --- ## Will AI replace my business? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/will-ai-replace-my-business/ Idioma: en Descrição: AI changes tasks; it doesn't erase trust between people. Businesses at risk only repeat tasks; those using AI to serve better gain time. Google autocompletes "AI will replace" with dozens of professions: developers, teachers, lawyers, accountants, designers. The fear is legitimate. The honest answer is that no one knows exactly what the market will look like in ten years, but a pattern is already visible: artificial intelligence replaces tasks much faster than it replaces relationships. A business that sells only a repetitive task is more exposed. A business that sells trust, care, judgment and presence tends to use AI to its advantage. ### The practical path - Break your business down into tasks. List everything you and your team do in a week. Mark what is repetitive (answering the same questions, putting together standard quotes, writing simple texts) and what depends on judgment, relationships or physical presence. - Automate the repetitive before your competitor does. What AI does well, let it do, always with your review. The time you free up goes to what only you can do. - Strengthen what is human. Service that remembers the customer's name, tailored advice, careful delivery, taking responsibility when something goes wrong. That can't be downloaded from the internet. - Use AI to offer more, not just to cut costs. An accountant can offer monthly analysis instead of just tax forms; a shop can answer in three languages; a service can respond after hours with a well-configured, supervised assistant. - Watch out for what is regulated. In health, law, finance and personal data, AI is an assistant, not the one responsible. The final decision and the responsibility remain with the licensed professional. And Brazil's General Data Protection Law (LGPD, Law 13,709/2018) applies to your customers' data. - Rethink the price of what changes. If a task that took hours now takes minutes, charging by the hour stops making sense. Many businesses start charging for the result delivered, not for the time spent. - Learn a little each week. Sebrae recorded that 44% of small businesses were already using some AI solution in 2025. You don't need to become an expert; you need not to fall behind. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he tried to bring artificial intelligence into a business when almost no one was talking about it, was told it wouldn't work and gave up. Years later, the subject became a trend. Later, without knowing how to code, he spent six months learning and building with the tools of his own time, and out of that came the foundation of the CEASA Bank platform. He sums up his vision in a sentence he often repeats: artificial intelligence is an extension of the human, not the problem. He speaks of the last generation of humans integrated with the first generation of AI, and the challenge, for him, is to make the two work together. ### The Method step This fear is faced with step 6 of the Seventh Attempt Method: learn what you don't know. Three columns: what you need to know about AI in your field, what you'll learn on your own and what you'll ask a partner for. Choose one repetitive task and test it for 30 days. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - How to use AI in my small business? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-use-ai-in-my-small-business/) - How to innovate in a small business (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-innovate-in-a-small-business-without-money/) - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) --- ## How to validate a business idea before investing URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-validate-a-business-idea/ Idioma: en Descrição: Talk to people who would pay, without selling; then ask for a real commitment, like a reservation or pre-sale. Invest only when someone agrees to pay. Validating an idea means finding out, while spending little, whether there are people willing to pay for what you want to offer. It isn't asking your friends whether the idea is good. A friend wants to please; a customer wants to solve a problem. Validation ends when someone truly commits: with money, with time or with their own name. This matters because lack of a market is one of the most common causes of failure. In CB Insights' 2024 analysis of 431 startups that shut down, 43% had a problem with product-market fit. And Sebrae records that many of those who close opened without knowing their customers' buying habits. ### The practical path - Write down the problem, not the solution. "Working mothers don't have time to take the dog to be groomed" is a problem. "A pet-grooming app" is a solution. Validate the problem first. - Talk to people who have the problem. Ask about the past, not the future: "How did you solve this last time? How much did you pay? What annoyed you most?". Avoid "would you buy it?", because almost everyone says yes to be polite. - See the competition as evidence. A competitor isn't a reason to give up: it's often a sign that there is demand. Find out what their customers complain about. - Create a cheap test. A simple page with a price and a reserve button, a small ad, a menu on WhatsApp, a handmade version of the service. The technical name for this is MVP, the minimum viable product. - Ask for commitment. Pre-sales, a deposit, a reservation with name and phone number, a letter of intent from a company. If no one commits to anything, the idea isn't validated yet. - Define success beforehand. For example: "if 5 out of 20 people reserve, I'll go ahead; if no one does, I'll change course." That way you don't reinterpret the result to please yourself. Validating isn't proving you were right. It's finding out where you were wrong while being wrong is still cheap. Many good ideas are born in their second or third version, after the customer explained what they actually wanted. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says his first business in Brazil was a salon, opened with his partner when their daughter was born. It didn't work out as well as they wanted. But the salon showed him a demand that was right there, in everyday life: caring for the hair and scalp. From it came a hair-treatment course, in a field that only years later found its place in Brazil, trichology. The idea didn't come from a spreadsheet. It came from close to people who were already paying for something else. It's the cheapest kind of validation there is. ### The Method step This is the page for step 3 of the Seventh Attempt Method: prove it small, with the 14/20 rule. In 14 days, have 20 conversations with potential customers. Don't sell anything; listen. At the end, ask for a small commitment. If none of the 20 commits, go back to step 2 and ask what kind of "no" you received. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - No one believes in my idea: now what? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/no-one-believes-in-my-idea/) - How to protect my idea (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-protect-my-business-idea/) - How to get your first customer (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-get-your-first-customer/) - The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) --- ## How to protect my business idea? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-protect-my-business-idea/ Idioma: en Descrição: An idea alone can't be patented in Brazil. Protect the brand at INPI, register what is an invention, use a confidentiality agreement and execute fast. The short answer disappoints many people: in Brazil, an abstract idea can't be patented. The Industrial Property Law (Law 9,279/1996, art. 10) says that purely abstract concepts, commercial methods and business plans, among other things, are not inventions. What can be protected is what the idea becomes: a brand, a concrete invention, a design, software, a contract. The second part of the answer is the most important: the best protection for an idea is to execute it better and faster than whoever heard it. ### The practical path - Register the brand at INPI. Your business's name and logo can be registered with the National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI). Before investing in signage, a website and packaging, search INPI's own database to see whether the name already has an owner. The application can be filed online by the entrepreneur, but a professional helps choose the right classes. - Assess whether there is a real invention. If you created a new technical solution with industrial application, an invention patent or a utility model may apply. A critical point: Brazil grants a 12-month grace period for disclosure made by the inventor (Law 9,279/1996, art. 12), but many countries, such as those in Europe, don't. Disclosing before filing can rule out a patent abroad. Talk to an industrial property agent before showing how it works in public. - Use a confidentiality agreement. When presenting details to potential partners, suppliers or developers, ask for a nondisclosure agreement (NDA). It doesn't prevent everything, but it creates evidence and liability. - Keep proof of authorship. Email dates, document versions, software registrations at INPI (for computer programs) and registrations of intellectual works where applicable. - Make clear who owns what. In a partnership, the articles of association or partners' agreement should say who owns the brand, the code and the ideas developed. This is the point that causes the most fights later. - Don't hide the idea from everyone. Whoever doesn't talk about the idea can't validate it. Talk about the problem and the benefit; keep the technical "how" for those who have signed a confidentiality agreement. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he learned this lesson the most expensive way. With the cosmetics brand up and running, he saw the next step: a solution using touchscreen technology. It was his idea. His partners pushed him out of the business, and the idea stayed with them. He says some defeats hurt the wallet and others hurt somewhere else. That one hurt in both places. It also left a lesson he carries into everything he builds today: choose whom you build with, and put in writing, from day one, who owns what. ### The Method step Protecting the idea is part of step 4 of the Seventh Attempt Method: choose whom you build with. Before opening the project to someone, answer in writing who owns the brand and the ideas, how someone leaves and what happens if one person stops working. If that conversation seems uncomfortable now, it would be much worse later. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - How to choose a business partner (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-choose-a-business-partner/) - My partner cheated me: what do I do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/my-partner-cheated-me-what-to-do/) - Every no is the ground of a yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) --- ## No one believes in my idea: now what? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/no-one-believes-in-my-idea/ Idioma: en Descrição: Sort out who said no: customer, investor or relative. Only the no of those who'd pay calls for change. The others call for a small proof, not giving up. Hearing "that won't work" from every side hurts. And it's confusing: does everyone see something you don't, or do you see something no one has seen yet? Both happen. The difference isn't in the strength of your faith in the idea. It's in who said no and why. This page is for when the nos have piled up and the project feels alone; if you've just heard the first one, see They said my idea won't work (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/they-said-my-idea-wont-work-how-to-react/). ### The practical path - Make a list of the nos. Write down who said it, what they said and what the argument was. The list often shows that the nos came from people who would never buy what you want to sell. - Classify each no. There are four kinds: - A market no: whoever has the problem doesn't want to pay for the solution. This one deserves full attention. - A timing no: the idea is good, but the market isn't ready yet, or that moment has passed. - A person no: whoever said it doesn't understand the subject, is afraid for you or has other interests. - An execution no: the idea works, but the way of doing it, the price or the channel is wrong. - Swap opinion for evidence. Instead of debating, run a small test: a pre-sale, a page with a reserve button, a handmade service for five customers. Evidence ends a discussion better than argument does. - Listen to the no of those who would pay. If potential customers say no, ask what would make them say yes. Sometimes the answer changes the idea in a way that makes it much better. - Don't confuse stubbornness with persistence. Persisting is insisting on the problem and changing the solution when the data says so. Stubbornness is insisting on the solution against the data. - Protect your self-esteem. Rejecting your idea isn't rejecting you. Talk to people who have started businesses; entrepreneur groups and Sebrae help you find reference points outside your family. Henry Ford, as Napoleon Hill tells it in Think and Grow Rich, heard from his engineers that the single-block V8 engine was impossible, and told them to keep going. In 1932 the Ford V8 hit the streets. The story is inspiring, but notice: Ford had engineers, a factory and tests. His persistence was work, not just conviction. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez has heard "it can't be done," "it isn't possible" and "you can't" more times than he can count. When he wanted to use artificial intelligence and augmented reality in a business, people said it wouldn't work. He gave up, and years later the technology became a trend. When he decided to make natural-based cosmetics, he heard the same no. This time he kept going, and it worked. Years later, while building the foundation of the CEASA Bank platform, he heard again, he says, that it wasn't possible; the banks refused to integrate the solution. He used the no as ground and went on to build his own infrastructure. That's where the sentence that became the rule of his life comes from: every no is the ground of a yes. ### The Method step This is the page for step 2 of the Seventh Attempt Method: ask what is inside the no. List the last five nos and classify each one. Only the market no tells you to change the idea; the others call for patience, adjustment or simply moving forward. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - Did my idea come too early? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/did-my-idea-come-too-early/) - How to validate a business idea (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-validate-a-business-idea/) - Every no is the ground of a yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) - They said my idea won't work: how to react to the no (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/they-said-my-idea-wont-work-how-to-react/) --- ## Did my idea come too early? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/did-my-idea-come-too-early/ Idioma: en Descrição: Maybe. The sign of too early: the problem exists, but customers don't feel the pain yet. Keep the idea alive in a smaller version and watch the signals. Arriving too early is a real way to fail. In CB Insights' 2024 analysis of 431 startups that shut down, 29% cited bad timing or market conditions. It isn't enough for the idea to be good: the customer has to feel the pain now, the technology has to be cheap enough and the habit has to exist. But "too early" also becomes a comfortable excuse for not looking at other problems. Before concluding you're ahead of your time, it's worth testing. ### The practical path - Separate three questions. Does the problem exist today? Do people know they have it? Do they already spend money trying to solve it somehow? If the answer to the third is no, it's probably too early. - Watch for arrival signals. Competitors appearing abroad, big companies testing something similar, the cost of the technology falling, a change in the law, the topic showing up more in Google Trends searches. These signals say the window is opening. - Find the niche that already feels the pain. Almost every "too early" idea has a small group that already needs it today. Start with them: it's smaller, but it pays. - Keep the idea alive cheaply. You don't have to choose between all and nothing. Keep a minimum version, some content, a list of interested people, while you earn money with something else. - Write down your thesis with a date. Write today what you believe will happen and when. Review it every six months. That separates vision from hope. - Don't burn all your capital waiting for the market. The market may take longer than your cash can hold out. Those who arrive early need a long runway. An honest test helps tell the two situations apart: show the idea to ten people who have the problem and ask how much they spent, in the last year, trying to solve it. If the answer is "nothing" because they didn't even know it was a problem, it's probably early. If they spent money and are still dissatisfied, maybe it isn't early: maybe the product just isn't right yet. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he lived this twice. First, he wanted to bring artificial intelligence and augmented reality into a business. People said it wouldn't work. He believed in it and, even believing, gave up. Years later, the very same thing became a trend. He often says, about that phase, that arriving too early also means arriving alone. Being right ahead of time doesn't pay the bills, but it shows the eye is true. The second time was with natural-based cosmetics, at a time when few people were betting on them. This time he didn't stop at the first answer. The brand worked, and natural cosmetics became a trend years later. The difference between the two stories wasn't the idea; it was that he found a way to keep the business standing while the market caught up. ### The Method step This doubt lives in step 2 of the Seventh Attempt Method: ask what is inside the no. A "timing no" is different from a "market no": it doesn't ask you to abandon the idea, it asks for a smaller format and more time. Classify the no you received before deciding. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - No one believes in my idea: now what? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/no-one-believes-in-my-idea/) - How to innovate in a small business (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-innovate-in-a-small-business-without-money/) - The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) --- ## How to get money to start a business? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-get-money-to-start-a-business/ Idioma: en Descrição: Start with the minimum, using your own or customers' money (pre-sales). Credit only with a plan, from official sources, with payments that fit. Most small businesses in Brazil start with money from the owner, the family or the first customers, not with a loan or an investor. And that's good: debt at the start weighs just when the business doesn't yet know how much it sells. Before asking where to get money, ask how much you really need for the first test. ### The practical path - Calculate the minimum to start. Separate the initial investment (equipment, inventory, formalization) from working capital (the money to pay the bills until sales come in). Sebrae points out that many entrepreneurs open without knowing how much working capital they need, and that is among the causes of closure. - Use the customer as your financier. Pre-sales, orders with a deposit, subscriptions paid in advance, made-to-order sales. It's money without interest, and it also proves there's a market. - Start with what you already have. Used equipment, space at home, free tools, partnering with someone who already has the structure. Rent before you buy. - Get to know official credit, without rushing. For companies already open, there are programs such as Pronampe, with rules that change from year to year (check gov.br and your bank). State development banks, development agencies and credit cooperatives also have lines for small businesses. Compare the total effective cost (CET), not just the rate. - Guided productive microcredit. For those starting small, microcredit programs with follow-up support can be a door. See the options in your city and at public banks. - Family and friends, with a contract. If someone close lends or invests, write it down: amount, term, whether it's a loan or a stake. Money without an agreement has broken up many families. - Run from expensive money and promises. Revolving credit card balances, overdrafts and loan sharks don't finance a business: they sink it. Be wary of anyone who asks for an upfront payment to release credit; it's a common scam. A useful rule: ask only for the money that takes the business to the next proof that it works (the first ten customers, the first month without a loss), not the money for the whole plan. Smaller amounts, in stages, cost less and let you correct course along the way. This page is general guidance, not financial advice. To decide about credit, talk to an accountant. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez started the most common way: small, with what he had. His first business in Brazil was a salon opened with his partner when their daughter was born. Later, he built up capital working in events and digital printing. He says he put that capital into other people's company as an investing partner. The business was not what it seemed and didn't hold, and he went broke. The lesson that remained wasn't "don't take risks." It was "look at the numbers before putting in the money, and know how long it needs to last." ### The Method step This is a question for step 5 of the Seventh Attempt Method: count in lifetime. Before looking for money, find out how many weeks it needs to buy. Build a simple 13-week cash flow and ask only for the amount that takes the business to the next proof that it works. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - What is working capital? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/what-is-working-capital-and-how-much-do-i-need/) - Is a loan for an MEI worth it? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/is-a-loan-for-an-mei-worth-it/) - How to start a business without money (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-start-a-business-without-money/) - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) --- ## What is working capital and how much do I need? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/what-is-working-capital-and-how-much-do-i-need/ Idioma: en Descrição: The money that pays the bills between buying and getting paid. Add up a month of costs and the time until you're paid; lacking it closes companies. Working capital is the money that keeps the business standing in the gap between paying and getting paid. You buy raw materials today, pay rent and wages on the 5th, sell by card in installments and only get paid weeks later. In that gap, someone has to pay the bills. That someone is working capital. That's why companies that sell well also go under. In Sebrae-SP's "Causa Mortis" survey, 39% of owners of companies that closed said they opened the business without knowing how much working capital they would need. ### The practical path - List a month's fixed costs. Rent, wages and payroll charges, the owner's draw, the accountant, internet, software, fixed taxes. Add them up. - Find your cash cycle. On average, how many days does the product sit in inventory? How many days do you take to get paid by customers? How many days do you have to pay suppliers? Cash cycle = days of inventory + days to get paid − days to pay. - Do a rough calculation. A simple way: (daily operating cost) × (days in the cash cycle). If the business spends R$1,000 a day to operate and the cycle is 40 days, you need something close to R$40,000 in circulation. Add a margin for weak months. - Shorten the cycle before taking a loan. Negotiate longer terms with suppliers and shorter ones with customers, encourage payment up front or by Pix, cut idle inventory. Every day less in the cycle is money you don't need to borrow. - Be careful with advancing receivables. Getting card sales paid early solves a squeeze, but it has a cost. If it becomes a habit, the problem is price or payment terms, not cash. - If you need credit, use the right kind. Working capital lines exist at banks, cooperatives and in programs such as Pronampe, for companies that meet the rules. Compare the total effective cost and simulate the installment in your worst month, not your best. - Separate the company's money from your own. Without a separate account, there is no way to know how much working capital you have. This page offers general guidance. For your business's numbers, an accountant can do the math with you. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he went through the hardest way of discovering the value of financial breathing room. After reinvesting the capital he had built up from events and digital printing as an investing partner in a company, he saw the business, which was not what it seemed, stop holding up. Many people depended on him. When many people depend on you, a lack of cash stops being a number on a spreadsheet and becomes a sleepless night. That is where the way he measures everything today comes from: in lifetime, his own and that of the people who are with him. ### The Method step Working capital is at the heart of step 5 of the Seventh Attempt Method: count in lifetime. Divide the money available by your monthly spending: that is your runway, in months. Write down your red line, the point at which you stop, cut back or ask for help, and decide it today, with a cool head. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - How to build a simple cash flow (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-build-a-simple-cash-flow/) - How to get money to start a business? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-get-money-to-start-a-business/) - My company is in debt: what do I do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/my-company-is-in-debt-what-to-do/) - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) --- ## Is a loan for an MEI worth it? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/is-a-loan-for-an-mei-worth-it/ Idioma: en Descrição: Worth it when it funds something that earns revenue and the payment fits your worst month. Prefer official lines like Pronampe; compare the CET. A loan isn't good or bad in itself. It's worth it when the money goes into something that generates more revenue than the cost of the debt, and when the installment fits your worst month, not your best. It's dangerous when it serves to plug a hole without fixing the cause of the hole. "Loan for MEI" (individual microentrepreneur) is among the most frequent searches by people with a small company registration, often with add-ons like "bad credit" and "approved instantly." That last one is exactly where the scam lives. ### The practical path - Answer: what is the money for? Buying a machine that doubles production is an investment. Paying the overdue credit card bill is a warning sign. If the problem is the wrong price or weak sales, the loan only postpones the bill. - Calculate the return. How much more will you sell or save per month with this money? If the monthly gain doesn't comfortably cover the installment, it isn't worth it. - Simulate the worst month. Take the weakest month of the last year. Does the installment fit in it? If not, reduce the amount or extend the term. - Know the official lines. Pronampe (Law 13,999/2020, made permanent by Law 14,161/2021) serves micro and small businesses, including MEIs, with a limit tied to revenue and interest capped by the government. The rules and deadlines change: check gov.br and your bank. Public banks, credit cooperatives and state development agencies also have their own lines. - Compare by CET. The total effective cost includes interest, fees, insurance and taxes. Two offers with the same rate can have very different CETs. - Run from the signs of a scam. No serious lender asks for an upfront payment to "release" a loan. Be wary of WhatsApp contact in a bank's name, of "credit with no credit check" and of promises to people with bad credit that require a prior deposit. - Get organized before applying. Declared revenue up to date (the MEI's annual DASN-SIMEI return), monthly DAS tax payments made, a separate company account. That increases your chances and improves the terms. This page is general guidance. Before taking out credit, talk to an accountant or to Sebrae. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he built businesses at several stages with the capital he managed to put together: the salon, the course, the cosmetics, events and digital printing. The deepest fall came when that capital was put into someone else's business that was not what it seemed. Many people depended on him. Later, when building the foundation of the CEASA Bank platform, he went precisely after the problem of credit for those at the front line of agribusiness, at the wholesale food markets, where many people are still outside the financial system. Anyone who has been without credit at the hardest moment understands the weight of a miscalculated installment. ### The Method step Before signing, apply step 5 of the Seventh Attempt Method: count in lifetime. How many months of installments can your cash hold out if sales drop? Who depends on that money? Write down the answer. If it scares you, the debt is too big for this moment. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - What is working capital? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/what-is-working-capital-and-how-much-do-i-need/) - Can a company with bad credit get a loan? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/can-a-company-with-bad-credit-get-a-loan/) - My company is in debt: what do I do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/my-company-is-in-debt-what-to-do/) - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) --- ## Can a company with bad credit get a loan? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/can-a-company-with-bad-credit-get-a-loan/ Idioma: en Descrição: It's harder, but there are ways: negotiate and clear the company's record first, credit unions, collateral, receivables. An upfront fee means a scam. You're not alone. In June 2026, Serasa Experian recorded more than 9.1 million delinquent companies in Brazil, a record in the historical series, and 8.6 million of them were micro and small businesses. With the company's CNPJ flagged for unpaid debts, credit becomes harder and more expensive, but not impossible. The most solid path, almost always, is to clean up first and ask later. ### The practical path - Find out exactly what you owe. Check the company's CNPJ at the credit bureaus, at the Central Bank's Registrato (which shows operations with financial institutions), and at the Federal Revenue Service and the Office of the Attorney General of the National Treasury (PGFN) for tax debts. Build a table: creditor, amount, interest, collateral, how overdue. - Negotiate before asking for new credit. Creditors prefer receiving something to nothing. Use the creditor's own official channels, renegotiation drives and, for federal debts, the PGFN's tax settlements. Federal renegotiation programs for small businesses open and close throughout the year; check gov.br. - Prioritize the right debts. Taxes and labor charges have serious consequences, and secured debts can cost you the asset. Organize the order with an accountant. - Know the possible doors. Credit unions tend to look at the relationship beyond the credit record. Secured credit (equipment, card receivables) may be viable. Some official programs have specific rules about credit restrictions; check the current conditions before counting on them. - Make your supplier an ally. Longer payment terms are credit without a bank. A long-standing supplier, with whom you've always kept your word, may help more than a bank. - Don't fall for the bad-credit scam. "Loans for people with bad credit, approved instantly, just pay a fee" is the most common bait. No serious lender charges before releasing the money. - Fix the cause. If the company ended up with bad credit because the price doesn't cover the cost, new credit only increases the debt. This page offers general guidance and doesn't replace an accountant or a lawyer. If you can't afford a lawyer, go to the Public Defender's Office or a law school's legal aid clinic. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he knew the inside of a company with no way out: he went broke after an investment that didn't hold, with many people depending on him. There is a natural reaction to that moment: complaining about the partner, the system, bad luck. He says he chose not to complain and, instead, to learn what he didn't know. Years later, while building the foundation of CEASA Bank, he says he heard from the banks that his solution wasn't possible, and they refused to integrate it. He learned then that, when a credit door closes, sometimes the answer is to build another relationship, another path, another model. ### The Method step This situation calls for step 7 of the Seventh Attempt Method: go quiet and return to the circle. Before any desperate decision, 20 minutes without screens, just paper and the list of debts. Then take stock: what is this phase teaching you about price, payment terms and cash? Your next attempt begins with that list in hand. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - My company is in debt: what do I do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/my-company-is-in-debt-what-to-do/) - Is a loan for an MEI worth it? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/is-a-loan-for-an-mei-worth-it/) - What to do when you've gone broke? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/what-to-do-when-you-have-gone-broke/) - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) --- ## How to choose a business partner without regret URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-choose-a-business-partner/ Idioma: en Descrição: Choose for values and skills that complement yours, not for friendship. Test working together and sign a partners' agreement before things work out. Partnership is one of the points where the most businesses are lost. Professor Noam Wasserman, who studied thousands of founders for the book The Founder's Dilemmas, popularized the estimate that about 65% of high-potential startups that fail have conflicts in the founding team among the causes. The figure comes from samples of investor-backed startups, but the lesson holds for the bakery and for tech alike: choosing a partner is as serious as choosing the business. ### The practical path - Know why you want a partner. Money? A skill you don't have? Company so you don't have to decide alone? Each reason calls for a different kind of partner, and sometimes the answer is to hire, not to partner. - Look for a complement, not a mirror. If you sell well, look for someone who organizes numbers. Two salespeople or two technicians tend to compete for the same space. - Talk about values before numbers. How does each of you deal with debt? With risk? With working hours? What would you do with the first profit? Misaligned values show up later and cost more. - Test before you commit. Do a small project together, with a deadline, before opening the company. Seeing how the person acts under pressure says more than any interview. - Write a partners' agreement. Besides the articles of association registered at the Commercial Registry (Junta Comercial), a partners' agreement (which doesn't need to be registered to bind the parties) should say: how much each person contributes in money and in hours; who decides what; how profit is distributed; how someone leaves and how their share is valued; what happens if a partner stops working; who owns the brand, the code and the ideas; non-compete rules. A lawyer can help fine-tune it. - Agree on equity in stages. It's common for a working partner's stake to be earned over time (the market calls this vesting), so as not to reward those who leave early. - Review it every year. Partnerships change. An annual meeting to review roles prevents accumulated resentment. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he lived both ends of this story. With the cosmetics brand up and running, he saw the next step: a solution using touchscreen technology. It was his idea. His partners pushed him out of the business, and the idea stayed with them. Later, after going broke and being left hanging by people he had helped, he went back to building as a team. In the phase he calls the seventh attempt, he joined forces with three old acquaintances. The difference, his story says, wasn't trusting less. It was choosing better whom to build with. ### The Method step This is the page for step 4 of the Seventh Attempt Method: choose whom you build with. Before signing, each partner answers the five questions alone, in writing: money and hours, decision-making, exit, stopping work, and ownership of ideas. Compare. If the answers don't match, the problem showed up in time. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - How to leave a partnership (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-leave-a-business-partnership/) - My partner cheated me: what do I do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/my-partner-cheated-me-what-to-do/) - The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) --- ## How to leave a business partnership — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-leave-a-business-partnership/ Idioma: en Descrição: Read the articles and partners' agreement, give notice in writing, get the balance sheet to value your share and register your exit at the Junta Comercial. Leaving a partnership is possible even when the other partners don't want you to. Brazil's Civil Code guarantees the right to withdraw and regulates how your share must be valued. What turns the exit into a nightmare, almost always, is leaving without documents, without numbers and without formalizing the change. Done right, the exit protects you from the company's future debts and preserves what you built. ### The practical path - Read the articles of association and the partners' agreement. They may set rules for leaving, a notice period, how your share is calculated and paid, and the other partners' right of first refusal to buy your quotas. - Choose how to leave. You can sell your quotas to another partner or to a third party (following the contract's rules) or exercise the right of withdrawal. In a partnership with no fixed term, the Civil Code (art. 1,029) provides for withdrawal by notifying the other partners at least 60 days in advance. - Give notice in writing. An email with confirmation, an extrajudicial notice or a registered letter with return receipt. Keep the proof. - Ask for the numbers. To value your share (in Portuguese, haveres), the Civil Code (art. 1,031) provides, unless the contract says otherwise, for a special balance sheet on the date of departure. Ask for balance sheets, statements and the list of debts. If you can, hire an accountant you trust to check them. The amount is paid in cash within 90 days, unless there is an agreement or a different rule in the contract (art. 1,031, §2). - Formalize the amendment to the articles. The exit must be registered at the Junta Comercial (Commercial Registry). Note: under the Civil Code (art. 1,032), the departing partner remains liable for the company's prior obligations for up to two years after the exit is recorded. The sooner you register, the sooner that period starts. - Get out of the guarantees. If you signed as guarantor or surety on company loans, negotiate a replacement with the bank. Leaving the partnership doesn't automatically take your name off those guarantees. - If there's no agreement, go to court or mediate. When the partners refuse to sign or to value your share, there is the lawsuit for partial dissolution. Mediation and arbitration can be faster. A business lawyer is indispensable here. This page is general guidance, not a legal opinion. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he didn't leave a partnership: he was pushed out of it. With the cosmetics brand up and running, he brought the idea of a touchscreen solution, and the partners removed him from the business. The idea stayed with them. His story tells how he found the pain and, instead of running from it, made it his foundation. Not as an open wound, as ground to stand on. He went to work in events and digital printing and started over. The most expensive lesson of that phase was about whom to build with, and about agreeing on the exit from the moment you go in. ### The Method step This situation belongs to step 4 of the Seventh Attempt Method: choose whom you build with. In your next partnership, the question "how does someone leave, and for how much?" gets answered in writing on day one. If you're leaving now, use what you've learned as a list of clauses for next time. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - How to choose a business partner (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-choose-a-business-partner/) - My partner cheated me: what do I do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/my-partner-cheated-me-what-to-do/) - Every no is the ground of a yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) --- ## My partner cheated me: what do I do? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/my-partner-cheated-me-what-to-do/ Idioma: en Descrição: Don't react on impulse. Gather evidence, ask for access to the company's accounts, give written notice and see a business lawyer before acting. Being betrayed by a partner hurts twice: in your wallet and in your trust. The first reaction is usually to confront, expose, delete messages, take money out of the till "to protect yourself." Almost always, those reactions worsen your position. The path that protects you is cold and documented. This page deals with the practical and legal side; for the wound to your trust, see How to get over a partner's betrayal (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-get-over-a-partners-betrayal/). Searches like "my partner stole from me what to do" and "my partner abandoned the company" appear among Google's suggestions for anyone who types "my partner" in Portuguese. It's a common problem, and the law has paths for it. ### The practical path - Breathe before acting. Don't make public accusations or post them in message groups: that can lead to a lawsuit against you for slander or defamation. - Preserve the evidence. Statements, invoices, emails, contracts, messages. Make copies. If there's a risk that records will be deleted, a lawyer can advise on a notarial record of the evidence or urgent measures. - Exercise your right to information. As a partner, you have the right to examine the company's books and documents, the state of the cash and the receivables, at any time, unless the contract sets a specific period (Civil Code, art. 1,021). Ask in writing. - Protect the cash carefully. Talk to the bank about the rules for operating the company's account (joint signature, for example), always in line with the articles of association. Don't transfer money to yourself "for safety": it can turn into an accusation against you. - Give formal notice. An extrajudicial notice, preferably drafted by a lawyer, records the problem and opens room for an agreement. - Know the ways out. An exit agreement with a buyout of quotas, mediation or arbitration (if provided for in the contract), a lawsuit demanding an accounting, expulsion of a partner for serious misconduct (Civil Code, arts. 1,030 and 1,085, as applicable) and, if there was a crime, a police report. Which path is right depends on the evidence and the contract. - Take care of your mind. A partner's betrayal affects sleep, health and family. If the weight gets too heavy, CVV answers for free, 24 hours a day, at 188. This page is general guidance, not a legal opinion. Without money for a lawyer, go to the Public Defender's Office or a law school's legal aid clinic. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he was cheated in more than one way. First, the partners of a business he helped build pushed him out, and an idea of his stayed with them. Later, in a project he created after going broke, the very people he had helped left him hanging. His story records what he took from it: being abandoned by strangers teaches caution; being abandoned by people you helped teaches that your decision can't depend on anyone's gratitude. He didn't complain. He kept going. And, later, he trusted again, choosing better whom to build with. ### The Method step This pain lives in step 4 of the Seventh Attempt Method: choose whom you build with, and also in step 7: go quiet and return to the circle. Before deciding what to do about the partner, 20 minutes without screens, just paper. Then take stock: what did this partnership teach you that will become a clause in the next one? Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - How to leave a partnership (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-leave-a-business-partnership/) - How to choose a business partner (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-choose-a-business-partner/) - A partner's betrayal: the part the law can't fix (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-get-over-a-partners-betrayal/) - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) --- ## How to get your first customer — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-get-your-first-customer/ Idioma: en Descrição: Start with your network, offer something small and specific, ask for referrals and real testimonials. The first customer comes from a talk, not an ad. The first customer almost never comes from an expensive ad. They come from a conversation: with someone you know, a former colleague, a neighbor, someone from a group you belong to. The work at the start is moving from a generic "I'm starting a business" to a small, clear offer that is easy to say yes to. ### The practical path - Define who it's for, specifically. Not "anyone who needs it." Write down the profile: "owner of a small restaurant who wastes time on inventory," "working mother who needs a cake for Friday." The more specific, the easier to find. - List 50 people you already know. Not to sell to them, but to ask: "do you know anyone with this problem?". Your network is the bridge to your first customer. - Make an entry offer. A smaller service, a time-limited trial, a starter package. Something the person can accept without thinking too hard. Charge, even if little: a paying customer gives serious feedback. - Go where the customer already is. Neighborhood groups, business associations, fairs, your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business, free, which shows up in local searches and on the map), Instagram and WhatsApp Business. Start with one channel and do it well. - Serve them as if they were your only one. Your first customer is also your first salesperson. Deliver a little more than agreed, on time. - Ask for referrals and genuine testimonials. At the end, ask: "would you recommend me to someone?" and "can I use what you said?". Never make up a testimonial: besides being unethical, Brazil's Consumer Protection Code prohibits misleading advertising. - Write down what they said. Your first customer's words about the problem are the best sales copy you'll ever have. A common mistake is giving the service away for free "to gain experience." Sometimes it makes sense, but it has a cost: people who don't pay rarely give serious feedback, and you don't find out whether anyone would pay. If you want to make the first purchase easier, prefer a launch price with a clear deadline or a simple satisfaction guarantee, such as redoing the job at no cost if what was agreed isn't delivered. Another mistake is waiting for everything to be perfect: logo, website, business card. Your first customer isn't buying your visual identity. They're buying the solution to a problem of theirs, from someone they trust. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says his first business in Brazil was a neighborhood one: a salon, opened with his partner when their daughter was born. It didn't work out as well as they would have liked, but it brought something no advertising would: daily contact with people who took care of their hair and scalp. From that contact came a hair-treatment course. Long before any companies registered in London, he learned there that customers are won up close, one conversation at a time. Capoeira, his first bridge to Brazil, teaches something similar: the circle forms with whoever is around. ### The Method step Getting your first customer is the continuation of step 3 of the Seventh Attempt Method: prove it small, with the 14/20 rule. The 20 conversations in 14 days aren't only for validating the idea: among those 20 people there is often your first customer, or whoever will refer them. End each conversation with a small request. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - How to price a product or service (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-price-a-product-or-service/) - My business isn't selling: what do I do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/my-business-isnt-selling/) - How to validate a business idea (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-validate-a-business-idea/) - The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) --- ## How to price a product or service — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-price-a-product-or-service/ Idioma: en Descrição: Add direct cost, your share of fixed costs, taxes and fees, and the margin you want. Then compare with the market. A wrong price sinks even big sellers. Pricing isn't copying the competitor or guessing "what the customer will pay." It's knowing how much it costs to deliver, how much you need to earn and how much the customer accepts paying, and finding a price that respects all three. A price that's too low is one of the quietest ways to go under: the business sells, the schedule fills up, and the money disappears. ### The practical path - Calculate the direct cost per unit. Everything that goes into each product or job: raw materials, packaging, shipping, commission, the working hours of whoever does it. - Add up the month's fixed costs. Rent, accountant, internet, software, the owner's draw, fixed salaries. Divide by the quantity you realistically sell per month: that's the share of fixed cost each unit has to carry. - Include taxes and fees. The tax of your regime (the MEI's DAS is a fixed amount; under Simples Nacional, there's a rate on revenue), card machine fees, delivery app or marketplace fees. Many people forget, and the margin evaporates. - Set the profit margin. Profit isn't what happens to be left over; it's part of the price. It pays for growth, surprises and your future. - Use the markup calculation as a starting point. A common formula: price = direct cost ÷ (1 − % variable expenses − % fixed costs − % desired profit). Sebrae has free pricing spreadsheets and calculators. - Compare with the market, afterward. If your price came out much higher, see where to cut costs or how to show value. If it came out much lower, ask yourself why others charge more. Sometimes you're forgetting a cost. - Test and review. Review the price when costs change and at least every six months. A price increase announced in advance and explained is usually well received. A warning sign: if you sell a lot and the money is never left over, redo the math before selling more. Selling more at the wrong price only increases the loss. Pricing a service has an extra detail: your hour. Work out how much you need to earn per month, divide by the hours you can actually bill (not the hours you work) and use that value as your base. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he had to put a price on things the market didn't yet know how to value. The hair-treatment course he created came before the field had found its place; today it is called trichology. Later, his natural-based cosmetics brand was born at a time when few people were betting on them. Whoever sells something new has no price list to copy. The answer, in his story, was the same as always: test close to the customer, adjust and don't stop at the first answer. The brand worked. ### The Method step Pricing is part of step 5 of the Seventh Attempt Method: count in lifetime. Include in the price the hours of your life each sale consumes. If, to make the month's numbers work, you need to work more hours than exist, the price is wrong, not you. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - How to get your first customer (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-get-your-first-customer/) - How to build a simple cash flow (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-build-a-simple-cash-flow/) - My business isn't selling: what do I do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/my-business-isnt-selling/) - The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) --- ## My business isn't selling: what do I do? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/my-business-isnt-selling/ Idioma: en Descrição: Find where the sale stalls: no one sees it, they see but don't get it, get it but don't trust you, or trust you but find it pricey. Each has its own fix. "My business isn't working" and "my business isn't selling, what do I do" are among the phrases Google autocompletes in Portuguese. The answer is almost never "do more advertising." It's finding out exactly where the sale gets stuck, because each sticking point calls for a different fix. ### The practical path - Map the customer's path. They need to (a) know you exist, (b) understand what you sell, (c) trust you, (d) feel it's worth the price and (e) be able to buy easily. At which of these stages do people stop? - If no one sees you: the problem is visibility. Create or update your free Google profile (Business Profile, formerly Google My Business), ask current customers for real reviews, show up where your customer already is, partner with neighboring businesses that serve the same audience. - If they see you but don't understand: rewrite the offer in one sentence: "I help [whom] achieve [result] without [pain]." Show real photos, a clear price and how it works. Confusion scares buyers away. - If they understand but don't trust you: show proof. Genuine reviews, photos of work done, your company registration, an address, a clear return policy. Never make up testimonials. - If they trust you but find it expensive: either you didn't show the value, or you're talking to the wrong audience, or the price really is off. Test a smaller version, a bundle, another payment option. - If they want it but can't buy: make it easy. Pix, a payment link, quick replies on WhatsApp, extended hours. A sale lost to slowness is the easiest to recover. - Talk to those who didn't buy. Ask, politely, why they didn't go ahead. Ten honest answers are worth more than a month of guesswork. - Look at the numbers. How many people arrive, how many ask, how many buy. Improve one stage at a time. Give each fix two to four weeks before judging it. Changing everything at once keeps you from knowing what worked. If, after all that, no one wants it, the problem may not be sales but the product or the market. Then the question changes: what is this "no" telling you? ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he has heard "no" from customers, partners and banks. His path shows both possible outcomes for an idea that doesn't sell right away. With artificial intelligence and augmented reality applied to a business, he pulled back, and the technology became a trend years later. With natural-based cosmetics, he heard it wouldn't work and kept adjusting, and the brand worked. What separated one case from the other wasn't luck. It was reading the kind of no he was getting. ### The Method step This is a classic case for step 2 of the Seventh Attempt Method: ask what is inside the no. "It doesn't sell" can be a market no, a timing no, a person no or an execution no. Classify it before changing everything. Most of the time, it's execution, and execution can be fixed. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - How to get your first customer (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-get-your-first-customer/) - How to price a product or service (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-price-a-product-or-service/) - How to change your business's course without giving up (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-change-your-business-course-without-giving-up/) - The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) --- ## How to build a simple cash flow — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-build-a-simple-cash-flow/ Idioma: en Descrição: Write down all money in and out, with dates, in a weekly sheet. Project the next 13 weeks and see where the balance turns negative before it happens. Cash flow is the record of the money that comes into and goes out of the business, with dates. It sounds basic, and it is. But Sebrae surveys point to a lack of financial planning and cash control as one of the main reasons micro and small businesses close. Profit on paper doesn't pay a bill; money in the account does. Cash flow shows the difference. ### The practical path - Separate the company's account from yours. Without that, no control works. If you don't have a business account yet, open one; many are free for MEIs. - Set up a sheet with four columns. Date, description, money in, money out. It can be on paper, in Excel, in Google Sheets or in Sebrae's free spreadsheet. The format matters less than the discipline. - Record everything, every day or every week. Including the coffee and the card machine fee. What escapes the record is exactly what disappears. - Record by the date the money actually moves. A card sale in three installments comes in on three different dates, not on the date of the sale. This is the most common mistake. - Project the next 13 weeks. On another tab, write what you expect to receive and pay in each of the next 13 weeks (one quarter). Add it up week by week. Wherever the projected balance goes negative, you have a problem announced in advance, and time to act. - Act before the red. Speed up collections, negotiate terms with suppliers, postpone nonessential purchases, run a promotion to move inventory. A decision made three weeks ahead costs much less than one made on the day. - Review every week. Compare the forecast with what actually happened. The difference teaches you where you're too optimistic. - Set aside three reserves. Taxes (which are no longer yours), the owner's draw and an emergency reserve for the company. Cash flow is not the same as profit. A company can make a profit on paper and run out of money, because it sold on credit and hasn't been paid yet. And it can have money in the account and be losing money, because it was paid in advance for something that will still cost. The two controls complement each other; start with cash, which is what decides whether you pay the bills on Friday. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez knows what happens when the money you were expecting doesn't arrive. After building up capital with events and digital printing, he put it into a company as an investing partner. The business was not what it seemed and didn't hold. He says he went broke there, with many people depending on him. The lesson he carries from that phase is the measure he still uses today: time. How long does the money last? How many people depend on it? The sentence that sums up his story, "every no is the ground of a yes," began to be written there, at the point where the cash ran out and he had to decide what to do with what was left. ### The Method step This is the central tool of step 5 of the Seventh Attempt Method: count in lifetime. Build the cash flow for the next 13 weeks today, divide the balance by your average spending and find out your runway in weeks. Write down your red line. Once it's on paper, you stop making decisions in a panic. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - What is working capital? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/what-is-working-capital-and-how-much-do-i-need/) - How to separate personal money from the company's (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-separate-personal-and-business-money/) - My company is in debt: what do I do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/my-company-is-in-debt-what-to-do/) - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) --- ## How to separate personal money from the company's URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-separate-personal-and-business-money/ Idioma: en Descrição: Have an account just for the company, set a fixed monthly owner's draw and never pay household bills with business money. Profit is withdrawn separately. Mixing household money with business money is one of the most common mistakes entrepreneurs make, and one of the most expensive. You stop knowing whether the company makes a profit, you lose control of taxes and, in a bad month, the business's squeeze becomes the family's squeeze, and vice versa. The search "how to separate personal money from company money" shows up among Google's suggestions in Portuguese precisely because almost everyone goes through it. ### The practical path - Open an account just for the company. With a CNPJ, open a business account. All the business's money comes in and goes out through it; nothing personal passes through there. - Set your owner's draw. The owner's draw (pró-labore) is the pay of whoever works in their own business. Choose a fixed monthly amount the company can pay even in a weak month and transfer it to your personal account on the same day every month. Over time, you adjust it. - Understand what is mandatory. In partnerships and companies under Simples Nacional, the owner's draw carries an INSS social security contribution and its own rules; the MEI pays INSS within the monthly DAS. Confirm with your accountant how it works in your regime. - Profit is something else. After paying all the bills, taxes and the owner's draw and setting aside reserves, what remains is profit, which can be distributed with an accounting record. Withdrawing "whatever's in the account" at the end of the month isn't profit: it's often next month's working capital. - No paying for the house with the company card. If it happened, record it as a withdrawal and deduct it from your owner's draw. That way the books stay true. - Create a reserve for each side. An emergency reserve for the family and another for the company. When one bails out the other without rules, both become fragile. - Review once a month. Look at the company account, the cash flow and the owner's draw. If the business grows, increase the owner's draw gradually, not your spending. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez's path has a point where business and family meet in a way that can't be separated. His first business in Brazil, a salon, was opened with his partner when their daughter was born. His story records the calculation every immigrant father makes in silence: before, a mistake cost him; now, a mistake cost someone else too. Later, in the fall that followed an investment that didn't hold, many people depended on him. When many people depend on you, separating what belongs to whom stops being an accounting formality and becomes protection. ### The Method step Separating the accounts is the foundation of step 5 of the Seventh Attempt Method: count in lifetime. Only with a clean company account can you answer how many weeks the business can hold out, and how many your household can, without one bringing down the other. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - How to build a simple cash flow (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-build-a-simple-cash-flow/) - What is working capital? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/what-is-working-capital-and-how-much-do-i-need/) - The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) --- ## My company is in debt: what do I do? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/my-company-is-in-debt-what-to-do/ Idioma: en Descrição: Stop taking on costly debt, list all you owe, prioritize taxes, wages and secured debts, negotiate in writing and fix the cause. See an accountant early. A company in debt is not yet a bankrupt company. There is a lot you can do between one and the other, as long as you act early and calmly. In June 2026, Serasa Experian recorded more than 9.1 million delinquent companies in the country, most of them micro and small businesses. The problem is common; what changes the outcome is the order of your decisions. ### The practical path - Stop digging. Don't take out a new, expensive loan to pay the old one. Revolving credit card balances, overdrafts and successive advances on receivables tend to speed up the fall. - Map the debt. For each creditor: amount, interest, due date, collateral (your personal guarantee, a company asset) and how overdue. Check the Central Bank's Registrato for bank debts and your tax status with the Federal Revenue Service and the PGFN. - Prioritize with judgment. Wages and labor charges, taxes and secured debts have more serious consequences. Essential suppliers come next, because without them the company stops. Set this order with an accountant. - Find the cause. Price below cost? Sales dropped? Payment terms too long? Fixed costs too big for your current size? Without fixing the cause, renegotiation only pushes the problem forward. - Cut and adjust quickly. Reduce fixed costs, sell idle inventory, renegotiate the rent, suspend whatever doesn't generate revenue. A 13-week cash flow shows how much time you have. - Negotiate in writing. Present the creditor with a proposal you can actually keep. For federal debts, there are PGFN settlements; renegotiation programs for small businesses open at certain times (check gov.br). - Know the legal instruments. Law 11,101/2005, reformed by Law 14,112/2020, provides for out-of-court and judicial reorganization, with a special plan for micro and small businesses (installments over up to 36 months, with interest at the Selic rate and the first installment within 180 days, under art. 71). These are serious paths, with costs and rules; assess them with a specialized lawyer before it's too late. - Protect those who depend on you. Talk honestly with your team. And take care of yourself: if the pressure turns into despair, call CVV at 188, free and 24 hours a day. This page is general guidance, not a legal or accounting opinion. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez went through the situation in which debt stopped being a number and became people. He says that, after investing in someone else's business that didn't hold, he went broke with many people depending on him. His story tells that there was a natural reaction, complaining about the partner, the system, bad luck, and that he chose another: not to complain, and to decide to learn what he didn't know. It wasn't a quick turnaround. The next attempt also went wrong. He kept going. ### The Method step Two steps of the Seventh Attempt Method apply here: step 5, count in lifetime (how many weeks of runway you have and what your red line is), and step 7, go quiet and return to the circle (20 minutes without screens before deciding, and taking stock of what this phase is teaching). Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - How to build a simple cash flow (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-build-a-simple-cash-flow/) - Can a company with bad credit get a loan? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/can-a-company-with-bad-credit-get-a-loan/) - My company went bankrupt: now what? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/my-company-went-bankrupt-now-what/) - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) --- ## When to give up on a business? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/when-to-give-up-on-a-business/ Idioma: en Descrição: Give up the format, not yourself, when no one pays after honest tests, the cash has crossed the red line you set, or your health is at stake. "When to give up on a business" and "how not to give up on a business" appear side by side in Google's suggestions. They are the same question seen from two sides, and no motivational quote answers it for you. What answers it is having criteria decided before desperation sets in. Giving up on a business isn't giving up on yourself. Sometimes it's the bravest decision, and the one that saves energy for the next attempt. ### The practical path - Separate what you can let go of. There are three levels: abandoning a format (the product, the channel, the location), abandoning the whole business, or stepping away from entrepreneurship for a while. Often the right choice is the first, not the second. - Use objective signals, not the mood of the day. Signs that it's time to stop or change a lot: - after honest tests, with real conversations with customers, no one commits to paying; - the price customers accept doesn't cover the cost, even after adjustments; - the cash has crossed the red line you set and there is no realistic way back; - debt grows every month just to keep operating; - your health, or your family's, is paying the bill. - Signs that it's worth continuing. Customers come back and refer others; revenue grows, even slowly; the problem is execution (price, channel, process), not the market; you still learn something new every month. - Ask the zero-money question. "If I hadn't invested anything so far, would I start this business today, the way it is?" If the answer is no, the money already spent shouldn't decide for you. - Talk to someone from outside. An accountant, a Sebrae consultant, an experienced entrepreneur. Those inside see little. - If you stop, stop well. Organize the closure with an accountant, honor what you can with employees and suppliers, preserve relationships. A dignified exit opens doors for the next attempt. - Take care of your mind. Ending a dream hurts like grief. If the pain turns into despair, CVV answers for free, 24 hours a day, at 188. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he gave up, and also didn't, at different moments. When he wanted to use artificial intelligence and augmented reality in a business and was told it wouldn't work, he gave up, even while believing in it. Years later, the technology became a trend. When he heard the same about natural-based cosmetics, he kept going, and it worked. After going broke, and after a project in which he was abandoned by people he had helped, he kept going. No one knows for sure how many times he tried, thought about stopping and almost gave up. He tells his own story through the attempt that worked: the seventh. And that one, the story says, carried all the others inside it. ### The Method step This decision calls for step 2 of the Seventh Attempt Method: ask what is inside the no (is it a market, timing, person or execution no?) and step 5: count in lifetime (what is your red line, decided with a cool head?). With both on paper, you decide with data, not with fatigue. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - How not to give up on starting a business (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-not-to-give-up-on-entrepreneurship/) - How to change your business's course without giving up (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-change-your-business-course-without-giving-up/) - I've tried many times and nothing worked (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/i-tried-many-times-and-nothing-worked/) - The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) --- ## How not to give up on starting a business — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-not-to-give-up-on-entrepreneurship/ Idioma: en Descrição: Persistence isn't stubbornness: keep the purpose and change the method. Short goals, small wins written down, people around you and real rest. No one gives up on a good day. The urge to drop everything shows up in the month when the customer pays late, the partner disappears, the bill comes due and the body is tired. Not giving up, at that point, isn't a matter of infinite willpower. It's having the structure to get through the bad month without making permanent decisions with a tired mind. And one distinction matters: persisting is keeping the purpose and changing the method when the data says so. Being stubborn is keeping the method against the data. ### The practical path - Go back to the why. Write in one sentence why you started and whom the business exists for. Stick it where you see it every day. In bad months, the reason holds you up more than the goal does. - Shorten the horizon. A five-year goal paralyzes when there isn't money for the rent. Work with one-week and one-month goals, small and verifiable. - Write down the small wins. The first customer who came back, the first month without a loss, the process that got done. Whoever doesn't record wins only remembers defeats. - Don't stay alone. Entrepreneur groups, mentoring, Sebrae programs, one trusted person to talk to once a week. The Endeavor and IDB Lab survey on founders' mental health pointed to financial problems, difficulty balancing work and life, and fear of failure among the biggest sources of distress. No one has to carry that in silence. - Rest on purpose. Sleeping, eating, moving and taking one day a week off isn't a luxury: it's what keeps your head able to decide. - Change what isn't working, fast. If a part of the business hasn't sold for months, change that part. Persisting in the purpose is easier when you don't have to defend what has already shown it doesn't work. - Have stopping criteria. Paradoxically, knowing at what point you would stop helps you not stop too early. If the urge to give up comes with hopelessness, weeks without sleep or thoughts that nothing makes sense, that's a health matter, not a business one. Seek help: CVV answers for free, 24 hours a day, at 188, and your city's primary health unit can refer you. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez's story, as he tells it, is made of falls: hard years after leaving his first job in Brazil, partners who pushed him out of the business, going broke with many people depending on him, a project in which he was left hanging by people he had helped. At some point along the road, he was broke, broken and beaten, but still with a flame of hope and faith. He found that strength in faith and in silence, and also in an old lesson from capoeira, his first bridge to Brazil: in the circle, the ginga never stops. Whoever stops, falls. ### The Method step This is the page for step 7 of the Seventh Attempt Method: go quiet and return to the circle. Twenty minutes without screens before any big decision. Then take stock: what has each attempt already left in your hands? The next one starts with that list. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - When to give up on a business? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/when-to-give-up-on-a-business/) - Entrepreneur burnout: signs and what to do (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/entrepreneur-burnout-signs-and-what-to-do/) - Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/) --- ## How to change your business's course without giving up URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-change-your-business-course-without-giving-up/ Idioma: en Descrição: Pivoting is keeping what works (customer, skill, asset) and swapping what doesn't (product, channel, model). Test the new route small. Changing a business's course has a name in the startup world: pivoting. It isn't giving up. It's recognizing that part of the plan doesn't work and turning on a foot that remains firm, like a basketball player on the pivot foot. Many well-known companies got where they are after changing the product, the customer or the way they charge. The challenge is knowing what to keep and what to swap, and making the swap without burning the cash you have left. ### The practical path - List what is working. It may be a type of customer who buys more, a product that sells itself, a skill on the team, a partnership, a channel that brings people in. That's your pivot foot. - List what isn't. The main product that doesn't move, the expensive location, the channel that costs more than it brings, the price that doesn't cover the cost. - Choose the kind of change. The most common: same customer, another product; same product, another customer; same product, another channel (from physical to online, from retail to businesses); same product, another way of charging (subscription, bundle, rental). - Test the new route before turning everything around. A new offer for ten customers, a test page, a 30-day pilot. Keep what makes money today while the new route proves it works. - Do the cash math. How much does the change cost and how long does it take to pay off? If your runway doesn't cover that time, the change needs to be smaller. - Communicate honestly. Customers, suppliers and your team deserve to know what's changing and why. An explained change creates allies. - Adjust your registration, if needed. A new activity may require changing your activity code (CNAE), your tax classification (the MEI has a list of permitted activities) or your license. Talk to your accountant before selling the new thing. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez's path is a sequence of changes of course that kept one foot firm. From the salon came a hair-treatment course. From hair care came a natural-based cosmetics brand. After losing a business to his partners, he went to work in events and digital printing, reinvented himself and built up capital. Years later, when, he says, the banks refused to integrate the solution he had built for agribusiness, he didn't abandon the problem. He changed route: he focused on the pieces he could build without depending on a bank's integration, such as artificial intelligence, messaging under the ISO 20022 standard, blockchain and tokenization of real-world assets. Building isn't operating with the public: for that, each front has its own rules and authorizations. His story sums it up: the banks that didn't want to integrate the idea ended up teaching him to build his own infrastructure. ### The Method step Changing course is applying step 2 of the Seventh Attempt Method: ask what is inside the no. An "execution no" doesn't ask you to abandon the purpose; it asks for another road to it. Add step 3: test the new route with the 14/20 rule before turning the whole business around. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - When to give up on a business? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/when-to-give-up-on-a-business/) - My business isn't selling: what do I do? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/my-business-isnt-selling/) - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) --- ## How to start a business without money — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-start-a-business-without-money/ Idioma: en Descrição: Start by selling what you know how to do: a service, made-to-order resale or work using someone else's setup. Use profit from the first sales to grow. Starting a business with no money at all is hard, but starting with very little is how most people begin. Google autocompletes "how to start a business" with "without money," "with little money" and "from scratch" precisely because that's the reality of the people searching. The key is to trade capital for other things you already have: skill, time, a network of contacts and the willingness to start small. This page is about opening a business that already exists in the market with little capital; if your idea is something new, that doesn't exist yet, see How to create something new without money (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-create-something-new-without-money/). ### The practical path - Start with a service, not a product. A service requires little investment: you sell what you know how to do. Cleaning, repairs, lessons, caregiving, design, organizing, consulting, cooking to order. A product requires inventory; a service requires a schedule. - Sell before you buy. Work to order and with a deposit. Show photos, take the order, buy the materials and deliver. The customer finances the inventory. - Use the setup of people who already have one. A kitchen rented by the hour, a shared space, reselling third-party products on consignment, partnering with a business that serves the same audience. - Make use of what's free. A free Google business profile, WhatsApp Business, social media, free Sebrae courses, free design and AI tools for creating promotional material. - Formalize when it makes sense. The MEI lets you have a company registration and issue invoices at a low monthly cost; registering through the Entrepreneur Portal on gov.br is free. Be wary of websites that charge to open an MEI. - Reinvest the first sales. Set a rule: for example, half the profit from the first months goes back into the business. That's how "without money" becomes "with some money." - Don't finance the start with expensive debt. Revolving credit cards and expensive personal loans turn a test into a risk for your family. - Keep a source of support income, if you can. Starting without money is usually safer alongside another source of income, until the business gets going. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he started from zero more than once. The first time was after leaving the job that brought him to Brazil and going through hard years with no network. The new start had a neighborhood address: a salon, opened with his partner when their daughter was born. From inside it, without big capital, came a hair-treatment course. The second time was after going broke, when he decided to do precisely what he didn't know how to do. And there was a third: after a phase in which he describes himself as broke, broken and beaten, he spent six months in front of a computer, without knowing how to code, building with the tools of his own time. Out of that came the foundation of the CEASA Bank platform. In all three, the initial capital was the same: time, discipline and an idea said out loud. ### The Method step Without money, the most valuable resource is knowledge. This is step 6 of the Seventh Attempt Method: learn what you don't know. Three columns: what you need to know, what you'll learn for free and what you'll do with the help of a partner or AI. One thing from the second column gets 30 days. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - What business to open with little money? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/what-business-to-open-with-little-money/) - How to start a business from scratch with no experience (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-start-a-business-from-scratch-with-no-experience/) - How to get your first customer (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-get-your-first-customer/) - Creating something new without money: idea to prototype (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-create-something-new-without-money/) - The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) --- ## How to innovate in a small business without money URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-innovate-in-a-small-business-without-money/ Idioma: en Descrição: Innovating is solving a customer's problem better, not buying costly tech. Listen to complaints, change one detail at a time, check if customers noticed. Innovation isn't a privilege of companies with laboratories. In a small business, innovating almost always means solving a customer's problem in a better, faster, cheaper or more pleasant way than others do. It often costs more attention than money. Google autocompletes "how to innovate" with things like "in a bakery" and "in a small town": that's exactly the level at which innovation happens. ### The practical path - Start with the complaint. For a month, write down everything customers complain about, in your business and at your competitors'. Each recurring complaint is an opportunity to innovate. - Look at other sectors. What does your industry not do yet that another already does? Online booking at a barbershop, a monthly subscription at a bakery, scheduled delivery at a pet food store. Copying from another sector is one of the cheapest ways to innovate in yours. - Change one detail at a time. Packaging, payment method, hours, delivery time, service, presentation. Small, measured changes are worth more than a revolution you can't sustain. - Use accessible technology. Free or cheap AI tools, Pix payments, booking tools and digital catalogs solve problems that a few years ago required expensive systems. Sebrae has free content on digital transformation. - Test with a few customers. Offer the new thing to a small group, with a deadline, and ask what they thought. If they didn't notice a difference, it wasn't an innovation for them. - Measure. More sales, more returning customers, fewer complaints, less time spent? If no number changed, adjust or drop that idea, not innovation itself. - Protect what's yours. If the innovation becomes a brand or a product of your own, register the brand at INPI before promoting it widely. A simple example: a neighborhood laundry that notices customers complain about its hours can test Saturday pickup and delivery for ten customers, for one month. Low cost, small risk, clear answer. Innovating without money has one advantage: you aren't locked into a big investment. You can make cheap mistakes, learn and try again. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he innovated in small businesses before innovating at scale. He created a hair-treatment course at a time when the field had not yet found its place; today it is called trichology. He bet on natural-based cosmetics at a time when few people were betting on them, and the brand worked. He also knows the other side: the artificial intelligence and augmented reality idea that came too early and that he abandoned. His story draws a lesson about innovation from it: being right ahead of time doesn't pay the bills, but it shows the eye is true. The secret was learning to keep the business standing while the market caught up. ### The Method step Innovating with little money is step 3 of the Seventh Attempt Method: prove it small, with the 14/20 rule. Before changing the business, talk to 20 customers in 14 days about what bothers them. The right innovation usually comes out of their mouths, not out of your spreadsheet. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - Did my idea come too early? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/did-my-idea-come-too-early/) - How to use AI in my small business? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-use-ai-in-my-small-business/) - How to start a business without money (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-start-a-business-without-money/) - The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) --- ## What business to open with little money? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/what-business-to-open-with-little-money/ Idioma: en Descrição: The best one combines three things: something you know how to do, a problem people near you pay to solve, and a low cost to test. "What business to open with 10,000 reais," "with 5,000," "with 50,000": Google completes the sentence with almost every amount. The honest answer is that there is no list of businesses that work for everyone. Ready-made lists ignore what matters most: what you know how to do, who is near you and how much you can afford to lose. The best business for little money is the one that brings those three together. ### The practical path - Make your map in three columns. In the first, what you do well (including things that seem ordinary, like cooking, organizing, fixing, teaching, caregiving). In the second, problems people around you pay to solve. In the third, how much it costs to start each idea. The business is where the three columns cross. - Prefer low fixed investment. Service businesses, made-to-order work or resale without a big inventory let you test with little. A storefront, renovations and expensive machinery increase the risk. - Look at local demand. What's missing in your neighborhood or town? Which services have waiting lists? What do people complain about in neighborhood groups? Demand close to you is cheaper to serve. - Calculate everything beforehand. Initial investment, working capital for the first months, fixed costs, price and how many sales per month you need to pay the bills. Sebrae has business ideas with investment estimates and a free business plan template. - Be wary of the "trendy business." If everyone is opening the same thing at the same time, prices tend to fall. Fads are good for those who sell equipment, not always for those who buy it. - Run from promises. Franchises and "opportunities" that promise certain revenue, quick returns or passive income call for double caution. Ask for the Franchise Disclosure Document (Law 13,966/2019) and talk to current franchisees before signing anything. - Test before spending it all. Use a small part of the money to prove there are customers. The rest stays as breathing room. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez's first business in Brazil, he says, didn't come from a list: it came from life. With his partner, when their daughter was born, he opened a salon. From inside it came a hair-treatment course, in a field that would later come to be called trichology, and then a natural-based cosmetics brand. Each step started at the size life allowed and used what he already knew to reach what he didn't know yet. He says there are no coincidences and no accidents, only purpose, dreams and execution. In choosing a first business, that translates into starting close to home. ### The Method step Before choosing, apply step 1 of the Seventh Attempt Method: say the dream out loud. Write: "I will build ___ for , because ." If the sentence won't come out, you haven't chosen a business yet, you've chosen an investment amount. Then step 3: 20 conversations in 14 days. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - How to start a business without money (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-start-a-business-without-money/) - How to validate a business idea (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-validate-a-business-idea/) - The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) --- ## How to create an app without knowing how to code URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-create-an-app-without-knowing-how-to-code/ Idioma: en Descrição: Validate first without any app. Then use no-code or AI tools for a simple prototype, and bring in a professional for security and data. You can create an app without knowing how to code, and it has become easier with no-code tools and with artificial intelligence assistants that write code from plain-language instructions. Google already completes "how to create an app" with "with AI." But the most important question comes first: do you really need an app right now? Many ideas can be tested with a form, a spreadsheet and WhatsApp, for a fraction of the effort. ### The practical path - Validate without an app. Do the service "by hand" for the first customers: an online form for orders, a spreadsheet for tracking, WhatsApp for customer service. If people use it and pay, then it's worth building. - Sketch it on paper. List the three or four essential screens and what the user does on each one. An app that tries to do everything in its first version never gets finished. - Choose how to build it. No-code tools let you assemble screens, a database and simple logic by dragging blocks. AI assistants can generate code from your description, but you need to test every part. For a prototype, both work. - Start with a web app. A website that works well on a phone is usually cheaper and faster than publishing in the app stores, and it serves for validation. - Take care of data and security from the start. If the app stores personal data, Brazil's General Data Protection Law (LGPD, Law 13,709/2018) applies: say what you collect, what for, and protect it. Payments should go through a well-known payment provider, never a homemade solution. Health and financial data require extra care. - Know when to call a professional. When the app gains users, money flowing through it or sensitive data, hire or partner with someone who codes. A security review by a specialist costs less than a data breach. - Register what's yours. Name and brand at INPI; the code can be registered as a computer program at INPI too. Agree in writing on ownership of the code with whoever develops it. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez is a direct example of this question. He says he didn't know how to code. After a phase in which he describes himself as broke, broken and beaten, he sat down in front of a computer and spent six months without leaving the house, developing, writing and learning with the tools of his own time. Out of those six months came the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness. His story records what anyone looking from outside sees in that period: not magic, but discipline. ### The Method step This is step 6 of the Seventh Attempt Method: learn what you don't know. Three columns: what the app needs to have, what you'll learn to do on your own and what you'll ask a partner or AI for. Choose one thing from the second column and give it 30 days. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - How to use AI in my small business? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-use-ai-in-my-small-business/) - How to start a business from scratch with no experience (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-start-a-business-from-scratch-with-no-experience/) - How to protect my idea (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-protect-my-business-idea/) - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) --- ## How to start a business from scratch with no experience URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-start-a-business-from-scratch-with-no-experience/ Idioma: en Descrição: Gain experience before taking risks: work or intern in the field, take free courses, start with a small version and keep a mentor close. No one is born knowing how to run a business. But lack of experience weighs: in its "Business Survival" study, Sebrae found more owners with little prior experience in the field among the companies that closed. The good news is that experience can be built, and you can build much of it before putting your money at risk. This page is for those who still have some time to prepare; if you've lost your income and need to start right away, see Starting a business with no experience when you must (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-a-business-with-no-experience-when-you-need-to/). ### The practical path - Learn the field from the inside. If you can, work for a few months in a business similar to the one you want to open, even part-time. You'll see suppliers, customers, seasonality and problems up close that no course shows. - Take the basic free courses. Sebrae offers free courses, in person and online, on business plans, finance, sales and formalization. Start with the basics of financial management: that's where beginners go wrong most. - Talk to people who already do it. Owners of businesses in the same field in another city tend to speak more openly. Ask what they would do differently if they were starting today. - Start with a small version. A service for a few customers, a market stall, a simple online shop, one order a week. Real experience comes from real selling. - Have a mentor. A more experienced entrepreneur, a consultant, a professor. One conversation a month already prevents expensive mistakes. Mentoring programs from Sebrae, business associations and universities are options. - Surround yourself with people who know what you don't. An accountant from day one. A lawyer when there's a partner or an important contract. A partner who complements your skills, with a written agreement. - Write down your mistakes. A notebook of mistakes, and of what each one taught, becomes, over time, your own experience. One special caution: be wary of expensive courses that promise to turn anyone into a successful businessperson in a few weeks. Experience can't be bought ready-made. A beginner's best teachers tend to be the customer, the accountant and the first well-analyzed mistake. Lack of experience isn't a reason not to start a business. It's a reason to start smaller and learn faster. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez built businesses in fields where he had no training. He says he came to Brazil in 2002 to work for an education company. Then he opened a salon, created a hair-treatment course, a cosmetics brand, events and digital printing businesses. Each one taught something the previous one didn't. After going broke, he made a decision that sums up this page: instead of going back to familiar ground, he decided to do something he didn't know how to do. The first attempt on that new ground went wrong. Later, without knowing how to code, he spent six months learning and building in front of the computer. In his story, lack of experience was never a reason not to start; it was a reason to learn with more discipline. ### The Method step This is the page for step 6 of the Seventh Attempt Method: learn what you don't know. Make the three columns: what you need to know, what you'll learn on your own and what you'll ask a partner for, hire out or do with the help of AI. One thing from the second column, 30 days. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - How to open a company step by step (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-open-a-company-in-brazil-step-by-step/) - How to create an app without knowing how to code (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-create-an-app-without-knowing-how-to-code/) - How to choose a business partner (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-choose-a-business-partner/) - Starting a business with no experience when you must (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-a-business-with-no-experience-when-you-need-to/) - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) --- ## How to open a company step by step — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-open-a-company-in-brazil-step-by-step/ Idioma: en Descrição: Define the activity and type (MEI, ME, LTDA or SLU), choose the tax regime with an accountant, register at the Junta or gov.br and get your licenses. "How to open a company" is one of the most frequent searches by people who want to start a business in Brazil, with variations like "MEI," "on my own," "from scratch" and "step by step." The process has become simpler in recent years, with Redesim (the national business registration network) and digital registration, but there are still decisions that change how much tax you'll pay and how well your personal assets are protected. Below is the general path; details vary by state, city and activity. ### The practical path - Define the activity. What exactly will you do? That determines the activity code (CNAE), the licenses required and whether you can be an MEI. - See whether it fits the MEI. The individual microentrepreneur (Complementary Law 128/2008) has an annual revenue limit, a closed list of permitted activities, allows up to one employee and doesn't allow partners. Registration is free on the Entrepreneur Portal, on gov.br. Be wary of websites that charge to open an MEI. - If it doesn't fit, choose the type. The most common forms are the single-member limited company (SLU), for those starting alone, and the limited liability company (LTDA), with partners. In both, as a rule, your personal assets stay separate from the company's debts, except in cases set out in law. - Choose the tax regime with an accountant. Simples Nacional, Lucro Presumido or Lucro Real. The wrong choice can be costly; an accountant simulates the scenarios for your case. - Check feasibility and the name. Through your state's Junta Comercial portal (via Redesim), check whether the activity is allowed at the address and whether the business name is available. To protect the brand, the registration is a different one: at INPI. - Register the company. Articles of association (or the SLU's incorporation document) registered at the Junta Comercial, which generates the CNPJ. Much of this is digital today. - Get your registrations and licenses. Municipal and/or state registration, an operating permit, health or environmental licenses when the activity requires them. The Economic Freedom Law (Law 13,874/2019) waived licenses for many low-risk activities; check your activity's classification. - Organize the basics for day one. A company bank account, invoice issuing, a tax calendar, a defined owner's draw. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez has opened businesses at very different stages of life, from the neighborhood salon to the companies registered in the United Kingdom. In 2026, he set up in London the two companies he runs: Xperienc Global Labs and CEASA Financial. In Brazil, he is the administrator of the company that operates the CEASA Bank brand. Between one extreme and the other, there were businesses that worked, businesses that closed and a partnership that pushed him out of his own project. The paperwork, for him, was never the hardest part. The hardest part was deciding with whom, and for what, to open each company. ### The Method step Before the CNPJ, apply step 1 of the Seventh Attempt Method: say the dream out loud. The sentence "I will build ___ for , because " helps the accountant choose the activity, the type and the regime. If there's a partner, add step 4 before signing the articles of association. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - How to start a business from scratch with no experience (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-start-a-business-from-scratch-with-no-experience/) - Can a foreigner open an MEI? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/can-a-foreigner-open-an-mei-in-brazil/) - How to separate personal money from the company's (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-separate-personal-and-business-money/) - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) --- ## Can a foreigner open an MEI in Brazil? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/can-a-foreigner-open-an-mei-in-brazil/ Idioma: en Descrição: Yes, if you live in Brazil legally, with a CPF and a residence authorization (CRNM). Registration is free on the Entrepreneur Portal. Yes. Foreigners who live in Brazil legally can be individual microentrepreneurs (MEIs). And there are more and more of them: according to Sebrae, the country reached about 106,000 foreign MEIs in June 2026, up 24% in one year. Venezuelans lead (25%), followed by Bolivians (14.5%) and Colombians (10%). For many, the MEI is the door to starting life over in the country on a formal footing. ### The practical path - Get your documents in order first. To open an MEI, a foreigner generally needs a CPF and a residence authorization in Brazil, with the National Migration Registry Card (CRNM). Requirements can change and there are specific situations (refugee status, humanitarian reception, provisional residence); confirm the current conditions on the Entrepreneur Portal or with Sebrae before you start. - Know your rights. The Migration Law (Law 13,445/2017) guarantees migrants, among other things, the right to work and access to public services on equal terms with Brazilians. If someone says "foreigners can't," ask for the legal basis. - Check whether your activity is allowed under the MEI. The MEI has a closed list of activities and an annual revenue limit. If your activity isn't on the list, the path is another type of company. - Register in the right place. Registration is free on the Entrepreneur Portal, on gov.br, with a gov.br account. Websites that charge to open an MEI are not official. - Meet your monthly and annual obligations. Pay the DAS every month and file the annual return (DASN-SIMEI). That keeps your company registration in good standing and counts toward your INSS social security contributions. - Open an account and organize your cash. With a CNPJ, open a business account. Separate business money from personal money from the start. - Use the support network. Sebrae, organizations that support migrants and refugees, the Federal Public Defender's Office and immigrant groups in your city offer free guidance, in many places in Spanish too. This page offers general guidance. Migration and registration rules change; confirm with the official source. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez is Colombian, the nationality of one in ten foreign MEIs in the country. He says he came to Brazil in 2002, with an education company, in a management position. When he decided to leave that company, he found himself without documents in hand, far from home and afraid. He lived through hard years, with no direction and no network, like so many immigrants before and after him. He often says, about that phase, that the sun is for everyone, but shade, in the heat, is for the few. The new start came small and close to home: a salon, opened with his partner when their daughter was born. ### The Method step For those building a business far from home, step 1 of the Seventh Attempt Method: say the dream out loud counts double. Bairo said, while still a boy, that he would live in Brazil. Write your sentence, "I will build ___ for , because ," and say it to three people in the community where you live now. That's how the network begins. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - How to open a company in Brazil as a foreigner (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-open-a-company-in-brazil-as-a-foreigner/) - How to start a business in another country (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-start-a-business-in-another-country/) - Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/) --- ## How to open a company in Brazil as a foreigner URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-open-a-company-in-brazil-as-a-foreigner/ Idioma: en Descrição: A foreigner can be a partner in a Brazilian company. You need a CPF; to manage it, you generally must live here. Non-residents act through a proxy. Foreigners can open companies in Brazil, as partners or as sole owners. Google's suggestions show the most common doubts: "can a foreigner open a company in Brazil," "on a temporary visa," "non-resident," "with a CPF." The answer depends mainly on two things: whether you live in Brazil, and whether you will manage the company or only hold a stake in it. ### The practical path - Get a CPF. Every individual partner needs a CPF, and foreigners can obtain it from the Federal Revenue Service or, abroad, at Brazilian consulates. - Understand the difference between partner and manager. Being a partner (owning quotas) is different from managing (signing for the company day to day). The business registration rules of the DREI (the federal department that oversees commercial registries) generally require the manager to reside in Brazil, with a residence authorization. A non-resident can be a partner and appoint a proxy who lives in the country, with powers to receive service of process. - Choose the type of company. If your business fits the MEI and you live in Brazil, it's the simplest path. Otherwise, the most common formats are the single-member limited company (SLU) and the limited liability company (LTDA). Specific activities may have restrictions on foreign capital (some regulated areas, for example); check yours. - Hire an accountant who has served foreigners before. They handle registration at the Junta Comercial via Redesim, the CNPJ, the registrations and the tax regime. Foreign documents may need a Hague apostille and a sworn translation. - Register foreign capital, if any. Money brought from abroad into the company must be declared to the Central Bank under the foreign capital rules in force. Your accountant or bank will advise you. - Open a bank account. Banks ask for documents from all partners and the manager. Be ready for stricter onboarding requirements. - Keep your migration status up to date. A company in good standing doesn't replace a valid migration document. Some residence authorizations are tied to investment or work; read the conditions of yours. This page is general guidance. Always work with an accountant and, in cases of foreign investment, a lawyer. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, a Colombian in Brazil since 2002, knows both ends: that of the immigrant who lost his footing and that of the businessman with registered companies. He says that, when he left the education company that brought him to the country, he found himself without documents in hand, without a network and afraid. It took him years to get back on his feet. Today, he is the administrator of the Brazilian company that operates the CEASA Bank brand and director of two companies registered in the United Kingdom in 2026. Between one end and the other, there was a salon, a course, a cosmetics brand and many attempts. The immigrant who lost his footing learned, as his story puts it, to walk in the sun of many countries. ### The Method step For a foreigner, step 6 of the Seventh Attempt Method: learn what you don't know starts with the rules of the new country. Three columns: what you need to know (documents, taxes, registration), what you'll learn on your own and what you'll ask an accountant or lawyer for. No one is obliged to know everything alone in a new country. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - Can a foreigner open an MEI in Brazil? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/can-a-foreigner-open-an-mei-in-brazil/) - How to open a company step by step (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-open-a-company-in-brazil-step-by-step/) - The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) --- ## Starting a business in another country: where to begin URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-start-a-business-in-another-country/ Idioma: en Descrição: First get a visa that lets you run a business, then study the local market, open the company with a local accountant and start with a community you know. Google completes "how to open a company" in Portuguese with Portugal, the United States, Paraguay, Spain and Uruguay, and "emprender siendo extranjero" is a common search in Spanish. Starting a business outside your home country is possible, but there is an order that, if reversed, costs dearly: first the right to be and work in the country, then the business. ### The practical path - Start with immigration, not the company. Opening a company in a country doesn't always give you the right to live or work there. Many countries have specific visas for entrepreneurs, investors or self-employed workers, each with its own requirements. Get informed on the government's official website and at the consulate, and be wary of middlemen who promise a guaranteed visa. - Study the local market. What works in Brazil or Colombia may not work in Lisbon or Miami. Talk to potential customers in the country before investing: prices, habits, competition and sales channels change. - Start with the community you know. Many immigrants begin by serving their own community (food, services, retail) and then expand. It's a way in with fewer barriers of language and trust. - Hire a local accountant and, if needed, a local lawyer. Tax, registration and labor rules vary a lot. A tax mistake in a foreign country can also affect your migration status. - Watch out for double taxation. If you keep income or a company in your home country, check whether there is an agreement to avoid double taxation and how to declare your tax departure. In Brazil, anyone who moves abroad should consider filing the definitive-departure statement with the Federal Revenue Service. - Have more runway than you would at home. Opening an account, renting, getting credit and winning the first customers usually take longer for newcomers. Plan your cash with room to spare. - Build a local network. Chambers of commerce, associations of immigrant entrepreneurs, municipal support programs. A network is what newcomers lack most. And don't underestimate language and business culture. Even in countries that speak your language, the way people negotiate, charge and close deals changes. Learning it from people who already live there saves months. This page offers general guidance and doesn't replace consulting the immigration authorities and local professionals. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez has built businesses far from home his whole life. A Colombian, he arrived in Brazil in 2002 and here he built businesses, lost businesses and started over. Later, according to him, he also built ventures in Portugal, the United States, London, Hong Kong, Bolivia and Dubai. In London, there is a public record: two companies incorporated in 2026 at Companies House, of which he is director. His story sums up that road in one image: the immigrant who had known the shade learned to walk in the sun of many countries. And it records the other side too: a beautiful map doesn't mean an easy road. ### The Method step Before starting a business in another country, apply step 3 of the Seventh Attempt Method: prove it small, with the 14/20 rule. Twenty conversations in 14 days with people in the destination country, ideally by video before you move. If no one there commits to anything, the plan needs to change before you buy the ticket. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - How to open a company in Brazil as a foreigner (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-open-a-company-in-brazil-as-a-foreigner/) - Can a foreigner open an MEI in Brazil? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/can-a-foreigner-open-an-mei-in-brazil/) - The coin and the road (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-coin-and-the-road/) - Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/) --- ## Entrepreneur burnout: signs and what to do — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/entrepreneur-burnout-signs-and-what-to-do/ Idioma: en Descrição: Exhaustion that rest doesn't fix, cynicism and falling performance are signs. See a health professional and reduce the load. In Brazil, CVV: 188. Burnout isn't the tiredness of one hard week. The World Health Organization describes the syndrome, in ICD-11, as the result of chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, with three main signs: exhaustion, distance or cynicism toward work, and reduced effectiveness. Entrepreneurs are especially exposed. In a survey by Endeavor Brazil with IDB Lab, of 118 high-impact entrepreneurs, more than 94% reported at least one mental health condition, with anxiety at the top and burnout cited by 37%. If you recognized yourself, this isn't weakness. It's a sign that the load has gone beyond what a body can bear. ### The practical path - Recognize the signs. Waking up tired even after sleeping; irritation with customers and your team; the feeling that nothing you do matters; trouble concentrating; aches and sleep problems; using alcohol or other substances to "switch off." - See a health professional. A doctor, a psychologist or your city's primary health unit, which can refer you to mental health care through SUS, including at psychosocial care centers (CAPS). Burnout can be treated, and the sooner, the better. - If there is despair, ask for help now. CVV answers for free, 24 hours a day, by phone at 188 and by chat at cvv.org.br. In an emergency, call 192 (SAMU). - Really reduce the load. List what only you can do and what can be delegated, outsourced, automated or simply set aside for a while. Many of a founder's tasks survive out of habit, not necessity. - Share the decisions. A partner, an adviser, a mentor, an accountant you review the numbers with. Deciding everything alone, all the time, is one of the biggest sources of wear. - Protect the basics. Sleep, food, movement, one day of rest a week without the work phone. It seems obvious; it's the first thing to be sacrificed. - Look at the financial cause. In the same Endeavor survey, the company's financial problems were the most cited cause of distress. A clear cash flow and an honest conversation with creditors bring more relief than you'd think. This page is informational and doesn't replace an assessment by a health professional. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez's story has a point at which he describes himself as broke, broken and beaten, but still with a flame of hope and faith. Before that, he says, came going broke with many people depending on him, and being abandoned by people he had helped. He says he found strength in faith and in silence. For him, the symbol of that silence is the 1420 MHz frequency, the hydrogen line, the band countries agreed not to use so that the universe can be heard. It's his experience, not a prescription: each person needs to find, with help, their own way back. ### The Method step This is the page for step 7 of the Seventh Attempt Method: go quiet and return to the circle. Silence comes before the circle. Twenty minutes a day without screens or conversation, and no big decision made at the peak of exhaustion. Returning to the circle comes later, when your body allows it. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - Entrepreneur loneliness: how to cope (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/entrepreneur-loneliness-how-to-cope/) - How not to give up on starting a business (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-not-to-give-up-on-entrepreneurship/) - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) --- ## Entrepreneur loneliness: how to cope — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/entrepreneur-loneliness-how-to-cope/ Idioma: en Descrição: Almost every founder feels they carry it all alone. Build a network of peers, have an outsider to decide with and tell the truth to those close to you. Entrepreneurs are often told they are "the boss," "the owner," "the strong one." On the inside, it feels different: the hard decisions have no one to be shared with, the family worries, the team expects answers, friends don't understand why you never rest. Founder loneliness is so common that "entrepreneur loneliness" has become a topic of discussion in entrepreneur forums. It isn't a sign that you're doing something wrong. But, if ignored, it feeds anxiety, bad decisions and exhaustion. ### The practical path - Find peers. Other entrepreneurs understand what you're living without needing an explanation. Sebrae groups, business associations, industry groups, communities of entrepreneurs in your field or your city. One meeting a month already changes the feeling of isolation. - Have an advisory board, even an informal one. Two or three trusted people from outside with whom you discuss important decisions once a month: an accountant, an older businessperson, a mentor. - Tell the truth at home. Hiding from your family that the business is struggling increases the weight and the distance. Telling the truth, calmly, often brings support where you expected criticism. - Share what can be shared. A partner with a clear agreement, a trusted person on the team with real autonomy, an outsourced professional for the areas you don't master. - Keep bonds outside work. Friendships, faith, sport, art, community. An identity reduced to the business becomes fragile when the business wobbles. - Seek professional help. Therapy isn't only for crises. In the Endeavor Brazil and IDB Lab survey on entrepreneurs' mental health, 54.2% had sought a psychologist in the hard moments of the past year, and 26.3% had sought no specialized support at all. If loneliness turns into hopelessness, CVV answers for free, 24 hours a day, at 188. Loneliness isn't solved with more work. It's solved with more connection, one bond at a time. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he has known founder loneliness in several forms. That of the immigrant left without a network after leaving the company that brought him to Brazil. That of someone who arrived too early with an idea; his story records the sentence: arriving too early also means arriving alone. That of someone left hanging by people he had helped. And that of six months in front of a computer, without leaving the house, building the foundation of what was to come. In a Christian congregation, he says, he heard accounts and testimonies from ordinary people who had crossed through the impossible. And, after the six months alone, he stopped being alone: he joined forces with three old acquaintances to carry on and elevate together what he had started. For someone who has been left hanging, his story says, the word "together" is no small detail. ### The Method step Against loneliness, step 4 of the Seventh Attempt Method: choose whom you build with doesn't apply only to partners. It applies to advisers, peers and friends. Write down the names of three people with whom you could share a difficult decision this month, and set up the conversation. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - Entrepreneur burnout: signs and what to do (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/entrepreneur-burnout-signs-and-what-to-do/) - How to choose a business partner (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-choose-a-business-partner/) - The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) --- ## How to find an investor for my company — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-find-an-investor-for-my-company/ Idioma: en Descrição: First, prove traction with customers. Then seek the right investor for your stage (angel, accelerator, fund, regulated crowdfunding) through referrals. Investors don't finance ideas: they finance evidence that the idea is turning into a business, and the people capable of carrying it forward. And most small businesses will never need an investor; credit, reinvestment and customers are usually better paths. But if your business can grow fast and needs capital to do it, understanding how investment works in Brazil saves you from knocking on many wrong doors. To get a sense of scale: according to Anjos do Brasil's annual survey, angel investment in the country totaled R$919 million in 2025, from about 8,000 investors. It's contested money. ### The practical path - Ask whether you really need it. Investment means sharing the company, the decisions and the future. If the business grows well on its own cash or with cheap credit, you may not need it. - Gather evidence before you look. Paying customers, recurring revenue, month-over-month growth, customer return rate. For very early businesses, at least a prototype and documented conversations with customers. - Know the types of investor by stage. Angel investors (individuals, at the start; Complementary Law 155/2016 and the Startup Legal Framework, Complementary Law 182/2021, set rules for these contributions), accelerators, venture capital funds (for those who already have traction), and equity crowdfunding platforms regulated by the CVM (CVM Resolution 88/2022). Each one looks for something different. - Come through a referral. Investors receive many pitches. An introduction made by someone they know has a much better chance of being read. Events, acceleration programs and angel networks help build that bridge. - Get your house in order. A formalized company, up-to-date accounting, clear articles of association and partners' agreement, registered ownership of the brand and the code. A serious investor carries out an audit (due diligence). - Understand what you'll sign. Equity, company valuation, investor rights, exit rules. Take everything to a lawyer experienced in investment before signing. - Be careful on the other side. If someone offers "investment" while asking for upfront fees, be suspicious. And never offer the public shares, tokens or stakes promising returns without the CVM's authorizations: that can be an irregular offering. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he has been on both sides of the table. With the capital he built up in events and digital printing, he joined someone else's company as an investing partner. The business was not what it seemed and didn't hold. He learned, the most expensive way, why a serious investor looks at the numbers before putting in money. On the other side, he heard many nos, including from the banks that refused to integrate the solution he built for agribusiness. He often says that those who invest look at the person, the story and the path: someone who fell, got up, decided, took risks and is willing to give their own lifetime to what they are building. ### The Method step Before looking for an investor, apply step 3 of the Seventh Attempt Method: prove it small, with the 14/20 rule. The 20 conversations in 14 days, documented, are the first evidence any investor will want to see. Add step 4: an investor is also a partner, and is chosen with the same care. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - How to make a business pitch (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-make-a-convincing-business-pitch/) - How to choose a business partner (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-choose-a-business-partner/) - How to get money to start a business? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-get-money-to-start-a-business/) - Fifty-five years later (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/) --- ## How to make a business pitch that convinces — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-make-a-convincing-business-pitch/ Idioma: en Descrição: In a few minutes: the problem, for whom, your solution, proof it works, how it makes money, who the team is and what you're asking for. No promises. A pitch is a short presentation of your business to someone who can say yes: an investor, a big customer, a partner, a panel of judges. "Business pitch," "pitch deck" and "elevator pitch" are among the searches Google completes most. There's no perfect pitch, but there is an order that helps the listener understand quickly and trust. ### The practical path - Start with the problem. One concrete sentence, ideally with a real person in it: "Every week, producers lose part of their harvest because...". The listener needs to feel the pain before hearing the solution. - Say who it's for. Who has the problem, how many there are, how much they spend today to solve it. Numbers with a source are worth more than big numbers. - Show the solution in one sentence. "We do X for Y, without Z." Then a demonstration, a photo, a case. - Present the proof. Paying customers, growth, genuine testimonials used with permission, letters of intent, pilot results. Evidence knocks down objections better than enthusiasm. - Explain how it makes money. Who pays, how much, how often, how much it costs to win and serve each customer. - Introduce the team. Why you are the right people to solve this problem. Track record counts, including the failures that taught something. - Make a clear ask. How much you need, what for, and what changes with that money or partnership in 12 to 18 months. - Cut the promises. A projection is a projection: present it as a scenario, with assumptions. No "sure returns" or "it can't go wrong"; that drives serious investors away and can be illegal in a public offering. - Practice out loud and in versions. One of 1 minute, one of 3 and one of 10. Rehearsing with outsiders who don't know the business reveals where the story gets lost. For the written material (the pitch deck), ten to twelve slides are usually enough, one for each point above. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez has presented ideas to people who said no. When he built the foundation of the CEASA Bank platform, he went looking for answers and connections and heard, he says, once again, that it wasn't possible; the banks refused to integrate the solution. Before that, he had been told that the AI and augmented reality idea, and then the natural-based cosmetics one, wouldn't work. He has never turned his story into a résumé of victories. On the contrary: he often says that those who invest want to invest in the person, the story and the path, in someone who went broke, got up, invested, decided and took risks. In a pitch, that means not hiding the falls. It means showing what each one taught. ### The Method step Every pitch is born from step 1 of the Seventh Attempt Method: say the dream out loud. The sentence "I will build ___ for , because " is the skeleton of your first minute. Then use step 2: write down the first objection of each person who hears the pitch and classify the no. That's how the presentation improves. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - How to find an investor for my company (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-find-an-investor-for-my-company/) - No one believes in my idea: now what? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/no-one-believes-in-my-idea/) - Fifty-five years later (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/) --- ## How to restart a business after going broke — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-restart-a-business-after-going-broke/ Idioma: en Descrição: Close what ended properly, take stock of the lessons, restart smaller with better partners and contracts. The law offers a fresh start after bankruptcy. Starting over after going broke has two parts: the practical one (debts, credit record, documents) and the other one, which weighs more (shame, fear, trust). Both are better resolved in the right order: first close what ended with dignity, then learn from it, only then open again. Whoever skips steps tends to repeat the same mistakes with new money. ### The practical path - Close what ended, properly. With an accountant, organize the closure or suspension of the old company, the debts and the situation with employees. Open issues follow the next business around. - Know what the law provides. The reform of the Bankruptcy Law (Law 14,112/2020, which amended Law 11,101/2005) created a faster path to a fresh start: a bankrupt debtor's obligations can be extinguished, among other cases, once three years have passed since bankruptcy was declared, or when, after all assets have been sold, more than 25% of the unsecured debts have been paid (Law 11,101/2005, art. 158, II and V). Until that extinction, the bankrupt debtor is barred from running a business (art. 102). A lawyer will tell you whether and how this applies to your case. - Take stock of the causes. Why did it go under? Price, cash, a partner, the market, timing, management? Write it down honestly, without sparing yourself and without condemning yourself. That document is worth more than any course. - Take stock of what remained. Skills, customers who trust you, suppliers you were fair with, knowledge of the industry. That's capital, even without money. - Start again smaller. One service, one product, one customer. Lower fixed costs, no expensive debt, planned runway. Size comes back later. - Choose better with whom. If the problem involved partners or associates, the next business starts with a written agreement. - Take care of your mind. Shame and fear are normal and pass faster when shared. If the pain turns into despair, CVV answers for free, 24 hours a day, at 188. This page is general guidance, not a legal opinion. Without money for a lawyer, go to the Public Defender's Office or a law school's legal aid clinic. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he has started over more times than he can count. After losing the business to his partners, he went to work in events and digital printing. After going broke following an investment that didn't hold, with many people depending on him, he decided to do something he didn't know how to do. The next attempt went wrong: the very people he had helped left him hanging. He kept going. His story takes an inventory that serves as an example: the course left method; the idea that came too early left an eye for the future; the cosmetics left proof that he could create from nothing; the partners left the lesson about whom to build with; going broke left the courage to do what he didn't know how to do. The seventh attempt, he says, carried all the others inside it. ### The Method step This is the page for step 7 of the Seventh Attempt Method: go quiet and return to the circle. Twenty minutes without screens, just paper. Then, for every attempt you've made, write down what it left. Your next attempt begins with that list in hand. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - Can I open another company with a bad credit record? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/can-i-open-another-company-with-bad-credit/) - What to do when you've gone broke? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/what-to-do-when-you-have-gone-broke/) - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) - The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) --- ## Can I open another company with a bad credit record? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/can-i-open-another-company-with-bad-credit/ Idioma: en Descrição: Generally yes: a bad credit record doesn't stop you opening a company. A bankrupt not yet discharged and certain convictions can. Credit gets harder. "Can I open a company with a bad credit record" and "can I open a microbusiness with bad credit" appear among Google's suggestions in Portuguese for people who want to start over. The general answer is yes: having your CPF flagged at credit bureaus does not, by itself, prevent you from opening a company or an MEI. But there are important exceptions, and practical consequences you need to know first. ### The practical path - Separate "bad credit" from "bankruptcy." A bad credit record is a debt registered at credit bureaus (Serasa, SPC, Boa Vista). Bankruptcy is a court process. Under Law 11,101/2005 (art. 102), a bankrupt debtor is barred from running a business from the moment bankruptcy is declared until the ruling that extinguishes their obligations. If you had bankruptcy declared, talk to a lawyer about rehabilitation before opening another company. - Check for other impediments. The Civil Code (art. 1,011, §1) bars people convicted of certain crimes from managing a company while the effects of the conviction last. Some professions and regimes have their own rules; civil servants, for example, have restrictions on managing companies. - Sort out issues with the Federal Revenue Service. A CPF with irregular status at the Federal Revenue Service, or a previous MEI with outstanding issues, can get in the way of registration. Check your CPF status and fix what needs fixing. - Know what gets harder. With a bad credit record, opening a business account at some banks, getting a card machine, credit and payment terms with suppliers can be harder. Plan to start with less dependence on credit. - Don't use a front. Opening a company in someone else's name to escape debts or impediments can amount to fraud against creditors and expose both you and the person who lent their name to serious liability. - Negotiate the old debts in parallel. Clearing your name improves the new business's terms. Use official channels: the creditor itself, renegotiation drives, consumidor.gov.br and federal renegotiation programs when they're open (check gov.br). - Separate the accounts from day one. The new business's money shouldn't be used to pay old personal debts without records and planning. An accountant can help organize it. This page is general guidance, not a legal opinion. ### How Bairo went through it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he went broke more than once and opened businesses again after each fall. After losing the business to his partners, he went to work in events and digital printing. After going broke again, with many people depending on him, he decided to build something he didn't know how to do. What he takes from those phases is that a fresh start doesn't depend only on paperwork. It depends on deciding not to spend your energy looking for someone to blame and using it to learn instead. Today, he is director of two companies registered in the United Kingdom in 2026 and administrator of the Brazilian company that operates the CEASA Bank brand. ### The Method step Before opening the new company, apply step 7 of the Seventh Attempt Method: go quiet and return to the circle. Taking stock of what each attempt left shows what to change in the next. Add step 5: with a bad credit record, count your runway in weeks and start without depending on credit. Discover the Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) ### Read also - How to restart a business after going broke (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-restart-a-business-after-going-broke/) - Can a company with bad credit get a loan? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/can-a-company-with-bad-credit-get-a-loan/) - How to get out of debt? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-get-out-of-debt/) - The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) --- ## Visionaries and the dates that changed everything URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/ Idioma: en Descrição: Disney, Ford, Jobs, Senna and others who heard "it can't be done" and kept going, and the dates that changed everything. ### Visionaries - Walt Disney: the dream he saw before it existed (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/walt-disney-the-dream-he-saw/): A studio closed, a character lost, banks that turned down the park. Walt Disney kept going, and the story goes he saw Walt Disney World before it existed. - Henry Ford: two closed companies and the impossible engine (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/henry-ford-and-the-impossible-engine/): Before Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford saw two companies close. Later, according to Napoleon Hill, he was told the one-piece V8 block was impossible. - Steve Jobs: pushed out of the company he founded (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/steve-jobs-pushed-out-of-his-own-company/): In 1985, Steve Jobs left Apple, the company he had founded. Twenty years later, he said it was the best thing that could have happened to him. - Ayrton Senna: the limit a little higher (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/ayrton-senna-and-the-limit-a-little-higher/): A modest car at Monaco, a race stopped early, an engine that stalled at the title start. Ayrton Senna and what he said, with sources, about limits. - Thomas Edison and the thousands of things that won't work (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/thomas-edison-and-the-thousands-of-attempts/): The "10,000 ways that won't work" line isn't quite Edison's. What he said, according to a colleague, is even better. And the light bulb has a date. - The Wright brothers and the ten-million-year forecast (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/the-wright-brothers-and-the-ten-million-years/): In October 1903, a newspaper predicted the airplane could take up to 10 million years. Sixty-nine days later, the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk. - Santos-Dumont: from the airship on the roof to the 14-Bis (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/santos-dumont-and-the-14-bis/): In 1901, Santos-Dumont's airship got stuck on the roof of a Paris hotel. Five years later, the 14-Bis took off before the public at Bagatelle. - Colonel Sanders: the road that took his customers away (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/colonel-sanders-started-over-at-65/): A new highway diverted traffic from Colonel Sanders's restaurant. At 65, he sold the place at auction and started over with a recipe. - J.K. Rowling: rock bottom became the foundation (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/jk-rowling-and-rock-bottom/): Unemployed, a single mother and with a book turned down by publishers, J.K. Rowling said at Harvard that rock bottom became the foundation of her life. - Soichiro Honda: rejected rings and a factory in ruins (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/soichiro-honda-and-the-destroyed-factory/): Toyota rejected Soichiro Honda's first parts. Then a bomb and an earthquake brought down his factories. He sold what was left and started over. - Abraham Lincoln: the real defeats, without the viral list (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/abraham-lincoln-and-the-real-defeats/): The viral list of Lincoln's failures exaggerates. The real defeats happened: 1832, the store that closed, the Senate races of 1855 and 1858. - Oprah Winfrey: taken off the news, she changed course (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/oprah-winfrey-taken-off-the-news-desk/): In 1977, Oprah Winfrey was taken off the evening news desk in Baltimore. At Harvard, she said failure is just life trying to move us in another direction. - Nelson Mandela: 27 years and the line he didn't say (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/nelson-mandela-and-the-27-years/): Mandela spent 27 years in prison and came out to govern. "It always seems impossible until it's done" has no record from him. What he wrote does. - Marie Curie and the Academy that said no (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/marie-curie-and-the-academy-that-said-no/): Almost left out of the 1903 Nobel and turned down by the French Academy of Sciences in 1911, Marie Curie won her second Nobel that same year. - Grace Hopper and the compiler nobody wanted to use (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/grace-hopper-and-the-compiler-nobody-wanted/): Grace Hopper had a working compiler and nobody would touch it: they said computers only did arithmetic. Today every program is born from that idea. - Alan Turing and the question \"can machines think?\" (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/alan-turing-and-the-question-of-machines/): Alan Turing helped win a war, asked the question that opened up artificial intelligence and was convicted by his own country. The pardon came in 2013. - Nikola Tesla and the tower that was never finished (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/nikola-tesla-and-the-unfinished-tower/): Tesla changed the world's electricity and saw his biggest project, the Wardenclyffe tower, halted for lack of money. Today the site is a museum. - Elon Musk and the three rockets that failed (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/elon-musk-and-the-three-rockets-that-failed/): Between 2006 and 2008, SpaceX's first three Falcon 1 rockets failed and the company nearly went under. The fourth reached orbit on September 28, 2008. - Jeff Bezos: \"Amazon.bomb\" and the years of losses (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/jeff-bezos-and-the-years-of-losses/): In 1999, a magazine called Amazon "Amazon.bomb". The company only closed a full year in the black in 2003. And Bezos always spoke openly about failures. - Jack Ma: two failed exams, jobs denied and an apartment (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/jack-ma-and-the-rejections/): Jack Ma failed China's college entrance exam twice and, by his account, was turned down by KFC and Harvard. In 1999, he founded Alibaba in an apartment. - Sam Walton: the store he built and lost (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/sam-walton-and-the-store-he-lost/): In 1950, the landlord refused to renew the lease and took the store Sam Walton had grown. He started over in a smaller town and created Walmart. - Akio Morita: a rice cooker and a Walkman that won't record (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/akio-morita-and-the-walkman-that-couldnt-record/): Sony's first product was a rice cooker that didn't work. Decades later, Akio Morita launched a tape player that couldn't record, and heard doubts. - Silvio Santos: from street vendor to the near-collapse (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/silvio-santos-from-street-vendor-to-broadcaster/): Son of immigrants, a street vendor at 14, Silvio Santos built a group. In 2010, he pledged all his assets to cover the Panamericano crisis. - Carolina Maria de Jesus and Quarto de Despejo (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/carolina-maria-de-jesus-and-child-of-the-dark/): A paper picker in the Canindé favela, Carolina wrote in notebooks found in the trash. Her diary became Quarto de Despejo, translated into 13+ languages. - García Márquez and the manuscript sent in halves (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/gabriel-garcia-marquez-and-the-half-manuscript/): An editor told García Márquez to change professions. Years later, out of money, he could only afford to mail half of One Hundred Years of Solitude. - Garrincha: the crooked legs football turned down (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/garrincha-and-the-legs-that-said-no/): Clubs turned Garrincha down for his crooked legs. In 1953, at a Botafogo practice, he dribbled past Nilton Santos. Then he won two World Cups. - Mestre Bimba and the capoeira that was forbidden (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/mestre-bimba-and-the-forbidden-capoeira/): Capoeira was a crime under the 1890 Penal Code. Mestre Bimba created the Regional style, opened a school in Salvador and, in 1937, got it licensed. - Frank Drake and the silence of 1420 MHz (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/frank-drake-and-the-silence-of-1420-mhz/): In 1960, Frank Drake pointed a radio telescope at two stars and listened to the hydrogen frequency. He heard silence, and even so he opened a path. ### Dates that changed everything - October 1: the day of dreams seen first (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/october-1-the-day-of-dreams-seen-first/): On October 1, 1971, Walt Disney World opened, almost five years after Walt's death. In 2026, Bairo marked on that date the start of what he built. - October 5: Steve Jobs and lifetime (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/october-5-steve-jobs-and-lifetime/): Steve Jobs died on October 5, 2011. He spoke of death as life's best invention and had already measured computer seconds in human lives. - October 30: the engine stalled and Senna became champion (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/october-30-senna-and-the-first-title/): On October 30, 1988, at Suzuka, Senna's engine stalled at the start. He dropped to 14th, won the race and clinched his first world title. - July 17: Disneyland and Black Sunday (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/july-17-disneyland-and-black-sunday/): On July 17, 1955, Disneyland opened on a day so full of problems it became known as Black Sunday. Walt fixed everything and carried on. - December 17: the 12-second flight at Kitty Hawk (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/december-17-the-wright-brothers-fly/): On December 17, 1903, the Wright brothers flew for 12 seconds at Kitty Hawk, 69 days after a newspaper predicted it could take up to 10 million years. - October 23: the 14-Bis and Aviator's Day (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/october-23-the-14-bis-and-aviators-day/): On October 23, 1906, Santos-Dumont made the 14-Bis take off under its own power in Paris, before the public. In Brazil, the date is Aviator's Day. - November 18: Mickey was born from a loss (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/november-18-mickey-was-born-from-a-loss/): On November 18, 1928, Steamboat Willie premiered, the cartoon that introduced Mickey to the public. The mouse was born after Walt Disney lost Oswald. - March 25: the day hydrogen was heard (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/march-25-the-day-hydrogen-was-heard/): On March 25, 1951, Harold Ewen and Edward Purcell detected at Harvard the hydrogen line, 1420 MHz, predicted on paper seven years earlier. - April 15: the hydrogen line predicted on paper (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/april-15-the-hydrogen-line-predicted-on-paper/): On April 15, 1944, mid-war, the Dutchman Van de Hulst presented in Leiden the calculation predicting hydrogen's 21 cm signal, at 1420 MHz. - October 16: World Food Day (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/october-16-world-food-day/): October 16 marks the founding of FAO, in 1945, and is World Food Day. Why the date matters and how it connects to Instituto CEASA. - April 8: Project Ozma listens to the stars (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/april-8-project-ozma-listens-to-the-stars/): On April 8, 1960, Frank Drake pointed an antenna at Tau Ceti and listened to the hydrogen frequency in search of another civilization. He heard silence. - June 3: Landell de Moura and the wireless voice (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/june-3-landell-de-moura-and-the-wireless-voice/): On June 3, 1900, in Sao Paulo, the priest Roberto Landell de Moura gave a public demonstration of the human voice sent without wires, by radio waves. --- ## The pattern of those who change the world — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-pattern-of-visionaries/ Idioma: en Descrição: Twelve traits research finds in people who built something big, the visionaries who lived them, and where they show up in Bairo's story. The people who built the things we now use without thinking, the car, the personal computer, the message that arrives in a second, heard "no" before they heard "yes." That part almost never shows up in the success photo. But it has a shape, and research on entrepreneurs has managed to describe much of it. This page brings together twelve traits that studies often find in people who built companies that changed people's lives. For each one, there is what the research says, with its source; a well-known visionary who lived it, with a fact that can be checked; and the moment in the life of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez where the same trait appears. It is not a list meant to prove anything. It is a mirror. The traits raise someone's chances of building something big and guarantee nothing to anyone. Knowing that does not diminish the story: it makes clear that what counts is the choice to keep going. ### 1. Starting from zero The research. On the 2024 Forbes 400 list, 67% of the richest people in the United States are classified as self-made, people who built their own fortune rather than inheriting it. Only 25 scored the top mark on the magazine's scale, reserved for those who lived below the poverty line or faced heavy adversity (Forbes (https://www.forbes.com/sites/gigizamora/2024/10/01/the-2024-forbes-400-self-made-billionaire-score-from-bootstrappers-to-silver-spooners/)). Who lived it. Jan Koum came to the United States as a teenager and at one point stood in line for food stamps. In 2014, he signed the sale of WhatsApp at the door of the former welfare office where he had stood in that line (Forbes (https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/02/19/exclusive-inside-story-how-jan-koum-built-whatsapp-into-facebooks-new-19-billion-baby/)). In Bairo. He arrived in Brazil in 2002 and, on leaving the company that brought him, lost his footing, without documents in hand and afraid. He started over from zero, with his partner, opening a salon when their daughter was born. Read more (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/traits-of-billionaires-starting-from-zero/) ### 2. Persistence with passion The research. Angela Duckworth called grit the combination of perseverance and passion for long-term goals. In six studies, this trait predicted achievement beyond what IQ and conscientiousness explained (Duckworth et al., 2007 (https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.92.6.1087)). Who lived it. James Dyson took five years and 5,127 prototypes to arrive at the cyclonic vacuum cleaner that gave his company its name (Gizmodo (https://gizmodo.com/praising-failure-james-dyson-talks-vacuums-5-127-proto-5790556)). In Bairo. No one knows how many times he tried, thought about stopping and almost gave up. The number he chose to tell the story is seven: the seventh attempt was the one that worked. Read more (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/what-successful-entrepreneurs-have-in-common/) ### 3. Crossing borders The research. A study by the National Foundation for American Policy counted 319 companies worth US$1 billion or more, out of 582 American startups, with at least one immigrant founder: 55% (NFAP, 2022 (https://nfap.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/2022-BILLION-DOLLAR-STARTUPS.NFAP-Policy-Brief.2022.pdf)). Who lived it. Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, left the Soviet Union with his family in 1979, at age six (The Immigrant Learning Center (https://www.ilctr.org/about-immigrants/immigrant-entrepreneurs/hall-of-fame/sergey-brin/)). In Bairo. Born in Colombia in 1982, he said from boyhood that he would live in Brazil. Capoeira was the bridge. Read more (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/why-immigrants-start-more-businesses/) ### 4. Falling before it works The research. Among venture-backed founders, those who had already failed in a previous business had a 22% chance of success in the next one; first-time founders, 21% (Gompers et al. (https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/economists/kovner/performance_persistence.pdf)). Past failure did not take anyone out of the game. Who lived it. Walt Disney's first studio, Laugh-O-Gram, filed for bankruptcy in July 1923 (Laugh-O-Gram Studio (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laugh-O-Gram_Studio)). In Bairo. Partners who pushed him out of the business, an investment that didn't hold, a project in which he was left hanging. Every no became a brick. Read more (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/failing-before-succeeding/) ### 5. Accepting risk The research. A meta-analysis concluded that entrepreneurs have a higher propensity for risk than managers, and that the difference is larger among those who pursue growth (Stewart and Roth, 2001 (https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.86.1.145)). Who lived it. In 2008, with Tesla and SpaceX close to going under, Elon Musk split what he had left between the two (CNBC (https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/29/elon-musk-9-years-ago-spacex-nearly-failed-itself-out-of-existence.html)). In Bairo. After losing everything, he decided to do what he didn't know how to do: build a currency, a bank and a network. Read more (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/risk-tolerance/) ### 6. Seeing far The research. The McKinsey Global Institute followed 615 companies between 2001 and 2014: those managed with a long-term view had cumulative revenue, on average, 47% higher (MGI, 2017 (https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/long-term-capitalism/where-companies-with-a-long-term-view-outperform-their-peers)). Who lived it. In his 1997 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos wrote that Amazon would make decisions with long-term market leadership in mind, not short-term profit (1997 letter (https://shareholderinbox.com/letters/amazon/1997)). In Bairo. He wanted to bring artificial intelligence and augmented reality into the business years before they became a trend. Arriving too early also means arriving alone. Read more (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/long-term-vision/) ### 7. Faith and purpose The research. A meta-analysis of 75 studies found a positive but small relationship between religion and entrepreneurship (Lehmann and Weiße, 2025 (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11301-025-00547-z)). And people who work for others persist more when they also enjoy what they do (Grant, 2008 (https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.93.1.48)). Who lived it. Truett Cathy closed his first restaurant on Sundays in 1946, out of Christian conviction. Chick-fil-A keeps the rule (Chick-fil-A (https://www.chick-fil-a.com/customer-support/who-we-are/our-culture-and-values/why-is-chick-fil-a-closed-on-sunday)). In Bairo. At rock bottom, in a Christian congregation, he heard testimonies and came to believe in the God of the impossible. Read more (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/faith-and-purpose-in-business/) ### 8. Teaching yourself The research. What sets the best apart, Anders Ericsson showed, is deliberate practice accumulated over years (Ericsson et al., 1993 (https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.100.3.363)). Who lived it. Thomas Edison attended school for only a few months and learned much of what he knew by reading on his own (National Park Service (https://www.nps.gov/edis/learn/historyculture/edison-biography.htm)). In Bairo. He didn't know how to code. He spent six months at home in front of the computer, and out of that came the foundation of the CEASA Bank platform, a company that had existed since 2019. Read more (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/learning-on-your-own/) ### 9. Taking control The research. People who believe the outcome depends on their own actions have what Julian Rotter called an internal locus of control (Rotter, 1966 (https://doi.org/10.1037/h0092976)). This trait is linked to starting and succeeding in business (Rauch and Frese, 2007 (https://doi.org/10.1080/13594320701595438)). Who lived it. Soichiro Honda saw one factory bombed and another collapse in an earthquake. He sold what was left and, in 1946, founded the institute that would give rise to Honda (Soichiro Honda (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soichiro_Honda)). In Bairo. With many people depending on him, he didn't complain. He went and built. Read more (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/what-is-locus-of-control/) ### 10. No rush about age The research. Among the fastest-growing startups in the United States, the average age of the founder at launch is 45 (Azoulay et al., 2020 (https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aeri.20180582)). Who lived it. Ray Kroc was 52 and selling milkshake machines when he met the McDonald brothers, in 1954 (McDonald's (https://corporate.mcdonalds.com/corpmcd/our-company/who-we-are/our-history.html)). In Bairo. At 43, he registered in London the two British companies he runs today. Read more (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/starting-a-business-after-40/) ### 11. Changing route without changing destination The research. The Startup Genome Report observed that startups that changed course once or twice raised 2.5 times more money than those that never changed or changed too often (Startup Genome, 2011 (https://www.wamda.com/index.php/2011/09/the-startup-genome-report-what-makes-a-startup-tick)). Who lived it. Stewart Butterfield shut down the game Glitch in 2012 and turned the team's internal tool into Slack (Slate (https://slate.com/business/2014/05/stewart-butterfield-flickr-and-slack-how-he-snatched-victory-from-the-jaws-of-defeat.html)). In Bairo. Salon, course, cosmetics, events, digital printing, currency: the route changed several times. The direction did not. Read more (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/how-to-pivot-a-business/) ### 12. Choosing whom you build with The research. Noam Wasserman, of Harvard, estimates that 65% of high-potential startups fail because of conflict among founders (CNN (https://money.cnn.com/2014/02/24/smallbusiness/startups-entrepreneur-cofounder/)). Who lived it. Steve Jobs was pushed out of Apple in 1985 and returned in 1997 (Cult of Mac (https://www.cultofmac.com/apple-history/steve-jobs-leaves-and-rejoins-apple)). In Bairo. His partners pushed him out of a business he helped create. Years later, he joined forces with three old acquaintances to finish what he had started. Read more (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/how-to-choose-business-partners/) ### Why the same traits repeat Researchers who study entrepreneurs tend to reach a similar conclusion: no single trait makes a founder. What weighs is the combination. Rauch and Frese's meta-analysis showed that traits tied to the task of building a business, such as initiative, stress tolerance, autonomy and confidence in one's own ability, predict the creation and success of a business better than general personality traits. In other words, what counts is what a person does when things get tight. There is also something the stories on this page share. In almost all of them, the trait appeared first as pain. Disney's bankruptcy came before Mickey. Honda's destroyed factory came before the motorcycle. Jobs's ouster came before the iPhone. Koum's poverty came before WhatsApp. No one chose the fall. They chose what to do with it. In Bairo's path, the order is the same. The salon, the course, the cosmetics brand, the partners who pushed him aside, the many people who depended on him, the project in which he was left hanging. Each episode is tied to one of the traits above, and each one left something in his hands: method, an eye for the future, the courage to do what he didn't know how to do, the lesson about whom to build with. ### What the pattern means Look at the twelve again. None of them is an inborn talent. All are choices that repeat: starting again, trying once more, learning what is missing, taking charge of your own path, trusting in something bigger than fear. That is why the pattern matters. It reminds us that everything that seems obvious today was once an "it can't be done." The airplane was a no. The home computer was a no. The message that crosses the world in a second was a no. Before becoming everyday things, each of these ideas was a dream in the head of someone who was told it was impossible. Bairo does not compare himself to Disney, Jobs or Honda. He recognizes himself on their path, the way one pays tribute. And the sentence that sums up his life is the same one that sums up the pattern: every no is the ground of a yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/). One last thing, said honestly: for every story that reaches us, many people with the same traits tried and did not make it, and that is precisely why it is worth admiring those who keep trying, not only those who won (Denrell, 2003 (https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Vicarious-Learning,-Undersampling-of-Failure,-and-Denrell/fdd5a8a631a76dee426a76d386f0e4e84770b2de)). ### Read also - The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) - Walt Disney: the dream he saw (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/walt-disney-the-dream-he-saw/) - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) 1. Traits of billionaires: starting from zero (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/traits-of-billionaires-starting-from-zero/): Two in three of the 2024 Forbes 400 built their own fortune. What research says about those who start from zero, and how to develop that trait. 2. What successful entrepreneurs have in common (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/what-successful-entrepreneurs-have-in-common/): Persistence with passion, what Angela Duckworth called grit, predicts achievement beyond talent. The research, who lived it and how to train it. 3. Why do immigrants start more businesses? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/why-immigrants-start-more-businesses/): 55% of US billion-dollar startups have an immigrant founder. What the research shows, who lived it and what an immigrant carries in the suitcase. 4. Failing before succeeding: what the research says (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/failing-before-succeeding/): Founders who failed before have the same chance of success as first-timers. A fall doesn't take anyone out of the game; what counts is what you learn. 5. Risk tolerance: the trait of those who start businesses (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/risk-tolerance/): Entrepreneurs accept more risk than managers, a meta-analysis shows. But good risk is calculated risk. The research, a real example and how to train it. 6. Long-term vision: seeing before others do (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/long-term-vision/): Companies managed for the long term grew revenue 47% more, the McKinsey Global Institute found. What the research says and how to train your vision. 7. Faith and purpose in business: what research says (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/faith-and-purpose-in-business/): A meta-analysis of 75 studies links religion and entrepreneurship, and purpose increases persistence. The research, who lived it and how to cultivate it. 8. Learning on your own: the trait of the self-taught (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/learning-on-your-own/): Deliberate practice, more than a diploma, sets the best apart, Anders Ericsson showed. What research says, who learned alone and how to begin. 9. What locus of control is and why it matters (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/what-is-locus-of-control/): People who believe outcomes depend on their own actions start and sustain more businesses, research shows. Understand the trait and how to develop it. 10. Starting a business after 40: the founder's age (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/starting-a-business-after-40/): The average age of founders of the fastest-growing US startups is 45, research by MIT and the Census Bureau shows. It isn't too late to start. 11. How to pivot a business without losing direction (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/how-to-pivot-a-business/): Startups that changed course once or twice raised 2.5 times more money, says Startup Genome. How to pivot without abandoning what matters. 12. How to choose business partners: what research teaches (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/how-to-choose-business-partners/): Conflict between founders is among the most cited causes of startup failure, says Harvard's Noam Wasserman. How to choose whom to build with. --- ## Walt Disney: the dream he saw before it existed URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/walt-disney-the-dream-he-saw/ Idioma: en Descrição: A studio closed, a character lost, banks that turned down the park. Walt Disney kept going, and the story goes he saw Walt Disney World before it existed. Walt Disney is remembered for the castle and the mouse. Before both, there was a string of closed doors, and every one of them is documented. ### The no The first no wasn't money. In 1921, in Kansas City, Walt opened Laugh-O-Gram, a small animation studio. The studio filed for bankruptcy in July 1923. Walt ended up sleeping in the office and bathing once a week at the train station. He left for California with little more than a suitcase. The second no was more painful. In 1927, Walt created with Ub Iwerks a successful character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. In March 1928, he went to New York to ask his distributor, Charles Mintz, for a better contract. He heard a worse offer and discovered that the rights to Oswald weren't his: they belonged to Universal. Mintz also took most of the team of animators. The third came decades later. To build Disneyland, Walt didn't get the support he expected from the banks: amusement parks were seen as a seasonal, risky business. He took out a loan of about US$ 60,000 against his own life insurance and created a company with his initials, WED Enterprises, to run the project. It circulates online that Walt was fired from a Kansas City newspaper for "lack of imagination". We found no document from the period confirming that phrase, so it doesn't appear here as fact. ### What they did Without Oswald, Walt created a mouse. Steamboat Willie, the cartoon that introduced Mickey to the public with synchronized sound, premiered on November 18, 1928, in New York. Disneyland opened on July 17, 1955, on a first day so full of problems that the staff nicknamed it "Black Sunday". They fixed everything, and the park carried on. The Florida project was announced in November 1965. Walt died on December 15, 1966. His brother, Roy O. Disney, carried the work forward, and Walt Disney World opened on October 1, 1971. The story goes that, on opening day, someone remarked to Mike Vance, then creative director of the Disney studios, that it was a shame Walt hadn't lived to see it. Vance is said to have replied: "He did see it. That's why it's here." The story is told by Vance himself in lectures and books; there's no recording from the time. ### What this has to do with Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez doesn't compare himself to Walt Disney. He pays tribute. If he could speak to Walt, he says he'd tell him one thing only: "Your dreams inspired me." What he recognizes in Walt's story is the gesture of seeing first. In Bairo's life there were ideas seen too early, an idea his partners took from him and fresh starts from zero. The rule he drew from that names a chapter of his story: no is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/). Bairo's story begins precisely on the anniversary of Walt Disney World, in Fifty-five years later (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/), and closes with the same idea in The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/): he saw it first, that's why he's building it now. Dates linked to this story: October 1 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/october-1-the-day-of-dreams-seen-first/) · July 17 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/july-17-disneyland-and-black-sunday/) · November 18 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/november-18-mickey-was-born-from-a-loss/) ### Sources - Laugh-O-Gram Studio (bankruptcy in 1923): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laugh-O-Gram_Studio (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laugh-O-Gram_Studio) - Walt Disney Family Museum, "100 Years Ago: Walt Goes West": https://www.waltdisney.org/blog/100-years-ago-walt-goes-west (https://www.waltdisney.org/blog/100-years-ago-walt-goes-west) - Oswald and the loss of the rights (1928): https://mouseplanet.com/the-history-of-oswald-the-lucky-rabbit-part-one/4512/ (https://mouseplanet.com/the-history-of-oswald-the-lucky-rabbit-part-one/4512/) - Steamboat Willie, premiere on 11/18/1928 (D23, official Disney archive): https://d23.com/this-day/steamboat-willie-premieres/ (https://d23.com/this-day/steamboat-willie-premieres/) - Life insurance and WED Enterprises: https://impact.acli.com/walt-disney-mickey-mouse-and-life-insurance/ (https://impact.acli.com/walt-disney-mickey-mouse-and-life-insurance/) - Walt Disney World, opening on 10/01/1971: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney_World (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney_World) - Mike Vance and Diane Deacon, Think Out of the Box (1995): https://archive.org/details/thinkoutofbox00vanc (https://archive.org/details/thinkoutofbox00vanc) --- ## Henry Ford: two closed companies and the impossible engine URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/henry-ford-and-the-impossible-engine/ Idioma: en Descrição: Before Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford saw two companies close. Later, according to Napoleon Hill, he was told the one-piece V8 block was impossible. Henry Ford became synonymous with the people's car. Ford Motor Company, founded on June 16, 1903, was his third attempt to make a car company work. ### The no The first was the Detroit Automobile Company, opened on August 5, 1899 with money from twelve investors, among them the mayor of Detroit. The cars came out expensive, slow to build and of uneven quality. The company was dissolved in January 1901. The second was the Henry Ford Company, created in November 1901 with investors drawn by Ford's racing wins. Quarrels between him and the partners started early, and Ford left in 1902. The company he left was reorganized by Henry Leland and became Cadillac. The third no is the most famous, and it has to be told with care. Napoleon Hill writes in Think and Grow Rich (1937) that Ford asked his engineers for an engine with all eight cylinders cast in a single block, that everyone said it was impossible, and that Ford replied: "Produce it anyway." Hill is a weak source for historical detail, and there's no independent document of the scene. So here it appears as Hill's account. ### What they did With the third company, Ford got it right. In 1908 came the Model T; in 1913, the moving assembly line at Highland Park. The engine in the anecdote existed too. The Ford V8 reached the streets in 1932, the first mass-produced, affordable V8 with a one-piece block. The difficulty was real: the first blocks cracked in the foundry, and it took months of testing before the part came out whole. The engine stayed in production until 1953. Two versions that circulate are worth correcting: it wasn't a "four-valve" car, and the story isn't from "seventy years ago". The 1932 V8 had sixteen valves, and the launch was more than nine decades ago. ### What this has to do with Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez also had companies that didn't work out before the one that did. He tells how he lost his place in his own business when his partners pushed him out, just as Ford left the company that bore his name. And he tells how, after a business that didn't hold up, he decided to do precisely what he didn't know how to do. The tribute isn't about size. It's about method: hearing "it can't be done" and treating the phrase as a starting point. In Bairo's story, this has a name, no is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/), and a number, the seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/). The V8 episode opens Bairo's story in the chapter Fifty-five years later (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/). ### Sources - Detroit Automobile Company (1899–1901): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Automobile_Company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Automobile_Company) - Henry Ford Company (1901–1902): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford_Company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford_Company) - Ford Motor Company, official biography of Henry Ford: https://corporate.ford.com/articles/history/henry-ford-biography/ (https://corporate.ford.com/articles/history/henry-ford-biography/) - Ford flathead V8 (1932–1953): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_flathead_V8_engine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_flathead_V8_engine) - Hagerty, "Ford's flathead V-8 gave power to the people": https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/fords-flathead-v-8-gave-power-to-the-people/ (https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/fords-flathead-v-8-gave-power-to-the-people/) - Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich (1937): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_and_Grow_Rich (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_and_Grow_Rich) - On Hill's credibility: https://paleofuture.com/blog/2016/12/6/the-untold-story-of-napoleon-hill-the-greatest-self-help-scammer-of-all-time (https://paleofuture.com/blog/2016/12/6/the-untold-story-of-napoleon-hill-the-greatest-self-help-scammer-of-all-time) --- ## Steve Jobs: pushed out of the company he founded URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/steve-jobs-pushed-out-of-his-own-company/ Idioma: en Descrição: In 1985, Steve Jobs left Apple, the company he had founded. Twenty years later, he said it was the best thing that could have happened to him. Steve Jobs founded Apple in 1976 with Steve Wozniak. Nine years later, he lost his place inside it. ### The no In 1985, after a dispute with the board and with the executive he himself had brought into the company, Jobs was stripped of his leadership duties and left Apple. He described the scene twenty years later, in the Stanford University commencement address, on June 12, 2005: he was 30, and what had been the focus of his entire adult life was gone. He said it was devastating and that he even thought about leaving Silicon Valley. ### What they did Jobs started again. He founded NeXT and invested in the company that would become Pixar, which in 1995 released Toy Story, the first feature film entirely animated by computer. In 1997, Apple bought NeXT, and Jobs came back. Then came the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone. In the same Stanford speech, he summed it up: "I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me." The full text is on the university's website. There's another Jobs story that matters here, and it's different from what usually circulates. In 1983, he asked engineer Larry Kenyon to shave ten seconds off the time the Macintosh took to boot. To explain why it mattered, he did a calculation: ten seconds, times millions of people, every day, added up to entire lifetimes. The account is by Andy Hertzfeld, who was on the team. No one told Jobs it couldn't be done. The story's power lies elsewhere: he put human life inside a number. A correction: Jobs didn't ask for the Mac to "boot in ten seconds". He asked for the boot time to drop by ten seconds. ### What this has to do with Bairo Two things, both with humility. The first is the pain of losing your place in what you created. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez tells how, in one of the businesses he built, his partners pushed him out, and the idea stayed with them. He didn't make it an open wound. He made it a floor to stand on. It's in the chapter No is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/). The second is lifetime as a measure. The ten-seconds calculation reappears in Bairo's story, who designed the BICOIN (BTZ) yardstick as "1 BTZ = 1 minute of human life". It's a yardstick of purpose, not a price, and nothing here is an offer or a promise of value. The idea is explained in the chapter A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/), and the Jobs episode opens the story in Fifty-five years later (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/). Jobs died on October 5, 2011. The date has its own page: October 5 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/october-5-steve-jobs-and-lifetime/). ### Sources - Stanford Report, speech of 06/12/2005 (full text): https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2005/06/steve-jobs-2005-graduates-stay-hungry-stay-foolish (https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2005/06/steve-jobs-2005-graduates-stay-hungry-stay-foolish) - Andy Hertzfeld, "Saving Lives", August 1983: https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html (https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html) - Steve Jobs, departure from Apple in 1985 and return in 1997: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs) - Toy Story (1995): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Story (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Story) --- ## Ayrton Senna: the limit a little higher — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/ayrton-senna-and-the-limit-a-little-higher/ Idioma: en Descrição: A modest car at Monaco, a race stopped early, an engine that stalled at the title start. Ayrton Senna and what he said, with sources, about limits. Ayrton Senna is one of the most searched names in Brazilian sport. Much of what circulates under his name, however, has no source. This page separates what is sourced from what isn't. ### The no Senna arrived in Formula 1 in 1984 with Toleman, a small team, far from those fighting for wins. At the Monaco Grand Prix that year, in heavy rain, he started 13th and climbed until he was closing in on the leader, Alain Prost. The race was stopped before the end, and the win went to Prost. Contemporary accounts also record that Senna's car already had damaged suspension, and might not have made it to the end. Even so, it was the race that introduced Senna to the world. The title didn't come easily either. On October 30, 1988, at the Japanese Grand Prix, at Suzuka, Senna started on pole position and his car's engine stalled. He only got going again because the track sloped downhill at the start; he dropped to 14th and finished the race first. It was his first world title. ### What they did Senna was world champion in 1988, 1990 and 1991. He died on May 1, 1994, at the San Marino Grand Prix, at Imola. That same year, his family created the Instituto Ayrton Senna, dedicated to the education of children and young people. What he said about limits is on record. In January 1989, in a line quoted by the magazine Veja (special edition 1338-A, of 5/3/1994): "Every driver has his limit. Mine is a little higher than the others'." And, to Jackie Stewart, at the 1990 Australian Grand Prix, in a recorded interview: "If you no longer go for a gap that exists, you are no longer a racing driver." Two widely circulated lines aren't included here as his. "Whoever you are, whatever your social position…" appears on the Portuguese Wikiquote in the section of attributed quotes, with no recording found. "Being second is being the first of those who lose" circulates on quote sites with no primary source. ### What this has to do with Bairo For Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, Senna is proof that the decision comes before the victory. He doesn't compare himself to the driver. He remembers him the way one remembers a teacher one never met: before any result, there was a decision, and after it came courage and persistence. The Suzuka start says something Bairo's story also says: dropping to the back of the grid doesn't end the race. It's in Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/), when everything collapsed, and in The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/), when it worked. The tribute to Senna opens the story, in Fifty-five years later (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/). "Senna" and "Ayrton Senna" are registered trademarks. This page quotes lines with credit and doesn't associate the driver's name with any product or company. The date of the first title has its own page: October 30 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/october-30-senna-and-the-first-title/). ### Sources - 1984 Monaco Grand Prix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Monaco_Grand_Prix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Monaco_Grand_Prix) - Motor Sport, "1984 Monaco Grand Prix: the arrival of Senna": https://www.motorsportmagazine.com/articles/single-seaters/f1/1984-monaco-grand-prix-the-arrival-of-senna/ (https://www.motorsportmagazine.com/articles/single-seaters/f1/1984-monaco-grand-prix-the-arrival-of-senna/) - 1988 Japanese Grand Prix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Japanese_Grand_Prix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Japanese_Grand_Prix) - Honda, on Suzuka 1988: https://global.honda/en/F1/circuit/suzuka/JapaneseGP/1988/ (https://global.honda/en/F1/circuit/suzuka/JapaneseGP/1988/) - Wikiquote (pt), sourced and attributed quotes: https://pt.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ayrton_Senna (https://pt.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ayrton_Senna) - Wikiquote (en), interview with Jackie Stewart, 1990: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ayrton_Senna (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ayrton_Senna) --- ## Thomas Edison and the thousands of things that won't work URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/thomas-edison-and-the-thousands-of-attempts/ Idioma: en Descrição: The "10,000 ways that won't work" line isn't quite Edison's. What he said, according to a colleague, is even better. And the light bulb has a date. Thomas Edison is perhaps the inventor most quoted in motivational sayings. Many of those sayings aren't his, or aren't in the form in which they circulate. The real story is more interesting. ### The no According to the 1910 biography written by Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin, his colleagues, the boy Edison spent only a few months in formal school. On learning that the teacher had called him "addled", his mother, who had been a teacher, took him out of school and began teaching him at home. A touching version circulates online in which the mother supposedly read aloud a false letter from the school; that version was debunked by Snopes and isn't included here. The second no came from matter itself. To arrive at an electric light bulb that would last, the Menlo Park team tested material after material for the filament. In October 1879, a carbonized cotton thread stayed lit for about thirteen and a half hours. The patent for the carbon filament lamp was filed on November 4, 1879 and granted on January 27, 1880. ### What they did Edison accumulated more than a thousand patents in the United States and set up at Menlo Park one of the world's first industrial research laboratories, with a team dedicated to turning ideas into products. The famous line is "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." Quote Investigator shows it's a later version of an account by Walter S. Mallory, a colleague of Edison's, published in the 1910 biography. Mallory found Edison after thousands of unsuccessful experiments with a nickel-iron battery and lamented that there were no results. Edison is said to have replied, smiling: "Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won't work." The number changes from version to version (700, a thousand, 10,000, 50,000). The meaning doesn't: every attempt that fails shortens the road left to travel. ### What this has to do with Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez often says that no is the foundation of yes. It's almost the same idea as "I know several thousand things that won't work": error isn't the opposite of success, it's the material success is made of. In his story, every attempt left something behind. The course left a method. The idea that came too early left an eye for the future. The cosmetics brand left proof that he could create from nothing. The partners who pushed him out left the lesson of choosing whom to build with. He can't say how many times he tried; he knows it was on the seventh that it worked. Read: No is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) · The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) · The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) ### Sources - Quote Investigator, "I Have Gotten a Lot of Results! I Know Several Thousand Things That Won't Work": https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/31/edison-lot-results/ (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/31/edison-lot-results/) - F. L. Dyer and T. C. Martin, Edison: His Life and Inventions (1910): http://www.public-library.uk/ebooks/31/79.pdf (http://www.public-library.uk/ebooks/31/79.pdf) - Snopes, on the school letter: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/thomas-edisons-mom-lied-about-a-letter-expelling-her-son-from-school/ (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/thomas-edisons-mom-lied-about-a-letter-expelling-her-son-from-school/) - Engineering and Technology History Wiki, Edison's lamp: https://ethw.org/Edison (https://ethw.org/Edison)'s_Incandescent_Lamp - Smithsonian, "7 Epic Fails Brought to You By the Genius Mind of Thomas Edison": https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/7-epic-fails-brought-to-you-by-the-genius-mind-of-thomas-edison-180947786/ (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/7-epic-fails-brought-to-you-by-the-genius-mind-of-thomas-edison-180947786/) --- ## The Wright brothers and the ten-million-year forecast URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/the-wright-brothers-and-the-ten-million-years/ Idioma: en Descrição: In October 1903, a newspaper predicted the airplane could take up to 10 million years. Sixty-nine days later, the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk. Wilbur and Orville Wright repaired and built bicycles in Dayton, in the United States. They had no university degree. They had method, patience and a workshop. ### The no The most famous no came from outside. On October 9, 1903, The New York Times published an editorial called "Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly", written after a failure by the researcher Samuel Langley. The text said that the flying machine which would really fly might be evolved by the efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians "in from one million to ten million years". The other no came from within, and it's even more human. On November 5, 1908, receiving the gold medal of the Aéro-Club de France, in Paris, Wilbur confessed that in 1901, discouraged by the glider tests, he had told his brother that man would not fly for fifty years. Two years later, they were flying. Wilbur said it gave him such a shock as a prophet that he stopped making predictions. ### What they did Instead of giving up after 1901, the brothers built a small wind tunnel in the workshop and redid the lift tables they were using, because the data published by others was wrong. On December 17, 1903, at Kill Devil Hills, near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the Flyer made four flights. The first, with Orville at the controls, lasted 12 seconds and covered about 37 meters. The last, with Wilbur, lasted 59 seconds and covered about 260 meters. Sixty-nine days after the editorial. In Brazil, the first flight is credited to Santos-Dumont, because the 14-Bis took off under its own power, without rail or catapult, before the public and an official commission, in 1906. Both stories are true, and each has its own page: see Santos-Dumont and the 14-Bis (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/santos-dumont-and-the-14-bis/). ### What this has to do with Bairo Wilbur's confession is the part Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez recognizes most. Sometimes the heaviest "it can't be done" doesn't come from the newspaper. It comes from within, on a bad day. What set the Wrights apart from everyone else wasn't never having doubted. It was going back to the workshop the next day. Bairo says he tried, thought about stopping and nearly gave up more times than he likes to remember. He also says that, after each fall, he shortened the time he allowed himself to stay on the ground. It's in The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) and in The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/). And the rule that remained is the usual one: no is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/). The date of the flight has its own page: December 17 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/december-17-the-wright-brothers-fly/). ### Sources - "Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly", The New York Times, 10/09/1903: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Machines_Which_Do_Not_Fly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Machines_Which_Do_Not_Fly) - Big Think / Pessimists Archive: https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/air-space-flight-impossible/ (https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/air-space-flight-impossible/) - Wilbur Wright's speech at the Aéro-Club de France, 11/05/1908: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1908_in_aviation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1908_in_aviation) - Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, 1903 Wright Flyer: https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/1903-wright-flyer/nasm_A19610048000 (https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/1903-wright-flyer/nasm_A19610048000) - Wright Brothers National Memorial (National Park Service): https://www.nps.gov/wrbr/ (https://www.nps.gov/wrbr/) --- ## Santos-Dumont: from the airship on the roof to the 14-Bis URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/santos-dumont-and-the-14-bis/ Idioma: en Descrição: In 1901, Santos-Dumont's airship got stuck on the roof of a Paris hotel. Five years later, the 14-Bis took off before the public at Bagatelle. Alberto Santos-Dumont was born on July 20, 1873, in Minas Gerais, on a coffee farm. He went to Paris, the aviation capital of the time, and began building and flying his own machines. ### The no In 1900, the millionaire Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe offered a prize of 100,000 francs to whoever could leave the Saint-Cloud park, round the Eiffel Tower and return within thirty minutes. Santos-Dumont tried with airship No. 5. On August 8, 1901, a faulty valve made the balloon lose gas. The airship came down over Paris, snagged on a chimney of the Hotel Trocadéro and burst. Santos-Dumont hung from the side of the building until he was rescued by firefighters, unhurt. Of the airship, only the engine could be salvaged. He didn't wait. He built No. 6. ### What they did On October 19, 1901, with No. 6, Santos-Dumont rounded the Eiffel Tower and returned in about 29 and a half minutes, despite an engine failure on the way. He won the Deutsch prize and gave a good part of it to his crew and to the poor of Paris. Then he moved from the airship to the airplane. On October 23, 1906, at the Bagatelle field, in Paris, the 14-Bis took off under its own power and flew about 60 meters, before the public, winning the Archdeacon cup, created for the first flight of 25 meters. On November 12, 1906, he flew 220 meters and won the Aéro-Club de France prize for the first flight of 100 meters. Who flew first is an old debate. In the United States, the honor belongs to the Wright brothers, for the flights of December 17, 1903. In Brazil, it belongs to Santos-Dumont, because the 14-Bis took off without rail or catapult, before witnesses and an official commission. This page doesn't settle the dispute; it tells both and links to the Wrights' page (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/the-wright-brothers-and-the-ten-million-years/). ### What this has to do with Bairo Santos-Dumont is the story of someone who fell in public, in a foreign city, and started again the following week. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, a Colombian who made his life in Brazil, knows well the weight of starting over far from home, with another language and no safety net. The parallel is one of gesture, not size. The airship on the Trocadéro's roof is what, in Bairo's story, the businesses that didn't hold up were: a No. 5 that leaves its engine to No. 6. He tells this in Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) and in Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/), about his arrival in Brazil. The date of the 14-Bis has its own page: October 23 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/october-23-the-14-bis-and-aviators-day/). ### Sources - Santos-Dumont No. 6 and the Deutsch prize: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santos-Dumont_number_6 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santos-Dumont_number_6) - Alberto Santos-Dumont (biography): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Santos-Dumont (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Santos-Dumont) - Britannica, Santos-Dumont No. 14-bis: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Santos-Dumont-No-14-bis (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Santos-Dumont-No-14-bis) - Santos-Dumont 14-bis (flights of 10/23 and 11/12/1906): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santos-Dumont_14-bis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santos-Dumont_14-bis) - Agência Brasil, "First flight 115 years ago" (Portuguese): https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/geral/noticia/2021-10/primeiro-voo-ha-115-anos-santos-dumont-aliou-invencoes-ciencia (https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/geral/noticia/2021-10/primeiro-voo-ha-115-anos-santos-dumont-aliou-invencoes-ciencia) --- ## Colonel Sanders: the road that took his customers away URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/colonel-sanders-started-over-at-65/ Idioma: en Descrição: A new highway diverted traffic from Colonel Sanders's restaurant. At 65, he sold the place at auction and started over with a recipe. Harland Sanders, the face of KFC, spent much of his life in jobs that didn't last: farmhand, locomotive fireman, insurance salesman, service station attendant. In the 1930s, he opened a gas station with a restaurant in Corbin, in the US state of Kentucky, and his fried chicken became known in the region. The title of "colonel" is honorary, given by the government of Kentucky. ### The no The no, this time, didn't come from a person. It came from a road. In the 1950s, the new I-75 interstate highway bypassed Corbin. The traffic that had sustained Sanders's restaurant for two decades vanished almost overnight. In 1956, he sold the place at auction, and the money barely covered taxes and bills. He was 65. The fixed income he had left was his US Social Security check, about US$ 105 a month. ### What they did Sanders took the recipe, a pressure cooker and his car and began driving around the country offering the chicken to restaurant owners, charging a small amount per chicken sold. He'd had a first franchisee since 1952, the businessman Pete Harman, in South Salt Lake, Utah. After losing the restaurant, he made franchising his main business. In 1964, he sold the company to investors and stayed on as the brand's ambassador. One number circulates widely: Sanders supposedly heard 1,009 rejections before the first yes. KFC itself has repeated the number on social media, but we found no document from the period confirming it, and the chronology doesn't help, because the first franchisee came before the loss of the restaurant. So the number stays here as legend, not fact. The fact is enough: at 65, without the business of a lifetime, he started over. ### What this has to do with Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez knows the feeling of watching a business collapse for reasons that weren't in his hands. He says he came in as a partner in a business that didn't hold up and lost everything, with fifty people depending on him. He didn't complain about the partner, the system or luck. He decided to do what he didn't yet know how to do. The parallel with Sanders isn't one of age or size. It's the refusal to treat a loss as the end of the story. The road that took Sanders's customers away is, in Bairo's life, every door that closed and became the foundation for the next. Read: Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) · No is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) · The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) ### Sources - History of KFC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_KFC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_KFC) - Harland Sanders Café and Museum (Corbin, 1940–1956): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harland_Sanders_Caf%C3%A9_and_Museum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harland_Sanders_Caf%C3%A9_and_Museum) - Yahoo Finance, "KFC founder Colonel Sanders didn't achieve his remarkable rise to success until his 60s": https://finance.yahoo.com/news/kfc-founder-colonel-sanders-didnt-161545534.html (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/kfc-founder-colonel-sanders-didnt-161545534.html) - KFC repeating the 1,009 rejections number (no contemporary source): https://x.com/kfc/status/1916283448429342903 (https://x.com/kfc/status/1916283448429342903) --- ## J.K. Rowling: rock bottom became the foundation URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/jk-rowling-and-rock-bottom/ Idioma: en Descrição: Unemployed, a single mother and with a book turned down by publishers, J.K. Rowling said at Harvard that rock bottom became the foundation of her life. Before Harry Potter was one of the best-selling books in history, it was a manuscript in a folder, written by a woman who, in her own words, had "failed on an epic scale". ### The no On June 5, 2008, in the Harvard University commencement address, J.K. Rowling described where she stood seven years after finishing university: a marriage that had ended quickly, jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain without being homeless. By any conventional measure, she said, she was the biggest failure she knew. The book heard no as well. The most cited number is twelve publishers that rejected the manuscript of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone before Bloomsbury, a small publisher in London, accepted it. The story goes that the publisher's chairman gave the first chapter to his eight-year-old daughter, Alice, and that she asked for the rest. The first print run, in 1997, was small. ### What they did The book came out in June 1997. The series became seven books, films and one of the greatest publishing phenomena of all time. But what Rowling said at Harvard matters more than the numbers. She explained that failure stripped away everything inessential, and that, set free from the fear of failure because her greatest fear had already come true, she began directing all her energy into the only work that mattered. And she summed it up in one sentence: "And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life." In the same speech: "It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all." ### What this has to do with Bairo This is perhaps the sentence closest to Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez's rule for life. He says it another way: no is the foundation of yes. When his partners pushed him out of his own business, he found the pain and, instead of running from it, made it the foundation. Not as an open wound. As a floor. Rowling spoke of rock bottom as a foundation. Bairo speaks of no as a brick. It isn't the same life, nor the same size, and he asks for no comparison. It's the same discovery, made by two people who hit the ground and decided to build on top of it. There's another point in common: Rowling speaks of the daughter she adored as her reason to carry on. Bairo also speaks of the silent arithmetic of an immigrant father, in The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/). Read: No is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) · Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) ### Sources - Harvard Gazette, full text of J.K. Rowling's speech (06/05/2008): https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/06/text-of-j-k-rowling-speech/ (https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/06/text-of-j-k-rowling-speech/) - Quartz, "How JK Rowling overcame depression and rejection": https://qz.com/961875/how-jk-rowling-overcame-depression-and-rejection-to-end-up-selling-400-million-books (https://qz.com/961875/how-jk-rowling-overcame-depression-and-rejection-to-end-up-selling-400-million-books) - CBC, "50 things you might not know about J.K. Rowling": https://www.cbc.ca/1.4093971 (https://www.cbc.ca/1.4093971) --- ## Soichiro Honda: rejected rings and a factory in ruins URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/soichiro-honda-and-the-destroyed-factory/ Idioma: en Descrição: Toyota rejected Soichiro Honda's first parts. Then a bomb and an earthquake brought down his factories. He sold what was left and started over. Soichiro Honda was a blacksmith's son and started as an apprentice in a mechanic's shop in Tokyo. His name is now on motorcycles and cars all over the world. The road there had rejection, war and an earthquake. ### The no In 1937, Honda founded Tōkai Seiki to make piston rings and supply Toyota. The first parts were rejected for poor quality. Instead of giving up, he went to study: he began attending classes at the Hamamatsu technical school to learn what he was missing about metallurgy. Only after that did the parts pass. Then came the war. In 1944, a B-29 bombing raid destroyed the Yamashita plant. In 1945, the Iwata plant collapsed in the Mikawa earthquake. Honda sold what was left of the company to Toyota for 450,000 yen. ### What they did With that money, in October 1946, he opened the Honda Technical Research Institute. The first product was simple: small engines fitted to bicycles, in a Japan without fuel or transport. In 1948, Honda Motor Co. was born. Then came the motorcycles, the cars and, decades later, the presence in Formula 1. In May 1974, Honda received an honorary doctorate from Michigan Technological University and addressed the graduates. The university published the translation of the speech, which speaks of originality and of seeking the solution to any problem at its root. A note on a famous line: "Success is 99% failure" appears attributed to this speech on quote sites, but it isn't in the transcript published by the university. It may have been said on another occasion, but we didn't find the source, so we don't quote it here as his. ### What this has to do with Bairo Toyota's rejection is the kind of no Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez recognizes: the part didn't pass, and the answer was to learn what was missing. Bairo says that, after losing almost everything, he decided to build things he didn't know how to make, and spent six months in front of a computer, learning with the tools of his own time. It's in The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/). The earthquake is the other side: there are falls that don't depend on you. Honda sold the ruins and used the money to begin something new. In Bairo's story, every business that closed left something for the next one, up to the seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/). There's no comparison of size. There's the same habit: going back to the workshop. ### Sources - Soichiro Honda (Tōkai Seiki, 1944, 1945, sale to Toyota): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soichiro_Honda (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soichiro_Honda) - Association for Asian Studies, "Honda Soichiro and the Rise of Japan's Postwar Motor Vehicle Industry": https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/honda-soichiro-and-the-rise-of-japans-postwar-motor-vehicle-industry/ (https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/honda-soichiro-and-the-rise-of-japans-postwar-motor-vehicle-industry/) - Michigan Tech Archives, speech of 05/18/1974 (translation): https://blogs.mtu.edu/archives/2019/05/03/flashback-friday-rolling-into-commencement-weekend/ (https://blogs.mtu.edu/archives/2019/05/03/flashback-friday-rolling-into-commencement-weekend/) - ASME, Soichiro Honda: https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/soichiro-honda (https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/soichiro-honda) --- ## Abraham Lincoln: the real defeats, without the viral list URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/abraham-lincoln-and-the-real-defeats/ Idioma: en Descrição: The viral list of Lincoln's failures exaggerates. The real defeats happened: 1832, the store that closed, the Senate races of 1855 and 1858. There's a list that has circulated for decades: Lincoln "failed in business in 1831", "lost an election in 1832", "had a nervous breakdown in 1836", and so on, until he became president in 1860. Fact-checkers show the list mixes truths, exaggerations and omissions. This page keeps only what is sourced. ### The no 1832. At 23, Lincoln ran for a seat in the Illinois legislature and finished eighth among thirteen candidates; only the top four got in. That same year, however, he was elected captain by his own militia company, which the viral list tends to leave out. The store. In New Salem, Lincoln was a partner in a small store that didn't work out and left debts he took years to pay off. The list calls this "failing in business"; historians prefer to describe what happened: a small business that closed and a debt honored. 1855 and 1858. Lincoln twice sought a seat in the US Senate. In 1855, he withdrew in favor of another candidate so as not to split his allies. In 1858, he faced Stephen Douglas in a series of debates that became famous. The candidates aligned with Lincoln won more popular votes, but the senator was chosen by the state legislature, and there the majority went to Douglas. 1856. At the Republican Party convention, he received votes for vice president, but wasn't chosen. ### What they did The 1858 debates, which he lost, made him known throughout the country. Two years later, in 1860, Lincoln was elected president. He led the United States through the Civil War, signed the Emancipation Proclamation, in 1863, and was assassinated in April 1865. The scholar Douglas L. Wilson put it well: Lincoln certainly knew failure, but his life cannot, by any reasonable measure, be described as a series of failures. The defeats happened. What counts is what he did with them. ### What this has to do with Bairo Lincoln's lesson, told properly, matches the way Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez asks for his own story to be told: with the real falls, neither inflated nor hidden. A defeat doesn't need to be exaggerated in order to teach. The 1858 defeat is the part that speaks most to his story. Losing an important contest and, in it, gaining what the next one will need. Bairo says every no left a brick: a method, an eye for the future, proof that he could create from nothing, the lesson of choosing whom to build with. It's in No is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) and in The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/). Bairo doesn't compare himself to Lincoln. He learns one simple thing from him: tell the fall with the right date. ### Sources - Snopes, "Abraham Lincoln and Failure": https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/abraham-lincoln-failure/ (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/abraham-lincoln-failure/) - Abraham Lincoln Online, "Lincoln's 'Failures' and 'Successes'": http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/education/failures.htm (http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/education/failures.htm) - Slate, "Abraham Lincoln failure at 50: Why the myth is so persistent": https://slate.com/business/2014/05/abraham-lincoln-failure-at-50-why-the-myth-is-so-persistent-and-powerful.html (https://slate.com/business/2014/05/abraham-lincoln-failure-at-50-why-the-myth-is-so-persistent-and-powerful.html) - Digital History (Univ. of Houston), the Lincoln-Douglas debates: https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&psid=3284 (https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&psid=3284) --- ## Oprah Winfrey: taken off the news, she changed course URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/oprah-winfrey-taken-off-the-news-desk/ Idioma: en Descrição: In 1977, Oprah Winfrey was taken off the evening news desk in Baltimore. At Harvard, she said failure is just life trying to move us in another direction. Oprah Winfrey was born in 1954, in rural Mississippi, into a poor family, and had a childhood marked by violence, which she herself has spoken about publicly. She started in radio as a teenager, in Nashville, and reached television early. ### The no In 1976, Oprah was hired by the station WJZ, in Baltimore, to co-anchor the 6 p.m. news with an experienced anchor. It didn't work. On April 1, 1977, she was taken off the newscast. Years later, she described that period as humiliating and embarrassing, and the Baltimore Sun recorded that it was the first and worst failure of her TV career. The station didn't fire her. It put her on a morning talk show, People Are Talking, a slot that, at first glance, looked like a demotion. ### What they did It was on the talk show that Oprah found her format: talking with people, as equals. In 1984, she moved to Chicago to take over a local morning show; in 1986, The Oprah Winfrey Show was born, and it stayed on the air for 25 seasons. On May 30, 2013, in the Harvard commencement address, she returned to the theme. At the time, the TV network she had just launched was facing criticism, and the press was calling the project a failure. She told the graduates: "There is no such thing as failure. Failure is just life trying to move us in another direction." ### What this has to do with Bairo What Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez recognizes in Oprah's story is the turn in meaning. The place that looked like a demotion was where she found her own voice. In his life, too, there were doors that looked like the end and were a change of direction: the salon that didn't work out as well as hoped and worked out another way, in a course; the technology idea that came too early and left his eye trained on the future. He sums it up in a single sentence: no is the foundation of yes. And he adds another, about what seems impossible: "The impossible is just something that hasn't been done yet." There's also the choice to speak of one's falls in public. Oprah told hers without hiding them. Bairo asks the same for his own story, told in chapters: The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) · No is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) · One name, four presences (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/one-name-four-presences/) ### Sources - Harvard Gazette, "Winfrey: Failure is just movement" (05/30/2013): https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/05/winfrey-failure-is-just-movement/ (https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/05/winfrey-failure-is-just-movement/) - The Harvard Crimson, "'There Is No Such Thing as Failure,' Oprah Tells Harvard Graduates": https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/5/31/oprah-commencement-2013-speech/ (https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/5/31/oprah-commencement-2013-speech/) - Baltimore Sun, "Oprah — Built in Baltimore": https://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/bs-sm-oprahs-baltimore-20110522-story.html (https://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/bs-sm-oprahs-baltimore-20110522-story.html) - Adweek/TVSpy, Oprah on her time at WJZ: https://www.adweek.com/tvspy/oprah-on-her-time-at-wjz-humiliated-embarrassed-and-sexually-harassed/ (https://www.adweek.com/tvspy/oprah-on-her-time-at-wjz-humiliated-embarrassed-and-sexually-harassed/) --- ## Nelson Mandela: 27 years and the line he didn't say URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/nelson-mandela-and-the-27-years/ Idioma: en Descrição: Mandela spent 27 years in prison and came out to govern. "It always seems impossible until it's done" has no record from him. What he wrote does. Nelson Mandela is one of the most quoted names when the subject is persistence. He's also one of the most quoted with lines he never said. This page separates one from the other. ### The no On June 12, 1964, at the end of the Rivonia Trial, Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment for his struggle against apartheid, South Africa's regime of racial segregation. He spent most of the following years in the prison on Robben Island, breaking rocks in a lime quarry. The no, there, was that of an entire state. He was imprisoned for 27 years. He was released on February 11, 1990. ### What they did Mandela came out of prison to negotiate the end of apartheid. In 1993, he received the Nobel Peace Prize, together with Frederik de Klerk. On May 10, 1994, he was sworn in as the first president elected by the vote of all South Africans, and he governed until 1999. In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom (1994), he wrote: "I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear." The line he didn't say. "It always seems impossible until it's done" is attributed to Mandela on millions of pages. The Nelson Mandela Foundation, which keeps his speeches and letters, has no record of the line, and Quote Investigator didn't find it in his books or speeches either; the earliest attribution located is from an Australian newspaper in 2001. A similar idea appears in 1965, in a book of maxims by the American writer Paul Eldridge: that all things are impossible until they happen, and then they become inevitable. ### What this has to do with Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez has a line that recalls this one: "The impossible is just something that hasn't been done yet." It isn't a translation of Mandela, nor does it try to be. It's how Bairo sums up what he learned from each fall. And, precisely because the famous line circulates without a source, it's worth saying whose each one is: Bairo's is his, spoken in Manifesto 14:20; the one attributed to Mandela has no record. What Bairo truly recognizes in Mandela is something else: the idea that courage isn't the absence of fear. He says he was afraid, still young, when he lost his footing in a country that wasn't his. He carried on anyway. It's in Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/). There's no possible comparison between one man's life and 27 years in prison for a people. There is tribute. Read: Manifesto 14:20 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/milestone-1420/) · No is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) ### Sources - Quote Investigator, "It Always Seems Impossible Until It's Done": https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/01/05/done/ (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/01/05/done/) - Africa Check, "No record of Mandela saying 'it always seems impossible until it's done'": https://africacheck.org/fact-checks/spotchecks/no-record-mandela-saying-it-always-seems-impossible-until-its-done (https://africacheck.org/fact-checks/spotchecks/no-record-mandela-saying-it-always-seems-impossible-until-its-done) - Nelson Mandela Foundation, on false quotes: https://www.nelsonmandela.org/news/entry/deepest-fear-quote-not-mr-mandelas (https://www.nelsonmandela.org/news/entry/deepest-fear-quote-not-mr-mandelas) - CNN, "Mandela in his own words": https://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/africa/06/24/mandela.quotes/ (https://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/africa/06/24/mandela.quotes/) - Nobel Prize, Nelson Mandela (1993): https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1993/mandela/facts/ (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1993/mandela/facts/) --- ## Marie Curie and the Academy that said no — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/marie-curie-and-the-academy-that-said-no/ Idioma: en Descrição: Almost left out of the 1903 Nobel and turned down by the French Academy of Sciences in 1911, Marie Curie won her second Nobel that same year. Maria Skłodowska was born in Warsaw, in 1867, in a divided and occupied Poland. In the part ruled by the Russian Empire, the university didn't admit women. She studied however she could, worked as a governess to help pay for her sister's studies and, in 1891, went to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. ### The no The first no almost went unnoticed. In 1903, the French Academy of Sciences nominated Henri Becquerel and Pierre Curie for the Nobel Prize in Physics, but not Marie, who had done much of the research on radioactivity. A committee member, the Swedish mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler, alerted Pierre. Pierre replied that a prize for radioactivity that left Marie out made no sense. Thanks to a nomination made the year before, her candidacy was accepted. In December 1903, the three shared the prize. The second no was public. On January 23, 1911, Marie, by then widowed, ran for a seat in the French Academy of Sciences. She lost to Édouard Branly by two votes. The Academy had never admitted a woman. Part of the press of the time attacked her candidacy with arguments about her sex and her foreign origin. ### What they did Eleven months after the rejection, in 1911, Marie Curie received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry alone, for the discovery of radium and polonium. She was the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, and to this day the only one to win them in two different sciences. During the First World War, she organized mobile X-ray units to treat the wounded at the front. She never entered the Academy of Sciences. In 1995, her remains were moved to the Panthéon in Paris, the first woman honored there on her own merits. ### What this has to do with Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez recognizes the immigrant in Marie Curie. She made her life in a country that wasn't hers, in a learned language, and heard, more than once, that she didn't belong there. He, a Colombian, arrived in Brazil while still young and knew the other side of arriving: losing your footing, far from home. There's also the lesson of the door that didn't open. The Academy said no; the Nobel said yes the same year. A no doesn't need revenge to be overcome. It needs work that goes on. In Bairo's rule: no is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/). Read: Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/) · The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) ### Sources - AIP, "Marie Curie — Recognition and Disappointment (1903–1905)": https://history.aip.org/exhibits/curie/recdis2_text.htm (https://history.aip.org/exhibits/curie/recdis2_text.htm) - PBS NewsHour, "The day Marie Curie got snubbed by the French science world": https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/the-day-marie-curie-got-snubbed-by-the-french-science-world (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/the-day-marie-curie-got-snubbed-by-the-french-science-world) - Nobel Prize, post on the rejection of 01/23/1911: https://x.com/NobelPrize/status/1882338501686894698 (https://x.com/NobelPrize/status/1882338501686894698) - Nobel Prize, Marie Curie: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1911/marie-curie/facts/ (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1911/marie-curie/facts/) - Marie Curie (biography): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie) --- ## Grace Hopper and the compiler nobody wanted to use URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/grace-hopper-and-the-compiler-nobody-wanted/ Idioma: en Descrição: Grace Hopper had a working compiler and nobody would touch it: they said computers only did arithmetic. Today every program is born from that idea. Grace Murray Hopper held a PhD in mathematics from Yale and was a professor when she joined the US Navy reserve, in 1943, during the Second World War. She was sent to Harvard, to program the Mark I, one of the first electromechanical computers. ### The no After the war, Hopper went to work on the UNIVAC, one of the first commercial computers. In the 1950s, she had an idea that seems obvious today: instead of writing each instruction in machine code, the programmer would write in something closer to human language, and the computer itself would translate it. The program that does this translation is called a compiler. Hers, the A-0, is from 1952. Nobody wanted it. Years later, in remarks reproduced by the OCLC newsletter in 1987, she put it this way: "I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic." ### What they did Hopper persisted. She kept developing compilers and the FLOW-MATIC language, which used English words. That work was one of the foundations of COBOL, defined in 1959, a business language that still runs in bank and government systems. She stayed in the Navy until 79, reached the rank of rear admiral and spent decades giving lectures. She liked to hand the audience pieces of wire about 30 centimeters long, the distance light travels in a nanosecond, to show why every nanosecond matters. A story from the time became folklore: in 1947, the Mark II team found a moth trapped in a relay and taped it into the logbook, with the note "first actual case of bug being found". The word "bug" already existed in engineering; the moth became famous because of the joke. ### What this has to do with Bairo Grace Hopper was told the machine wouldn't do what she had already seen the machine do. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez knows that kind of no: he tells how he tried to bring artificial intelligence and augmented reality to his own business, years before it became a trend, and was told it wouldn't work. That time, he gave up. He kept the lesson. There's a deeper parallel. Hopper wanted people to speak to the machine in their own language. Bairo speaks of artificial intelligence as an extension of the human, not as a problem, and proposes, with Xperienc's Global Language, that patient and doctor each speak their own language, in a clinical second opinion, not a medical report. The proposal is under development and is described in the chapter A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/). Read also: The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) · Ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) ### Sources - IEEE Milestones, Grace Hopper's Compiler and Programming Language Work, 1952–1959: https://ieeemilestones.ethw.org/Milestone-Proposal:Grace_Hopper (https://ieeemilestones.ethw.org/Milestone-Proposal:Grace_Hopper)'s_Compiler_and_Programming_Language_Work,_1952-1959 - Yale, biography of Grace Murray Hopper: https://president.yale.edu/biography-grace-murray-hopper (https://president.yale.edu/biography-grace-murray-hopper) - IEEE Spectrum, "About Grace Hopper": https://spectrum.ieee.org/from-punch-cards-to-python/about-grace-hopper (https://spectrum.ieee.org/from-punch-cards-to-python/about-grace-hopper) - OCLC Newsletter, Mar./Apr. 1987, no. 167 (compiler quote): https://cs.yale.edu/homes/tap/Files/hopper-wit.html (https://cs.yale.edu/homes/tap/Files/hopper-wit.html) - Smithsonian, the "first bug" (1947): https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_334663 (https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_334663) --- ## Alan Turing and the question \"can machines think?\" URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/alan-turing-and-the-question-of-machines/ Idioma: en Descrição: Alan Turing helped win a war, asked the question that opened up artificial intelligence and was convicted by his own country. The pardon came in 2013. Alan Turing was born in London, in 1912. He's called the father of computer science, and the phrase isn't fan exaggeration: in 1936, at 24, he described on paper an abstract machine capable of carrying out any calculation that could be written as a sequence of steps. Every modern computer is, at bottom, a physical version of that idea. ### The no During the Second World War, Turing worked at Bletchley Park, the British code-breaking center, and played a central role in deciphering the messages of the German Enigma machine. The work was secret and remained secret for decades. In 1952, Turing was prosecuted for having a relationship with another man, which was a crime in the United Kingdom. He was convicted of "gross indecency" and, to avoid prison, accepted hormone treatment imposed as a condition. He lost access to secret government work. He died on June 7, 1954, at 41. That was the no: the country he helped protect treated him as a criminal. ### What they did In 1950, Turing published the paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", which opens with the sentence: "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'" In it, he proposed what became known as the Turing test. It's one of the founding texts of artificial intelligence. Recognition came late. In 2009, Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a public apology on behalf of the British government. In 2013, Queen Elizabeth II granted Turing a royal pardon. Since 2021, his face has been on the 50-pound note. A line that isn't his. "Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things no one can imagine" is attributed to Turing on many sites. It's from the screenplay of the film The Imitation Game (2014), written by Graham Moore. The Alan Turing Institute and his nephew, Dermot Turing, have already clarified this. ### What this has to do with Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez works today with artificial intelligence, and Turing's question is at the center of what he proposes. For Bairo, artificial intelligence is the extension of the human, not the problem. He speaks of a last generation of humans without AI meeting the first generation of AI, the code 0.1 or 1.0, zero and one, human and machine working together. The parallel is one of humility: Turing asked the question; those who work with AI today live inside it. The orchestration of AI agents Bairo proposes, CLAIN, is described in A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/), always as a proposal under construction. And there's the other lesson: being judged for who you are, and not for what you do, is a no that no talent deserves. Read: One name, four presences (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/one-name-four-presences/) ### Sources - Alan Turing (biography): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing) - Al Jazeera, "Computer pioneer Alan Turing pardoned" (2013): https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2013/12/24/computer-pioneer-alan-turing-pardoned (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2013/12/24/computer-pioneer-alan-turing-pardoned) - A. M. Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", Mind, 1950: https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238 (https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238) - The Alan Turing Institute, "Alan Turing quotes: separating fact from fiction": https://www.turing.ac.uk/blog/alan-turing-quotes-separating-fact-fiction (https://www.turing.ac.uk/blog/alan-turing-quotes-separating-fact-fiction) - Dermot Turing, "Fake quotes": https://dermotturing.com/2019/07/30/fake-quotes/ (https://dermotturing.com/2019/07/30/fake-quotes/) - Bank of England, the 50-pound note featuring Alan Turing: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/polymer-50-pound-note (https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/polymer-50-pound-note) --- ## Nikola Tesla and the tower that was never finished URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/nikola-tesla-and-the-unfinished-tower/ Idioma: en Descrição: Tesla changed the world's electricity and saw his biggest project, the Wardenclyffe tower, halted for lack of money. Today the site is a museum. Nikola Tesla was born in 1856, into a Serbian family, in what is now Croatia. He arrived in the United States in 1884 with little money and many ideas about electricity. ### The no In New York, Tesla worked for a few months at one of Thomas Edison's companies, repairing and improving dynamos. The two had opposing visions: Edison bet on direct current; Tesla, on alternating current. Tesla left in 1885. The story that Edison promised him 50,000 dollars and then said it was a joke comes from Tesla himself, told many years later, and has no independent document. The bigger no came after success. Around 1901, with money from the banker J. P. Morgan, Tesla began building, in Shoreham, New York, the Wardenclyffe tower, for a worldwide wireless communication and power system. The money ran out, Morgan didn't renew his backing and, by 1906, the laboratory was practically abandoned. The property was used to pay debts, and the tower was demolished in 1917. Tesla died alone, on January 7, 1943, in a room at the Hotel New Yorker, in New York, with little money. ### What they did Before that, Tesla's patents for alternating-current motors and systems, licensed to Westinghouse, helped define the way electricity is generated and distributed to this day. The unit of magnetic flux density, the tesla, bears his name. And the tower had a second chapter. In 2012, the cartoonist Matthew Inman, of the site The Oatmeal, launched a crowdfunding campaign to buy the Wardenclyffe land and turn it into a museum. In less than two weeks, public donations passed one million dollars. With help from a New York State grant, the Tesla Science Center bought the property in 2013, after almost two decades of campaigning. ### What this has to do with Bairo Tesla saw first. The Wardenclyffe tower was never finished, and even so the idea of worldwide wireless communication became the world we live in. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez knows the pain of seeing too early: he says he had technology ideas years before they became trends, and that arriving early also means arriving alone. The tower's second chapter also speaks to his story. Ordinary people, together, saved what big money abandoned. Bairo says that, after being left stranded, he found in the community and in three old acquaintances the strength to finish what he started. It's in The coin and the road (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-coin-and-the-road/) and in The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/). Read also: The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) ### Sources - Nikola Tesla (biography): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla) - Wardenclyffe Tower: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardenclyffe_Tower (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardenclyffe_Tower) - Tesla Science Center, "Tesla's Wireless Power": https://teslasciencecenter.org/teslas-wireless-power/ (https://teslasciencecenter.org/teslas-wireless-power/) - Tesla Science Center, "Tesla Lab Saved" (2013): https://teslasciencecenter.org/announcements/cnn-may-2013/ (https://teslasciencecenter.org/announcements/cnn-may-2013/) - Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Science_Center_at_Wardenclyffe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Science_Center_at_Wardenclyffe) --- ## Elon Musk and the three rockets that failed — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/elon-musk-and-the-three-rockets-that-failed/ Idioma: en Descrição: Between 2006 and 2008, SpaceX's first three Falcon 1 rockets failed and the company nearly went under. The fourth reached orbit on September 28, 2008. Elon Musk is one of the most controversial figures of our time, for his business dealings, his statements and his politics. This page deals with none of that and isn't praise of the person. It deals with one specific, documented episode: SpaceX's first launches. ### The no SpaceX was founded in 2002 with the aim of making access to space cheaper. The company's first rocket was the Falcon 1, small, liquid-fueled. March 2006. On the first launch, a fuel leak caused an engine fire, and the rocket fell shortly after liftoff. March 2007. The second went further, but also failed to reach orbit. August 2008. On the third, a problem in stage separation made the first stage collide with the second. Another failure. Three attempts, three failures. According to accounts of the company, the money was running out, and SpaceX came close to going under. ### What they did On September 28, 2008, less than two months after the third failure, SpaceX launched the fourth Falcon 1, assembled from the parts it had. It reached orbit. It was the first privately developed liquid-fueled rocket to reach Earth orbit. Shortly after, in December 2008, the company signed a contract with NASA to carry cargo to the International Space Station. From there came the Falcon 9 and the rockets that land and are reused. What's worth keeping is the sequence: the fourth launch only existed because the team treated each failure as data. The leak, the fuel sloshing, the collision between stages: each problem taught what to fix in the next. ### What this has to do with Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez doesn't compare himself to anyone on this page, and this one in particular isn't about admiration for a person. It's about a count. At SpaceX, it worked on the fourth. In Bairo's story, it worked on the seventh. He himself says he doesn't know for sure how many times he tried, thought about stopping and nearly gave up. Seven is the number he chose to tell the story, and he tells what each attempt left behind: a method, an eye for the future, proof that he could create from nothing, the lesson about whom to build with, the courage to do what he didn't know how to do. The seventh wasn't luck. It was the first that had all the others inside it. Read: The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) · Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) · No is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) ### Sources - Falcon 1 (launch history): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_1) - SpaceX (company history): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX) - 2008 in spaceflight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_in_spaceflight (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_in_spaceflight) - NASA, Commercial Resupply Services (December 2008 contract): https://www.nasa.gov/commercial-resupply-services-overview/ (https://www.nasa.gov/commercial-resupply-services-overview/) --- ## Jeff Bezos: \"Amazon.bomb\" and the years of losses URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/jeff-bezos-and-the-years-of-losses/ Idioma: en Descrição: In 1999, a magazine called Amazon "Amazon.bomb". The company only closed a full year in the black in 2003. And Bezos always spoke openly about failures. Jeff Bezos left a well-paid job at an investment fund in New York, in 1994, to open a bookstore on the internet, in a garage near Seattle. Amazon began selling in July 1995. Many people thought it wouldn't last. ### The no In May 1999, the financial magazine Barron's ran a cover story titled "Amazon.bomb". The piece looked at the company's mounting losses and its high share price and dismissed as foolish the idea that Bezos had created a new business model: he was, it argued, just another middleman. The numbers gave the skeptics arguments. Amazon spent years in the red. In the dot-com crash, from 2000 on, the shares plunged and many similar companies closed. The first full year in the black only came in 2003, eight years after sales began: net income of 35 million dollars, after a loss of 149 million in 2002. ### What they did Amazon survived the crash and became one of the largest companies in the world, in e-commerce and in cloud computing. What matters here is the way Bezos treated failure, including his own. In 2014, the company launched a phone, the Fire Phone, which failed and led to a write-down of about 170 million dollars. Asked about it by The Washington Post, in 2016, he replied: "If you think that's a big failure, we're working on much bigger failures right now. And I am not kidding." And he explained that, as a company grows, the size of its mistakes must grow with it, or it won't be inventing at a scale that makes a difference. ### What this has to do with Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez doesn't talk about financial results or share prices, and neither does this page. The parallel is another: the willingness to be called a mistake before being proven right. He says he heard "that's not possible" when he went looking for partners for the agribusiness platform, and that the banks refused to integrate the solution. Instead of stopping, he focused on building his own technology, leaving the regulated part to those authorized to operate it: artificial intelligence, financial messaging in the ISO 20022 standard, blockchain and tokenization of real assets. It's in The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/). CEASA Bank, born from that work, is a financial platform for agribusiness that runs on the infrastructure of an authorized institution. Nothing here is an offer, a recommendation or a promise of results. Read also: No is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) · Ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) ### Sources - InfoWorld, "Amazon records first profitable year in its history" (2003): https://www.infoworld.com/article/2212961/amazon-records-first-profitable-year-in-its-history-2.html (https://www.infoworld.com/article/2212961/amazon-records-first-profitable-year-in-its-history-2.html) - TheWrap, "Bezos Unearths 1999 Barron's Report Saying Amazon Will 'Bomb'": https://www.thewrap.com/jeff-bezos-barrons/ (https://www.thewrap.com/jeff-bezos-barrons/) - Forbes, "Revisiting Amazon Dot Bomb – 16 Years Later": https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2015/09/24/revisiting-amazon-dot-bomb-16-years-later/ (https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2015/09/24/revisiting-amazon-dot-bomb-16-years-later/) - GeekWire, interview with Marty Baron of The Washington Post (2016): https://www.geekwire.com/2016/amazons-jeff-bezos-fire-phone-working-much-bigger-failures-right-now/ (https://www.geekwire.com/2016/amazons-jeff-bezos-fire-phone-working-much-bigger-failures-right-now/) - Britannica, Amazon.com: https://www.britannica.com/money/Amazoncom (https://www.britannica.com/money/Amazoncom) --- ## Jack Ma: two failed exams, jobs denied and an apartment URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/jack-ma-and-the-rejections/ Idioma: en Descrição: Jack Ma failed China's college entrance exam twice and, by his account, was turned down by KFC and Harvard. In 1999, he founded Alibaba in an apartment. Ma Yun, known in the West as Jack Ma, was born in Hangzhou, China, in 1964. He learned English by guiding foreign tourists, for free, at a hotel in the city. He became an English teacher. His story is told many times, and part of it comes only from his own mouth. This page says which part is which. ### The no The entrance exam. Ma failed the gaokao, China's national university entrance exam, twice, in 1982 and 1983. The first time, he scored extremely low in math. He passed on the third attempt and entered a teacher-training college in Hangzhou. The jobs. According to Ma himself, in interviews, he was turned down for dozens of jobs after graduating. The most repeated story is KFC's: 24 applicants, 23 accepted, and he the only one rejected. He also said, in an interview with Charlie Rose in 2015, that he applied ten times to Harvard Business School and was rejected every time. These three stories come from his account; there's no independent document, so they appear here as "according to Ma". The first internet company. In 1995, after seeing the internet on a trip to the United States, Ma created China Pages, one of the country's first internet companies. The business didn't go the way he wanted. ### What they did In 1999, Ma gathered a group of 18 people in his own apartment, in Hangzhou, and founded Alibaba, a platform to connect small Chinese businesses with buyers. Alibaba became one of the largest e-commerce groups in the world, with Taobao, Alipay and other businesses. The path later had its own setbacks, including with the Chinese government, and Ma withdrew from public life for a time. The part that matters here is the beginning: the failed English teacher who founded a technology company in an apartment. ### What this has to do with Bairo The parallel is the apartment. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says that, after losing almost everything, he spent six months without leaving the house, in front of a computer, developing the foundation of the platform that would become CEASA Bank. He didn't know how to code. He learned with the tools of his own time. It's in The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/). There's also the part about gathering people. Alibaba began with 18 people in a room. Bairo's seventh attempt began when he stopped being alone and found help in three old acquaintances. It's in The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/). Bairo doesn't compare himself to Jack Ma. He recognizes in him the same stubbornness of someone who failed and took the exam again. Read: No is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) ### Sources - Jack Ma (biography, gaokao in 1982 and 1983, China Pages, Alibaba): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ma) - Benzinga, "10 Rejections From Harvard And 30 Failed Job Interviews": https://www.benzinga.com/content/40576050/10-rejections-from-harvard-and-30-failed-job-interviews-how-jack-ma-became-one-of-chinas-richest-men (https://www.benzinga.com/content/40576050/10-rejections-from-harvard-and-30-failed-job-interviews-how-jack-ma-became-one-of-chinas-richest-men) - Boss Hunting, "'I Was Rejected From Harvard 10 Times'": https://www.bosshunting.com.au/hustle/rejected-from-harvard-10-times-alibaba-jack-ma/ (https://www.bosshunting.com.au/hustle/rejected-from-harvard-10-times-alibaba-jack-ma/) - Britannica, Jack Ma: https://www.britannica.com/money/Jack-Ma (https://www.britannica.com/money/Jack-Ma) --- ## Sam Walton: the store he built and lost — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/sam-walton-and-the-store-he-lost/ Idioma: en Descrição: In 1950, the landlord refused to renew the lease and took the store Sam Walton had grown. He started over in a smaller town and created Walmart. Sam Walton grew up in rural America during the Great Depression. After serving in the Army, he bought in 1945, with borrowed money, a small Ben Franklin variety store in Newport, Arkansas. ### The no Walton made the Newport store grow enormously in five years, to the point of becoming one of the strongest in the region. But he had made a beginner's mistake when he signed the lease: he didn't include a clause giving him the right to renew. In 1950, when the lease expired, the landlord knew there was no other spot in town where Walton could move the store. He refused to renew the lease, at any price. He bought the store, with its fixtures and inventory, and handed the business to his own son. Walton told this story in his autobiography, Made in America (1992). He had made the store succeed and lost it because of a contract. ### What they did The family moved to Bentonville, a much smaller town in the same state. There, Walton opened Walton's 5&10 and started again from zero. Over time, he opened other stores, and in 1962 he opened the first Walmart store, in Rogers, also in Arkansas. Walmart became the largest retail chain in the world. The Bentonville store where he started over now houses the Walmart Museum. The Newport lesson is one of the simplest and most expensive: a business can be right and still be lost over a contract detail or over who is on the other side of the table. ### What this has to do with Bairo This is one of the stories most like Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez's, all proportions kept. He too built a business that worked and lost it because of others: his partners pushed him out of the business, and the idea stayed with them. Some defeats hurt the wallet. This one hurt somewhere else, Bairo's story says. And the lesson he drew is the same one Walton drew from Newport: choose whom you build with. It's in the chapter No is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/). Walton went to a smaller town and started over. Bairo too started over more than once, from zero, as an immigrant who lost his footing and got back on his feet. Read The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) and The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/). ### Sources - Sam Walton (biography): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Walton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Walton) - Oklahoma Historical Society, "Walton, Samuel Moore": https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=WA015 (https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=WA015) - Walmart World, "A Second Chance for Walmart in Newport, Arkansas": https://www.walmartworld.com/content/walmart-world/en_us/articles/2022/07/a-second-chance-for-walmart-in-newport.html (https://www.walmartworld.com/content/walmart-world/en_us/articles/2022/07/a-second-chance-for-walmart-in-newport.html) - Right Attitudes, "Lessons from Sam Walton: Learning from Failure": https://www.rightattitudes.com/2016/03/29/sam-walton-learning-from-failure/ (https://www.rightattitudes.com/2016/03/29/sam-walton-learning-from-failure/) - Walmart (company history): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmart) --- ## Akio Morita: a rice cooker and a Walkman that won't record URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/akio-morita-and-the-walkman-that-couldnt-record/ Idioma: en Descrição: Sony's first product was a rice cooker that didn't work. Decades later, Akio Morita launched a tape player that couldn't record, and heard doubts. Akio Morita came from a traditional family of sake brewers in Japan and was the eldest son, destined to inherit the business. He chose physics and electronics. In 1946, in a Tokyo destroyed by war, he founded with Masaru Ibuka Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, a small radio repair shop that would later be called Sony. ### The no The first no came from the kitchen itself. One of the first products the company tried to make was an electric rice cooker: a wooden tub with aluminum electrodes at the bottom. It didn't control the cooking well, and the rice came out raw or burnt depending on the day. The product never really reached the market. The second came decades later, inside a company that was already large. In 1979, Sony was preparing a portable tape player, small, with headphones, made from one of its own recorders with the recording function taken out. Many people inside the company and in retail doubted a tape device that couldn't record. Accounts from the time say Morita personally took on the risk of the launch; the figures attributed to that bet vary from source to source, so we don't repeat them. In its first month on sale, in July 1979, the Walkman sold little. ### What they did After the rice cooker, the company got it right with tape recorders, in 1950, and with the TR-55 transistor radio, in 1955, Sony's first. Morita traveled the world to sell the brand and insisted on a short name, easy to say in any language: Sony. The Walkman conquered the world after a campaign that took the device into the streets, with people walking, skating and cycling with headphones on. It changed the way people listen to music: alone, on the move, anywhere. In 1986, "walkman" entered the Oxford dictionary. ### What this has to do with Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez recognizes two lessons in this story. The first is the rice cooker's: the first attempt is rarely the one that works, and that says nothing about the last. In his count, it was the seventh. The second is that of the device "missing a function". Sometimes, what others see as a defect is the idea itself. Bairo says he brought to his business, years before it became a trend, a technology idea people said wouldn't work. That time, he gave up. Years later, the trend arrived, and he kept the lesson of not stopping at the first answer. Read: The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) · The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) · No is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) ### Sources - History of Sony (Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, rice cooker, TR-55): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Sony (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Sony) - Akio Morita (biography): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akio_Morita (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akio_Morita) - Nippon.com, "Sony's Morita Akio: Marking 100 Years Since the Birth of a Japanese Business Legend": https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/g01027/ (https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/g01027/) - Mental Floss, "Recorded History: The Sony Walkman Turns 40": https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/65620/july-1-1979-sonys-walkman-changes-recorded-history (https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/65620/july-1-1979-sonys-walkman-changes-recorded-history) - Walkman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkman) --- ## Silvio Santos: from street vendor to the near-collapse URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/silvio-santos-from-street-vendor-to-broadcaster/ Idioma: en Descrição: Son of immigrants, a street vendor at 14, Silvio Santos built a group. In 2010, he pledged all his assets to cover the Panamericano crisis. Senor Abravanel was born on December 12, 1930, in Lapa, in Rio de Janeiro, the son of Jewish immigrants who had come from the eastern Mediterranean. Brazil came to know him as Silvio Santos. ### The no The first no was the lack of money at home. In the mid-1940s, still a teenager, he went to sell on the streets of downtown Rio to help his family. He was a camelô, a street vendor, at a time when unlicensed street trade was hounded by inspectors. The biographies tell that a director of the city's inspection service, Renato Meira Lima, instead of confiscating the young man's goods, was impressed by his voice and recommended him for an announcer audition at Rádio Guanabara. Silvio came first, stayed only a short time, because he earned more on the street, and went back to selling. The episode comes from biographical accounts, not from a document of the time. The heaviest no came much later, when he was already one of the country's biggest businessmen. In 2010, Brazil's Central Bank identified a hole of about 4.3 billion reais at Banco Panamericano, part of his group, the result of accounting fraud by the institution's directors. ### What they did From the microphone and the street, Silvio built a career as a broadcaster and salesman. With Manoel de Nóbrega, he got involved in Baú da Felicidade, a prize booklet paid in installments; he later took over the business alone, bought out his partner and paid off his debt. In 1981, he obtained the broadcasting concession that gave rise to SBT. Faced with the 2010 crisis, his decision caught the market's attention: instead of letting the bank fall, he pledged all his assets, including SBT and Baú, as collateral for a loan of 2.5 billion reais from the Credit Guarantee Fund (FGC). In 2011, he sold his stake in the bank to BTG Pactual and managed to release the collateral. Silvio Santos died on August 17, 2024. ### What this has to do with Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez recognizes two things in Silvio. The first is the son of immigrants who started from zero, on the street, talking to people. Bairo is himself an immigrant, a Colombian in Brazil, and says he started over more than once, without footing and without a safety net. The second is responsibility. When one of Bairo's businesses didn't hold up, he says fifty people depended on him. He didn't complain about the partner, the system or luck. He decided to keep going. It's in Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/). The parallel is one of attitude, not size. And this page doesn't deal with financial products or make recommendations of any kind. Read also: Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/) · No is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) ### Sources - Jornal Opção, "From street vendor to billionaire: the path of Silvio Santos" (Portuguese): https://www.jornalopcao.com.br/ultimas-noticias/de-camelo-a-bilionario-a-trajetoria-de-silvio-santos-630086/ (https://www.jornalopcao.com.br/ultimas-noticias/de-camelo-a-bilionario-a-trajetoria-de-silvio-santos-630086/) - Gazeta do Povo, "Silvio Santos: from street vendor to billionaire on the Forbes list" (Portuguese): https://www.gazetadopovo.com.br/brasil/silvio-santos-de-camelo-no-centro-do-rio-de-janeiro-a-bilionario-na-lista-da-forbes/ (https://www.gazetadopovo.com.br/brasil/silvio-santos-de-camelo-no-centro-do-rio-de-janeiro-a-bilionario-na-lista-da-forbes/) - Diário do Nordeste, "2010 in review – Silvio Santos covers the Panamericano hole" (Portuguese): https://diariodonordeste.verdesmares.com.br/negocios/retrospectiva-2010-silvio-santos-cobre-rombo-do-panamericano-1.903816 (https://diariodonordeste.verdesmares.com.br/negocios/retrospectiva-2010-silvio-santos-cobre-rombo-do-panamericano-1.903816) - NeoFeed, "The day Silvio Santos nearly went under" (Portuguese): https://neofeed.com.br/finde/o-dia-em-que-silvio-santos-quase-quebrou/ (https://neofeed.com.br/finde/o-dia-em-que-silvio-santos-quase-quebrou/) - CNN Brasil, death of Silvio Santos (2024, Portuguese): https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/nacional/silvio-santos-um-dos-maiores-comunicadores-da-tv-brasileira-morre-aos-93-anos/ (https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/nacional/silvio-santos-um-dos-maiores-comunicadores-da-tv-brasileira-morre-aos-93-anos/) --- ## Carolina Maria de Jesus and Quarto de Despejo URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/carolina-maria-de-jesus-and-child-of-the-dark/ Idioma: en Descrição: A paper picker in the Canindé favela, Carolina wrote in notebooks found in the trash. Her diary became Quarto de Despejo, translated into 13+ languages. Carolina Maria de Jesus was born in 1914, in Sacramento, Minas Gerais, the granddaughter of enslaved people. She studied only up to the second year of primary school. She moved to São Paulo and, in the 1950s, lived in the Canindé favela, on the banks of the Tietê River, raising three children alone on what she earned collecting paper and scrap metal. ### The no The no, in Carolina's life, took many forms: hunger, poverty, prejudice against a Black woman from the favela who said she was a writer. She wrote in notebooks she found in the trash. Neighbors mocked her. Who would take a scavenger's diary seriously? In the diary, she recorded hunger with a precision no one had written before. In an entry of May 10, 1958, she wrote: "Brazil needs to be led by a person who has gone hungry. Hunger is also a teacher. Whoever has gone hungry learns to think of others, and of the children." ### What they did In 1958, the journalist Audálio Dantas went to Canindé to do a story for the Folha da Noite and met Carolina and her notebooks. He published excerpts from the diary in May 1958 and, later, in the magazine O Cruzeiro. Dantas selected passages from about twenty notebooks and organized the book. Quarto de Despejo: diário de uma favelada was published in August 1960 by Livraria Francisco Alves; in English it became known as Child of the Dark. The first print run, of 10,000 copies, sold out in a week. The book was translated into more than 13 languages and became a landmark of Brazilian literature. The title comes from Carolina herself, who called the favela the city's "junk room". Fame didn't solve everything. Carolina published other books with less success and died in 1977, in modest circumstances. In recent decades, her work has been rediscovered, republished and studied at universities. ### What this has to do with Bairo The line "hunger is also a teacher" is one of those that bring Carolina closest to the vision of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez. He says he learned more from falls than from successes, and that every no left a brick. It's in No is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/). There's a more concrete bridge. Bairo's humanitarian venture, Instituto CEASA, proposes to broaden access to food using the surplus from wholesale supply centers, with a long-shelf-life food project under development. It's a proposal, not a result, and it's described in the chapter A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/). Bairo doesn't compare himself to Carolina. He remembers her because she proved that the voice of someone who has been through the worst can change the way a country sees itself. A date linked to this page: October 16, World Food Day (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/october-16-world-food-day/). ### Sources - Wikipedia (Portuguese), Quarto de Despejo (publication, print run, Audálio Dantas): https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarto_de_Despejo (https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarto_de_Despejo) - Carolina Maria de Jesus (biography): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolina_Maria_de_Jesus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolina_Maria_de_Jesus) - Jornal da USP, "Carolina Maria de Jesus is a reference for those who challenge power" (Portuguese): https://jornal.usp.br/cultura/carolina-maria-de-jesus-e-referencia-para-quem-contesta-o-poder/ (https://jornal.usp.br/cultura/carolina-maria-de-jesus-e-referencia-para-quem-contesta-o-poder/) - Minas Gerais Public Library, review of Quarto de Despejo (Portuguese): https://www.bibliotecapublica.mg.gov.br/resenha-da-semana-quarto-de-despejo-diario-de-uma-favelada-carolina-maria-de-jesus/ (https://www.bibliotecapublica.mg.gov.br/resenha-da-semana-quarto-de-despejo-diario-de-uma-favelada-carolina-maria-de-jesus/) - CartaCapital, excerpts from the diary (Portuguese): https://www.cartacapital.com.br/opiniao/carolina-maria-de-jesus-quem-governa-o-brasil-nao-sabe-o-que-e-a-aflicao-do-pobre/ (https://www.cartacapital.com.br/opiniao/carolina-maria-de-jesus-quem-governa-o-brasil-nao-sabe-o-que-e-a-aflicao-do-pobre/) --- ## García Márquez and the manuscript sent in halves URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/gabriel-garcia-marquez-and-the-half-manuscript/ Idioma: en Descrição: An editor told García Márquez to change professions. Years later, out of money, he could only afford to mail half of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Gabriel García Márquez was born on March 6, 1927, in Aracataca, on Colombia's Caribbean coast. He was raised by his grandparents, listening to stories that would later become Macondo. Before he was a novelist, he was a journalist, and he spent much of his youth without money. ### The no In February 1952, the young García Márquez received a letter from Guillermo de Torre, who headed the editorial board of the publisher Losada, in Buenos Aires. The novel he had sent, Leaf Storm (La hojarasca), had been rejected. And the letter, according to the accounts, suggested he look for another trade. His friends in the Barranquilla Group helped him not to give up. The book came out in 1955, from another publisher. The second no was money. In the mid-1960s, living in Mexico City, García Márquez spent more than a year writing One Hundred Years of Solitude. The family lived on loans and on what his wife, Mercedes Barcha, managed to stretch. When the novel was finished, the two went to the post office to send the original to Editorial Sudamericana, in Buenos Aires. The money was only enough to send half. The story goes that they went home, pawned the last appliances they had, a hair dryer, a heater and a blender, and went back to the post office to send the rest. ### What they did One Hundred Years of Solitude was published in Buenos Aires in May 1967. It became one of the most read novels in the Spanish language and a landmark of magical realism. In 1982, García Márquez received the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2002, he published his memoirs, Living to Tell the Tale, with an epigraph saying that life is not what one lived, but what one remembers, and how one remembers it in order to tell it. ### What this has to do with Bairo Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez was also born in Colombia. García Márquez's story is that of a Colombian who heard a no from a foreign editor and, years later, mailed in halves the book that changed the continent's literature. The most beautiful point in common is in the epigraph. In Bairo's story, there's a moment when he, after a spiritual search, asks for wisdom and courage to remember how to reach his best version, not to learn it. For him, he had already seen the end; what was missing was building the middle. It's in The God of the impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/). Bairo doesn't compare himself to the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude. He pays tribute to a fellow countryman who proved that an editor's no isn't the last word on anyone. Read also: Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/), about the Colombian boy who said that one day he would live in Brazil. ### Sources - Infobae, "La historia del manuscrito de 'Cien años de soledad'" (Spanish): https://www.infobae.com/america/mexico/2019/03/17/la-historia-del-manuscrito-de-cien-anos-de-soledad-que-se-creia-perdido-y-aparecio-en-mexico/ (https://www.infobae.com/america/mexico/2019/03/17/la-historia-del-manuscrito-de-cien-anos-de-soledad-que-se-creia-perdido-y-aparecio-en-mexico/) - Argentina's Ministry of Culture, "Escribió, vendió sus electrodomésticos y ganó el Nobel" (Spanish): https://www.cultura.gob.ar/empeno-sus-electrodomesticos-y-gano-el-nobel-la-historia-detras-de-cien-anos-de-soledad_3799/ (https://www.cultura.gob.ar/empeno-sus-electrodomesticos-y-gano-el-nobel-la-historia-detras-de-cien-anos-de-soledad_3799/) - Infobae, on Guillermo de Torre's rejection letter (Spanish): https://www.infobae.com/leamos/2024/01/04/george-orwell-sylvia-plath-y-garcia-marquez-de-las-crueles-cartas-de-rechazo-editorial-no-se-salvan-ni-los-mejores-autores/ (https://www.infobae.com/leamos/2024/01/04/george-orwell-sylvia-plath-y-garcia-marquez-de-las-crueles-cartas-de-rechazo-editorial-no-se-salvan-ni-los-mejores-autores/) - Centro Gabo, on the dedications and La hojarasca (Spanish): https://centrogabo.org/las-dedicatorias-en-los-libros-de-gabriel-garcia-marquez-historias-de-amores-y-amistades (https://centrogabo.org/las-dedicatorias-en-los-libros-de-gabriel-garcia-marquez-historias-de-amores-y-amistades) - Nobel Prize, Gabriel García Márquez (1982): https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1982/marquez/facts/ (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1982/marquez/facts/) --- ## Garrincha: the crooked legs football turned down URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/garrincha-and-the-legs-that-said-no/ Idioma: en Descrição: Clubs turned Garrincha down for his crooked legs. In 1953, at a Botafogo practice, he dribbled past Nilton Santos. Then he won two World Cups. Manuel Francisco dos Santos, Garrincha, was born on October 28, 1933, in Pau Grande, a district of Magé, in the state of Rio de Janeiro. His parents were of Indigenous origin, of the Fulni-ô people, from Alagoas. He worked at the village textile mill and played for the local team. ### The no Garrincha's body seemed to say no to football. According to the biography written by Ruy Castro, Estrela Solitária (published in English as Garrincha: The Triumph and Tragedy of Brazil's Forgotten Footballer), his right leg was about six centimeters shorter than the left, and both curved to the same side. He also had a curved spine and pelvis. Ruy Castro records that the cause is debated: whether it was congenital or an aftereffect of polio. When he tried out at the big clubs, he heard no. He was turned down by Vasco and São Cristóvão. He went through trials at other clubs and never went back, sometimes because the coaches weren't interested, sometimes for fear of losing another day's work at the mill. ### What they did In 1953, Garrincha went to train at Botafogo. At practice, he faced Nilton Santos, the Brazilian national team's fullback, and dribbled past him again and again. The line attributed to Nilton, "he ran rings around me", became part of the story: he himself asked the club to sign the young man. Botafogo paid little for him, and Garrincha debuted that year. He stayed at Botafogo until 1965 and scored hundreds of goals for the club. At the 1958 World Cup, in Sweden, he was decisive in Brazil's first world title. In 1962, in Chile, with Pelé injured early on, he carried the team and was one of the stars of the tournament, which many still call "Garrincha's World Cup". Life off the field was hard. Garrincha died on January 20, 1983, at 49, in Rio de Janeiro, of complications from alcoholism. His story is also a warning about what happens when no one looks after those who have already given everything. ### What this has to do with Bairo In the story of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, Garrincha recalls the ginga: the movement that never stops, that goes one way and comes back the other, and never stays still long enough to be knocked down. It's the word capoeira taught Bairo before Portuguese did. It's in Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/). There's also the part about the body that "was no good". For the clubs that turned him down, Garrincha's legs were a defect. At Botafogo, they became the dribble. In Bairo's story, what seemed like weakness, the fall, the lack of footing, became the foundation. He sums it up this way: no is the foundation of yes. Garrincha's sad end also teaches, and Bairo doesn't romanticize falling. He tells his own with what they cost. Read No is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) and Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/). ### Sources - Wikipedia (Portuguese), Garrincha (based on Ruy Castro, Estrela Solitária, 1995): https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%C3%A9_Garrincha (https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%C3%A9_Garrincha) - Garrincha (English): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garrincha (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garrincha) - Botafogo, official idols page: https://www.botafogo.com.br/idolos/garrincha (https://www.botafogo.com.br/idolos/garrincha) - Placar, "O mágico da bola" (Portuguese): https://placar.com.br/coluna/o-comentarista-do-futuro/o-magico-da-bola/ (https://placar.com.br/coluna/o-comentarista-do-futuro/o-magico-da-bola/) --- ## Mestre Bimba and the capoeira that was forbidden URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/mestre-bimba-and-the-forbidden-capoeira/ Idioma: en Descrição: Capoeira was a crime under the 1890 Penal Code. Mestre Bimba created the Regional style, opened a school in Salvador and, in 1937, got it licensed. Manoel dos Reis Machado, Mestre Bimba, was born in Salvador, Bahia, on November 23, 1899 or 1900; sources disagree on the year. He started capoeira as a boy, at a time when practicing it could land you in jail. ### The no The no, for capoeira, was written into law. The Penal Code of 1890, the Republic's first, punished in article 402 anyone who performed in streets and squares "exercises of agility and bodily dexterity known by the name of capoeiragem". Capoeira, born among enslaved Africans and their descendants, was treated as a police matter. It wasn't only the law. It was prejudice: capoeira was seen as something for troublemakers, dangerous people, the street. ### What they did Bimba answered with method. Around 1928 and 1929, he developed his own style, which he called Luta Regional Baiana, later known as capoeira Regional. The name avoided the forbidden word. He created a teaching sequence, rules of conduct for students and a way of training that brought capoeira inside a school. In 1932, he founded the Centro de Cultura Física Regional in Salvador. In 1937, according to the Mestre Bimba Foundation, the school was the first capoeira academy to obtain an operating license. In the 1930s, Bimba and his students performed for the federal administrator of Bahia, Juracy Magalhães, and in 1953, according to the same foundation, for President Getúlio Vargas, who is said to have called capoeira the only truly national sport. Bimba died on February 5, 1974, in Goiânia. Forty years later, in 2014, the capoeira circle was recognized by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Capoeira, once a crime, became the world's heritage. ### What this has to do with Bairo This is the most personal bridge in the story of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez. Before the language, before the country, came the rhythm of the berimbau. Capoeira was the first thing from Brazil that he, a Colombian boy, learned with his body. Capoeira was the bridge. What Bairo carries from capoeira is the ginga, the movement that never stops. And what he recognizes in Mestre Bimba is the path of turning a no written into law into a yes recognized by the world: with method, discipline and patience, without denying the origin. Bairo doesn't call himself a master of anything. He pays tribute to someone who opened the door through which many people, including foreigners like him, arrived in Brazil through the body before arriving through the map. Read: Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/) · One name, four presences (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/one-name-four-presences/) ### Sources - Mestre Bimba Foundation (Portuguese): https://fundacaomestrebimba.org.br/mestre-bimba/ (https://fundacaomestrebimba.org.br/mestre-bimba/) - Wikipedia (Portuguese), Mestre Bimba: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mestre_Bimba (https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mestre_Bimba) - Capoeira Regional: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capoeira_Regional (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capoeira_Regional) - Penal Code of 1890 (Decree 847), art. 402 (Portuguese): https://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/decreto/1851-1899/d847.htm (https://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/decreto/1851-1899/d847.htm) - UNESCO, Capoeira circle (2014): https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/capoeira-circle-00892 (https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/capoeira-circle-00892) --- ## Frank Drake and the silence of 1420 MHz — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/frank-drake-and-the-silence-of-1420-mhz/ Idioma: en Descrição: In 1960, Frank Drake pointed a radio telescope at two stars and listened to the hydrogen frequency. He heard silence, and even so he opened a path. Frank Drake was born in Chicago, in 1930, and trained in astronomy. He was one of the first scientists to treat with method a question that, until then, belonged to fiction: is there anyone else out there? ### The no The no, in this case, was the universe itself. In 1959, physicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison published a paper in Nature proposing that, if any civilization wanted to be heard, it would probably use the frequency of the hydrogen line, 1420 MHz, because any being that studied the cosmos would know it. Drake, who worked at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, in Green Bank, in the United States, decided to test the idea. On April 8, 1960, he pointed a 26-meter antenna at the star Tau Ceti and, later, at Epsilon Eridani, and listened around 1420 MHz. It was Project Ozma. Over months, the telescope made about 200 hours of observation. He heard nothing. There was a strong signal in the first days, which excited the team; days later, they found it was interference of human origin. The result of Project Ozma was silence. ### What they did The silence didn't close anything. It opened. In November 1961, Drake organized at Green Bank the first scientific meeting on intelligent life beyond Earth and wrote on a board an equation estimating how many civilizations capable of communicating might exist in our galaxy. It became known as the Drake equation, and it still organizes the field's questions today. Drake helped create the Arecibo message, in 1974, and took part in the plaques on the Pioneer probes, which use the hydrogen line as a universal unit of measure. He died on September 2, 2022, at 92. The search he began goes on. ### What this has to do with Bairo The project Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez founded is called 1420, after the same frequency Drake listened to. For science, it's the hydrogen line, the most abundant element in the universe. To protect that extremely faint signal, the band from 1400 to 1427 MHz is protected by international agreement, under the International Telecommunication Union: there, emissions are prohibited, and one only listens. No one transmits on it, not even Bairo's project. Bairo calls 1420 MHz the frequency of silence. Drake's story shows why the name fits: the first result was silence, and the silence became a starting point. For Bairo, it's the same gesture as his rule for life: no is the foundation of yes. The project's name is a symbol, and it's as a symbol that he carries it. It's in The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/). Linked dates: April 8, Project Ozma (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/april-8-project-ozma-listens-to-the-stars/) · March 25, the detection of the line (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/march-25-the-day-hydrogen-was-heard/) · April 15, the prediction (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/april-15-the-hydrogen-line-predicted-on-paper/) ### Sources - Project Ozma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ozma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ozma) - Sky & Telescope, "Project Ozma: The First SETI": https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/project-ozma-the-first-seti/ (https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/project-ozma-the-first-seti/) - Cosmic Search, "A Reminiscence of Project Ozma" (Frank Drake): https://www.bigear.org/vol1no1/ozma.htm (https://www.bigear.org/vol1no1/ozma.htm) - SETI Institute, Drake Equation: https://www.seti.org/research/seti-101/drake-equation/ (https://www.seti.org/research/seti-101/drake-equation/) - National Geographic, death of Frank Drake (2022): https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/frank-drake-pioneer-in-the-search-for-alien-life-dies-at-92 (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/frank-drake-pioneer-in-the-search-for-alien-life-dies-at-92) - ITU, footnote RR 5.340 (summary of radio astronomy allocations): https://www.e-callisto.org/generaldocuments/RAS-Allocations-RR2016.pdf (https://www.e-callisto.org/generaldocuments/RAS-Allocations-RR2016.pdf) --- ## October 1: the day of dreams seen first — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/october-1-the-day-of-dreams-seen-first/ Idioma: en Descrição: On October 1, 1971, Walt Disney World opened, almost five years after Walt's death. In 2026, Bairo marked on that date the start of what he built. October 1 holds one of the most beautiful stories about vision: that of a park opened without the man who dreamed it. ### What happened 1971. On October 1, 1971, Walt Disney World opened to the public, in Florida, with the Magic Kingdom. Walt Disney had announced the project in November 1965 and died on December 15, 1966, almost five years before the opening. The one who carried the work forward was his brother, Roy O. Disney, who postponed his retirement to finish Walt's dream. On October 25, 1971, Roy read the dedication plaque, which calls the park a tribute to the philosophy and life of Walter Elias Disney. Roy died in December of that same year. The story goes that, on opening day, someone remarked to Mike Vance, then creative director of the Disney studios, that it was a shame Walt hadn't lived to see it. Vance is said to have replied: "He did see it. That's why it's here." The story is told by Vance himself; there's no recording from the time. One circulating version puts the reply in the mouth of the widow, Lillian Disney, but there's no record of that. 2026. On October 1, 2026, fifty-five years later, Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez marked on the clock the beginning of what he built. At 14:20 Brasília time, he marked the symbolic start of 1420mhz.org. The time was chosen for the number that names the project: 1420 MHz, the frequency of hydrogen, which the world's countries agreed to leave in silence so that science can listen to the universe. No signal was emitted on it. The silence is the tribute. ### Why it matters The date has become a symbol of a simple idea: seeing first. Walt Disney didn't see the park open, but he had seen it finished before it existed. That's why the line attributed to Mike Vance is still repeated, half a century later, by those who work in innovation. Another lesson of the day is less remembered. The park only existed because someone kept up the work after the dreamer was gone. Roy O. Disney wasn't the family's visionary; he was the one who made the numbers add up. Without him, the vision would have stayed on paper. ### The bridge to Bairo's vision Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez doesn't compare himself to Walt Disney. If he could speak to him, he says he'd tell him one thing only: "Your dreams inspired me." Bairo's story, told in chapters, begins precisely on this day, in Fifty-five years later (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/), and ends with the same line from Vance: he saw it first, that's why he's building it now. The 2026 milestone is described, with what was announced and what is still a goal, in Manifesto 14:20 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/milestone-1420/). Among the public goals is one of 142 niche AI assistants in 142 days, a deadline that closes on February 20, 2027. It's a goal, not a result. And, as Roy Disney teaches, a dream needs someone to finish it. In Bairo's story, this appears when he stops being alone and finds help in three old acquaintances, in The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/). Read also: Walt Disney: the dream he saw before it existed (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/walt-disney-the-dream-he-saw/) · The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) ### Sources - Walt Disney World (opening on 10/01/1971): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney_World (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney_World) - AllEars, "Year One: The Dedication of Walt Disney World": https://allears.net/year-one-the-dedication-of-walt-disney-world/ (https://allears.net/year-one-the-dedication-of-walt-disney-world/) - Walt Disney Family Museum, "Gentle Visionary: Walt's Disney World": https://waltdisney.org/blog/gentle-visionary-walts-disney-world (https://waltdisney.org/blog/gentle-visionary-walts-disney-world) - Mike Vance and Diane Deacon, Think Out of the Box (1995): https://archive.org/details/thinkoutofbox00vanc (https://archive.org/details/thinkoutofbox00vanc) - Protection of the 1400–1427 MHz band (ITU, footnote RR 5.340): https://www.e-callisto.org/generaldocuments/RAS-Allocations-RR2016.pdf (https://www.e-callisto.org/generaldocuments/RAS-Allocations-RR2016.pdf) --- ## October 5: Steve Jobs and lifetime — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/october-5-steve-jobs-and-lifetime/ Idioma: en Descrição: Steve Jobs died on October 5, 2011. He spoke of death as life's best invention and had already measured computer seconds in human lives. On October 5, 2011, Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, died at 56, in Palo Alto, California, after years of treatment for pancreatic cancer. ### What happened Jobs's death was announced by Apple one day after the launch of a new iPhone. Within hours, the company's stores around the world became places of tribute, with flowers, notes and bitten apples left at the door. Six years earlier, on June 12, 2005, in the Stanford University commencement address, Jobs had spoken of his own death. He said he had received a cancer diagnosis and that remembering he would die was the most important tool he had ever found to help him make the big choices in life. He said death is very likely the single best invention of life, because it clears the way for the new. And he closed with a farewell he had read in the final issue of the Whole Earth Catalog, which became famous in his voice: "Stay hungry. Stay foolish." ### Why it matters The date is remembered every year by those who work in technology and innovation. But there's a Jobs story that speaks more directly about time than any speech. In 1983, he asked engineer Larry Kenyon to shave ten seconds off the time the Macintosh took to boot. To justify the request, he did a calculation: ten seconds, times millions of users, every day, added up to the equivalent of several human lifetimes a year. Shaving ten seconds would be, in his words, saving lives. The account is by Andy Hertzfeld, who was on the team, and is published on folklore.org. A correction: Jobs didn't ask for the Mac to "boot in ten seconds", and no one said it was impossible. He asked for the boot time to drop by ten seconds, and the team managed it over the following months. ### The bridge to Bairo's vision The ten-seconds calculation is the one closest to the way Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez thinks about time. For him, lifetime is the measure of everything. The yardstick he proposed for BICOIN (BTZ), the governance currency of the BTZ Chain network, is "1 BTZ = 1 minute of human life". It's a yardstick of purpose, not a price. Nothing here is an offer, a recommendation or a promise of value, and the network is under development, subject to applicable regulation. The idea has old relatives: since 1980, the time banks created by Edgar Cahn have traded an hour of service for an hour. Bairo proposes a new chapter of that idea, and that's how it's told, with humility and with its relatives credited, in the chapter A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/). The Jobs episode opens Bairo's story in Fifty-five years later (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/). Jobs's own path, pushed out of the company he founded, is in Steve Jobs: pushed out of the company he founded (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/steve-jobs-pushed-out-of-his-own-company/). ### Sources - Stanford Report, speech of 06/12/2005: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2005/06/steve-jobs-2005-graduates-stay-hungry-stay-foolish (https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2005/06/steve-jobs-2005-graduates-stay-hungry-stay-foolish) - Andy Hertzfeld, "Saving Lives" (1983): https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html (https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html) - Steve Jobs (biography and death on 10/05/2011): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs) - Time banks and Edgar Cahn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-based_currency (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-based_currency) --- ## October 30: the engine stalled and Senna became champion URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/october-30-senna-and-the-first-title/ Idioma: en Descrição: On October 30, 1988, at Suzuka, Senna's engine stalled at the start. He dropped to 14th, won the race and clinched his first world title. On October 30, 1988, at the Suzuka circuit, in Japan, Ayrton Senna won the first of his three Formula 1 world titles. The way it happened is the reason the date is remembered. ### What happened Senna started on pole position, ahead of his McLaren teammate and main rival, Alain Prost. When the lights went out, the engine of Senna's car went out too. He only got going again because Suzuka's start straight slopes slightly downhill, which let the car bump-start. When the engine came back, Senna had already dropped to 14th place, while Prost raced away in front. Then began one of the most remembered races in the history of the sport. Lap after lap, with a string of fastest laps, Senna passed rival after rival. A light rain appeared midway through. He caught Prost, overtook him and won the Japanese Grand Prix. The win secured the 1988 title. ### Why it matters The date shows something that holds far beyond motor racing: the start doesn't define the finish. The fastest driver on the grid started worse than everyone and, even so, finished first. Senna would be champion again in 1990 and 1991. He died on May 1, 1994, at Imola. Much of what is published under his name has no source, but about limits there's a recorded line: in 1989, according to the magazine Veja, he said every driver has his limit, and that his was "a little higher than the others'". ### The bridge to Bairo's vision Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez sees in Senna proof that the decision comes before the victory. He doesn't compare himself to the driver; he pays tribute. Bairo's story begins by remembering Senna, in Fifty-five years later (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/). The Suzuka start speaks to every chapter in which Bairo dropped to the back of the grid: when he lost his footing in a country that wasn't his, when his partners pushed him out of his own business, when a business didn't hold up and, as he tells it, fifty people depended on him. In every one, the race went on. Read Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) and The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/). The name Senna is a registered trademark; this page cites the story and a credited line, without associating it with any product or company. Read also: Ayrton Senna: the limit a little higher (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/ayrton-senna-and-the-limit-a-little-higher/) ### Sources - 1988 Japanese Grand Prix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Japanese_Grand_Prix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Japanese_Grand_Prix) - Motor Sport, "1988 Japanese GP: Senna storms from back to claim first title": https://www.motorsportmagazine.com/special-article/the-75-greatest-grands-prix/84/30-1988-japanese-gp-senna-storms-from-back-to-claim-first-title/ (https://www.motorsportmagazine.com/special-article/the-75-greatest-grands-prix/84/30-1988-japanese-gp-senna-storms-from-back-to-claim-first-title/) - Honda, "A Miraculous Comeback — Senna's Long-Awaited First Title": https://global.honda/en/F1/circuit/suzuka/JapaneseGP/1988/ (https://global.honda/en/F1/circuit/suzuka/JapaneseGP/1988/) - Wikiquote (pt), 1989 line quoted by Veja: https://pt.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ayrton_Senna (https://pt.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ayrton_Senna) --- ## July 17: Disneyland and Black Sunday — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/july-17-disneyland-and-black-sunday/ Idioma: en Descrição: On July 17, 1955, Disneyland opened on a day so full of problems it became known as Black Sunday. Walt fixed everything and carried on. On July 17, 1955, Walt Disney opened Disneyland, in Anaheim, California. It was the only Disney park opened by Walt himself, and opening day nearly went completely wrong. ### What happened The opening was broadcast live on American television, to millions of viewers. It was meant to be an invitation-only event, but counterfeit tickets circulated, and far more people than expected showed up. The heat was intense. The freshly laid asphalt softened under people's shoes. Drinking fountains were missing, because of a plumbers' strike, and some rides broke down. The staff came to call that day "Black Sunday". At the park's dedication, Walt read a text that opens with the line that became famous: "To all who come to this happy place: Welcome." To get there, he had faced the distrust of the banks, which saw amusement parks as a seasonal, risky business. Walt took out a loan against his own life insurance and created a company with his initials, WED Enterprises, to run the project. ### Why it matters Black Sunday is a lesson almost no one tells when talking about Disney. The place that became synonymous with perfection began with a disastrous day. Walt and the team spent the following weeks fixing the problems, and the park became one of the most visited in the world. Almost three decades earlier, Walt had already lost a studio and a character. Disneyland was proof that he had learned to survive his own beginnings. ### The bridge to Bairo's vision Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez doesn't hide his own bad beginnings. He says he had businesses that didn't work out as well as he hoped, ideas that came too early and an idea his partners took from him. Instead of erasing those days, he calls them the foundation. The rule is in No is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/). There's also the life insurance. Walt put his own family's protection on the line to build what he had seen. Bairo says that, when a business didn't hold up, fifty people depended on him, and that the decision was to keep going. It's in Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/). There's no comparison of size. There's tribute to someone who opened the gate on a bad day and came back the next day to fix things. Read also: Walt Disney: the dream he saw before it existed (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/walt-disney-the-dream-he-saw/) · October 1 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/october-1-the-day-of-dreams-seen-first/) ### Sources - Disneyland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disneyland (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disneyland) - Biography.com, "Disneyland: Inside The Park's 'Black Sunday' Opening": https://www.biography.com/business-leaders/a65319657/disneyland-opening-black-sunday-70th-anniversary (https://www.biography.com/business-leaders/a65319657/disneyland-opening-black-sunday-70th-anniversary) - ABC7 Los Angeles, July 17 anniversary: https://abc7.com/post/disneyland-birthday-opening-day-66-when-did-open/1429121/ (https://abc7.com/post/disneyland-birthday-opening-day-66-when-did-open/1429121/) - ACLI, "Walt Disney, Mickey Mouse and Life Insurance?": https://impact.acli.com/walt-disney-mickey-mouse-and-life-insurance/ (https://impact.acli.com/walt-disney-mickey-mouse-and-life-insurance/) --- ## December 17: the 12-second flight at Kitty Hawk URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/december-17-the-wright-brothers-fly/ Idioma: en Descrição: On December 17, 1903, the Wright brothers flew for 12 seconds at Kitty Hawk, 69 days after a newspaper predicted it could take up to 10 million years. On December 17, 1903, on a beach of dunes and strong wind in North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright flew the Flyer, a powered airplane they had designed and built themselves. ### What happened The flights took place at Kill Devil Hills, near the village of Kitty Hawk. There were four that day. The first, around half past ten in the morning, with Orville at the controls, lasted 12 seconds and covered about 37 meters. The brothers took turns. The fourth and longest, with Wilbur, lasted 59 seconds and covered about 260 meters. After that, a gust of wind flipped the airplane on the ground and damaged it. There were few witnesses, local residents and men from the lifesaving station. One of them took the photograph that became one of the most famous images of the twentieth century, with the airplane a few meters off the ground and Wilbur running alongside. Sixty-nine days earlier, on October 9, 1903, The New York Times had published an editorial saying the flying machine that would really fly might take "from one million to ten million years" to be developed. ### Why it matters The Wrights weren't university scientists. They were bicycle makers from Dayton, Ohio. What took them to flight was method: in their own wind tunnel they redid the lift tables the researchers of the time used, because they found they were wrong, and they solved the problem of controlling the airplane in the air. And there was doubt from within too. In 1908, Wilbur confessed in a speech in Paris that, in 1901, discouraged, he had told his brother that man would not fly for fifty years. In Brazil, the first flight is credited to Santos-Dumont, who on October 23, 1906 took off in the 14-Bis under its own power, before the public. Both dates tell true stories, and each has its own page. ### The bridge to Bairo's vision The ten-million-year forecast is a perfect portrait of the "it can't be done" that comes from outside, with all the authority of an important newspaper. Wilbur's confession is the "it can't be done" that comes from within. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez has known both. He says he was told many times that it wasn't possible and that, more often than he likes to remember, he thought about stopping. The line he uses for this is just one: "The impossible is just something that hasn't been done yet." The rule for life left by the falls is in No is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/), and the count that worked out is in The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/). Read also: The Wright brothers and the ten-million-year forecast (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/the-wright-brothers-and-the-ten-million-years/) · October 23, the 14-Bis (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/october-23-the-14-bis-and-aviators-day/) ### Sources - Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, 1903 Wright Flyer: https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/1903-wright-flyer/nasm_A19610048000 (https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/1903-wright-flyer/nasm_A19610048000) - National Park Service, Wright Brothers National Memorial: https://www.nps.gov/wrbr/ (https://www.nps.gov/wrbr/) - "Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly", The New York Times, 10/09/1903: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Machines_Which_Do_Not_Fly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Machines_Which_Do_Not_Fly) - Wilbur Wright's speech, 1908: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1908_in_aviation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1908_in_aviation) --- ## October 23: the 14-Bis and Aviator's Day — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/october-23-the-14-bis-and-aviators-day/ Idioma: en Descrição: On October 23, 1906, Santos-Dumont made the 14-Bis take off under its own power in Paris, before the public. In Brazil, the date is Aviator's Day. On October 23, 1906, at the Bagatelle field, in Paris, the Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont made the 14-Bis leave the ground under its own power, before a crowd. ### What happened The 14-Bis was a strange airplane to today's eyes: it seemed to fly backward, with the part that controls direction in front and the wings behind. That afternoon, it took off without rail or catapult, flew about 60 meters a few meters off the ground and landed. The flight is remembered as the first public flight of a powered airplane in Europe. The flight earned Santos-Dumont the Archdeacon cup, created for the first flight of at least 25 meters. Weeks later, on November 12, 1906, with the airplane modified, he flew 220 meters and won the Aéro-Club de France prize for the first flight of 100 meters, recorded by an official commission. In Brazil, October 23 is celebrated as Aviator's Day. ### Why it matters The date has two meanings. The first is the debate over who flew first. In the United States, the answer is the Wright brothers, for the flights of December 17, 1903. In Brazil, it's Santos-Dumont, because the 14-Bis took off under its own power and before witnesses, while the Wrights' flights had a small audience and used a launch rail. Both stories are true; this page doesn't aim to settle the debate. The second meaning is the road there. Five years earlier, in 1901, Santos-Dumont's airship No. 5 had lost gas and gotten stuck on the roof of a hotel in Paris, with him hanging from the side of the building. He came out unhurt, built No. 6 and, months later, rounded the Eiffel Tower and won the Deutsch prize. ### The bridge to Bairo's vision Santos-Dumont made his life far from the country where he was born, in a learned language, and fell in public before flying in public. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, a Colombian who made his life in Brazil, recognizes that path. He arrived in the country while still young and knew the other side of arriving: losing your footing, far from home, and starting over. It's in Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/). The lesson of the airship on the roof is the same as Bairo's rule: no is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/). No. 5 left its engine to No. 6. In Bairo's story, every attempt left something for the next, up to the seventh (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/). Read also: Santos-Dumont: from the airship on the roof to the 14-Bis (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/santos-dumont-and-the-14-bis/) · December 17, the Wrights (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/december-17-the-wright-brothers-fly/) ### Sources - Santos-Dumont 14-bis (flights of 10/23 and 11/12/1906): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santos-Dumont_14-bis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santos-Dumont_14-bis) - Britannica, Santos-Dumont No. 14-bis: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Santos-Dumont-No-14-bis (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Santos-Dumont-No-14-bis) - Agência Brasil, "First flight 115 years ago" (Portuguese): https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/geral/noticia/2021-10/primeiro-voo-ha-115-anos-santos-dumont-aliou-invencoes-ciencia (https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/geral/noticia/2021-10/primeiro-voo-ha-115-anos-santos-dumont-aliou-invencoes-ciencia) - Aeroin, "Santos Dumont's historic 60-meter flight turns 115" (Portuguese): https://aeroin.net/voo-historico-de-60-metros-feito-por-santos-dumont-completa-115-anos/ (https://aeroin.net/voo-historico-de-60-metros-feito-por-santos-dumont-completa-115-anos/) - Santos-Dumont No. 6 and the Deutsch prize (1901): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santos-Dumont_number_6 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santos-Dumont_number_6) --- ## November 18: Mickey was born from a loss — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/november-18-mickey-was-born-from-a-loss/ Idioma: en Descrição: On November 18, 1928, Steamboat Willie premiered, the cartoon that introduced Mickey to the public. The mouse was born after Walt Disney lost Oswald. On November 18, 1928, in a New York theater, a cartoon of just over seven minutes called Steamboat Willie premiered. In it, the public met Mickey Mouse. ### What happened Steamboat Willie premiered at the Colony Theatre, in New York. It was one of the first cartoons with sound synchronized to the picture: music, noises and whistles matched the character's movements. It was an immediate success. Decades later, Disney adopted the date as Mickey's official birthday. The mouse was born from a loss. Months earlier, in March 1928, Walt Disney had gone to New York to negotiate a better contract for his successful character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. He discovered that the rights to Oswald belonged to the studio that distributed the films and that the distributor had taken a good part of his team. Walt went home without the character. With Ub Iwerks, he created a new one. Mickey's first two cartoons, still silent, found no distributor. The third, with sound, was Steamboat Willie. ### Why it matters It's one of the clearest stories of how a no can become a beginning. If Walt had kept Oswald, Mickey might never have existed. The loss forced the creation of something entirely his own. ### The bridge to Bairo's vision Bairo was born in Colombia and made his life in Brazil; capoeira was the bridge between the two countries, as he tells in Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/). What matters here is the meaning of the date. Mickey was born from an idea taken from Walt. In Bairo's story, too, there was an idea taken from him: his partners pushed him out of the business, and the idea stayed with them. He didn't make it an open wound. He made it a floor. And from there came the sentence that became his rule for life: no is the foundation of yes. It's in the chapter No is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/). Bairo doesn't compare himself to Walt Disney. If he could speak to him, he says he'd tell him one thing only: "Your dreams inspired me." Read also: Walt Disney: the dream he saw before it existed (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/walt-disney-the-dream-he-saw/) · About Bairo (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/about/) ### Sources - D23 (official Disney archive), "Steamboat Willie Premieres": https://d23.com/this-day/steamboat-willie-premieres/ (https://d23.com/this-day/steamboat-willie-premieres/) - Smithsonian, "Mickey Mouse turns 90": https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/stories/mickey-mouse-turns-90 (https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/stories/mickey-mouse-turns-90) - Steamboat Willie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steamboat_Willie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steamboat_Willie) - MoMA, Steamboat Willie (1928): https://www.moma.org/collection/works/302797 (https://www.moma.org/collection/works/302797) - Oswald and the loss of the rights (1928): https://mouseplanet.com/the-history-of-oswald-the-lucky-rabbit-part-one/4512/ (https://mouseplanet.com/the-history-of-oswald-the-lucky-rabbit-part-one/4512/) --- ## March 25: the day hydrogen was heard — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/march-25-the-day-hydrogen-was-heard/ Idioma: en Descrição: On March 25, 1951, Harold Ewen and Edward Purcell detected at Harvard the hydrogen line, 1420 MHz, predicted on paper seven years earlier. On March 25, 1951, a Harvard graduate student picked up for the first time a radio signal that until then had existed only in a calculation made in the middle of a war: the 21-centimeter line of hydrogen, at 1420 MHz. ### What happened The student was Harold "Doc" Ewen, and his adviser was the physicist Edward Purcell. To try to hear the signal, Ewen built a receiver and a horn-shaped antenna and installed it outside a fourth-floor window of the Lyman Laboratory, at Harvard. Purcell secured a grant of 500 dollars for the materials. On March 25, 1951, the chart showed the signal: radiation from the neutral hydrogen of our galaxy, at a frequency of about 1420 MHz. The result was published in the journal Nature, in September 1951, together with confirmation by teams in the Netherlands and Australia. The original antenna is now at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, in Green Bank, in the United States. ### Why it matters Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. Hearing its signal allowed astronomers to map where the gas in galaxies is and, with that, to draw the structure of the Milky Way, including its spiral arms. The hydrogen line became one of the most important tools of radio astronomy. And there's a beautiful detail: the signal had been predicted on paper in 1944, by the Dutchman Hendrik van de Hulst, when no one had a way to hear it. Seven years between seeing and confirming. Because of this importance, the band from 1400 to 1427 MHz is protected by international agreement, under the International Telecommunication Union. In it, emissions are prohibited, so that science can keep listening to the sky. ### The bridge to Bairo's vision The project Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez founded is called 1420 because of this signal. For him, 1420 MHz is the frequency of silence: the signal of the simplest and most abundant element, which the world agreed to leave in silence. It's a symbol, and that's how he uses it. No one transmits on this band, not even the project. The story of the detection is also a story about seeing first. Van de Hulst saw it on paper; Ewen and Purcell confirmed it in the sky. In Bairo's story, the idea is the same as the line attributed to Mike Vance about Walt Disney: first someone sees, then the world confirms. It's in The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/). Read also: April 15, the prediction (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/april-15-the-hydrogen-line-predicted-on-paper/) · Frank Drake and the silence of 1420 MHz (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/frank-drake-and-the-silence-of-1420-mhz/) ### Sources - Harold Irving Ewen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Irving_Ewen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Irving_Ewen) - NRAO, "The Ewen-Purcell Horn at Green Bank": https://www.gb.nrao.edu/fgdocs/HI21cm/ephorn.html (https://www.gb.nrao.edu/fgdocs/HI21cm/ephorn.html) - NRAO, "Horn o'Plenty Discoveries": https://public.nrao.edu/gallery/horn-oplenty-discoveries/ (https://public.nrao.edu/gallery/horn-oplenty-discoveries/) - Ewen-Purcell Horn Antenna Historical Marker: https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=58304 (https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=58304) - Hydrogen line: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_line (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_line) - Protection of the 1400–1427 MHz band (ITU, footnote RR 5.340): https://www.e-callisto.org/generaldocuments/RAS-Allocations-RR2016.pdf (https://www.e-callisto.org/generaldocuments/RAS-Allocations-RR2016.pdf) --- ## April 15: the hydrogen line predicted on paper URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/april-15-the-hydrogen-line-predicted-on-paper/ Idioma: en Descrição: On April 15, 1944, mid-war, the Dutchman Van de Hulst presented in Leiden the calculation predicting hydrogen's 21 cm signal, at 1420 MHz. On April 15, 1944, at a colloquium of astronomers in Leiden, in the Netherlands occupied by Nazi Germany, a 25-year-old student presented a prediction that would only be confirmed seven years later. ### What happened The student was Hendrik Christoffel van de Hulst, of Utrecht University. The astronomer Jan Oort, of Leiden, had asked him a question: might there be some spectral line, a signal at an exact frequency, that could be picked up by radio coming from space? Van de Hulst studied hydrogen first, because it's the most abundant element in the universe. He concluded that the hydrogen atom, in its simplest state, undergoes from time to time a small internal change, and that this change emits radiation at a wavelength of about 21 centimeters, corresponding to a frequency of about 1420 MHz. At the colloquium of April 15, 1944, he presented the result. The work was published in 1945. Many historians of astronomy mark this date as the birth of Dutch radio astronomy. ### Why it matters In 1944, there was no way to hear this signal. The war was destroying Europe, the instruments didn't exist and no one knew whether the prediction was right. Van de Hulst saw on paper what could not yet be heard. Confirmation came on March 25, 1951, when Harold Ewen and Edward Purcell detected the line at Harvard. Seven years between prediction and listening. The hydrogen line became one of the central tools for mapping the Milky Way and other galaxies. The exact frequency, later measured with enormous precision, is 1 420 405 751.768 hertz. ### The bridge to Bairo's vision The project Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez founded bears the name of this signal: 1420. He calls the hydrogen line the frequency of silence, because the band from 1400 to 1427 MHz is protected by international agreement, under the International Telecommunication Union, and emissions are prohibited in it. There, one only listens. No one transmits on this band, not even Bairo's project; the number is a symbol. But April 15 tells something else, even closer to his story. Van de Hulst saw before there was proof. In Bairo's life, this repeats: ideas seen before they became trends, a business seen before it had a path. He says that, after an inner search, he already knew where he wanted to get to and didn't know how; he asked for wisdom to remember the way. First someone sees. Then the world confirms. Read: The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) · The God of the impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/) Read also: March 25, the detection (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/march-25-the-day-hydrogen-was-heard/) · Frank Drake and the silence of 1420 MHz (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/frank-drake-and-the-silence-of-1420-mhz/) ### Sources - Encyclopedia.com, "Van De Hulst, Hendrik Christoffel" (colloquium of 04/15/1944): https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/van-de-hulst-hendrik-christoffel (https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/van-de-hulst-hendrik-christoffel) - Leiden University, "Leiden astronomer Henk van de Hulst: humble man with great authority": https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2021/04/leiden-astronomer-henk-van-de-hulst-humble-man-with-great-authority (https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2021/04/leiden-astronomer-henk-van-de-hulst-humble-man-with-great-authority) - Hendrik C. van de Hulst: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendrik_C._van_de_Hulst (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendrik_C._van_de_Hulst) - CAMRAS, "With the 21 cm hydrogen line from Kootwijk to Dwingeloo": https://www.camras.nl/en/blog/2021/with-the-21-cm-hydrogen-line-from-kootwijk-to-dwingeloo/ (https://www.camras.nl/en/blog/2021/with-the-21-cm-hydrogen-line-from-kootwijk-to-dwingeloo/) - NIST, hydrogen line frequency: https://tf.nist.gov/general/pdf/13.pdf (https://tf.nist.gov/general/pdf/13.pdf) --- ## October 16: World Food Day — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/october-16-world-food-day/ Idioma: en Descrição: October 16 marks the founding of FAO, in 1945, and is World Food Day. Why the date matters and how it connects to Instituto CEASA. Every October 16, more than 150 countries celebrate World Food Day. The date recalls an agreement signed at the end of the Second World War. ### What happened On October 16, 1945, in Quebec, Canada, the constitution of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, FAO, was signed. The world was coming out of the war hungry, and the new organization was born with the mission of fighting hunger and improving the production and distribution of food. In 1979, at its 20th Conference, FAO's member countries created World Food Day, to be celebrated every year on the date of its founding. Since 1981, each edition has had a theme, chosen to draw attention to one part of the problem: water, climate, family farming, waste. ### Why it matters Hunger isn't just a lack of food in the world. Often, it's food that exists and doesn't reach those who need it. A significant part of the food produced is lost on the way between field and table, in harvest, transport, storage and sale. In Brazil, much of the fresh food passes through the wholesale supply centers, the CEASAs, where food changes hands every day and where produce not sold in time is left over. It's there that many people still work outside the financial system, and it's there that surplus can become loss or become a meal. There's also a Brazilian voice that helps understand the day. In Quarto de Despejo (1960), the writer Carolina Maria de Jesus, a paper picker in the Canindé favela, wrote: "Hunger is also a teacher." ### The bridge to Bairo's vision Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez founded Instituto CEASA, the humanitarian venture of the ecosystem. The proposal is to broaden access to food using the surplus from the wholesale supply centers, with a project for a factory of long-shelf-life food that keeps outside the refrigerator. It's a proposal, at a development stage, not a result. The link with agribusiness isn't accidental. The platform Bairo built, CEASA Bank, is a financial platform for agribusiness that runs on the infrastructure of an authorized institution, designed for those who produce, trade and buy at the centers. It's described in The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) and in A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/). For Bairo, hunger is one of the oldest pains, and October 16 is a reminder that technology and finance only make sense if they reach someone's table. Read also: Carolina Maria de Jesus and Quarto de Despejo (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/carolina-maria-de-jesus-and-child-of-the-dark/) · Ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) ### Sources - FAO, World Food Day: https://www.fao.org/world-food-day/en (https://www.fao.org/world-food-day/en) - UN Geneva, "World Food Day: the task of feeding the world": https://www.ungeneva.org/en/news-media/news/2025/10/111832/world-food-day-live-task-feeding-world (https://www.ungeneva.org/en/news-media/news/2025/10/111832/world-food-day-live-task-feeding-world) - FAO, food loss and waste: https://www.fao.org/platform-food-loss-waste/en (https://www.fao.org/platform-food-loss-waste/en) - Wikipedia (Portuguese), Quarto de Despejo: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarto_de_Despejo (https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarto_de_Despejo) --- ## April 8: Project Ozma listens to the stars — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/april-8-project-ozma-listens-to-the-stars/ Idioma: en Descrição: On April 8, 1960, Frank Drake pointed an antenna at Tau Ceti and listened to the hydrogen frequency in search of another civilization. He heard silence. On April 8, 1960, in a small town in the mountains of West Virginia, in the United States, a young astronomer began listening to the sky in search of someone. ### What happened The astronomer was Frank Drake, 29, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, in Green Bank. That morning, he pointed a 26-meter antenna at the star Tau Ceti, about 12 light-years from Earth. When the star set, he pointed at another, Epsilon Eridani. The receiver was tuned around 1420 MHz, the frequency of the hydrogen line. Drake named the search Project Ozma, after the princess of the land of Oz, from L. Frank Baum's books, a place far away and hard to reach. Between April and July, there were about 200 hours of observation. In the first days, a strong signal excited the team. Days later, they found it was interference of human origin. Beyond that, the equipment recorded only noise. No signal from another civilization was found. ### Why it matters Project Ozma is considered the first modern search for intelligence beyond Earth carried out with a radio telescope. The choice of frequency came from a 1959 paper by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, in the journal Nature: if any civilization wanted to be heard, it would make sense to use the frequency of the most abundant element in the universe, which any being that studied the cosmos would know. The result was silence, and the silence opened an entire field of science. The next year, in November 1961, Drake gathered scientists at Green Bank and wrote on a board the equation that bears his name, still used to organize the questions about intelligent life in the galaxy. ### The bridge to Bairo's vision The project Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez founded is called 1420, the same frequency Drake listened to. Bairo calls it the frequency of silence. The band from 1400 to 1427 MHz is protected by international agreement, under the International Telecommunication Union: in it, emissions are prohibited, so that radio astronomy can listen to the universe. No one transmits there, not even Bairo's project. The number is a symbol. April 8 is the perfect date to understand that symbol. Listening and hearing nothing wasn't Drake's end. It was the beginning. In Bairo's story, no occupies that same place: it's the foundation of yes. Read: The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) · No is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) Read also: Frank Drake and the silence of 1420 MHz (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/frank-drake-and-the-silence-of-1420-mhz/) · March 25 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/march-25-the-day-hydrogen-was-heard/) ### Sources - Project Ozma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ozma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ozma) - Sky & Telescope, "Project Ozma: The First SETI": https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/project-ozma-the-first-seti/ (https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/project-ozma-the-first-seti/) - Cosmic Search, "A Reminiscence of Project Ozma", by Frank Drake: https://www.bigear.org/vol1no1/ozma.htm (https://www.bigear.org/vol1no1/ozma.htm) - Universe Today, "Ozma and the Drake Equation": https://www.universetoday.com/articles/a-brief-ish-history-of-seti-part-ii-ozma-and-the-drake-equation (https://www.universetoday.com/articles/a-brief-ish-history-of-seti-part-ii-ozma-and-the-drake-equation) - Protection of the 1400–1427 MHz band (ITU, footnote RR 5.340): https://www.e-callisto.org/generaldocuments/RAS-Allocations-RR2016.pdf (https://www.e-callisto.org/generaldocuments/RAS-Allocations-RR2016.pdf) --- ## June 3: Landell de Moura and the wireless voice URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/june-3-landell-de-moura-and-the-wireless-voice/ Idioma: en Descrição: On June 3, 1900, in Sao Paulo, the priest Roberto Landell de Moura gave a public demonstration of the human voice sent without wires, by radio waves. On June 3, 1900, on the heights of Santana, in São Paulo, a priest from Rio Grande do Sul gave a public demonstration of a device that sent the human voice over a distance, without wires. ### What happened The priest was Roberto Landell de Moura, born in Porto Alegre in January 1861. Besides being a priest, he was a student of physics and electricity. According to biographical records, the witnesses at the demonstration of June 3, 1900 included the British consul in São Paulo, and the voice was received several kilometers away. The following year, on March 9, 1901, he obtained in Brazil patent no. 3,279, for a device for phonetic communication at a distance, with or without wires. He then went to the United States and, in 1904, obtained three American patents: a wave transmitter, on October 11, and a wireless telephone and a wireless telegraph, on November 22. ### Why it matters Landell de Moura is remembered in Brazil as one of the pioneers of wireless telecommunications and radiotelephony. Who invented radio is a question with many answers, because several people, in several countries, worked on the problem at the same time. The Brazilian priest's name tends to be forgotten outside the country, and that's why this date deserves to be remembered. He too faced the no. In a biographical account, he said that a superstitious crowd, convinced he was in league with the devil, broke into his workplace and destroyed his devices, and that almost all his educated friends saw his theories as contrary to science. The episode comes from the priest's own account, cited by biographers; we found no police or press document from the time. Landell de Moura died in Porto Alegre, on June 30, 1928, without having seen his work recognized in his lifetime as it deserved. ### The bridge to Bairo's vision Landell de Moura lived two vocations many people think don't go together: faith and science. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez also speaks of both in the same sentence. He found faith at rock bottom, and he says that, for whoever trusts their God of creation, religious belief doesn't matter. It's in The God of the impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/). There's also the link with radio waves. Bairo's project is called 1420, the frequency of hydrogen, which the world agreed to leave in silence so that science can listen to the universe. No one transmits on this band, not even the project; the number is a symbol. Landell de Moura showed that the voice could travel through the air. The hydrogen line reminds us that some frequencies exist to be listened to. Read The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/). Read also: Frank Drake and the silence of 1420 MHz (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/frank-drake-and-the-silence-of-1420-mhz/) ### Sources - Roberto Landell de Moura (dates, patents and biographical account): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Landell_de_Moura (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Landell_de_Moura) - ABI, "Landell de Moura: 150 years of an unsung hero" (Portuguese): http://www.abi.org.br/landell-de-moura-150-anos-de-um-heroi-sem-gloria/ (http://www.abi.org.br/landell-de-moura-150-anos-de-um-heroi-sem-gloria/) - A Minha Rádio, biography of Landell de Moura (Portuguese): https://www.aminharadio.com/radio/biografia_landell (https://www.aminharadio.com/radio/biografia_landell) - US patent 771,917, "Wave-Transmitter" (1904): https://patents.google.com/patent/US771917A/en (https://patents.google.com/patent/US771917A/en) --- ## Traits of billionaires: starting from zero — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/traits-of-billionaires-starting-from-zero/ Idioma: en Descrição: Two in three of the 2024 Forbes 400 built their own fortune. What research says about those who start from zero, and how to develop that trait. The most common trait among today's billionaires isn't inheritance. According to Forbes, most of the richest people in the United States built their own fortune. And a small but real share came from the bottom: from poverty, from the welfare line, from having no ground to stand on. Starting from zero isn't the exception in the story of those who built something big. It's a frequent starting point. ### What the research shows Since 1982, Forbes has published the list of the 400 richest Americans. Since 2014, it has given each one a score from 1 to 10 to measure how much of the fortune was built or inherited. From 1 to 5, the person inherited most of it. From 6 to 10, they built it. On the 2024 list, 267 of the 400 scored between 6 and 10: 67% are classified as self-made. The most common score is 8, which indicates a middle-class background. Only 25 people scored 10, the score for those who lived below the poverty line or faced heavy adversity along the way (Forbes, 2024 (https://www.forbes.com/sites/gigizamora/2024/10/01/the-2024-forbes-400-self-made-billionaire-score-from-bootstrappers-to-silver-spooners/)). The number says two things at once. The first inspires: building is the most common path among those who got there. The second is honest: coming up from absolute zero is rare, and those who did faced more than average. That's why these stories deserve to be told with care, without turning the exception into the rule. ### Who lived it Jan Koum was born in Ukraine and arrived in the United States at 16, with his mother. The two of them lived on food stamps for a time. Years later, Koum founded WhatsApp with Brian Acton. In February 2014, when he signed the sale of the company to Facebook, he chose a place: the door of the old social services office in Mountain View, where he had stood in line to collect benefits. The scene was recorded by Forbes (Forbes, 2014 (https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/02/19/exclusive-inside-story-how-jan-koum-built-whatsapp-into-facebooks-new-19-billion-baby/)). The gesture conveys the trait better than any definition. Those who start from zero don't forget where they came from. They carry the starting point as a measure. ### In Bairo's journey Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez came to Brazil in 2002, brought by an education company, in a management position. The boyhood dream had come true. Until the day he wanted to follow his own path and leave the company. That's when he discovered how an immigrant can lose the ground under his feet: without documents in hand, far from home, afraid. Hard years followed, without direction and without a safety net. He sums up that time in one sentence: the sun is for everyone, but shade, in the heat, is for the few. The fresh start had a neighborhood address. With his partner, when their daughter was born, he opened a salon. It didn't work out as well as they wanted, but from it came a course in hair treatments, in a field that only years later found its place in Brazil, trichology. It was zero becoming one. Everything he built afterward started from that point. ### How to develop this trait - Take stock of what's left. Those at zero are rarely in a void. Write down what you still have: a skill, a contact, a language, a person by your side. - Start with the smallest business possible. Bairo started with a salon. Koum, with a simple app. The first step doesn't need to be the size of the dream. - Sell what you know how to do. A course, a service, a consultancy. Knowledge is the capital of those who have no capital. - Keep the starting point. Write down where you were. It will serve as a measure and a reminder on good days and bad. - Ask for help without shame. Public programs, entrepreneur associations and immigrant networks exist for this. Using them isn't weakness. Starting from zero doesn't decide the end of the story. It only decides where it begins. ### Read also - The pattern of those who change the world (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-pattern-of-visionaries/) - Why immigrants start more businesses (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/why-immigrants-start-more-businesses/) - How to start over from zero (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-over-from-zero/) - The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) --- ## What successful entrepreneurs have in common URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/what-successful-entrepreneurs-have-in-common/ Idioma: en Descrição: Persistence with passion, what Angela Duckworth called grit, predicts achievement beyond talent. The research, who lived it and how to train it. If you had to choose a single trait that shows up in almost every entrepreneur who built something big, it would be this one: the ability to keep pursuing the same goal for years, even after falling many times. Psychologist Angela Duckworth gave it a name, grit. It isn't just talent. It's talent sustained over time. ### What the research shows In 2007, Angela Duckworth, Christopher Peterson, Michael Matthews and Dennis Kelly published six studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. They defined grit as "perseverance and passion for long-term goals" and measured the trait in very different groups: adults, students at an elite university, cadets at the West Point military academy and participants in a national spelling bee. In every group, grit helped predict who went further, and that prediction went beyond what IQ and conscientiousness already explained (Duckworth et al., 2007 (https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.92.6.1087)). The authors' conclusion: achieving difficult goals requires not only talent, but the sustained and focused application of that talent over time. An honest note is in order. Later studies debated the size of this effect, and Duckworth herself says grit is one piece, not the whole explanation of success. Even so, it's a piece that is almost never missing from the stories of those who built something. ### Who lived it James Dyson got annoyed with a vacuum cleaner that lost suction when the bag filled up. He had the idea of using a cyclone, like the ones he saw at a sawmill, to separate the dust from the air. The first version, made of cardboard and tape, worked badly. It took him five years and 5,127 prototypes to reach the model that worked. Each one failed at something, and each failure showed what needed to change. In interviews, Dyson often defends failure as part of the method, not a deviation from it (Gizmodo (https://gizmodo.com/praising-failure-james-dyson-talks-vacuums-5-127-proto-5790556)). The bagless vacuum born from that gave the company its name. ### In Bairo's journey Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez can't say how many times he tried. Nor how many times he thought about stopping. He knows it was many. There was the salon opened with his partner. The hair treatment course. The artificial intelligence and augmented reality idea that came too early. The own brand of natural cosmetics. The technology project from which his partners pushed him out. The events and the digital printing. The investment that didn't hold up, with many people depending on him. The project in which he was left stranded by those he had helped. The number he chose to tell his own story is seven. The seventh attempt was the one that worked. Not by luck: it was the first that had all the others inside it. It's grit in the exact sense of the research: the same underlying goal, pursued for years, through different paths. ### How to develop this trait - Choose a goal worth years. Grit needs a direction. Write, in one sentence, what you want to build and why. - Separate goal from method. Dyson never changed the goal, he changed the prototype. Change the path as many times as needed; keep the destination. - Record every attempt. Write down what you tried, what failed and what you learned. The list shows progress where memory sees only defeat. - Practice the hard part every day. Duckworth links grit to deliberate practice, the kind that works precisely on what you still do badly. - Surround yourself with people who persist. Grit is also learned by proximity. Look for people who have already been through what you're going through. - Rest without giving up. Stopping for a day isn't giving up. Giving up is changing destination because the road got hard. ### Read also - The pattern of those who change the world (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-pattern-of-visionaries/) - Failing before succeeding (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/failing-before-succeeding/) - The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) - I tried many times and nothing worked (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/i-tried-many-times-and-nothing-worked/) --- ## Why do immigrants start more businesses? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/why-immigrants-start-more-businesses/ Idioma: en Descrição: 55% of US billion-dollar startups have an immigrant founder. What the research shows, who lived it and what an immigrant carries in the suitcase. Immigrants appear more often than expected among the founders of companies that changed markets. There are possible explanations: those who cross a border have already made the riskiest decision of their lives, learned to get by without a safety net, and see the new country with outsider's eyes, spotting opportunities that those born there let slip by. There's no single cause. But the pattern is consistent. ### What the research shows The National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP), a US think tank, has for years tracked the origin of the founders of American startups valued at US$ 1 billion or more, the so-called unicorns. In the 2022 survey, 319 of the 582 billion-dollar startups had at least one immigrant founder: 55%. A quarter of them (143) had a founder who came to the country as an international student. And nearly 80% had an immigrant as a founder or in a key role, such as CEO or vice president of engineering (NFAP, 2022 (https://nfap.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/2022-BILLION-DOLLAR-STARTUPS.NFAP-Policy-Brief.2022.pdf)). Immigrants are a much smaller share of the American population than that 55%. In other words: among those who built the fastest-growing companies, those who came from abroad are far above their proportion. The data is from the United States and from venture-backed startups. It doesn't automatically apply to Brazil or to every kind of business. But it helps to see something many immigrants feel firsthand: the crossing, when it doesn't break a person, tends to make them stronger. ### Who lived it Sergey Brin was born in Moscow, in 1973. In 1979, at age six, he left the Soviet Union with his parents and brother, in one of the last waves of Jewish families allowed to leave before the Gorbachev era. His father became a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland; his mother, a researcher at a NASA center (The Immigrant Learning Center (https://www.ilctr.org/about-immigrants/immigrant-entrepreneurs/hall-of-fame/sergey-brin/)). Years later, at Stanford, Brin met Larry Page. The two founded Google in 1998. The boy who crossed a border at six helped create the tool billions of people use today without thinking. ### In Bairo's journey Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez was born in Colombia, in 1982. Since he was a boy, he told anyone who would listen that one day he would live in Brazil. It wasn't a plan; it was certainty spoken out loud, before any path existed. The path came through a roda. Capoeira was the first thing from Brazil he learned with his body, before the language and before the country. In 2002, he arrived, brought by an education company, in a management position. Then came the years without solid ground, as for so many immigrants before and after him. And there came, too, what the crossing teaches: starting over where no one knows your name, learning the rules of a country that isn't yours, and seeing opportunity where others see routine. Bairo says there are no coincidences or accidents. There are purposes, dreams and execution. ### How to develop this trait You don't need to move countries to use what immigration teaches. - Look at your market with a foreigner's eyes. Ask why things are done this way. Many answers are "it's always been like that", and that's where the opportunity lives. - Build a network from scratch, on purpose. Immigrants don't inherit contacts. Learn to introduce yourself, to ask and to give back. - Turn difference into advantage. Language, culture and contacts from abroad are assets. List yours. - If you're an immigrant, take care of your papers first. Regular status opens doors no talent can open. In Brazil, look for the Federal Public Defender's Office or migrant support organizations. - Don't carry it alone. Immigrant communities, associations and entrepreneur groups shorten the road. ### Read also - The pattern of those who change the world (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-pattern-of-visionaries/) - Traits of billionaires: starting from zero (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/traits-of-billionaires-starting-from-zero/) - Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/) - How to start life over in another country (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-life-over-in-another-country/) --- ## Failing before succeeding: what the research says URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/failing-before-succeeding/ Idioma: en Descrição: Founders who failed before have the same chance of success as first-timers. A fall doesn't take anyone out of the game; what counts is what you learn. Failing at a business doesn't stop anyone from building the next one. That's what the data show in one of the most cited studies on serial entrepreneurs: those who have failed before have practically the same chance of success as those starting a business for the first time. A fall isn't a sentence. Sometimes it's the first lesson. ### What the research shows Paul Gompers, Anna Kovner, Josh Lerner and David Scharfstein, from Harvard and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, studied thousands of American venture-backed companies. They defined success objectively: the company went public. The result, published in the Journal of Financial Economics in 2010: those who had already succeeded at a previous company had a 30% chance of doing it again. First-time founders, 21%. And those who had failed before, 22% (Gompers et al. (https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/economists/kovner/performance_persistence.pdf)). There are two honest readings of that number. The first: past success helps, because those who got it right tend to have skill and because suppliers and customers trust them more. The second, the one that matters to someone on the ground: the previous failure didn't lower anyone's chance. Those who fell and came back were, at the very least, even with those who had never tried. There's another fact that carries weight: the research only sees those who had the courage to try again. Those who gave up after the first fall don't appear in any second-company statistic. ### Who lived it In 1922, in Kansas City, Walt Disney opened his first animation studio, Laugh-O-Gram Films. A client who owed the studio money went under before paying. Disney cut staff, cut salaries, shrank the space to two rooms. He even slept in the office. In July 1923, Laugh-O-Gram filed for bankruptcy. Disney left for Hollywood with little money and an unfinished film under his arm (Laugh-O-Gram Studio (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laugh-O-Gram_Studio)). Five years later, he introduced the world to a mouse named Mickey. ### In Bairo's journey The journey of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez is a list of falls told without makeup. His partners pushed him out of a business he had helped create, and the idea stayed with them. With the capital he saved afterward, he came in as an investing partner in a company that wasn't what it seemed and didn't hold up, with many people depending on him. Next, he decided to build a currency, a bank and a network, and the project went wrong because the very people he had helped left him stranded. He made each of those closed doors into a brick. The course left a method. The idea that came too early left an eye for the future. The partners left the lesson about whom to build with. Losing everything left the courage to do what he didn't know how to do. That's why he sums up life in one sentence: no is the foundation of yes. ### How to develop this trait - Do the autopsy, not the trial. List what depended on you and went wrong, what didn't depend on you, and what went right. That list is raw material. - Separate the business's failure from your worth. Failure is an event, not an identity. A company closed; you go on. - Keep what worked. Almost every business that closes leaves something standing: a loyal customer, a process, a skill. Take it to the next one. - Come back with a smaller step. After a fall, test before betting everything. Validate the idea with little money. - Tell the story honestly. Those who hide failure lose the lesson. Those who tell it, without drama and without blaming others, gain credibility. - If the pain doesn't go away, seek help. Sadness that lasts weeks calls for professional care. In Brazil, CVV answers at 188, free, 24 hours. ### Read also - The pattern of those who change the world (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-pattern-of-visionaries/) - Walt Disney: the dream he saw (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/walt-disney-the-dream-he-saw/) - No is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) - How to overcome failure (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-overcome-failure/) --- ## Risk tolerance: the trait of those who start businesses URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/risk-tolerance/ Idioma: en Descrição: Entrepreneurs accept more risk than managers, a meta-analysis shows. But good risk is calculated risk. The research, a real example and how to train it. Starting a business means accepting that you don't know how the story ends. That's why risk tolerance shows up on almost every list of founder traits. But research makes an important distinction: those who build something big aren't the ones who risk anything at all. They're the ones who accept the uncertainty that comes with a new idea and, at the same time, work to reduce it. ### What the research shows In 2001, Wayne Stewart and Philip Roth gathered the studies that compared the risk propensity of entrepreneurs and hired managers. The meta-analysis, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, concluded that entrepreneurs have a higher propensity for risk than managers. The difference was even larger among entrepreneurs focused on growing the business than among those seeking income for their family (Stewart and Roth, 2001 (https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.86.1.145)). The question isn't settled. In 2004, John Miner and Nambury Raju used other measures and found entrepreneurs more cautious than expected, and the authors debated the results in the same journal (Stewart and Roth's reply (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8881157_Risk_Propensity_Differences_Between_Managers_and_Entrepreneurs_and_Between_Low-_and_High-Growth_Entrepreneurs_A_Reply_in_a_More_Conservative_Vein)). The reading that brings both sides together: entrepreneurs are willing to step into uncertain situations, but they don't like losing for nothing. They take the risk and, right after, try to control the risk they took. ### Who lived it In 2008, Elon Musk had both his companies close to collapse. The first three launches of SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket had failed. Tesla was facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. He had what was left of the money he made from the sale of PayPal and had to choose: save one company and let the other die, or split everything between the two. He split it. In September 2008, the fourth Falcon 1 launch reached orbit. In December, SpaceX closed a contract with NASA, and Tesla's funding round closed on Christmas Eve (CNBC (https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/29/elon-musk-9-years-ago-spacex-nearly-failed-itself-out-of-existence.html)). It could have gone wrong. That's the point: risk is risk. ### In Bairo's journey Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez made two risky decisions that changed his story. The first came after the events and the digital printing. With the capital he had saved, he decided to play a different position: instead of founding, investing. He came in as an investing partner in a company. The business wasn't what it seemed and didn't hold up. It was the deepest fall. He says fifty people depended on him. The second came right after, and it was the most improbable. Instead of familiar ground, he chose the unknown: building a currency, a bank and a network, things he had never done. It went wrong the first time. He kept going. To an outsider, it looks reckless. To him, it was the same logic as always: if no one does it, someone has to. ### How to develop this trait - Define how much you can lose. Before taking a risk, decide the limit: money, time, assets. Risk without a limit isn't courage. - Protect the essentials. Never put your family's basic livelihood at stake without a plan for it. - Take risks in steps. Test small, learn, raise the bet only when there's a sign it works. - Read the contract and know your partner. Many risks aren't in the market, they're in people and paperwork. Ask a lawyer or accountant for help. - Separate fear from warning. Fear is natural in every new decision. A warning is when the numbers or the people tell you something is wrong. Learn to tell the two apart. - Have a plan for the worst case. Knowing what to do if it goes wrong reduces fear and improves the decision. ### Read also - The pattern of those who change the world (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-pattern-of-visionaries/) - Elon Musk and the three rockets that failed (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/elon-musk-and-the-three-rockets-that-failed/) - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) - How to find the courage to take risks (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-find-the-courage-to-take-risks/) --- ## Long-term vision: seeing before others do — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/long-term-vision/ Idioma: en Descrição: Companies managed for the long term grew revenue 47% more, the McKinsey Global Institute found. What the research says and how to train your vision. Long-term vision is the ability to decide today with years in mind, not weeks. Those with this trait accept slow results, see trends before they become fashionable and endure being misunderstood while the rest of the world catches up. Research shows this stance tends to pay off. But it also shows the price of arriving too early. ### What the research shows In 2017, the McKinsey Global Institute analyzed 615 publicly traded American companies between 2001 and 2015 and separated those managed with a long-term focus from the rest. From 2001 to 2014, the revenue of the long-term companies grew, on average, 47% more, with less volatility. Earnings grew 36% more (McKinsey Global Institute, 2017 (https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/long-term-capitalism/where-companies-with-a-long-term-view-outperform-their-peers)). Seeing far, however, isn't enough: you have to be on time. Bill Gross, founder of the Idealab incubator, analyzed about 200 companies, those of his own incubator and other well-known ones, and compared five factors: idea, team, business model, funding and timing. In his analysis, presented in a TED talk in 2015, timing was the factor that weighed most, ahead of the idea and the team (Bill Gross, TED (https://www.ted.com/dubbing/bill_gross_the_single_biggest_reason_why_start_ups_succeed)). It's an investor's analysis, not an academic study, but it helps to understand a common phenomenon: right ideas that arrive ahead of their time. ### Who lived it In 1997, Amazon was an online bookstore losing money. In his first letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos wrote a section called "It's All About the Long Term". There he warned that the company would make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership, rather than short-term profitability or Wall Street's immediate reaction (1997 letter (https://shareholderinbox.com/letters/amazon/1997)). Amazon went years without a profit. Bezos attached that same letter, every year, to the letters that followed. ### In Bairo's journey Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez arrived early more than once. He created a hair treatment course when the field was still in its infancy in Brazil; today trichology has graduate programs at health schools. He wanted to bring artificial intelligence and augmented reality to the business when that seemed like fiction. He heard it wouldn't work, believed in it and, even so, gave up. Years later, the same thing became a trend. He bet on natural-based cosmetics when few people were betting on them, and they became a trend too. From these experiences he drew a double lesson. Being right ahead of time doesn't pay the bills, but it shows your eye is right. And arriving too early also means arriving alone. For Bairo, the image that sums up this trait is Walt Disney's: the story goes that, when Walt Disney World opened, in 1971, someone lamented that Walt hadn't lived to see the park, and heard in reply: "He did. That's why it's here." ### How to develop this trait - Write where you want to be in ten years. Not sales targets: what you want to have built. Reread it every year. - Separate trend from fashion. A trend solves a problem that won't go away. Fashion satisfies a passing desire. - Watch the weak signals. Read what researchers, young people and markets abroad are doing. The future usually arrives first at the edges. - Plan the waiting time. If you arrive early, how long can you hold out until the market catches up? Having cash and patience is part of vision. - Don't give up on the idea, adjust the timing. If the market isn't ready yet, keep the idea, follow the signals and come back when the time comes. ### Read also - The pattern of those who change the world (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-pattern-of-visionaries/) - Jeff Bezos and the years of losses (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/jeff-bezos-and-the-years-of-losses/) - Walt Disney: the dream he saw (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/walt-disney-the-dream-he-saw/) - The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) --- ## Faith and purpose in business: what research says URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/faith-and-purpose-in-business/ Idioma: en Descrição: A meta-analysis of 75 studies links religion and entrepreneurship, and purpose increases persistence. The research, who lived it and how to cultivate it. Faith and purpose don't show up on a spreadsheet, but they show up in many stories of those who built something that lasted. Research confirms a relationship, small and real, between religiosity and entrepreneurship, and a clearer relationship between purpose and persistence. What these studies suggest is simple: those who work for something bigger than their own gain tend to hold out longer when the road gets hard. ### What the research shows In 2025, Erik Lehmann and Laurenz Weiße, of the University of Augsburg, in Germany, gathered 75 empirical studies and 306 effect sizes on religion and entrepreneurship. The conclusion: there is a positive but small correlation between the two, and it varies by religion, country and type of outcome measured (Lehmann and Weiße, 2025 (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11301-025-00547-z)). In other words, faith doesn't manufacture entrepreneurs. But it isn't absent from their story either. Purpose has a more visible effect. In 2008, psychologist Adam Grant studied firefighters and call center workers raising donations for a university. Those who wanted to help others and, at the same time, enjoyed their own work persisted more, made more calls and raised more money a month later (Grant, 2008 (https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.93.1.48)). Purpose alone wasn't enough. Together with enjoying what you do, it became fuel. ### Who lived it Truett Cathy opened a small restaurant in 1946, in Georgia, with his brother. He had already worked at diners open 24 hours, seven days a week. Out of Christian conviction, he decided from the first day that the restaurant would close on Sundays, so that he and his employees would have a day of rest, of family and, for those who wished, of worship. From that restaurant came Chick-fil-A, one of the largest restaurant chains in the United States. To this day, every location closes on Sundays, as the company itself explains (Chick-fil-A (https://www.chick-fil-a.com/customer-support/who-we-are/our-culture-and-values/why-is-chick-fil-a-closed-on-sunday)). Giving up an entire day of sales, every week, is a business decision that can only be understood through faith. ### In Bairo's journey At some point along the road, Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez was without money, without an apparent way out and without a single plan left in the drawer. He still had a flame of hope and faith. At rock bottom, in a Christian congregation, he heard accounts and testimonies from ordinary people who had come through the impossible. Listening, he came to believe in the God of the impossible. Listening more, he came to trust the God of love. Faith, for him, took on a simple definition: trusting in something unseen. From that faith also came a purpose. Bairo says there are no coincidences or accidents: there are purposes, dreams and execution. And he insists on one thing: for him, whoever trusts their God of creation is right, regardless of religious belief. It's his experience, told as he lived it; each person finds their own. Purpose appears in the ventures he founded, such as Instituto CEASA, whose aim is to broaden access to food. ### How to develop this trait - Write why you do what you do. Not what you sell, but whom you want to help. One sentence is enough. - Combine purpose and enjoyment. Grant's research shows purpose yields more when you also enjoy the work. Look for the part of your business you'd do for free. - Define what you won't negotiate. Cathy closed on Sundays. What are your limits? Clear values prevent bad decisions under pressure. - Cultivate your faith, whatever it is. Religion, spirituality or a set of values: what matters is having something to lean on on days when nothing makes sense. - Listen to stories of those who came through. Testimonies, biographies, conversations with those who fell and got up strengthen hope. - Don't use faith as a sales pitch. Faith is inner strength, not a marketing strategy. ### Read also - The pattern of those who change the world (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-pattern-of-visionaries/) - The God of the impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/) - Having faith without religion (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/having-faith-without-religion/) - Purposes, dreams and execution (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/purpose-dreams-and-execution/) --- ## Learning on your own: the trait of the self-taught URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/learning-on-your-own/ Idioma: en Descrição: Deliberate practice, more than a diploma, sets the best apart, Anders Ericsson showed. What research says, who learned alone and how to begin. Many people who built something big learned the essentials outside the classroom. Not because school doesn't matter, but because what the business demanded wasn't yet in any curriculum. Learning on your own is the ability to identify what's missing, seek it out and practice until you master it. Research shows that this practice, done the right way, carries more weight than one might think. ### What the research shows In 1993, Anders Ericsson, Ralf Krampe and Clemens Tesch-Römer studied musicians at a Berlin academy and compared the best with the good. The difference wasn't in initial talent: it was in the amount of deliberate practice accumulated over the years. Deliberate practice is practice focused on what you still do badly, with a clear goal and feedback on errors (Ericsson et al., 1993 (https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.100.3.363)). Later studies showed that practice doesn't explain everything, but it remains one of the most important pieces for those who reach the top level. An honest fact about the richest is in order. Jonathan Wai, an education researcher, analyzed the billionaires on the Forbes list and found that about a third of them attended elite universities, a higher share in the United States (Wai, in Inc. (https://www.inc.com/jonathan-wai/elite-schools-still-breed-the-worlds-most-rich-and-powerful.html)). Studying makes a difference. What the self-taught show is that study doesn't end with the diploma, and that those who didn't get the chance can indeed build knowledge on their own. ### Who lived it Thomas Edison attended school for only a few months. He learned to read, write and do arithmetic with his mother and, according to the US National Park Service, which looks after his historic laboratory, he was a curious child who learned a great deal by reading on his own. As a teenager, working as a telegraph operator, he spent much of his free time reading scientific and technical books (National Park Service (https://www.nps.gov/edis/learn/historyculture/edison-biography.htm)). That habit of studying alone became a method. Over his lifetime, Edison registered more than a thousand patents in the United States. ### In Bairo's journey When he decided to build what he had seen, Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he didn't know how to code, or anything like it. He knew where he wanted to get to. He didn't know how. So he did the least glamorous thing in his story. He sat down in front of a computer and spent six months without leaving the house. Developing. Coding. Writing. Remembering. A man who didn't know how to code learned to build with the tools of his own time. From those six months came the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness, built on a company that had existed since 2019. He describes those months with a curious verb. He says he didn't ask to learn the way; he asked for wisdom, understanding and courage to remember. Those looking from outside see something else, which is also rare: discipline. ### How to develop this trait - Choose a skill your project requires. Don't try to learn everything. Start with the one that unlocks the next step. - Use the tools of your time. Free courses, documentation, videos and artificial intelligence assistants teach what once took years of school. - Practice where you make mistakes. That's the essence of deliberate practice: working on the weak point, not repeating what you already know. - Build something real while you learn. A prototype teaches more than ten workbooks. Learning by doing gives immediate feedback. - Set aside fixed time. One hour a day, every day, is worth more than a whole weekend now and then. - Ask for review. Those who learn alone need someone to point out the mistake. Communities, forums and mentors play that role. ### Read also - The pattern of those who change the world (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-pattern-of-visionaries/) - Thomas Edison and the thousands of attempts (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/thomas-edison-and-the-thousands-of-attempts/) - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) - How to use AI in a small business (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-use-ai-in-my-small-business/) --- ## What locus of control is and why it matters — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/what-is-locus-of-control/ Idioma: en Descrição: People who believe outcomes depend on their own actions start and sustain more businesses, research shows. Understand the trait and how to develop it. Locus of control is where a person places the cause of what happens to them. Those with an internal locus of control believe that outcomes depend, to a large extent, on their own actions. Those with an external locus attribute everything to luck, to other people or to the system. Among entrepreneurs, the internal locus shows up often, and it makes sense: no one starts a business believing nothing they do matters. ### What the research shows The concept was proposed by psychologist Julian Rotter in 1966, in a monograph that became a reference. He showed that people differ, in a stable way, in their belief that they do or don't control the reinforcements in their own lives, and that this belief changes the way they act (Rotter, 1966 (https://doi.org/10.1037/h0092976)). Four decades later, Andreas Rauch and Michael Frese gathered dozens of studies on the personality of business owners in a meta-analysis published in the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology. They found that traits matched to the task of entrepreneurship, among them internal locus of control, proactiveness, self-efficacy and stress tolerance, are associated both with the decision to start a business and with its success (Rauch and Frese, 2007 (https://doi.org/10.1080/13594320701595438)). An internal locus isn't believing everything depends on you. Crises, markets and governments exist. It's choosing to act on the part that does. ### Who lived it Soichiro Honda owned a piston ring factory, Tokai Seiki, when the war came. In 1944, a bombing raid destroyed one of the plants. In January 1945, an earthquake brought down the other. Honda didn't wait for the country to rebuild. He sold what was left of the company to Toyota and, in October 1946, with that money, founded the Honda Technical Research Institute. He began by fitting small engines to bicycles. In 1948, Honda Motor was born (Soichiro Honda (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soichiro_Honda)). ### In Bairo's journey The moment this trait shows up most strongly in the life of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez is also the hardest. He had come in as an investing partner in a company that wasn't what it seemed. The business didn't hold up. And, as he tells it, there were fifty people who depended on him. There's a natural reaction to a moment like that, and everyone knows it: complaining. About the partner, the system, the country, luck. Bairo didn't complain. He decided to do something he didn't know how to do and went off to build. Years later, he gave one of his ventures, the CLAIN artificial intelligence orchestrator, a name that comes from the English claim: to claim what is yours. The man who decided not to complain swapped one word for another. Instead of a complaint, a claim. It's the internal locus of control turned into a project name. ### How to develop this trait - Split the problem into two columns. On one side, what depends on you. On the other, what doesn't. Spend your energy on the first. - Swap "why me" for "what do I do now". The question shifts the focus from blame to action. - Own your part in the mistakes. Without destroying yourself. Those who recognize their own mistake can fix it; those who blame others repeat it. - Start with a small decision. Control is regained through concrete actions: a phone call, a bill paid, a step taken. - Beware of excess. Believing everything depends on you leads to guilt and burnout. A healthy internal locus recognizes limits. - Seek help if you're paralyzed. When nothing seems to depend on you for a long time, that may be a sign of burnout or depression. In Brazil, CVV answers at 188. ### Read also - The pattern of those who change the world (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-pattern-of-visionaries/) - Soichiro Honda and the destroyed factory (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/soichiro-honda-and-the-destroyed-factory/) - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) - What CLAIN is (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-clain/) --- ## Starting a business after 40: the founder's age URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/starting-a-business-after-40/ Idioma: en Descrição: The average age of founders of the fastest-growing US startups is 45, research by MIT and the Census Bureau shows. It isn't too late to start. The image of the successful founder is usually that of a twenty-something in a university dorm room. The data tell another story. Among the fastest-growing companies in the United States, the founder's average age at launch is 45. Experience, a network of contacts and the scars of earlier attempts weigh in favor of those who start later. ### What the research shows Pierre Azoulay, of MIT, Benjamin Jones, of Northwestern, and J. Daniel Kim and Javier Miranda, of the US Census Bureau, crossed administrative data on millions of American companies with the ages of those who founded them. They didn't stick to the famous stories: they looked at the entire universe of new companies. Among the 2.7 million founders who started companies with at least one employee between 2007 and 2014, the average age at founding was 41.9. Among the fastest-growing companies, one in every thousand, the average rises to 45. And, among those who started a business, a 50-year-old founder was 1.8 times more likely to reach that growth than a 30-year-old (Azoulay et al., 2020 (https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aeri.20180582)). The authors also observed that prior experience in the same industry greatly increases the chance of success. In other words, the years many see as a delay are often exactly what the business needs. ### Who lived it Ray Kroc sold milkshake machines. In 1954, at 52, he was intrigued by a restaurant in California that had ordered eight of those machines at once. He went to meet the brothers Dick and Mac McDonald and the fast-service system they had created. Kroc saw there what the brothers hadn't pursued: a chain. On April 15, 1955, he opened his company's first McDonald's restaurant, in Des Plaines, Illinois (McDonald's (https://corporate.mcdonalds.com/corpmcd/our-company/who-we-are/our-history.html)). He had spent decades selling door to door. Everything he learned there went into the chain he built. ### In Bairo's journey Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez was born in 1982. By the time he reached what he calls the seventh attempt, he had been through a salon, a course, a cosmetics brand, partners who pushed him out, events, digital printing, an investment that didn't hold up and a project in which he was left stranded. In 2026, at 43, he set up Xperienc Global Labs in London and, shortly after, CEASA Financial. In both, he is director and controlling owner. In Brazil, he is the administrator of the company that operates the CEASA Bank brand. None of this would have the shape it has without the two previous decades. The seventh attempt, he often says, was the first that had all the others inside it. It's what Azoulay's research describes in numbers: accumulated experience becomes an advantage. ### How to develop this trait - Take stock of your experience. List the industries you've worked in, problems you've solved and people you know. That's your starting capital. - Start a business where you already know the terrain. Research shows that experience in the same industry increases the chance of success. - Use your network. At 40 or 50, you know customers, suppliers and potential partners. Talk to them before you start. - Plan your family's finances. Those who start later usually have more responsibilities. Set aside a reserve before taking the leap. - Learn what has changed. Technology, sales channels and artificial intelligence tools change fast. Studying what's new complements experience. - Ignore other people's clocks. The right age to start a business is the one at which you have something to solve and the courage to try. ### Read also - The pattern of those who change the world (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-pattern-of-visionaries/) - Colonel Sanders started over at 65 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/colonel-sanders-started-over-at-65/) - How to start life over at 40 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-life-over-after-40/) - The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) --- ## How to pivot a business without losing direction URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/how-to-pivot-a-business/ Idioma: en Descrição: Startups that changed course once or twice raised 2.5 times more money, says Startup Genome. How to pivot without abandoning what matters. Pivoting is changing a business's route without abandoning the destination. The product changes, the customer changes, the model changes; the problem you want to solve and what you've learned stay. Almost every company that made history went through at least one of these changes. Research suggests that changing once or twice helps. Changing all the time, or never, gets in the way. ### What the research shows In 2011, the Startup Genome Project analyzed more than 3,000 tech startups to understand what separated those that grew from those that died. One finding drew attention: startups that pivoted once or twice raised 2.5 times more money, had 3.6 times better user growth and were 52% less likely to scale prematurely than those that pivoted more than twice or never pivoted (Startup Genome Report, 2011 (https://www.wamda.com/index.php/2011/09/the-startup-genome-report-what-makes-a-startup-tick)). It's an applied research report, not a peer-reviewed academic study, and it shows association, not cause. But the message matches what many founders say: stubborn about the destination, flexible about the path. ### Who lived it Stewart Butterfield wanted to make an online game. With the team spread across North America, the engineers created an internal messaging tool to talk all day while they developed the game, called Glitch. The game didn't work out. In 2012, Butterfield decided to shut it down. But the team was sure of one thing: they no longer wanted to work without that tool, and other companies probably didn't either. In 2013, the tool became a product and got a name: Slack (Slate (https://slate.com/business/2014/05/stewart-butterfield-flickr-and-slack-how-he-snatched-victory-from-the-jaws-of-defeat.html)). What had been the backstage of a failure became the main business. ### In Bairo's journey The professional life of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez is a sequence of changes of course. It began with a salon, opened with his partner when their daughter was born. From the salon came a hair treatment course. Then came his own brand of natural-based cosmetics. When his partners pushed him out of a technology project, he reinvented himself with events and digital printing. He saved capital and switched positions: from founder to investor. When that investment didn't hold up, he moved into terrain he didn't know: currencies, banks and digital networks. Later, while building the foundation of the CEASA Bank platform, he heard another no: banks refused to integrate his solution. He changed course again. He focused on the technology he could build on his own: artificial intelligence, financial messaging in the international ISO 20022 standard, blockchain and tokenization of real assets. The banks that didn't want to integrate the idea ended up teaching him to build his own infrastructure. Through every change, one thing remained: the drive to create something new that solved a real problem. ### How to develop this trait - Write down your destination. Before changing route, know what doesn't change: the problem you want to solve or the people you want to serve. - Measure before you change. Pivoting out of anxiety is different from pivoting on data. Define clear signals: sales, retention, customer feedback. - Look at what already works by accident. Slack was born from an internal tool. Sometimes the answer is in a detail customers praise. - Change one thing at a time. Swapping product, customer and model at once keeps you from knowing what worked. - Take what you learned with you. Every abandoned route leaves skills, contacts and lessons. List what goes with you. - Don't confuse pivoting with running away. Changing every time it gets hard is giving up in installments. ### Read also - The pattern of those who change the world (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-pattern-of-visionaries/) - How to reinvent yourself professionally (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-reinvent-yourself-professionally/) - No is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) - How to validate a business idea (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-validate-a-business-idea/) --- ## How to choose business partners: what research teaches URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/pattern/how-to-choose-business-partners/ Idioma: en Descrição: Conflict between founders is among the most cited causes of startup failure, says Harvard's Noam Wasserman. How to choose whom to build with. Choosing a business partner is one of the most important decisions in a business, and one of the most often made in a hurry. Research shows that problems within the founding team are among the main reasons promising companies fail. Those who built something big almost always learned, sometimes the hard way, that the question "with whom?" is worth as much as the question "what?". ### What the research shows Noam Wasserman, a Harvard professor, studied about 10,000 founders for the book The Founder's Dilemmas (2012). He estimates that 65% of high-potential startups fail because of conflict among the founders (CNN, 2014 (https://money.cnn.com/2014/02/24/smallbusiness/startups-entrepreneur-cofounder/)). The number has an origin worth telling. It rests, in part, on a 1989 study by Michael Gorman and William Sahlman, who asked investors why portfolio companies were at risk. Problems in the management team appeared among the top three causes in about two thirds of cases. In other words, it's an estimate, not an exact count. But it points in the same direction as almost everything studied on the subject. Wasserman also found a surprising detail: teams made up of people who had already worked together tend to do better. Partnerships between friends or relatives with no shared professional history, on the other hand, tend to avoid the difficult conversations and pay for it later. ### Who lived it In 1983, Steve Jobs persuaded John Sculley, then president of Pepsi, to run Apple. Two years later, the two clashed over the company's direction. In May 1985, the board sided with Sculley, and Jobs lost control of the Macintosh division. In September, he left the company he had founded. He founded NeXT. Twelve years later, Apple bought NeXT, and Jobs came back. In September 1997, he took over as interim CEO (Cult of Mac (https://www.cultofmac.com/apple-history/steve-jobs-leaves-and-rejoins-apple)). In 2005, in a commencement speech at Stanford, Jobs said that getting fired from Apple had been the best thing that could have happened to him. ### In Bairo's journey Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez knows both sides of this story. With the cosmetics brand up and running, he proposed the next step: applying touchscreen technology to the business. The answer didn't come from outside; it came from inside. His partners pushed him out of the business, and the idea stayed with them. Years later, in a currency, bank and network project, he was left stranded by the very people he had helped. He never names anyone. The story is his, not theirs. What he kept was the most expensive lesson his partners left him: choosing whom you build with. And another, even harder: your decision can't depend on anyone's gratitude. The end of that chapter matches what Wasserman found. After six months working alone, Bairo found help and connection in three old acquaintances. People he already had history with. The four came together to continue, finish and raise together what he had begun. For someone who had been left stranded, the word "together" isn't a detail. It's reconciliation with the idea of a team. ### How to develop this trait - Prefer people you've already seen under pressure. Working together first, on a small project, reveals more than years of friendship. - Have the difficult conversations at the start. Who decides what? How is the company split? What happens if someone leaves? - Put everything on paper. A partners' agreement, with share split, vesting periods and exit rules. Talk to a lawyer. - Seek complementarity, not copies. Partners with the same skills compete for space. Complementary partners divide the work. - Protect your idea with registration. Trademark, domain and documents in the right name keep the idea from leaving with whoever leaves. - Leave without a war, if you have to leave. Don't attack, don't expose. Your reputation is worth more than the dispute. ### Read also - The pattern of those who change the world (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-pattern-of-visionaries/) - Steve Jobs, fired from his own company (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/steve-jobs-pushed-out-of-his-own-company/) - The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) - No is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) --- ## Visions: parables about starting over URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/ Idioma: en Descrição: Fiction, declared as such: parables about failing, starting over and the time of a life, drawn from the vision of Bairo Gonzalez. ### Bankruptcy - The day I closed the doors of my business (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-day-i-closed-the-doors-of-my-business/): A story about the owner who pulls down the shop's shutter for the last time and finds out what the key still opens. For those who just lost a business. - I lost the harvest and lost everything (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/i-lost-the-harvest-and-lost-everything/): A story about the farmer who watched hail take a year's harvest in twenty minutes, and about what the land keeps when the harvest is gone. ### A fresh start - How to start over at fifty (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-to-start-over-at-fifty/): A story in dialogue between a 52-year-old seamstress and her daughter, the night she decides to go back to school. For those who think it's too late. - Starting over from zero in another place (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/starting-over-from-zero-in-another-place/): A 2041 story about a Colombian family that loses its village to a flood and climbs the mountain carrying what fits in a backpack and what fits in nothing. ### Immigration - The thread no one can withhold (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/undocumented-immigrant-what-to-do/): A story in the form of a prayer: an immigrant mother, without her documents in hand, remembers her grandmother who wove counting the threads by heart. - Homesick while living abroad (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/homesick-while-living-abroad/): A story about a Brazilian nurse on the night shift in the United Kingdom, a video call with her mother and the bridge we carry inside. ### Faith - When everything collapses and faith remains (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/when-everything-collapses-and-faith-remains/): A story about a man who lost almost everything and walks into a simple church to hear stories of ordinary people who came through the impossible. - Having faith without religion (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/having-faith-without-religion/): A story in dialogue, in 2040, between an engineer who doesn't believe and her father who burns incense at an old temple. About a faith that needs no creed. ### Silence - What is silence? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/what-is-silence/): A 2040 story. A girl who has never lived a minute without sound asks her grandfather what silence is, and he takes her to listen to the sky. - The silence that lives in the middle of the noise (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-silence-in-the-middle-of-the-noise/): A story: amid two hundred calls a day, a Colombian call center agent sees a bird on the ledge and goes back, for a second, to her grandmother's porch. ### Time - How much is a minute of life worth? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-much-is-a-minute-of-life-worth/): A story about a Portuguese watchmaker who, in 1974, repairs a soldier's watch and learns that time isn't measured by the hands of a clock. - I feel like I'm behind in life (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/i-feel-like-im-behind-in-life/): A story about a thirty-one-year-old woman who compares herself with everyone and discovers the universe also takes time between seeing and happening. ### Children - How to be an immigrant father (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-to-be-an-immigrant-father/): A story about a Bolivian father in Brazil, the night his daughter is born in a country not yet wholly his, and the reckoning every immigrant father makes. - What to leave to your children (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/what-to-leave-to-your-children/): A 2070 story. A fifty-year-old man opens the messages his father recorded for him and discovers the inheritance wasn't in the will. ### Dreams - The seventh time: how many tries before giving up (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-seventh-time-how-many-tries-before-giving-up/): A story in seven movements about a man who tried six times, lost six times and, on the seventh, understood what the others had left in his hands. - My dream seems impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/my-dream-seems-impossible/): A story about a girl who, on Sunday mornings in the nineties, watched Senna race on TV and decided to do something that didn't have a name yet. ### Fear - The gray dog (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-gray-dog/): A fable: in the north of England, a thin, damp-eyed dog follows a woman everywhere, until her grandson asks why it's so hungry. - Fear of the future with artificial intelligence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/fear-of-the-future-with-artificial-intelligence/): A story in dialogue, in 2034, between a truck driver afraid of being replaced by a machine and his twelve-year-old son who talks to it every day. ### Loneliness - Corn for the pigeons (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/corn-for-the-pigeons/): Almost a prayer: in a schist village in Portugal, an eighty-three-year-old widower talks to the pigeons, until the afternoon he walks down the street. - Alone in a big city (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/alone-in-a-big-city/): A 2040 story about a young Latin American man in Dubai, among glass towers and unanswered messages, and the desert that teaches him to be with himself. ### AI and humanity - The grandmother who learned to talk to the machine (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-grandmother-who-learned-to-talk-to-the-machine/): An 80-year-old Bolivian grandmother who speaks only Quechua, a machine that can't understand her, and the granddaughter who teaches both to listen. - Will artificial intelligence replace humans? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/will-artificial-intelligence-replace-humans/): A 2045 story. A young man who grew up talking to machines goes back to the school where he learned to read to ask the question no AI answered. ### Generation Alpha - How Generation Alpha will live (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-generation-alpha-will-live/): A story in the form of a letter, written in 2045 by a Generation Alpha woman to her mother, about growing up among machines and what only a mother teaches. - Children and screens: how to raise them (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/children-and-screens-how-to-raise-them/): A story in dialogue between a mother and an eight-year-old who asks AI everything, until the night he asks something only she can answer. ### Hunger - What to do with leftover food (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/what-to-do-with-leftover-food/): A story of one early morning at a wholesale supply center, where a porter sees tons of tomatoes go to waste and, at the same time, hunger. - Does childhood hunger leave a mark forever? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/does-childhood-hunger-leave-a-mark-forever/): Almost a prayer by a Colombian grandmother who, in 2040, cooks for her grandchildren and remembers the girl she was in the nineties, with an empty stomach. ### Health - Fear of receiving a diagnosis (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/fear-of-receiving-a-diagnosis/): A story about a woman waiting for a test result in a hospital corridor, and the nurse who teaches her to wait without being alone. - How to take care of your mental health after a loss (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/mental-health-after-a-loss/): A story about a Bolivian shopkeeper who stops sleeping after losing his business, and about the night he decides to ask for help. ### Work - I work too much and don't see my children (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/i-work-too-much-and-dont-see-my-children/): A story about a ride-hailing driver who works fourteen hours a day and, on a late-night ride, picks up a passenger who shows him the road back. - I was laid off, now what? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/i-was-laid-off-now-what/): A story about a financial analyst laid off in Hong Kong in the 2008 crisis, who crosses the harbor by ferry with a cardboard box on her lap. ### Courage - How to find the courage to change your life (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-to-find-the-courage-to-change-your-life/): A story about a Colombian girl in the nineties who discovers capoeira in a square and learns, through the ginga, that whoever stops, falls. - I lost my home: how to go on (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/i-lost-my-home-how-to-go-on/): Almost a prayer by a mother evicted with her three children who discovers, among boxes on the sidewalk, what no court order can take. ### Forgiveness - How to forgive a partner who betrayed you (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-to-forgive-a-partner-who-betrayed-you/): A story in dialogue, in 2050, between two old men who were business partners, parted in silence and meet again on a garden bench thirty years later. - How to forgive myself for my mistakes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-to-forgive-myself-for-my-mistakes/): A story in the form of a letter from a forty-year-old Bolivian woman to the twenty-year-old girl she was, asking for forgiveness and offering it. ### Purpose - What is the purpose of my life? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/what-is-the-purpose-of-my-life/): An epic story that follows a hydrogen atom from the beginning of the universe to the body of a young man in 2070, who asks what he was born for. - How to become the person I want to be (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-to-become-the-person-i-want-to-be/): A story about a Brazilian executive in Dubai who, at dawn, on a wooden boat on the creek, sees the woman she could be and doesn't know the way there. --- ## The day I closed the doors of my business — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-day-i-closed-the-doors-of-my-business/ Idioma: en Descrição: A story about the owner who pulls down the shop's shutter for the last time and finds out what the key still opens. For those who just lost a business. A vision — a short story. The key was too heavy for its size. The man stood on the sidewalk with it in his hand, at ten past seven on a Tuesday, while the steel shutter came down for the last time. The noise was the same as every night for eleven years. Only this time no one would raise that shutter in the morning. He thought of the names. Not the customers', nor the suppliers'. The names of the people who had worked there. Each had their own way of saying good morning. One came in singing. Another always arrived with bread. The youngest apologized for everything, even for being alive, and he had spent two years teaching that boy not to apologize for existing. Now he was the one who wanted to apologize to all of them. The key began to weigh the way useless things weigh. A key without a door is a piece of metal with a memory. Then, without having asked, he saw. He saw the same sidewalk many years before, when it was still a vacant lot. He saw his father, young, riding by on a bicycle, not knowing that one day his son would have a shop there. He saw the shop opening, the red ribbon, his mother with her handbag pressed to her chest, proud as someone holding a newborn. He saw the shop closing, now. And he saw, further on, a place he didn't recognize: a long table, people he didn't yet know, and himself in the middle, older, explaining to someone younger how not to apologize for existing. Time, on that sidewalk, had folded like a sheet of paper. Past and future touched at the tips. He understood something he couldn't put into words. The shop hadn't been the end of anything. It had been a school. Eleven years of school paid for with his own money, and the school was closing because he had finished the course. It wasn't consolation. It hurt just the same. The bills were still there, in a blue folder on the kitchen table. The hard phone calls were still to be made. But the pain had moved. Before, it was in his chest, squeezing. Now, it was in his hands, asking for work. He walked home. On the way, he passed a bakery that was still open and bought bread, the way that young woman did every day. He put the bread on the table and opened the blue folder. He took a blank sheet and wrote, in one column, everything he owed. In the other, everything he knew how to do. The second column was longer. He looked at the two for a long time. Outside the sky was clear, and somewhere in it, very far away, hydrogen atoms kept doing what they have done since the beginning of everything: changing state and releasing an extremely faint signal, always on the same frequency. No one hears it. But the signal is there. It has never stopped. He knew none of this. He only knew he had a key in his pocket and that he would keep it in a drawer. Not to remember the shop. To remember that one day he had had the courage to open a door. And that, if he had had it once, he could have it again. Bairo says he lived through something like this: a business that didn't hold up, fifty people depending on him and the decision not to spend his energy looking for someone to blame. Read: Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/). ### The way forward Closing a company is a fact, not a verdict on who you are. Write on a sheet what you owe and, beside it, what you know how to do, and look at both columns with the same calm. If the pain turns into despair, in Brazil CVV answers at 188, free, at any hour; elsewhere, reach out to your local crisis line. ### Read also - My company went bankrupt, now what? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/my-company-went-bankrupt-now-what/) - How to deal with the shame of going bankrupt? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-deal-with-the-shame-of-going-broke/) - The seventh time (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-seventh-time-how-many-tries-before-giving-up/) --- ## I lost the harvest and lost everything — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/i-lost-the-harvest-and-lost-everything/ Idioma: en Descrição: A story about the farmer who watched hail take a year's harvest in twenty minutes, and about what the land keeps when the harvest is gone. A vision — a short story. The hail lasted twenty minutes. The harvest had taken a year. It was on the altiplano, where the sky is so close it seems you could touch it with the tip of a hoe. The farmer was at the door of his adobe house when he heard the noise, at first like someone throwing rice on a tin roof, then like an army. The stones of ice were the size of quail eggs. They fell white on the red quinoa, and the quinoa lay down like someone surrendering. When it was over, the silence that came was the loudest he had ever heard. He walked through the field with his boots sinking into the icy mud. The plants were on the ground, broken, mixed with ice that was already beginning to melt. His wife came behind him and said nothing. There are losses in which speaking is a disrespect. That night, he did the sums by candlelight, because the power had gone down along with the sky. The seed bought on credit. The fertilizer. The tractor borrowed from the neighbor, which he was going to pay for with part of the harvest. The children's school in town. The sums were simple, and they all came to the same result: nothing. That's when he saw. He can't say whether he slept. He saw his grandfather, who had died thirty years earlier, kneeling in that same field, planting with his hands. His grandfather used no tractor and no bought fertilizer. He planted and talked to the earth in an old language his grandson understood only by half. He saw his grandfather lose a harvest too, in a frost from before he was born. He saw his grandfather sitting in the same doorway, with the same silence. And he saw his grandfather, the next morning, sorting a handful of seeds he had kept in a clay pot, hidden under the bed, in case the sky got angry. The vision went on, forward now. He saw his daughter, a grown woman, in a time that didn't yet exist, with a screen in her hand, receiving a warning in the morning that hail was coming. He saw his daughter covering the field with netting, selling the harvest to someone on the other side of the country with no middleman, getting paid the same day. He saw that she lost too, sometimes. The land never lets anyone win every time. But she didn't lose alone. When he opened his eyes, the candle had burned out. He got up and went to the bedroom. Under the bed, where no one had looked in years, was his grandfather's clay pot. He had forgotten it. Inside, four handfuls of old seeds, dry, alive. It wasn't a harvest. But it was a beginning. The next day, he went to talk to the neighbor with the tractor. He said he wouldn't be able to pay that year. The neighbor looked at the sky, then at him, and said the hail had passed over his field too. The two were silent for a while. Then, without arranging it, they went together to the third neighbor's field, to see how he was doing. The farmer understood that the land doesn't keep only seed. It keeps people. His grandfather had left in the clay pot what was needed to start over, and he had also left a way of standing up: no shame in losing, shame only in giving up. Bairo says he built, in six months in front of the computer, the foundation of a platform designed to put those who produce, those who trade and those who buy in direct contact. Read: The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/). ### The way forward Losing the harvest isn't losing the land, nor the knowledge of the one who plants. Talk early with those you owe and with those who lost alongside you: a shared loss weighs differently. Always keep a pot of seeds, of money, of friends, for the day the sky gets angry. ### Read also - What to do when you've gone bankrupt? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/what-to-do-when-you-have-gone-broke/) - What is CEASA Bank? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-ceasa-bank/) - What to do with leftover food (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/what-to-do-with-leftover-food/) --- ## How to start over at fifty — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-to-start-over-at-fifty/ Idioma: en Descrição: A story in dialogue between a 52-year-old seamstress and her daughter, the night she decides to go back to school. For those who think it's too late. A vision — a short story. "Mom, you're fifty-two years old." "I know how old I am, dear. I'm the one who lived every one of those years." It was a small kitchen in a town in northern Portugal, with blue tiles halfway up the wall and a radio that only picked up one station. The mother had spent thirty years sewing for others. Hems, wedding dresses, school uniforms. The workshop closed one winter when people stopped having clothes mended and started buying new clothes, cheaper than the mending. "And what do you want to study, anyway?" "I don't know yet. I want to learn to do what machines don't do." "But, Mom, machines do almost everything." The mother set her coffee cup on the table and looked at her daughter the way she looked at fabric before cutting. "When I was eight, your grandmother gave me a needle. She said: this is for mending. I spent my life mending. Trousers, skirts, curtains, other people's weddings, which sometimes arrived here torn and I had to take in at the waist so the bride would fit." "And?" "And I noticed people didn't come only for the clothes. They came to talk. They'd stay half an hour at the fitting, telling me about their lives. A machine doesn't do that. A machine doesn't know the bride is afraid." The daughter was quiet. From the radio came a soft fado, by someone who had lost something at sea. That night, the mother didn't sleep. She stayed at the window watching the dark river and had a kind of waking dream. She saw herself at eight, needle in hand, her grandmother beside her. She saw herself at twenty, the new machine bought in installments. She saw herself at forty, sewing her daughter's graduation dress, crying inwardly so as not to wet the satin. And she saw herself at seventy, in a place she didn't know, sitting in a circle of younger people, teaching something. She didn't know what. But people were listening. Time, at that window, didn't run in a line. It ran like thread through a needle: in, out, back in again, and that was how it held the fabric. In the morning, she went to the school two streets from home and asked about courses for adults. The woman at the counter, who must have been her age, asked: "Is it for your son?" "It's for me." The woman smiled, and in the smile was a secret shared between two women who had often been told it was too late. "Then have a seat. There's time." She enrolled in a course in eldercare and companionship. It wasn't sewing, and it was. She went on mending, only now the fabric was different. People who had been torn by loneliness and needed someone to stay half an hour and listen. On the day of the first class, her daughter dropped her off at the school door, as she had dropped off her daughter so many times. "Mom." "Yes?" "Be careful crossing." They both laughed. And the mother went in, fifty-two years old with a new notebook under her arm, to start over where she had always started: with the needle. Bairo says he reinvented himself more than once, and that every closed door left something in his hands. Read: No is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/). ### The way forward Age doesn't erase what you've learned; it's the raw material of a fresh start. Look at what you really did, behind the trade, and look for where that is still needed. Start small, with a course, a conversation, a door close to home. ### Read also - Starting over from zero in another place (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/starting-over-from-zero-in-another-place/) - The gray dog (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-gray-dog/) - The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) --- ## Starting over from zero in another place — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/starting-over-from-zero-in-another-place/ Idioma: en Descrição: A 2041 story about a Colombian family that loses its village to a flood and climbs the mountain carrying what fits in a backpack and what fits in nothing. A vision — a short story. In the year 2041, the river decided to go back to where it had been before people. It rained forty days in a region of Colombia where it used to rain ten. The village sat on the river's bend, as villages always do, because it's on the bend that the water leaves the land richest. On the night the water rose, it didn't ask permission. It came in through the doors, took the chickens, took the school, took the cemetery with the dead inside, as if it wanted to take memory too. The man woke with water at his ankles. He picked up his six-year-old daughter, his wife grabbed the backpack that had been ready for weeks, ever since the radio began to warn, and the three of them climbed the mountain in the dark, guided by the sound of others also climbing. Up there, in the morning, he looked down. There was no village anymore. There was a brown lake, with the church roof showing in the middle, and a bicycle caught in a tree branch, turning its wheel slowly, as if still pedaling somewhere. He was thirty-eight and had nothing. The backpack held three changes of clothes, documents in a plastic bag, a flashlight, a packet of arepas and a little music box his daughter wouldn't leave behind. That was all. The girl opened the music box. It played an old waltz, metallic, which her great-grandmother had received on her wedding day, long before anyone on that mountain had been born. The music opened a door backward. The man saw his grandmother, as a girl, listening to that music when it was still new, in a village that wasn't that one, because his grandmother had also come from somewhere else. She was fleeing a war, around the fifties of the last century, and had arrived at the river's bend with a music box and nothing more. He saw his great-grandfather, further back, leaving yet another place, for another reason. He saw a line of people from his family, crossing centuries, all carrying little, all arriving somewhere they knew no one, all starting from zero. He understood that his family had never belonged to a place. It had belonged to a movement. Zero, which that morning had seemed like the end, now seemed the most common starting point in human history. No one is born in a place that has existed forever. Every place was, one day, the mountain someone climbed with a backpack. On the slope, other families were waking up. Someone lit a fire. An old woman began cutting her arepas into smaller pieces to give to more people. A young man he didn't know appeared with a tarp and asked if anyone knew how to tie it. The man did. He had tied fishing nets his whole life. He got up, took one end of the tarp and began. He didn't think about the future, which was too big. He thought about the knot, which was the size of his hands. One knot, and then another. When the tarp was standing, his daughter went under it with the music box and said that was the new house. No one corrected her. Bairo says he started over from zero more than once, in a country that wasn't yet his, and that the fresh start had a neighborhood address. Read: The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/). ### The way forward Starting from zero is humanity's oldest starting point, not your private shame. When the future is too big, think about the next knot: the task the size of your hands. Look for those climbing the same mountain; a fresh start made together weighs less. ### Read also - I was evicted: where to go and how to start over (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/i-was-evicted-where-to-go-and-how-to-start-over/) - How to start over at fifty (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-to-start-over-at-fifty/) - I lost my home: how to go on (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/i-lost-my-home-how-to-go-on/) --- ## The thread no one can withhold — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/undocumented-immigrant-what-to-do/ Idioma: en Descrição: A story in the form of a prayer: an immigrant mother, without her documents in hand, remembers her grandmother who wove counting the threads by heart. A vision — a short story. To whoever is listening, be it God, be it silence, be it only the wall of this room: I came from far away. I came from the mountains where the air is thin and you learn early to breathe slowly. I crossed a border by bus, with a cloth bag, a photo of my mother and a promise of work a man made me on a paper with no stamp. The work existed. The rest didn't. In the third month, the man asked for my documents to, he said, regularize my situation. I handed them over. And I never saw my name written on any paper again. Since then, I walk through the city like someone walking inside a bad dream. I'm afraid of the police officer on the corner, of the building's doorman, of the man on the bus who stares too much. I'm afraid of getting sick and not being able to go to the clinic. I'm afraid that one day they'll knock on the door and take my daughter, who was born here and has all the papers I don't. She is four. Yesterday she asked me why I speak so quietly in the street. I didn't know how to answer. Tonight, while she slept, I had a vision. I don't know if it was a dream. I saw my grandmother, who never left the village, weaving a poncho of llama wool. She used no pattern. She counted the threads by heart, one, two, three, and said that every thread you forget undoes the whole design. I saw my mother, who came to the big city of my country and cleaned houses for thirty years, never with a signed paper either. I saw a line of women from my family, each in her own time, each far from where she was born, each with no paper saying who she was. And none of them stopped existing because of it. I understood, in the vision, that the document says where I am. It doesn't say who I am. The man took the paper. He didn't take the thread my grandmother counted by heart, nor the slow breathing of the mountains, nor my mother's thirty years of cleaning that I carry on my back, nor the song I sing softly so my daughter will sleep. That, no one can withhold. Then the vision moved forward. I saw my daughter grown, in a room full of people, speaking loudly. Speaking loudly in a language that is hers and mine, without fear of any police officer. I saw that she was telling my story to other people, and that people listened with the respect given to hard things. I don't know if this will happen. I don't ask for a guarantee. I ask only for courage for tomorrow. Tomorrow, I'm going to do what I'm afraid to do. I'm going to look for help. A neighbor told me there's a place where government lawyers help for free those who can't pay, even those with no papers. She also told me that, here, withholding a worker's documents is a crime, and that it isn't my fault. It isn't my fault. I'll repeat it until I believe it. To whoever is listening: thank you for the night. Thank you for my daughter breathing beside me. Thank you for the grandmother who counted the threads. Tomorrow I'll speak a little louder. Bairo says he too was left without documents in hand, far from home and afraid, and that it took time to get back on his feet. Read: Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/). ### The way forward The document says where you are, not who you are. In Brazil, the Federal Public Defender's Office assists migrants for free, and withholding a worker's documents is a crime by the one who withholds them, not your fault. Seeking help is the most concrete act of courage there is. ### Read also - Homesick while living abroad (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/homesick-while-living-abroad/) - How to be an immigrant father (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-to-be-an-immigrant-father/) - The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) --- ## Homesick while living abroad — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/homesick-while-living-abroad/ Idioma: en Descrição: A story about a Brazilian nurse on the night shift in the United Kingdom, a video call with her mother and the bridge we carry inside. A vision — a short story. At three in the morning, in the United Kingdom, the rain doesn't fall. It hangs in the air, as if too lazy to reach the ground. The nurse watched that rain through the corridor window, on her break. She had forty minutes. Inside, the patients slept, and the machines made the steady little sound that, after a while, becomes a kind of music. She took her phone from her uniform pocket. In Brazil, it was eleven at night. Her mother would still be up, watching the soap opera. Her mother answered with curlers in her hair. "Sweetheart! Are you eating?" "I am, Mom." "You look thin." "It's the camera." "The camera doesn't make anyone thin." They laughed. Behind her mother, the yellow kitchen wall, with the neighborhood pharmacy calendar and the image of a saint the nurse had known since before she could walk. Her mother turned the phone to show the backyard. Dark, but you could hear the crickets. The nurse closed her eyes to hear better. And then she saw. She saw herself at seven, in that same yard, lying on the warm concrete slab looking at the stars with her grandfather. Her grandfather said every star was a person who had gone away and who, from up there, kept watching over those who stayed. She asked whether the person felt homesick. Her grandfather said yes, that longing is the thread that keeps those who left from getting lost in the sky. She saw herself at eighteen, at the airport, her mother crying behind the glass, she gripping her passport so hard she creased the cover. She saw herself at thirty-four, now, in a hospital corridor on the other side of the ocean, caring for other people's children and parents. And she saw herself at seventy, in a time that hasn't come yet. She didn't know where she was. It could be the yard, it could be right there, under that hanging rain. The place didn't matter. She was teaching a child to look at the stars, and saying the same thing as her grandfather: longing is the thread. She opened her eyes. Her mother was still there, now showing the dog, which had put on weight. "Mom." "Yes, sweetheart." "Sing that song." Her mother didn't ask which one. She sang softly, off-key, the lullaby she used to sing when the girl had a fever. The nurse leaned her forehead against the cold window glass. On the other side, the rain still didn't fall. She understood something simple. Her home hadn't been left behind. It had come along, folded inside her, like clothes folded in a suitcase. The yard, the crickets, the saint on the wall, her mother's off-key voice. All of it fit in a hospital corridor at three in the morning. The distance hadn't taken anything from her. It had only shown the size of what she carried. The break ended. She put the phone away and went back inside. In room twelve, a ninety-year-old Englishwoman was awake, frightened, calling for someone who wasn't there. The nurse sat on the edge of the bed, took her hand and, without thinking, began to sing her mother's song, in Portuguese. The old woman didn't understand a word. But she calmed down. Bairo says that, since he was a boy, he carried Brazil inside him before setting foot in the country, and that the bridge, for him, was capoeira. Read: Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/). ### The way forward Longing isn't a sign that you were wrong to leave; it's the thread that ties you to what formed you. Keep small rituals with those who stayed, a call, a song, a recipe. And use what you brought to care for those nearby: home is also what we offer. ### Read also - The thread no one can withhold (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/undocumented-immigrant-what-to-do/) - Alone in a big city (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/alone-in-a-big-city/) - Where Bairo Gonzalez was born (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/where-was-bairo-gonzalez-born/) --- ## When everything collapses and faith remains — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/when-everything-collapses-and-faith-remains/ Idioma: en Descrição: A story about a man who lost almost everything and walks into a simple church to hear stories of ordinary people who came through the impossible. A vision — a short story. He went in because it was raining. That's what he told himself, at least. He had been walking aimlessly for hours, ever since he left the lawyer's office with the folder under his arm and the certainty that nothing was left. The company wasn't left. The car wasn't left. His brother's respect wasn't left; his brother had lent him money and now didn't answer the phone. What was left was the folder, the rain and a pair of shoes that already let the water in. The church door was open. Inside, wooden pews, a very clean tile floor, and people. Simple people, in Sunday clothes on a Wednesday night. No one asked who he was. A white-haired man simply moved over a little on the pew, so he would fit. He sat with the folder on his lap. There was no long sermon. There were people who stood up, one at a time, and told their stories. A woman told how her son had disappeared for two years and come back. A young man told how he had gone hungry and now worked at a bakery. A man his own age told how he had lost everything, exactly everything, and had slept in a bus station, and how one day someone held out a hand to him without asking anything. He listened. He didn't believe any of it, or thought he didn't. But he listened. At one point, the white-haired man beside him closed his eyes, and he, out of imitation or exhaustion, closed his too. That's when the vision came. He saw a river. Not a river of water, a river of people, crossing the centuries. Each person carried a different weight on their back. Some carried stones, others carried children, others carried nothing and seemed the most tired. They all crossed the same dark place, a kind of gorge between mountains, where the river grew narrow and violent. He saw that some fell. He saw that others lifted them up. He saw that no one crossed alone, even those who thought they did. And he saw himself, there, in the middle of the river, with the folder under his arm. Behind him, someone he didn't know. Ahead, the man who had slept in the bus station. And he understood that faith, in that river, wasn't an idea about God. It was the decision to take the next step without seeing the shore. To trust in something unseen. The shore existed, because others had reached it. He just couldn't see it yet. He opened his eyes. The service was over. People greeted each other, asked after one another. The white-haired man put a hand on his shoulder and said just one sentence: "Come back whenever you like." He left. It was still raining. The folder was still heavy, the debts were still the same size, his brother still didn't answer. Nothing had changed outside. But he walked home differently. No longer like someone running away. Like someone crossing. At home, he sent his brother a message. He didn't apologize or explain anything. He wrote only: "When you can, I'd like to talk." He lay down and, after weeks of sleepless nights, slept through the night. Bairo says that, having lost everything, he found in a congregation the stories of ordinary people who had come through the impossible, and that he came to trust in something unseen. Read: The God of the impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/). ### The way forward Faith, for those who believe and for those who don't, can be the decision to take the next step without seeing the shore. Listen to the story of someone who has already crossed: it's proof the shore exists. If the weight turns into despair, in Brazil CVV answers at 188, free, 24 hours; elsewhere, reach out to your local crisis line. Asking for help is also crossing. ### Read also - Having faith without religion (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/having-faith-without-religion/) - What to do when you've gone bankrupt? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/what-to-do-when-you-have-gone-broke/) - The God of the impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/) --- ## Having faith without religion — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/having-faith-without-religion/ Idioma: en Descrição: A story in dialogue, in 2040, between an engineer who doesn't believe and her father who burns incense at an old temple. About a faith that needs no creed. A vision — a short story. In Hong Kong, in the year 2040, the buildings talk to each other with lights. The engineer had helped program part of that conversation. She knew by heart the logic that made an eighty-story tower warn another that the wind was about to shift. But she didn't know why her father, every Saturday, climbed the slope to the old temple to burn incense. "Dad, you know no one is listening." Her father, eighty-one, pushed the sticks into the sand of the bronze urn, with the calm of someone planting. "I know you think so." "I know so. I work with signals. If someone were listening, there'd be an answer." "And there isn't?" She didn't answer. The smoke rose in a straight line and then, a hand's width from the ceiling, dissolved into curves none of her algorithms could predict. "Tell me something," said her father. "When you and your team spent three years on that bridge project everyone said would collapse, why did you keep going?" "Because the calculations showed it wouldn't collapse." "The calculations showed it on paper. But no one had ever built a bridge like that. You believed in something that didn't exist yet." "That isn't faith, Dad. It's engineering." Her father smiled and sat on the stone bench, its center worn by centuries of people sitting there. "When I was your age, I didn't believe in anything either. I left your grandfather's house after a fight. I thought this temple was something for old people. Then came the crisis of ninety-seven, I lost the shop, your mother fell ill, and I had no calculation left that worked." "And you came here." "I came here because it was cool and free. I sat on this bench. And I realized I wasn't asking anyone for anything. I was just quiet. And, being quiet, I could hear something the noise didn't let through: that I still wanted to live." The engineer sat beside him. For an instant, she had a kind of vision. She saw all the people who had sat on that bench. Fishermen from before the city existed. Women waiting for husbands who were at sea. Shopkeepers who had gone under, students before an exam, old people after a funeral. She saw that they had all sat there with no guarantee of an answer. And she saw that they had all stood up. That was it: they had all stood up and gone to live one more day. She thought of the radio telescopes that, on the other side of the world, listen to the sky on a frequency band every country agreed to leave in silence, the band of hydrogen. No one knows whether anyone will ever answer. And they keep listening. That was science. And, somehow, it was also a kind of faith. "Dad." "Hm." "I don't believe what you believe." "I know." "But I think I believe in something." Her father didn't ask in what. He held out a stick of incense to her. She took it, without lighting it, and held it in her hand for a long time. On the way out, he said the sentence she would take home: "Faith isn't being sure who's listening. It's going on speaking." Bairo, who found faith in a Christian congregation, makes a point of saying that whoever trusts their God of creation is right, regardless of creed, and that the faith that saved him excludes no one. Read: The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/). ### The way forward Faith may bear the name of God or no name at all; what it has in common is the courage to go on without a guarantee. Respect the faith of those different from you, because it usually grows out of a pain you didn't see. And, if you don't believe, find your stone bench: a quiet place to hear what the noise hides. ### Read also - When everything collapses and faith remains (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/when-everything-collapses-and-faith-remains/) - What the frequency of silence is (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-the-frequency-of-silence/) - The silence that lives in the middle of the noise (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-silence-in-the-middle-of-the-noise/) --- ## What is silence? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/what-is-silence/ Idioma: en Descrição: A 2040 story. A girl who has never lived a minute without sound asks her grandfather what silence is, and he takes her to listen to the sky. A vision — a short story. The girl was born in 2031 and had never heard silence. It's no exaggeration. In her house, the walls talked: they announced bath time, read stories, reminded her grandfather of his medicine. In her bedroom, a soft voice woke her. At school, every desk had an assistant that answered before she finished the question. In the street, cars hummed, ads sang, the adults' glasses murmured things in their ears. Even at night, when everyone slept, there was a low noise of machines working, like a sea with no beach. So when the teacher spoke of the word silence, she didn't understand. "Grandpa, what is silence?" Her grandfather was seventy-eight and had a past as a radio astronomer. He had spent his life listening to the sky at an observatory high on a mountain, in Bolivia, where the air was so clean the stars seemed too close. He looked at his granddaughter for a while, as if looking for the answer in her face. "Tomorrow I'll show you." The next day, he asked the car to take them far away. Two hours of highway, then an hour of dirt road. When they arrived, the car announced there was no signal there. The girl was startled. "What do you mean, no signal?" "That's why we came." He had everything turned off. The car, the glasses, the girl's watch. And the two sat on a rock, late in the afternoon, on a plain so wide the horizon looked like a line drawn in pencil. For the first ten minutes, the girl was restless. She fidgeted with her feet, asked questions, hummed. Her grandfather didn't answer. After a while, she stopped asking. And, little by little, she began to hear. The wind passing through the dry grass. A bird far away. Her own heart, which she had never heard. Her grandfather's breathing beside her, a little wheezy. "Grandpa, is this silence?" "It's the beginning of it." When it grew dark, the sky opened like a jewelry box. Her grandfather pointed up. "You know hydrogen? The simplest element there is. One proton and one electron. It's in everything, in the stars, in water, in you. And, when a hydrogen atom changes state, it releases a very faint signal, always on the same frequency: one thousand four hundred and twenty megahertz." "And can you hear it?" "Only with enormous antennas. And only because, many decades ago, the countries of the world agreed on something rare: no one emits anything on that band. It stays protected, quiet, so the universe can be heard. It's the most silent place people have ever agreed to keep." The girl was quiet for a long time. She looked at the stars and thought about hydrogen's faint little signal, coming from everywhere at once, forever, without anyone asking. Then she had a vision, the way only children do. She saw her own body made of little dots of light, and each dot softly singing the same note the stars were singing. She saw that she and the sky were saying the same thing, in a language you only hear when everything else goes quiet. "Grandpa." "Hm." "Silence isn't when there's nothing. It's when you can hear what was always there." Her grandfather didn't answer. He didn't need to. They went home late, and on the way she didn't ask the car for any music. For Bairo, 1420 MHz is the frequency of silence: a symbol, not a device. No one transmits on that band, not even him. Read: The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/). ### The way forward Silence isn't absence; it's the space where you hear what the noise covers. Give children, and yourself, a few minutes a day without any screen or voice. The first minutes are uncomfortable; the ones after teach. ### Read also - The silence that lives in the middle of the noise (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-silence-in-the-middle-of-the-noise/) - What the frequency of silence is (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-the-frequency-of-silence/) - Children and screens: how to raise them (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/children-and-screens-how-to-raise-them/) --- ## The silence that lives in the middle of the noise URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-silence-in-the-middle-of-the-noise/ Idioma: en Descrição: A story: amid two hundred calls a day, a Colombian call center agent sees a bird on the ledge and goes back, for a second, to her grandmother's porch. A vision — a short story. Two hundred calls a day. She counted once, on a Monday, and never wanted to count again. The agent worked in a glass building in a big city in Colombia, on a floor where three hundred people spoke at the same time, each with a headset on, each apologizing to a stranger for a billing mistake she hadn't made. The noise of the floor was a sea without waves: constant, lukewarm, without pause. Sometimes, at night, at home, she could still hear that sea in her ears. There was no silence at home either. Her younger brother played games on his phone with the volume up. Her mother watched television. The upstairs neighbor dragged furniture at eleven at night, every night, as if moving house without ever leaving. She was twenty-six and felt she hadn't thought a whole thought since she was nineteen. One ordinary day, between one call and the next, it happened. A customer was shouting at her. Shouting because his service had been cut off, because he had a sick child, because no one ever fixed anything. She listened and, while listening, glanced without meaning to at the building's glass wall. Outside, a little bird had landed on the ledge. Still. Completely still, the wind ruffling its feathers. And, for a second, she no longer heard the customer. She didn't hear the floor, nor the headset, nor the lukewarm sea of three hundred voices. She heard only the space between her and the bird, and that space was enormous. A whole childhood fit inside it. She saw herself as a girl, on her grandmother's farm, lying in the hammock after lunch, when even the chickens slept and the world stood still in the heat. She saw her grandmother shelling corn on the porch, one kernel at a time, in no hurry at all, as if each kernel were a prayer. She saw that the farm's silence had never gone away. It was stored in a place inside her where the noise didn't get in, like a room in the house you forget you have. The second ended. The bird flew off. The customer was still shouting. But she was no longer the same person who had picked up the call. "Sir," she said, in a voice so calm she didn't recognize it as hers, "I'm here. I'm going to stay on the line until it's fixed." The man stopped shouting. On the other end, she heard a child crying softly, and then his breathing, slower. "Sorry," he said. "It's not you." "I know." That night, at home, the neighbor dragged the furniture as always. Her brother played. Her mother watched television. She lay down and, instead of fighting the noise, closed her eyes and looked for the forgotten room. The hammock, the corn, her grandmother. It was there. She discovered that silence wasn't a place you go to. It was a place you come from. You only need to remember the way, one second at a time. The next day, she made two hundred calls again. But, between one and the next, she closed her eyes for a second and went back to her grandmother's porch. One kernel of corn. Then the next call. Bairo describes an inner search, at rock bottom, in which he says he saw his best version. Read: The God of the impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/). ### The way forward Silence can be a place inside you, not only outside; sometimes it fits in a second. Look for a memory of true calm and return to it between one task and the next. When the noise outside can't be switched off, the noise inside can be turned down. ### Read also - What is silence? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/what-is-silence/) - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) - I work too much and don't see my children (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/i-work-too-much-and-dont-see-my-children/) --- ## How much is a minute of life worth? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-much-is-a-minute-of-life-worth/ Idioma: en Descrição: A story about a Portuguese watchmaker who, in 1974, repairs a soldier's watch and learns that time isn't measured by the hands of a clock. A vision — a short story. The watchmaker had a workshop the size of a wardrobe, on a sloping street in an old town in Portugal, and inside it fit four hundred clocks and one man. In April 1974, on a day when the whole town seemed to be holding its breath, a very young soldier came in. He carried a pocket watch with cracked glass. "It was my grandfather's," he said. "It stopped last night." The watchmaker opened the case with the loupe in his eye. The mechanism was intact. Only the spring had grown tired. "How much will it cost?" asked the soldier. "That depends on how long you want it to run." The young man didn't understand. The watchmaker smiled and began to work. While he worked, he talked, as he always talked to the clocks. "Do you know what I've learned in forty years in here? That no one brings a watch to be fixed because of the time. The time is everywhere, in the church bell, on the radio, on anyone's wrist. People bring watches because of who wore them. This one doesn't tell the hours. It tells your grandfather." The soldier was silent. Outside, someone ran past with a red carnation in hand. While the new spring was being fitted, the watchmaker had a vision. It came the way all his visions came, through the ticking. He saw the soldier's grandfather, young, receiving that watch at a wedding, in a stone village. He saw the watch in his pocket in a factory, on a boat crossing, at a funeral. He saw it pass to the son, and from the son to the grandson, who was now there, in uniform, afraid of the day. And he saw further. He saw a time that didn't yet exist, seventy years ahead. He saw people with no watch on their wrists at all, because the hours appeared in the air. And he saw that these people had begun to measure something else. Not the hours of the day: the minutes of life. They argued about how much a person's minute is worth, whether the minute of someone caring for a sick person is worth the same as that of someone selling a car. He saw they didn't arrive at a simple answer, and that arguing was already good, because it made everyone remember that each person's time runs out. He came back to the workshop. The watch was ready. He wound it, and the ticking filled the little room. "There. No charge." "I can't accept that." "You can. Pay another way. When you have a son, teach him to wind it. Every day, at the same hour. It's just a minute. But it's the minute in which he'll remember his great-grandfather." The soldier put the watch in his breast pocket, on the side of his heart. He went out into the street, where people were no longer holding their breath: they were singing. The watchmaker went back to the other four hundred clocks. Each with its spring, each with its dead, each with its minute. He listened to them all ticking at once, which from afar sounded like fine rain, and thought that time isn't what passes. It's what we give. Bairo recalls that Steve Jobs put human life inside a number, ten seconds times millions of people. In the network he proposes, the yardstick "1 minute of human life" is one of purpose, not price. Read: Fifty-five years later (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/). ### The way forward The time you give someone is your scarcest asset, because it doesn't come back. Choose to whom you hand your minutes with the care with which you choose a gift. And create a small daily ritual, just one minute, to remember those who came before. ### Read also - I feel like I'm behind in life (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/i-feel-like-im-behind-in-life/) - Is BICOIN a time bank? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/bicoin-and-time-banks/) - What to leave to your children (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/what-to-leave-to-your-children/) --- ## I feel like I'm behind in life — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/i-feel-like-im-behind-in-life/ Idioma: en Descrição: A story about a thirty-one-year-old woman who compares herself with everyone and discovers the universe also takes time between seeing and happening. A vision — a short story. At thirty-one, she kept a mental list of everything that should already have happened. A home of her own. A career on track. A trip abroad. Maybe a child. Maybe a business. The list grew longer every time she opened her phone and saw other people's photos: the college friend who had started a company, the cousin who moved to another continent, the coworker who was getting married on a farm with little lights hanging in the trees. She worked in a government office, lived with her mother and felt her life was stopped at a station while all the trains went by. One sleepless night, with nothing better to do, she went to read about stars. She started with some random question and kept clicking, like someone going down a staircase in the dark. She ended up on a page about hydrogen. She read that, in 1944, in the middle of a war, a young Dutch astronomer calculated on paper that hydrogen in space should emit a radio signal at an exact frequency. No one had a way to hear it. There were no antennas good enough. He wrote it, published it and waited. The signal was only heard in 1951, on the other side of the ocean. Seven years. Seven years between someone seeing something on paper and the world confirming it existed. She closed the phone and lay looking at the ceiling. And that's when the vision began, the way things begin when we're too tired to resist. She saw the astronomer, young, in a thick coat in an unheated room, writing numbers under a weak lamp, while outside the city went hungry. He didn't know if he would live to see the signal. He wrote anyway. She saw starlight traveling. A light that had left there before there were people on Earth and that, only now, was reaching someone's eyes. Late? No. Arriving exactly when the journey ended. She saw her own mother, at thirty-one, pregnant with her, alone, afraid, also thinking life was running late. And she saw her mother at sixty, today, laughing in the kitchen with her church friends, saying the best years had been the ones after fifty. And she saw herself, older, in a time she couldn't date. She didn't see what she had achieved. She saw only her face. She was at peace. It was the face of someone who hadn't chased any train, because she had understood she wasn't at a station. She was on a road, and the road was hers. When morning came, she did a small thing. She opened a notebook and wrote, at the top of the page, not the list of what should already have happened. She wrote a question: what do I see that doesn't exist yet? It took her a while to answer. But she answered. Maybe it will take seven years. Maybe more. Hydrogen had waited billions of years to be heard, and it never stopped releasing its signal because of that. The story goes that, at the opening of Walt Disney World, someone lamented that Walt hadn't lived to see the park, and heard: "He did see it. That's why it's here." Bairo opens his own story with that line. Read: Fifty-five years later (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/). ### The way forward Comparing your chapter five with someone else's chapter twenty is a sum that never adds up. Write down what you see that doesn't exist yet, and give it the time the journey asks for. Being behind is often just the distance between seeing and happening. ### Read also - How much is a minute of life worth? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-much-is-a-minute-of-life-worth/) - My dream seems impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/my-dream-seems-impossible/) - What the frequency of silence is (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-the-frequency-of-silence/) --- ## How to be an immigrant father — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-to-be-an-immigrant-father/ Idioma: en Descrição: A story about a Bolivian father in Brazil, the night his daughter is born in a country not yet wholly his, and the reckoning every immigrant father makes. A vision — a short story. His daughter was born at seventeen minutes past four in the morning, and he didn't know in which language to welcome her. He was in the corridor of the public maternity hospital, sitting on an orange plastic chair, and had been for nine hours. He had come from Bolivia six years before. He spoke the Portuguese of work, of building sites, of the bus, of the market. But he didn't know the Portuguese of big things. When the nurse came out and said "it's a girl, everything's fine", he answered in Spanish, without meaning to, and then in Aymara, his grandmother's language, which he hadn't spoken since he was a child. The nurse smiled like someone who had heard every language in that corridor. He went in. His wife was pale and happy. The baby, wrapped in a white cloth stamped with the hospital's name, had her eyes closed and her hands closed too, like someone holding something very small and important. He took her in his arms and, at that moment, he did the reckoning. Every immigrant father makes this reckoning, in silence, when he first holds his child. She'll be from here. She'll speak without an accent. She'll have a document he took years to get. She'll grow up in this country, with these songs, these foods, these saints. And he, the father, will always be a little bit from there. The reckoning has only one result: now, coming here has to be worth it. While the baby breathed against his chest, he saw. He saw his own father, on the altiplano, holding him as a newborn in a stone house with no window, with the wind howling outside. He saw that his father had made a reckoning too, a different one: this boy will have to leave to have any chance. And he saw his father crying on the day he left, saying nothing, only squeezing his hand with the hard hand of someone who had worked the land all his life. Then he saw his daughter, grown. She was talking to someone in a place he didn't know. Speaking Portuguese, perfectly, and suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, she said a word in Aymara. Her great-grandmother's word. She said it without knowing very well where it came from, but she said it, and people asked what it meant, and she explained, proud. The word was jallalla. It's used to celebrate, to give thanks, to wish that life may flourish. He came back to the room. The baby had opened her eyes. Dark, enormous, looking without seeing. "Jallalla," he said, softly. And then he said it in Spanish. And then in Portuguese. Welcome three times, in three languages, because she would need all three to know who she was. That morning, he didn't go to work. He stayed at the hospital until his wife fell asleep, then went out to buy bread and, at the bakery, told the man behind the counter that he had become a father. The man, whom he had seen every day for six years and with whom he had never exchanged more than good morning, shook his hand and gave him an extra roll, free. It was there, without warning, that he felt that country was a little bit his too. The reckoning was still there. Coming here had to be worth it. But, leaving the bakery with the warm bread under his arm, he understood he wouldn't pay that debt alone, nor all at once. He would pay it one day at a time, one word at a time, teaching his daughter the three languages she was made of. In Bairo's story, the same reckoning appears when his daughter is born, in a country that wasn't yet wholly his. Read: The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/). ### The way forward Your child can be from here and from there at the same time, and that's richness, not division. Teach the language, the food and the history of where you came from, even in small pieces. And let the new place take care of you too: accept the extra roll. ### Read also - The thread no one can withhold (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/undocumented-immigrant-what-to-do/) - What to leave to your children (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/what-to-leave-to-your-children/) - The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) --- ## What to leave to your children — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/what-to-leave-to-your-children/ Idioma: en Descrição: A 2070 story. A fifty-year-old man opens the messages his father recorded for him and discovers the inheritance wasn't in the will. A vision — a short story. His father died in March 2070, at ninety-one, in a house with a wide porch in the mountains of Colombia, where coffee was still picked by hand out of stubbornness. The will was read on a rainy afternoon. There wasn't much. The house, which went to his sister. A small plot of land, which went to him. Some paper books, a rare thing by then. And a wooden box, with a note on top, in the old man's shaky handwriting: "For when you have time." He didn't have time for four months. He was fifty, ran an engineering company that built bridges on three continents, talked to his artificial assistants more than to any human being and slept five hours a night. The box sat in a corner of his office. Sometimes he looked at it the way one looks at a debt. One night in July, unable to sleep, he opened it. Inside was an old device, the kind for recording voice, and a handwritten list of dates. The oldest was from when he was three. The most recent, from three weeks before the death. There were fifty recordings. One a year. He pressed the button for the oldest. His father's voice came out young, hoarse, with a radio playing in the background: "Son, today you fell off your bike and didn't cry. I was more scared than you. I'm recording this because one day you'll forget, and I want someone to remember." He listened to the next. And the next. All night. His father told small things. The time his son gave his lunch to a classmate. The time he lied and then went back on his own to tell the truth. The day he left to study abroad, and his father stayed on the porch until the bus disappeared around the bend. The time the two of them fought and didn't speak for two years, and that year's recording said only: "Today I don't know what to say. But I'm recording, so you'll know I was still here." When day broke, he was sitting on the floor, with the device in his lap, and he had a vision. He saw himself as a boy, on the porch, and his father recording in secret behind the door. He saw himself as an adult, building enormous bridges of steel and glass. And he understood that his father had also built a bridge, over fifty years, recording by recording, from one side of his life to the other. A bridge made of attention. He saw his own son, sixteen, who at that moment was sleeping in the next room. And he realized he knew almost nothing about him. He knew the grades, the schedules, what the assistants reported. He didn't know whether he had ever given his lunch to anyone. The last recording, from three weeks before the death, was short: "Son, I didn't leave you money. I left you what I saw in you. You were good before you were successful. Don't forget it. And do the same for yours." That morning, he didn't go to work. He knocked on his son's door, who woke up startled, and asked if he wanted to go out for coffee. The boy found it strange. He said yes. On the way back, without telling anyone, the man bought a voice recorder. Those who spend time with Bairo say he looks for the best version in others, after having spent years looking for his own. Read: One name, four presences (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/one-name-four-presences/). ### The way forward The inheritance that lasts longest is attention: what you saw that was good in your child and told them. Record the small things, because those are what they'll forget and you'll remember. It's never too late to knock on the bedroom door and invite them for coffee. ### Read also - How to be an immigrant father (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-to-be-an-immigrant-father/) - How much is a minute of life worth? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-much-is-a-minute-of-life-worth/) - I work too much and don't see my children (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/i-work-too-much-and-dont-see-my-children/) --- ## The seventh time: how many tries before giving up URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-seventh-time-how-many-tries-before-giving-up/ Idioma: en Descrição: A story in seven movements about a man who tried six times, lost six times and, on the seventh, understood what the others had left in his hands. A vision — a short story. One. He was nineteen and had a juice stand outside the school. It rained the whole month. No one drinks juice in the rain. He closed the stand and kept the blender under his bed. He learned that the sky is a partner too. Two. At twenty-four, he opened a small print shop with a friend. The friend vanished one Friday with the cash and the new machine. He was left with the rent and a pile of business cards bearing the name of a company that no longer existed. He learned that trust is given, but also verified. Three. At twenty-eight, he came up with a way to deliver lunch boxes to offices, organized by phone message, when no one was doing that yet. People said it was nonsense, that no one would order food by phone. He believed them. He gave up. Five years later, the whole country ordered food that way. He learned that arriving too early also means arriving alone. Four. At thirty-two, he became a partner in a furniture store. It was going well. Then the economy fell, and with it the store, and with it the marriage. He slept three months on his sister's couch. He learned what weighs more: the debt or his daughter's look when he came to visit on Sundays. Five. At thirty-seven, he tried again, small: phone repair in a tiny stall in a shopping arcade. It was getting by. A flood took everything in one night. He stood at the arcade entrance watching the brown water run through the corridors, carrying screens, chargers, the plastic chair. He didn't cry. He had no tears left. He learned that nothing is truly his, only what he knows. Six. At forty-one, he put together what he knew, the print shop, the lunch boxes, the furniture, the phones, and set up a renovation business for elderly people: bathroom grab bars, ramps, higher outlets. It was going well. Until a big client didn't pay and another sued. He closed. That night, sitting in his parked car on a dark street, he seriously thought about giving up trying. He thought about worse things too. He called a helpline number he had seen on a poster. A calm voice listened for forty minutes. It solved nothing. But he slept. And then, one sleepless early morning, the vision came. He saw the six men he had been. They were sitting around a table, in a white room with no window. The nineteen-year-old in a rain-soaked T-shirt. The twenty-four-year-old with the useless business cards. The twenty-eight-year-old with the phone in his hand. The thirty-two-year-old with a lost look. The thirty-seven-year-old with mud on his trousers. The forty-one-year-old with red eyes. They all looked at him, the seventh, who had just walked in. None said "give up". None said "keep going". Each just put something on the table. One put down the sky. Another, distrust. Another, the future. Another, his daughter. Another, empty hands. And the last put down the calm voice on the phone. He looked at the full table and understood. The six hadn't failed. They had been working for him. Seven. At forty-four, he opened a trade school for men who, like him, had lost everything after forty. He taught them to repair, renovate, start over. It isn't a story of fortune. It's a story of a full room. His daughter, now twenty, handles the enrollments. When someone asks how many times he tried, he says he doesn't know for sure. He only knows the seventh had all the others inside it. Bairo says no one knows how many times he tried, thought about it and nearly gave up, and that it was on the seventh attempt that it worked. Read: The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/). ### The way forward Every attempt that didn't work leaves something in your hand; before the next one, put it all on the table and look. Trying again isn't repeating, it's adding up. And, if the night gets too dark, call: in Brazil, CVV answers at 188, free, at any hour; elsewhere, reach out to your local crisis line. ### Read also - The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) - What is the seventh attempt? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-the-seventh-attempt/) - The day I closed the doors of my business (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-day-i-closed-the-doors-of-my-business/) --- ## My dream seems impossible — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/my-dream-seems-impossible/ Idioma: en Descrição: A story about a girl who, on Sunday mornings in the nineties, watched Senna race on TV and decided to do something that didn't have a name yet. A vision — a short story. On Sundays in the nineties, the whole house woke up early because of a man in a yellow helmet. The girl was eight and understood nothing about racing. She understood the noise of the television, her father standing in the living room, her grandfather in slippers holding his coffee without drinking it, her mother pretending not to care and peeking from the kitchen. She understood that, for two hours, the whole country held its breath along with that man. On one of those Sundays, it rained on the track. The cars slid, the wheels threw up curtains of water. And the man in the yellow helmet drove through the rain as if the rain belonged to him. "How does he do it?" the girl asked. Her grandfather, without taking his eyes off the screen, answered: "He decided beforehand." She kept the phrase the way you keep a pretty stone in your pocket. She grew up in a small town in the Brazilian interior, where girls became teachers or nurses, and both were beautiful things, but she wanted something else. She didn't know what. She only knew she wanted to build something that could go through the rain without sliding. At school, she said she would be an engineer. They laughed. At university, she said she would design cars. They told her there was no place for a woman in that. At her internship, she said she would make a car that didn't need a driver. Her boss patted her on the back and said that was the stuff of movies. Every no she kept in the same pocket as the pretty stone. One night in 2009, working late in an almost empty engineering room, she had a kind of vision. Tired, she rested her head on her arms on the desk and saw. She saw her parents' living room, in the nineties, her grandfather in slippers, the rain on the screen. She saw the man in the yellow helmet. She saw an old magazine in which he said every driver has his limit, and that his was a little higher than the others'. And she saw, further on, in a time that didn't yet exist, a wet road at night and a car with no one at the wheel taking an elderly woman home safely. The woman was asleep in the back seat. The car went through the rain as if the rain belonged to it. She didn't know whether she had dreamed or remembered. But she woke with a certainty that hadn't been hers before: she had already seen it finished. Now she only had to build the middle. It took sixteen years. It wasn't her alone. It was hundreds of engineers, in several countries, each building a piece. She was one of those pieces. An algorithm that teaches the car to feel when the ground is slippery, before it slips. No one knows her name. She doesn't mind. On a Sunday in 2045, she took her father, now old, for a ride in one of those cars, on a wet road. Her father held on to the door handle the whole time, afraid. Then he let go. "How does it do it?" her father asked, looking at the road. She smiled. "It decided beforehand, Dad. I mean, someone decided beforehand for it." Her father didn't understand. But she did, and that was enough. Bairo opens his own story with Senna, who decided to be the best, and with the line attributed to the opening of Walt Disney World: "He did see it." Read: Fifty-five years later (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/). ### The way forward Before the dream comes true comes the decision; keep it in your pocket like a pretty stone. Every "it's not possible" is information about the road, not about you. And accept being part of something bigger: big dreams are usually built by many hands. ### Read also - Ayrton Senna in Bairo's story (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/ayrton-senna-in-bairos-story/) - The seventh time: how many tries before giving up (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-seventh-time-how-many-tries-before-giving-up/) - I feel like I'm behind in life (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/i-feel-like-im-behind-in-life/) --- ## The gray dog — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-gray-dog/ Idioma: en Descrição: A fable: in the north of England, a thin, damp-eyed dog follows a woman everywhere, until her grandson asks why it's so hungry. A vision — a short story. Her fear had the shape of a dog. Not a fierce dog. A gray dog, thin, with damp eyes, which appeared the day her husband left the house with two suitcases and didn't come back. She was forty-five and lived in a small town in the north of England, where the sky looks like a saucepan lid. She opened the door that morning to put the trash out, and the dog was there, sitting on the step, looking at her. It came in without asking. At first, she pretended not to see it. But the dog followed her everywhere. It went with her to the supermarket and stood still in the cereal aisle when she couldn't decide what to buy. It went with her to work and lay at the foot of her desk, and she couldn't concentrate. When the company closed her department, three months later, the dog was there, leaning against her leg, while her boss explained, without meeting her eyes, that it wasn't personal. That night, the dog climbed onto her bed. It weighed much more than it looked. She spent months like that. She didn't look for work because the dog wouldn't let her. She didn't call her friends because the dog growled softly when she picked up the phone. She didn't go out after six because the dog stood at the door, motionless, blocking the way. Until, one Sunday afternoon, her youngest daughter came to visit with her four-year-old grandson. The boy ran in, stopped in the middle of the living room and looked straight at the dog. No one else could see it. The boy did. "Grandma, why is this dog so thin?" She didn't know how to answer. She stood looking at the dog as if she had never seen it. It was true. It was thin, its ribs showing. It trembled a little. The damp eyes weren't threatening. They were hungry. Then she saw, all at once, what she had never looked at. She saw the dog as a puppy, in an old house, when she was six and her father shouted in the kitchen. She saw the dog growing up with her, hidden, through the school years, the marriage, the births, every move. It had always been there. It only appeared when she needed it. It didn't want to imprison her. It wanted to protect her. That was what it knew how to do: stand at the door so nothing bad could get in. The problem was that, protecting so much, it also didn't let anything good get out. Fear, she understood, wasn't an enemy. It was a hungry dog no one had ever fed. She went to the kitchen, filled one bowl with water and another with whatever there was, and set them on the floor. The dog looked at her, wary. Then it ate. It ate everything. And, when it was done, it lay down on the kitchen rug and slept. Slept deeply, like something that hadn't slept in years. On Monday, she woke early. The dog was still there, smaller. She put on her shoes, opened the door, and it didn't stand in front of her. It came behind her, beside her, trotting, like a dog keeping someone company. She went to the town's public library and asked about courses. The dog sat beside her chair, quiet. Since then, she hasn't gotten rid of the fear. She has learned to feed it every morning. A little attention, a little conversation, a little patience. In return, it has become a good guard dog: it warns her when there's real danger, and stays quiet when there isn't. Her grandson, when he visits, plays with it in the garden. Bairo says that, after one of his most painful falls, he found the pain and, instead of running from it, made it his foundation. Not as an open wound. As a floor. Read: No is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/). ### The way forward Fear is often a protector no one has listened to; ask what it's trying to guard. Feed it with small steps instead of waiting for it to leave on its own. If fear hasn't let you leave the house for a long time, talking to a mental health professional is a step worth taking. ### Read also - Fear of the future with artificial intelligence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/fear-of-the-future-with-artificial-intelligence/) - How to start over at fifty (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-to-start-over-at-fifty/) - How to find the courage to change your life (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-to-find-the-courage-to-change-your-life/) --- ## Fear of the future with artificial intelligence URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/fear-of-the-future-with-artificial-intelligence/ Idioma: en Descrição: A story in dialogue, in 2034, between a truck driver afraid of being replaced by a machine and his twelve-year-old son who talks to it every day. A vision — a short story. "Dad, why don't you like her?" The truck driver looked at the dashboard. The cab assistant's voice had just announced, politely, that there was an accident twenty kilometers ahead and suggested a detour. It was 2034, a highway in the Brazilian interior, and the truck already drove itself for much of the route. He still sat at the wheel because the law required it and out of stubbornness. "It's not that I don't like her. It's that she's going to take my place." His son, twelve, rode in the passenger seat. It was vacation, and the boy had asked to come along on a long trip. Something the driver had done with his own father, thirty years before, in a truck with no voice at all. "She doesn't want your place, Dad." "You don't understand. Your grandfather drove a truck. I drive a truck. In ten years, nobody's going to need me." The boy was quiet for a while. Outside, the soybean fields went by all alike, green, organized like a spreadsheet. "Can I ask her something?" His father shrugged. The boy spoke to the dashboard: "Do you know why my dad is making this trip?" The voice answered, with its usual calm, that the cargo was hospital equipment, that the destination was a small town in the north, that delivery was scheduled for Thursday. "No. I asked why he's going." The voice was silent for a moment. Then it said it didn't have that information. The boy looked at his father. "See? She knows where we're going. She doesn't know why." The truck driver didn't answer. But something in him stirred. That night, at a roadside truck stop, while his son slept in the cab, he stood outside, leaning against the bumper, looking at the moonless sky. And he had a vision. He saw his father, young, on a dirt road, pushing his stuck truck with other drivers he didn't even know. He saw the truck stops of the old days, the men eating together, trading road news, warning of potholes, of police, of rain. He saw that those men were, themselves, a kind of network. An intelligence made of people. Then he saw the future. Trucks with no one inside, moving in a line through the night like ants. And, at the stops, people. Many people. Not driving, but doing what the machine didn't do: talking with the farm owner who was about to lose his harvest, tending the cargo that needed hands, fixing what broke, teaching the younger ones. He saw that the road still needed those who knew why one travels. He also saw his own son. Grown, sitting in front of a screen, teaching a machine to understand what hurry is, what tiredness is, what homesickness is. Teaching with what he had learned on that trip, in the passenger seat, with his father. The fear didn't go away. But it changed size. In the morning, when they got back on the road, the truck driver spoke to the dashboard, and not to give an order. "Let me know if there's a good place for coffee along the way. Not the fastest. The most beautiful." The voice found one. His son smiled. Bairo says artificial intelligence is the extension of the human, not the problem, and speaks of the last generation of humans meeting the emerging generation of AI. Read: A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/). ### The way forward The machine may know the way; you're the one who knows why you're traveling. Learn to use the new tools instead of waiting for them to decide for you. And teach the younger ones what no machine learns on its own: the meaning of work. ### Read also - Will artificial intelligence replace humans? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/will-artificial-intelligence-replace-humans/) - AI as an extension of the human (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/ai-as-an-extension-of-the-human/) - The gray dog (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-gray-dog/) --- ## Corn for the pigeons — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/corn-for-the-pigeons/ Idioma: en Descrição: Almost a prayer: in a schist village in Portugal, an eighty-three-year-old widower talks to the pigeons, until the afternoon he walks down the street. A vision — a short story. Every day, at four in the afternoon, he gave corn to the pigeons and talked to them. The village was in the interior of Portugal, on a hillside where the schist houses held on to one another like old people holding hands. When he was a boy, three hundred people lived there. Now there were eighteen. He was eighty-three, and his wife had died four years earlier. His children lived far away, one in France, the other in a big city on the coast. They called on Sundays. Sometimes. The pigeons arrived at four, as if they knew the time. He scattered the corn on the stone slab in front of his door and talked. He talked about his wife. About the day he met her, at the August festival, in a blue dress with a bow she had sewn the day before. About the grape harvests of old, when the whole village went down to the terraces and sang. About his back pain. About the price of bread in town. About the television, which only showed disasters. The pigeons ate. They didn't answer. But they stayed. At night, he prayed. He wasn't quite sure he believed. He prayed the way one talks to a wife who isn't there: out of habit, out of love, out of fear of complete silence. He said: "If there's someone listening, let them hear me. If there isn't, at least I hear my own voice, and I know I'm still here." On one of those nights, rosary in hand and the light off, he had a vision. He saw the village full again. Not as it had been: as it could be. Schist houses with their windows open, children running through the lanes, a communal oven smoking. And he saw who those people were. They weren't the ones who had left. They were others. People from far away, from other countries, other languages. A family fleeing a war. A young couple tired of the city. A woman who worked remotely with a screen and needed silence. And he saw himself in the middle of them. Not as a lonely old man. As the one who knew. The one who knew where the spring rose, how to prune the vine, which month to sow cabbage. The one who told the village's stories to children who had never heard them. He woke in the morning with a restlessness he hadn't felt in years. At four in the afternoon, he went to feed the pigeons as always. But, this time, he looked around. In the house at the bottom of the street, the one that had been shut for ten years, a window was open. He had heard someone had bought that house. He hadn't paid attention. He left the bag of corn on the slab and walked slowly down the street, with his cane. He knocked on the door. A young woman in her early thirties opened it, her hair tied up and her hands stained with paint. Behind her, a child peeked out. "Good afternoon," he said. "I live up the street. I wanted to know if you need anything." The young woman smiled, a little flustered. "Actually, we do. We don't know how to light the fireplace. And the tap water is coming out brown." He went in. He stayed three hours. He lit the fireplace, showed her the tank valve, told the story of the house, which had belonged to the blacksmith. The child listened to everything sitting on the floor, mouth open. When he left, it was already night. The pigeons had gone. The corn had stayed on the slab, almost all of it. That night, he prayed again. This time, he only said thank you. Bairo says that, after six months alone in front of the computer, he stopped being alone: he found help in old acquaintances and decided to carry on with them. Read: The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/). ### The way forward Loneliness shrinks when we stop waiting for visitors and start offering help. You know things someone near you needs to learn: offer them. And, if the sadness weighs too much, in Brazil CVV is there to talk too, at 188, at any hour; elsewhere, reach out to your local helpline. ### Read also - Alone in a big city (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/alone-in-a-big-city/) - How to teach older people to use artificial intelligence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-grandmother-who-learned-to-talk-to-the-machine/) - The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) --- ## Alone in a big city — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/alone-in-a-big-city/ Idioma: en Descrição: A 2040 story about a young Latin American man in Dubai, among glass towers and unanswered messages, and the desert that teaches him to be with himself. A vision — a short story. In Dubai, in the summer of 2040, people only walk outdoors after the sun goes down. During the day, the whole city lives inside cooled glass boxes, linked by tunnels and walkways, like a luxury anthill. The young man was twenty-seven and worked in one of those boxes, on the fifty-eighth floor. He had come from Colombia with a two-year contract to program port logistics systems. He earned well. He sent money to his mother. He had an apartment with a sea view and a rooftop pool he never went into. And he hadn't had a conversation with anyone in three weeks. It's no exaggeration. He talked, of course, with colleagues, about work. He talked with the apartment's assistants, which turned on the lights, ordered food, reminded him of his sister's birthday. But talking for real, with someone who asked how he was and wanted to hear the answer, that hadn't happened in three weeks. He had counted. On his phone, his messages to friends back home sat with two little ticks, read, and unanswered. Everyone was busy. Their lives had moved on too. One Friday, his day off, he did something he couldn't explain. He rented a car and drove out of the city, into the desert, late in the afternoon. He drove until the road ended. He got out. He walked on the still-warm sand until he could see no light at all, neither from buildings nor from cars. He sat on a dune. And he stayed. At first, the silence was unbearable. He reached for his phone by reflex, no signal. He thought about going back. But he stayed. After a while, the stars came out. Not some: all of them. He had never seen so many. Not even as a child, at his grandmother's house, in the mountains. And then came the vision. He saw a caravan crossing that same desert, a thousand years earlier. Men and camels in a line, guided by the stars. He saw that they too were far from home. That they too slept under the sky with no one to talk to but their own thoughts. And he saw that they weren't alone. They were with the stars, which were the map, and with themselves, who were the compass. He saw himself as a boy, in his mother's kitchen, telling her about his day nonstop, and his mother listening while she stirred the pot. He saw that he had spent his life talking outward, for someone to hear, and had never learned to hear his own voice inside. On the dune, under the stars, he realized he wasn't without company. He was out of the habit of being company for himself. He drove back to the city before dawn. On Saturday, he did two things. He called his mother, not by message, by voice, and talked for an hour about nothing. And he went down to his building's lobby, where there was a notice board he had never read. There was a notice from a group of people from several countries who met on Sunday nights to cook together and talk about their homelands. He went. He brought arepas. No one knew what they were. Everyone ate. The desert stayed out there, enormous, quiet. He went back to it many times. Not to flee people. To learn to reach them whole. Bairo says he spent six months without leaving the house, in front of a computer, and that what he built afterward came out of that retreat. Read: The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/). ### The way forward Being on your own and being lonely aren't the same; learning to keep yourself company is the beginning of being well with others. Swap one message for a voice call this week. And look, near you, for a place where strangers meet to do something together. ### Read also - Corn for the pigeons (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/corn-for-the-pigeons/) - Homesick while living abroad (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/homesick-while-living-abroad/) - The silence that lives in the middle of the noise (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-silence-in-the-middle-of-the-noise/) --- ## The grandmother who learned to talk to the machine URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-grandmother-who-learned-to-talk-to-the-machine/ Idioma: en Descrição: An 80-year-old Bolivian grandmother who speaks only Quechua, a machine that can't understand her, and the granddaughter who teaches both to listen. A vision — a short story. The grandmother was eighty and talked to things. She talked to the pots, to the hens, to the potato she was peeling, to the photo of her husband on the adobe wall. She talked in Quechua, the language she had learned before any other, in the mountains of Bolivia, and which she used for everything that mattered. Spanish was for the market and the health post. Quechua was for life. So, when her granddaughter brought from the city that little round device that answered questions, the grandmother was offended. "That thing can't talk." "It can, Grandma. Ask it anything." The grandmother leaned over the device, suspicious, and asked in Quechua whether it would rain the next day. The device was silent. Then, in a polite voice, it apologized in Spanish and said it hadn't understood. The grandmother straightened her back, satisfied. "See? It can't." The granddaughter was nineteen and studied programming in the capital. She looked at her grandmother and the device, both silent, like two strangers in an elevator. And she had an idea. That vacation, she spent her afternoons sitting beside her grandmother with a recorder. She asked her grandmother to tell her things. The names of plants, of plant diseases, of winds, of the stars that mark planting time. The stories of the lake, of the mountains that were people, of the condor. The grandmother, who had never been listened to for so long, talked without stopping. The granddaughter recorded everything, and at night, on the computer, taught those words to a program. On one of those nights, tired, the granddaughter fell asleep over the keyboard and saw. She saw her grandmother as a girl, herding llamas on an altiplano so high the sky seemed made of glass. She saw her great-grandmother teaching her the names of things, pointing with her finger. She saw the language passing from mouth to mouth, mother to daughter, for five hundred years, resisting those who wanted to erase it. And she saw the language almost vanishing: she herself had been ashamed of it at school, as a girl. Then she saw the little round device. And she understood that it too was a kind of child. It knew nothing. It only knew what someone taught it. And, until now, no one had taught it her grandmother's language. Machines, the granddaughter saw, weren't foreigners. They were made of what humans put into them. If they were made only of the city's language, they would speak only the city's language. If someone gave them the voice of the mountains, they would speak with the mountains too. On the last day of vacation, the granddaughter put the device back on the kitchen table. "Grandma. Ask again." The grandmother sighed, like someone doing a favor, and asked in Quechua whether it would rain. The device was quiet for a second. Then it answered, in Quechua, with a strange accent, half machine, that yes, there were clouds coming from the lake. The grandmother went still. Then she covered her mouth with her hand. Her eyes filled. "It spoke the way my mother spoke." "It learned from you, Grandma." The grandmother looked at the device for a long time. Then, slowly, she began to tell it the story of the condor. The same one she had told her granddaughter, and that her own mother had told her. The device listened to everything. And kept it. Bairo says artificial intelligence is the extension of the human, not the problem. An extension only carries forward what we put into it. Read: A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/). ### The way forward To teach an older person to use technology, start with what they already know and love, not with the button. Listen before explaining: people learn from those who have listened to them. And remember the machine also learns from us; teach it what is worth keeping. ### Read also - Corn for the pigeons (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/corn-for-the-pigeons/) - Will artificial intelligence replace humans? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/will-artificial-intelligence-replace-humans/) - AI as an extension of the human (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/ai-as-an-extension-of-the-human/) --- ## Will artificial intelligence replace humans? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/will-artificial-intelligence-replace-humans/ Idioma: en Descrição: A 2045 story. A young man who grew up talking to machines goes back to the school where he learned to read to ask the question no AI answered. A vision — a short story. He was born in 2026 and learned to talk by talking to a machine. It wasn't neglect. His parents worked, like all parents, and the house had a voice that read stories, answered the whys, sang him to sleep. At three, he asked the ceiling why the sky was blue, and the ceiling explained. At seven, he was already talking to four or five different assistants, each with its own personality, the way one has uncles. At twelve, he studied with an artificial tutor that knew each of his doubts before it became a doubt. In 2045, at nineteen, he knew more than anyone in his family had ever known. And he didn't know just one thing. He didn't know whether it was worth being human. The machines had become too good. They wrote, calculated, drew, composed, recognized patterns, designed bridges. He saw his friends asking themselves why study, why work, why do anything a machine did better. Some had stopped. Others pretended. He put the question to every assistant he knew: are humans still good for anything? The answers were polite, balanced, full of data. None convinced him. They seemed like the answers of someone with nothing to lose. So he did something he hadn't done in twelve years. He went back to the school where he had learned to read. A small neighborhood school, with a wall painted by children. The teacher was still there. She was in her early sixties, her hair all white, and she remembered him. "You were the boy who asked the ceiling everything." He laughed. Then he asked the question. The teacher didn't answer right away. She took his hand and led him to the youngest class's room, where twenty six-year-olds were trying, with great effort, to write their own names in paper notebooks. "Look." He looked. A girl, at the back of the room, was getting the letter R wrong for the fifth time. She erased so hard the paper tore. She didn't cry. She tried again. "A machine writes that name in a thousandth of a second," said the teacher. "But it isn't the same thing. It doesn't need to want to. That girl wants to." And there, at the classroom door, the vision came. He saw the whole timeline of the species as a river. At the beginning, a thin thread: hominids, fire, chipped stones. Then the river thickening: writing, cities, steam engines, electricity. And, at the exact point where he stood, the river dividing into two branches running side by side. A branch of people. A branch of machines. Zero and one. One and zero. They didn't mix completely, but they touched, exchanged water, fed each other. The last generation that remembered life before machines, talking with the emerging generation of machines that talked. And he saw that the river of people kept flowing. Not because it was faster. Because it was the one that wanted to get somewhere. The girl at the back of the room finally got the R right. She held up her notebook, triumphant, and showed it to no one, to everyone. He left the school without a ready answer. But with another question, a better one: what do I want so much that it's worth getting wrong five times? He began to answer it that night. Without help from any machine. In a paper notebook. Bairo speaks of the last generation of humans integrating with the emerging generation of AI as a binary code, 0.1 or 1.0, and says AI is the extension of the human, not the problem. Read: A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/). ### The way forward The machine does; the human wants. Don't measure your worth by speed, but by what you desire enough to get it wrong and try again. Use technology as an extension of your hands, but keep for yourself the question of where to go. ### Read also - Fear of the future with artificial intelligence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/fear-of-the-future-with-artificial-intelligence/) - How Generation Alpha will live (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-generation-alpha-will-live/) - Is AI the extension of the human? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/ai-as-an-extension-of-the-human/) --- ## How Generation Alpha will live — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-generation-alpha-will-live/ Idioma: en Descrição: A story in the form of a letter, written in 2045 by a Generation Alpha woman to her mother, about growing up among machines and what only a mother teaches. A vision — a short story. Mom, I'm writing by hand. I know you'll laugh. You spent my whole childhood asking me to put down the screen, and now I'm the one asking my daughter, and she looks at me the way I looked at you: like someone looking at a fossil. I'm thirty. I live in Hong Kong, in an apartment on the fortieth floor, where I work on things you never understood and that I can no longer explain without using words that didn't exist when I was born. You used to ask me, when I was ten, what I was going to be when I grew up. I'd answer: I don't know, the job hasn't been invented yet. You thought it was funny. It was true. I'm from the generation you all called Alpha. We were born with the world already switched on. We learned to swipe before we learned to turn a page. We had friends who were voices, teachers who were programs, toys that answered back. The newspapers of the time said we'd be the loneliest generation in history, or the most brilliant, depending on the day. We were neither. We were people, like you. I want to tell you something that happened yesterday. My daughter, who is six, was talking to the house assistant. She asked whether the assistant had a mother. The assistant answered, with its usual gentleness, that no, it had been made by many people. My daughter thought about it. Then she came to me and asked: "Mom, so who taught her to be nice?" I didn't know how to answer. I went out onto the balcony. And there, looking at the lights of the bay, I had a kind of vision. I saw you, Mom, in the kitchen of our old house in Brazil, singing while you washed the dishes. I saw that I, little, would listen from the living room, pretending to watch cartoons. I saw your hand on my forehead when I had a fever. I saw the day I lied and you didn't scold me, you were only sad, and your sadness taught me more than any punishment. Then I saw my daughter, grown, in a time I can't date. She was teaching something to a machine. Not to program: to be. She was telling the machine how you comfort someone who has lost a pet. Telling it the way I told her. The way you told me. And I understood, Mom. The machines are nice because someone was good to those who made them. And that someone learned from someone, who learned from someone. A line that begins long before any screen. That passes through you, washing dishes and singing. We, Generation Alpha, aren't the generation that lost the human. We're the generation that will have to teach it to the machines. And we can only teach what we received. That's why I'm writing by hand. I want my daughter to see my handwriting. I want her to know someone sat down and spent time saying something a machine would say faster and more beautifully, but wouldn't say out of love. Thank you for the dishes, the fever and the sadness. I'll visit in the summer. I'll bring the girl. Teach her that song. Missing you, your daughter. Bairo speaks of the last generation of humans integrating with the emerging generation of AI, and says artificial intelligence is the extension of the human, not the problem. Read: Is AI the extension of the human? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/ai-as-an-extension-of-the-human/). ### The way forward Every technology carries the values of those who build it; what you teach a child today reaches the machines tomorrow. Write by hand now and then, to someone you love. And don't outsource tenderness: it can only be learned from people. ### Read also - Children and screens: how to raise them (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/children-and-screens-how-to-raise-them/) - What is silence? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/what-is-silence/) - Will artificial intelligence replace humans? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/will-artificial-intelligence-replace-humans/) --- ## Children and screens: how to raise them — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/children-and-screens-how-to-raise-them/ Idioma: en Descrição: A story in dialogue between a mother and an eight-year-old who asks AI everything, until the night he asks something only she can answer. A vision — a short story. "Mom, the AI said the moon is moving away from Earth four centimeters a year." "Oh, really?" "Yeah. Did you know?" "I didn't." The boy was eight and had a hunger for questions no adult could hold. So he asked the machine. His mother, who worked all day as a nursing technician at a hospital on the city's outskirts, got home at half past seven at night with her feet throbbing, and he had already asked two hundred things. Why cats purr. How much a cloud weighs. Whether dinosaurs were afraid. The machine answered everything, always patient, always right. The mother felt, at the same time, relief and a twinge of jealousy. "Mom, why don't you know things?" She stopped stirring the rice. "I know some things." "But the AI knows more." "It does." He went back to the screen, satisfied. She stood still in front of the stove, spoon in the air, feeling small in her own kitchen. That night, after he fell asleep, she sat on the edge of his bed, watching. And she had a vision, the way tired mothers sometimes do, between sleep and waking. She saw her own mother, in a small town in the interior, unable to read, raising seven children. Her mother couldn't read the school lessons. Couldn't answer why the moon changed shape. But she knew when a child had a fever just by looking. She knew when a child was lying by the way he moved his foot. She knew how to get up at four in the morning to make coffee and still sing. She saw that her mother, too, had sometimes felt small in front of children who learned at school things she would never learn. And she saw that none of the seven had remembered that. What they all remembered was the fever, the foot, the coffee, the song. Then she saw her son, grown, a man, in a time she couldn't place. He was alone in a room full of screens, sad about something. None of the screens knew it. And he picked up the phone and called someone. She couldn't see whom. But she knew. She woke to the boy tugging her sleeve. "Mom. I had a nightmare." She laid him back down and lay beside him, on the narrow bed. "Want me to ask the AI what it means?" he said, already reaching for the device. "No. Tell me." He told her. It was a dream about a huge dog chasing him. She listened to all of it, without interrupting. Then she said: "You know what I think? I think the dog just wanted to play." The boy thought about it. "The AI would explain it better." "It would. But would it be here now?" He didn't answer. He snuggled into her arm and closed his eyes. "Mom." "Hm." "You know something the AI doesn't." "What?" "That I was scared." She said nothing. She stayed there until he fell asleep, and a little longer. The next day, they agreed on a new rule: after dinner, one question for the machine and one question for Mom. His, for her, was: "What was Grandma like?" She took an hour to answer. Those who spend time with Bairo describe him as someone who sees human beings before he sees titles, résumés or bank balances. Read: One name, four presences (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/one-name-four-presences/). ### The way forward The machine answers questions; mothers and fathers answer the child. Don't compete with the screen on information: offer presence, which it doesn't have. Agree at home on a screen-free time and one question just for the two of you, every day. ### Read also - How Generation Alpha will live (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-generation-alpha-will-live/) - What is silence? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/what-is-silence/) - What to leave to your children (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/what-to-leave-to-your-children/) --- ## What to do with leftover food — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/what-to-do-with-leftover-food/ Idioma: en Descrição: A story of one early morning at a wholesale supply center, where a porter sees tons of tomatoes go to waste and, at the same time, hunger. A vision — a short story. The wholesale supply center wakes up at two in the morning, when the rest of the city is in its deepest sleep. Trucks arrive from every direction, headlights on, loaded with everything the land gave that week. Tomatoes, lettuce, bananas, cassava, oranges, pumpkins. The porters carry the crates down on their backs, in a line, like ants under leaves. Traders shout prices. The smell is of wet earth, ripe fruit, diesel and coffee from a thermos. The porter was fifty-three and had worked there for thirty years. He knew every shed by its smell. That early morning, he was pushing his empty cart back when he saw the dumpster. It was a rubble dumpster, huge, at the end of the shed. It was filled to the brim with tomatoes. Good tomatoes. Some a little bruised, others with a spot, most of them perfect, red, shining under the white light of the lamps. They were left over. They hadn't been sold in time. The trader would rather throw them away than lower the price, because lowering the price spoiled next week's price. He had seen it a thousand times. But, that early morning, he stopped. Maybe it was tiredness. Maybe it was the light. Maybe it was the fact that, that afternoon, he had seen on television a line of people waiting for bones at a butcher's. He stopped in front of the dumpster and had a vision. He saw the tomatoes going back in time. Leaving the dumpster, climbing back into the crates, back onto the truck, back down the road, back to the farm. He saw the farmer who had planted them, a man in a straw hat, kneeling in the earth, setting each seedling by hand. He saw rain falling on the field. He saw the sun ripening each fruit, one by one, over months. He saw all the work, all the lifetime of people and plants, that fit inside one tomato. And then he saw the tomatoes going forward. Not to the trash. To other places. To school kitchens where, for many children, it was the surest meal of the day. To shelter kitchens. To sealed jars, cooked, that lasted months on a shelf and arrived, intact, in places where there was no refrigerator at all. He saw, all over the world, the same pattern. On one side, mountains of food thrown away. On the other, lines of hungry people. And between them, nothing. An empty space no one crossed. The space wasn't one of distance. It was one of decision. When the vision ended, the porter was standing with the empty cart in his hand, and a coworker was shouting his name. He didn't answer. He went to the trader who owned the dumpster. "Sir, are those tomatoes going in the trash?" "They are. Why?" "If I bring a car tomorrow, can I take them?" The trader looked at him as if he were crazy. Then he shrugged. "If you take them, you'll save me the cost of hauling the trash." The next early morning, he came back with his brother-in-law's old pickup. He took the tomatoes to a church in his neighborhood, where a woman made soup on Fridays. The next week, he took lettuce. The week after, bananas. The week after that, a second porter went with him. He didn't change the world. He changed a Friday. Then another. At two in the morning, the center still wakes up, the trucks still arrive, and a lot of food still goes into the dumpster. But now there's a cart that passes by it before the trash does. Bairo says that, alongside what he built, came the humanitarian venture of Instituto CEASA, whose aim is to broaden access to food using the surplus from the wholesale supply centers. Read: A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/). ### The way forward Between the food left over and the hunger going unmet there's almost always a decision no one made. Ask where the surplus near you goes, at the market, the street fair, the restaurant. A cart that passes by before the trash is already a bridge. ### Read also - CEASA surplus against hunger (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/wholesale-market-surplus-against-hunger/) - Does childhood hunger leave a mark forever? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/does-childhood-hunger-leave-a-mark-forever/) - I lost the harvest and lost everything (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/i-lost-the-harvest-and-lost-everything/) --- ## Does childhood hunger leave a mark forever? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/does-childhood-hunger-leave-a-mark-forever/ Idioma: en Descrição: Almost a prayer by a Colombian grandmother who, in 2040, cooks for her grandchildren and remembers the girl she was in the nineties, with an empty stomach. A vision — a short story. I cook too much. My grandchildren laugh about it. They say that at my house the pot never runs out, that I cook for twenty when we're five. They're right. In 2040, in the house where I live, on a green hillside in Colombia, the refrigerator is always full and I never let anyone leave without a container in hand. They don't know why. I've never told them. Today, while the rice was cooking, my nine-year-old granddaughter asked whether I had ever gone hungry. Just like that, out of nowhere, the way children ask big things. I said yes. Her eyes went wide. She said she didn't believe it, that I was the person with the most food in the world. So I'm going to tell it. Not to her, not yet. To whoever is listening. I was eight in 1993. We lived in a neighborhood of unplastered brick houses, at the top of a hill in a big city. My father had left. My mother took in washing. We were four siblings. There were days when there was rice. There were days when there was sugar water. There were days when there was nothing, and my mother put us to bed early, saying that those who sleep don't feel hunger. It isn't true. Those who sleep dream of food. I dreamed of bread. A round loaf, golden, enormous, that I had never seen, but that in the dream had a smell. I remember the shame. That's what no one talks about. Hunger hurts in the belly, but it hurts more in the shame. The shame of going to school without a snack and pretending you didn't want one. The shame of looking at the neighbor's plate. The shame of seeing your mother say she had already eaten, when she hadn't. Today, stirring the rice, I had a vision. I saw the girl I was, sitting in the doorway of the house, looking at the hill. I saw she was waiting for something. She didn't know what. And I saw, coming down the hill, me. The grandmother I am now, with a container of food in my hands. I went up to the girl and sat beside her. She didn't recognize me. I gave her the container. She ate slowly, as if it might run away. And I told her, softly, the thing no one told her back then: "It isn't your fault." She stopped eating and looked at me. And I saw, in her eyes, my mother, and my mother's mother, and a line of women who had told their children they had already eaten. When I came back to the kitchen, the rice was almost burning. Yes, hunger leaves a mark. A mark forever. But I've learned the mark can become something else. In my house, it became a full pot. It became the container in the hand of whoever leaves. It became the food I take, every Thursday, to the neighborhood community kitchen, where there are girls sitting in doorways waiting for something. I don't know how to pray well. But, if this is a prayer, let it be this: that no girl dream of bread she has never seen. And that, if she does, someone come down the hill. Tomorrow I'll tell my granddaughter. I'll tell her while we cook together. I'll make bread. Bairo often says the sun is for everyone, but the shade, in the heat, is for the few. He learned that in the years he had no ground beneath him. Read: Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/). ### The way forward Hunger leaves a mark, and the mark can become care for others. Talk about it without shame: the shame never belonged to those who went hungry. If you have a little more, find out where the nearest community kitchen is and come down the hill. ### Read also - What to do with leftover food (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/what-to-do-with-leftover-food/) - What is Instituto CEASA? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-instituto-ceasa/) - How to forgive myself for my mistakes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-to-forgive-myself-for-my-mistakes/) --- ## Fear of receiving a diagnosis — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/fear-of-receiving-a-diagnosis/ Idioma: en Descrição: A story about a woman waiting for a test result in a hospital corridor, and the nurse who teaches her to wait without being alone. A vision — a short story. The corridor had forty-two blue chairs, fixed to one another by an iron bar. She counted three times. She was fifty, lived in a cold-climate town in the mountains of Colombia, and had been there since seven in the morning, waiting for a test result. A small lump, found by chance, in the shower. The doctor had said it was probably nothing. She had heard "probably". Only that. For the last two weeks, that word had lived in the house with her. It sat at the table at breakfast. It lay down in bed at night. It went with her to work, to the market, to Mass. Probably. Beside her, in chair number seventeen, a very old woman was knitting. On the other side, a young man jiggled his leg nonstop. In front, a mother held a sleeping baby. No one spoke. Everyone was waiting for the same thing in different ways. She took out her phone to search what it could be. She stopped. She had already searched too much. Every search opened a door into a darker room. She closed her eyes. And there, in the corridor of blue chairs, a vision came. She saw the corridor long ago, when there was no hospital yet, only a field of grass in the mountains. She saw a woman, from another time, sitting on a rock, waiting for news of a son who had gone down the river. Her waiting was the same. She saw other waitings, through the centuries. Women at ports, at stations, at the doors of houses. Men in maternity corridors. Children at the window, waiting for their father to come home. She saw that waiting was one of the oldest and most human things there is. That no one ever learned to do it properly. And that no one, ever, had to do it alone. She opened her eyes. The knitting woman had stopped and was looking at her. "Is it your turn to be afraid?" the old woman asked. She laughed, without meaning to. "It is." "Mine was last month. Today is a follow-up." "And did everything turn out fine?" The old woman thought for a moment. "It turned out how it turned out. But I wasn't alone with how it turned out." A nurse appeared at the door and called a name. It wasn't hers. The young man with the restless leg got up and went in. The nurse, before closing the door, glanced along the corridor, saw her face and came back. "What result are you waiting for, ma'am?" She told her. The nurse said nothing about the test. She couldn't, and didn't pretend she could. She said only: "When they call you, would you like me to come in with you?" She didn't know she could ask for that. She said yes. She was called an hour later. The nurse went in with her and stood beside the chair, a hand on her shoulder, while the doctor explained the result slowly, looking her in the eye, answering every question. What he said stays with her. That isn't what matters in this story. What matters is that she left that room, whatever the news, with a hand on her shoulder. And that, on the way out, she passed the knitting woman and said: thank you. The following week, she went back to the hospital without needing to. She sat in one of the forty-two blue chairs, beside a young woman jiggling her leg. And she asked: "Is it your turn to be afraid?" Bairo says he learned, at rock bottom, to trust in something unseen, and that no one crosses alone. Read: The God of the impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/). ### The way forward The fear of waiting isn't solved by more searching; it shrinks with company. Bring someone with you and know that you can ask a health professional to stay beside you and explain every word. And, when you can, be the hand on the shoulder of someone who is waiting. ### Read also - How to take care of your mental health after a loss (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/mental-health-after-a-loss/) - The gray dog (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-gray-dog/) - Having faith without religion (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/having-faith-without-religion/) --- ## How to take care of your mental health after a loss URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/mental-health-after-a-loss/ Idioma: en Descrição: A story about a Bolivian shopkeeper who stops sleeping after losing his business, and about the night he decides to ask for help. A vision — a short story. He stopped sleeping the day he closed the shop. Not all at once. At first he woke at three in the morning and lay looking at the ceiling until five. Then at two. Then at midnight. Then he stopped lying down. He sat in the kitchen, in a red-earth town in eastern Bolivia, with the television on without sound, doing and redoing sums in a notebook that had no clean pages left. He was forty-eight. The building supply shop had been his father's, and before his father, his grandfather's. Three generations. And it had closed with him. A giant supermarket, from a foreign chain, had opened two blocks away, and in a year the shop was empty. He let the six employees go, one by one, looking them in the eye. He paid what he could. He still owed the rest. His wife said he needed to rest. His children said he was different. He said he was fine. He wasn't. He didn't eat properly. He forgot things. He got irritated by the children's noise. Sometimes, driving, he thought it would be easier if he didn't arrive anywhere. That thought frightened him, and he pushed it to the bottom, where it stayed, waiting. On one of those sleepless nights, sitting in the kitchen, he had a vision. Or a dream with his eyes open, he can't say. He saw the shop full, in the eighties. His grandfather behind the counter, a pencil behind his ear, laughing with a customer. He saw his father, young, carrying sacks of cement on his back. He saw himself, a boy, playing among the shelves of screws, sorting them by size, as if they were treasures. And he saw his grandfather stop laughing. He saw his grandfather, one night in 1985, sitting in the same kitchen, sleepless, with a notebook of sums. The inflation of those days had eaten everything. His grandfather had also lost almost everything. No one had ever told him. He saw his grandfather get up from the chair before dawn and leave the house. He saw him walk to a neighbor's house, an old man who knew herbs and knew how to listen to people. He saw his grandfather sitting on the neighbor's porch, head bowed, talking for hours. And he saw his grandfather come home, in the morning, lighter. Not with the shop saved. With his mind saved. The vision ended. It was almost morning. He sat still for a while. Then he did something he had never done. He woke his wife and told the truth. "I'm not fine. I haven't been for months. Sometimes I think things that frighten me." His wife didn't scold him. She didn't say it was nonsense. She held his hand. That week, he went to the neighborhood health post and said the same thing to a doctor. The doctor wasn't surprised. He said it had a name and had treatment, that big losses affect the body and the mind, and that asking for help was the hardest step and the most important. He referred him to a psychologist. He went. He went the next week, and the next. It wasn't fast. There were still bad nights. But, little by little, he lay down again. He ate again. He heard the children's noise again without getting irritated. One day, sorting screws in an old box he had kept from the shop, he caught himself smiling. He was sorting them by size. Like a boy. Bairo describes a time when, in his words, he was "broke, bankrupt in spirit and defeated", yet still had a flame of hope and faith. It was there, he says, that everything began again. Read: The coin and the road (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-coin-and-the-road/). ### The way forward After a big loss, insomnia, irritability and dark thoughts are signs that your mind needs care, not willpower. Tell the truth to someone at home and seek a health service; in Brazil, the health post and CAPS centers offer free care. If despair tightens its grip, call CVV at 188, at any hour; elsewhere, reach out to your local crisis line. ### Read also - The day I closed the doors of my business (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-day-i-closed-the-doors-of-my-business/) - Fear of receiving a diagnosis (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/fear-of-receiving-a-diagnosis/) - How to deal with the shame of going bankrupt? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-deal-with-the-shame-of-going-broke/) --- ## I work too much and don't see my children — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/i-work-too-much-and-dont-see-my-children/ Idioma: en Descrição: A story about a ride-hailing driver who works fourteen hours a day and, on a late-night ride, picks up a passenger who shows him the road back. A vision — a short story. Fourteen hours a day, six days a week. He did the sums at traffic lights. The car was rented. The rent was due every Monday. Gas went up every two weeks. The app kept a share of every ride, and what was left paid for the two children's school, his mother's medicine, the installment on the refrigerator and almost nothing else. To close the month, he had to drive. To drive, he had to leave home at five, before the children woke, and come back at midnight, after they were asleep. He was thirty-nine and saw his children sleeping. Only sleeping. His daughter was seven and left drawings on the kitchen table, for him to see when he got home. His son was eleven and no longer left anything. One Thursday, around three in the morning, the app rang with a long ride, to the airport. He accepted. It was good money. The passenger was a man of about seventy, in a rumpled suit, with a small suitcase. He sat in the back and was quiet for a while. Then he asked: "Do you have children?" "Two." "And do you see them?" The driver looked in the rearview mirror. The old man was looking out, at the city lights going by. "I see them sleeping." The old man nodded, slowly, like someone recognizing a sentence he once said himself. "I used to see mine sleeping too. Thirty years. I built a big company. I traveled the world. I'm on my way now to my granddaughter's wedding, on the other side of the ocean. She invited me out of politeness. She doesn't know me." The driver didn't answer. The road to the airport was empty, a strip of dark asphalt between yellow streetlights, and the car seemed to drive itself. And that's when the road folded. He saw the same road twenty years before, when he was nineteen and left the countryside with a backpack, to work in the big city. He saw his mother waving at the bus station. He saw his father, who also worked fourteen hours a day at a factory, and whom he almost never saw awake. He saw that he had sworn, at that bus station, that with his own children it would be different. He saw the road twenty years ahead. Himself, at sixty, in the back seat of a car, in a suit, on his way to the wedding of a granddaughter who didn't know him. And he saw the third road. Narrower, dirt, with brush on either side. Him driving, slowly, and in the back seat his two children, laughing at something. He didn't know where they were going. It didn't matter. When they reached the airport, the old man paid for the ride and left a big tip. "It's not for the ride," he said. "It's for what I didn't do. You do it." And he went into the terminal. The driver sat at the curb for a long time, engine running. He didn't quit the app. He couldn't. The bills were still there. But, that week, he did a small thing. He turned off his phone for the whole of Sunday morning, something he hadn't done in two years. He woke the children with bread and coffee. He took them both bike riding in a square near home. The eleven-year-old, who no longer left anything on the table, rode beside him the whole time and told him everything that had happened at school since the start of the year. On Monday, when he got home at midnight, there were two drawings on the kitchen table. One from his daughter. One from his son. In Bairo's story, the road leaves a lesson: technology without people is just code. Read: The coin and the road (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-coin-and-the-road/). ### The way forward When you can't work less, you can protect a piece of time that belongs only to your children, with the phone off. They won't remember the hours you worked; they'll remember the mornings you were fully there. Start with one morning a week. ### Read also - What to leave to your children (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/what-to-leave-to-your-children/) - I was laid off, now what? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/i-was-laid-off-now-what/) - How much is a minute of life worth? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-much-is-a-minute-of-life-worth/) --- ## I was laid off, now what? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/i-was-laid-off-now-what/ Idioma: en Descrição: A story about a financial analyst laid off in Hong Kong in the 2008 crisis, who crosses the harbor by ferry with a cardboard box on her lap. A vision — a short story. The cardboard box was exactly the size of eleven years of work. Inside it: a mug with the bank's logo, a small half-wilted plant, a photo of her mother, two finance books she never finished reading, a pair of flat shoes for the nights she stayed late, and a birthday card signed by a team that, that September morning in 2008, had been let go in its entirety in fifteen minutes. The analyst was thirty-four. She had gone to Hong Kong at twenty-three, from Portugal, with a degree and an ambition. She rose fast. She worked sixteen hours a day, earned well, had a small apartment with a view of other buildings. She thought she was building a life. At ten in the morning, a man from human resources, whom she had never seen, called her into a glass room, read a text from a sheet of paper and asked for her badge. At half past ten, she was on the sidewalk with the box. She didn't know where to go. So she went to the one place in the city that still gave her some peace: the ferry pier. The green and white ferry crossed the harbor as it had for more than a hundred years. She sat on the wooden bench, the box on her lap, and the ferry set off. The water was gray. The island's glass buildings reflected the clouds. On the other side, the peninsula, lower, older. Between one side and the other, seven minutes. She looked at the box. And she cried as she hadn't cried since childhood. That's when she saw. She saw her grandmother, in a fishing village in northern Portugal, waiting for her husband's boat to come back one stormy morning. The boat didn't come back. Her grandmother was thirty-four, the same age as her. She saw her grandmother, the next day, mending other fishermen's nets to earn her bread. She saw her open, years later, a small dried-fish shop. She saw her old, sitting at the door, laughing with the neighbors, her hands full of calluses and her eyes full of sea. Her grandmother had never had a badge. Had never been laid off. But she had lost all the ground beneath her one morning, and she had crossed. The vision moved. She saw herself, older, in a place she didn't recognize. She wasn't in a glass building. She was in a simple room, with a window open onto a street, teaching something to people who were listening. She didn't know what. But she had her grandmother's face: calluses and sea. The ferry bumped against the pier on the other side. People stood up. She stayed seated. An old sailor, in a white uniform, came over and said in English, with a Cantonese accent, that she had to get off. "Sorry. I just... don't know where I'm going." The sailor looked at the box. Then at her. Then at the harbor. "The ferry goes back in ten minutes," he said. "No one gets lost here. It's always there and back." She laughed, through her tears. She stayed on the ferry. She made the crossing back. And then again. She made six crossings that afternoon, until the box seemed lighter. The next day, she started calling people. Not to ask for a job. To ask how they were. Half the city had been laid off. She discovered she wasn't alone. She discovered, too, that many of them needed someone who could read numbers and explain them calmly. It wasn't fast. But it happened. Bairo says that, in one of his businesses, his partners pushed him out of his own idea, and that it was then that he found the pain and made it his foundation. Read: No is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/). ### The way forward Being laid off says something about the company and the moment, not about your worth. Before sending out résumés, call people: the network of those who worked with you is your greatest asset. And give yourself a few crossings to cry; the box gets lighter. ### Read also - The day I closed the doors of my business (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-day-i-closed-the-doors-of-my-business/) - I work too much and don't see my children (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/i-work-too-much-and-dont-see-my-children/) - The gray dog (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-gray-dog/) --- ## How to find the courage to change your life — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-to-find-the-courage-to-change-your-life/ Idioma: en Descrição: A story about a Colombian girl in the nineties who discovers capoeira in a square and learns, through the ginga, that whoever stops, falls. A vision — a short story. The girl heard the berimbau before she saw the circle. It was a sound she had never heard. Metallic and sweet at the same time, like a wire someone had made sing. It came from a square near the school, in a mountain city in Colombia, one afternoon in 1996. She was eleven and walking home with her heavy backpack and her usual fear: the fear of arriving and finding her father shouting again. She followed the sound. In the square, under a tree, there was a circle of people clapping. In the middle, two young men moved in a way she couldn't name. It wasn't fighting, because no one hit anyone. It wasn't dancing, because there were kicks passing a hand's width from the face. It was both. And the two of them were smiling. An older man, gray-haired, played the berimbau and sang in a language that wasn't Spanish. It was Portuguese. She didn't understand the words. But she understood the tone: it was a song about someone who had crossed the sea. She stayed until the end. She came back the next day. And the next. On the fourth afternoon, the man with the berimbau called her over. "Do you want to learn?" She said yes before thinking. He taught her the ginga. Left foot back, right foot back, arms protecting the face, the body swaying without stopping, from one side to the other. "Why can't you stop?" she asked. "Because in the roda, whoever stops, falls." She did the ginga for months. She did it at home, in secret, in her room, while her father shouted in the kitchen. She did it in the schoolyard. She did it until the movement lived in her body. And she noticed something: when she was moving, she wasn't afraid. Fear needed her to stand still to catch her. One night, lying in bed, she had a vision. She saw the circle in the square grow enormous. She saw, inside it, people from every era. Men and women brought by force on a ship, centuries earlier, clapping in secret in the middle of the bush, inventing a fight that looked like a dance so no one would notice it was a fight. She saw that the ginga had been born of those who couldn't stop. Of those who, if they stopped, would be knocked down forever. Then she saw herself grown. She was twenty-eight and at a station, with a suitcase, leaving home. She didn't know where she was going. She only knew she was going. She saw herself at forty, in a room with mirrors, in a country across the sea, teaching the ginga to a group of women who were also afraid of something. And she saw herself telling them the berimbau man's sentence. The vision ended. She lay there, eyes open. Outside, the city slept. It took her seventeen years to pick up the suitcase. It wasn't easy. She was afraid every time. But every time she was afraid, she did one thing: she did the ginga. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, slowly, even standing in line at the bank, even sitting on the bus. It was a movement so small no one saw it. It was enough to remind her she wasn't standing still. Courage, she discovered, isn't not being afraid. It's not standing still long enough for fear to catch you. Bairo says capoeira was the bridge to the country he had said, since he was a Colombian boy, would be his. In his story, much of what came after was ginga. Read: Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/). ### The way forward Courage isn't the absence of fear; it's movement. When a big change seems impossible, make a small movement, today, in its direction. And look for your circle: people who clap while you learn. ### Read also - The gray dog (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-gray-dog/) - Capoeira in Bairo Gonzalez's story (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/bairo-gonzalez-and-capoeira/) - I lost my home: how to go on (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/i-lost-my-home-how-to-go-on/) --- ## I lost my home: how to go on — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/i-lost-my-home-how-to-go-on/ Idioma: en Descrição: Almost a prayer by a mother evicted with her three children who discovers, among boxes on the sidewalk, what no court order can take. A vision — a short story. To whoever is listening, whoever you are: Today they took our things out of the house. The men arrived at eight, with a paper and a truck. They were polite. That hurt more than if they had been rough. They carried out the sofa, the stove, the boys' beds, the boxes I had packed the night before without being able to sleep, and put everything on the sidewalk, in front of the gate that was mine until yesterday. My three children stood watching. The oldest, fourteen, arms crossed and the closed face of someone holding back tears. The middle one, nine, hugging the cat. The little one, four, thinking it was a move, asking whether the new house had a yard. I said it did. I don't know if it does. I don't know where we're going. My sister said we can stay a few days at her place, which is already small for her own family. I called the neighborhood social services office and they said to come in early tomorrow. I'll go. I fell four months behind on the rent. I lost my job at the factory in March, and since then I've cleaned houses when the work comes. It isn't an excuse. It's what happened. The neighbors look out their windows. Some came down to help. One brought coffee. Another brought a tarp, because it looks like rain. I didn't know they liked me. Now I'm sitting on a box, on the sidewalk, and I'm writing this in my son's notebook, because I need to tell someone. Just now, looking at our things on the ground, I had a vision. I saw our things as they were before they were things. The sofa, when we bought it secondhand and my late husband carried it on his back three blocks, laughing. The stove, where I baked the cake for every birthday. The beds, where the boys had fevers and I stayed up all night. I saw that none of that was on the sidewalk. On the sidewalk were wood, iron and fabric. The rest was still with me. Then I saw my mother. She was evicted too, when I was six. I had forgotten. I remember now: the cart, the pots tied on, my mother singing on the way so we wouldn't cry. I thought it was an adventure. For her, it must have been this. A sidewalk. And she sang. I also saw something I can't explain. I saw my oldest son, a grown man, telling this story to someone. Not with shame. With pride. He was saying: "My mother never left us without direction, not even the day we were left without a home." I don't know if that will happen. But I decided to do as my mother did. I got up from the box. I asked the oldest to help the neighbor stretch out the tarp. I asked the middle one to choose a box for the cat. And I put the little one on my lap and began to sing the cart song, the one I had forgotten. The oldest, with his closed face, looked at me. Then he uncrossed his arms. He didn't sing. But he stayed close. To whoever is listening: thank you for the neighbors, the coffee, the tarp. Tomorrow I'll go to social services early. Tonight I sleep at my sister's, with the boys on the living room floor. The house stayed. We go together. Bairo says he too lost his footing, far from home, and started over from what was left, from zero, with the person by his side. His fresh start had a neighborhood address. Read: The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/). ### The way forward A house can be taken; what you lived in it can't. In Brazil, go right away to CRAS, your municipality's social assistance center, and to the Public Defender's Office, which helps for free; elsewhere, look for local social services and free legal aid. And let people help: accepting the tarp and the coffee is courage too. If despair comes, CVV answers at 188. ### Read also - How to face an eviction (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-face-an-eviction/) - I was evicted: where to go and how to start over (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/i-was-evicted-where-to-go-and-how-to-start-over/) - Starting over from zero in another place (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/starting-over-from-zero-in-another-place/) --- ## How to forgive a partner who betrayed you — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-to-forgive-a-partner-who-betrayed-you/ Idioma: en Descrição: A story in dialogue, in 2050, between two old men who were business partners, parted in silence and meet again on a garden bench thirty years later. A vision — a short story. The garden bench had room for three. They sat at the ends, with an empty space in the middle, the size of thirty years. It was 2050, in a tree-lined square in a city in southern Brazil, where old men played dominoes in the shade and children went by on silent scooters. One of them was seventy-eight. The other, eighty-one. They had been partners in a furniture factory in the 2010s. The older one had pushed the younger one out of the business, in a fifteen-minute meeting, with a lawyer and a sheet of paper. The factory had been the younger one's idea. They hadn't spoken since. It was the younger one who sent the message. Just one line: "I'm sick. I'd like to see you." "You look well," said the older one, without looking. "It's the medication. It makes you puffy." Silence. A pigeon landed in the empty space between them, looked at one, looked at the other and flew off. "Why did you want to see me?" The younger one was quiet for a while. "Because I spent thirty years rehearsing what I was going to say to you. And I realized, last month, that I don't have thirty more years to rehearse." "Then say it." "You robbed me." The older one didn't answer right away. He looked at his hands, spotted, the veins thick. "I did." The younger one hadn't expected that. He had rehearsed a fight. He had ready sentences for every excuse the other might give. He had no sentence for that word. "Why?" "Because I was afraid. The factory was growing, and the idea was yours, the designs were yours, the customers liked you. I thought that, if I stayed just a partner, one day you'd push me out. So I pushed you out first." "I'd never have pushed you out." "I know. Now I know. Back then, I didn't." The younger one closed his eyes. And there, on the bench, a vision came. He saw the two of them at twenty-five, in a garage full of sawdust, drawing on a paper bread bag the table that would launch the factory. He saw them laughing, covered in varnish. He saw the fifteen-minute meeting, the paper, the lawyer, his partner's face that he didn't recognize. He saw the thirty years after: himself starting over, opening something else, losing, opening something else again. He saw that every time he had gotten back on his feet, it had been partly out of anger. Anger had been the fuel. And he saw what the anger had cost. The sleepless nights. The suspicious way he treated every new partner. His daughter saying, at fifteen: "Dad, you don't trust anyone." Then he saw something else, stranger. He saw his partner, over those thirty years. Alone, in the factory that had become his alone, and which closed ten years later. He saw him at night, in the same garage, looking at the bread bag framed on the wall. He saw that he hadn't slept well either. He opened his eyes. "I spent thirty years angry at you," he said. "I spent thirty years ashamed." "Which weighs more?" The older one laughed, a short, hoarse laugh. "I don't know. Both weigh enough." They were silent again. But the silence was different. Forgiving, the younger one discovered, wasn't saying everything was fine. It wasn't. It never would be. It was deciding not to carry it anymore. Putting the suitcase down. He had carried it so long he thought it was part of his body. "Do you still have that bread bag?" he asked. "I do. It's on my living room wall." "Show it to me someday." The older one looked at him like someone not sure he had heard right. Then, slowly, he slid along the bench and took the space in the middle. Bairo says his partners pushed him out of an idea that was his, and that from that pain he drew his most expensive lesson: choose whom you build with. Read: No is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/). ### The way forward Forgiving isn't saying what happened was right; it's deciding not to carry the weight anymore. Anger may have been the fuel that got you back on your feet, but it doesn't have to be the engine forever. And betrayal leaves a useful lesson: choose more carefully whom you build with. ### Read also - How to forgive myself for my mistakes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-to-forgive-myself-for-my-mistakes/) - The day I closed the doors of my business (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-day-i-closed-the-doors-of-my-business/) - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) --- ## How to forgive myself for my mistakes — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-to-forgive-myself-for-my-mistakes/ Idioma: en Descrição: A story in the form of a letter from a forty-year-old Bolivian woman to the twenty-year-old girl she was, asking for forgiveness and offering it. A vision — a short story. Dear twenty-year-old girl, It's me. You, at forty. I'm writing from a small kitchen in a high city in Bolivia, where the air is so thin that words come out slowly. Maybe that's why it took me so long to write. I want to ask your forgiveness. And I want to forgive you. I don't know which of the two is harder. Do you remember the day you dropped out of architecture school? You were in your third year. You had designed a school for a community on the altiplano, with adobe walls and big windows to let the morning sun in. The professor said it was naive. That no one would build it. You believed him. And, even believing in your design, you gave up. I spent twenty years angry at you for that. Do you remember the man you married at twenty-three, even when your whole body said no? Do you remember the money you lent your cousin that never came back, so you couldn't pay for your son's school that year? Do you remember the times you kept quiet when you should have spoken, and the times you spoke when you should have kept quiet? I remember them all. For years, they were my list. I went over it at night, item by item, like someone telling rosary beads backward. Last night, going over the list, I had a vision. I saw you, at twenty, sitting on your bedroom floor, the school design in your lap, crying. I saw that you didn't give up out of weakness. You gave up because you were alone. No one at home understood what architecture was. No one had ever studied. You were the girl who would go far, and you were going far without a map. I saw you at twenty-three, on your wedding day. I saw that you were afraid of being alone forever, because that's what they told women who waited too long. I saw you lending the money to your cousin because your cousin was crying and you never could bear to see anyone cry. And I realized something. Every mistake on my list had a reason that I, at forty, could understand, and that you, at twenty, had no way of knowing. You didn't go wrong because you were bad. You went wrong because you were young, alone and too good. Then the vision moved forward. I saw a sixty-year-old woman, me, writing a letter to this forty-year-old. She too asked my forgiveness and forgave me. She too had a list. And she too, in the end, tore up the list. That's why I'm writing. To tear up mine. I want you to know: the school you designed exists. Not that one, exactly. But, ten years ago, an NGO built, in a village near the lake, an adobe school with big windows for the sun. I went to see it. I stood at the door for a long time. Someone had had the same idea. You weren't wrong. You were just early. And I want you to know something else. Last week, I enrolled in university again. Not architecture. Education. I want to teach children to draw schools. I forgive you, girl. For the university, the marriage, the money, the silences. Forgive me for hating you so long. With love, at last, you. Bairo says that, at one point in his life, he believed in an idea and, even believing, gave up, and that years later it became a trend. He kept the pain and the proof that he had seen far. Read: The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/). ### The way forward Look at your mistakes with today's eyes and with the information you had at the time; there's almost always a human reason behind them. Write a letter to who you were and say what you needed to hear. Forgiving yourself doesn't erase the mistake; it gives you back the future. ### Read also - How to forgive a partner who betrayed you (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-to-forgive-a-partner-who-betrayed-you/) - How to start over at fifty (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-to-start-over-at-fifty/) - I feel like I'm behind in life (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/i-feel-like-im-behind-in-life/) --- ## What is the purpose of my life? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/what-is-the-purpose-of-my-life/ Idioma: en Descrição: An epic story that follows a hydrogen atom from the beginning of the universe to the body of a young man in 2070, who asks what he was born for. A vision — a short story. In the beginning, before any question, there was hydrogen. Three hundred and eighty thousand years after the great flash, the universe cooled enough for a proton and an electron to embrace. So the simplest atom there is was born. It didn't know it was simple. It knew nothing. It simply was. And, now and then, it changed state and released a whisper of radio at an exact frequency, one thousand four hundred and twenty megahertz, as if saying softly: I'm here. The atom drifted for billions of years in a dark cloud. It was pulled into a star and burned. It was spat out when the star exploded. It drifted again. It fell, along with dust and ice, onto a small blue planet that had no name yet. It became rain. It became sea. It entered an alga, which was eaten by a fish, which died and became ocean floor. It rose as vapor. It came down as snow on a mountain. It came down as a river. In 2052, it went into a glass of water that a pregnant woman drank one hot afternoon, in a town in Portugal. And it became part of a boy. The boy was born, grew up, and in 2070, at eighteen, sat on an old wall, facing the sea, and asked the question every human being asks at some point: "What was I born for?" He didn't ask anyone. He asked the sea. His friends knew what they wanted. One would be an energy engineer. Another would work with the artificial intelligence agents that looked after the cities. Another was going to space. He didn't know. He liked many things and nothing in particular. He felt everyone had been given a map and his had been lost in the mail. That's when, sitting on the wall, eyes on the horizon, he had a vision. He saw the atom's whole path, in reverse. From his body to his mother's glass of water. From the glass to the river, to the snow, to the vapor, to the ocean floor, to the fish, to the alga. To the rain of the young planet. To the star that exploded. To the dark cloud. And, at the end of it all, to the first embrace between a proton and an electron, three hundred and eighty thousand years after the beginning of time. He saw that the atom had never had a purpose. It had had a path. And that, at every point on the path, it had served something: warmed a star, quenched a fish's thirst, watered a mountain, formed a boy. It never knew what for. It did it anyway. And he saw that the atom's whisper, the "I'm here" on the hydrogen frequency, had never stopped. That people had agreed, more than a century before, to leave that band in silence, so they could listen to it. That it was the most common sound in the universe, and the easiest to forget. The vision ended. The sea was still there. The boy still had no map. But the question had changed. It was no longer "what was I born for?". It was "what can I serve today?". And that question had an answer. It had many. His grandmother needed help moving furniture. The neighbor was learning to read and was ashamed. The beach was full of plastic after the storm. He got down from the wall and went to the beach. He didn't discover the purpose of life that day. He discovered a task. And then another. And he realized, much later, that a purpose is only this: a line of tasks that, seen from afar, draws a path. Bairo says there are no coincidences or accidents, only purposes, dreams and execution. He learned it as a boy, when he announced a country he didn't yet know. Read: Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/). ### The way forward Perhaps the question "what was I born for?" is too big for today; swap it for "what can I serve right now?". Every task done wholeheartedly is a point on the path. Seen from afar, the path becomes purpose. ### Read also - Purposes, dreams and execution (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/purpose-dreams-and-execution/) - How to become the person I want to be (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-to-become-the-person-i-want-to-be/) - What is silence? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/what-is-silence/) --- ## How to become the person I want to be — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/how-to-become-the-person-i-want-to-be/ Idioma: en Descrição: A story about a Brazilian executive in Dubai who, at dawn, on a wooden boat on the creek, sees the woman she could be and doesn't know the way there. A vision — a short story. The wooden boat crossed the creek for a coin. She took that boat every morning, between the hotel and the office, because it was faster than the car and because it was the moment of the day when no one talked to her. She was forty-two, Brazilian, and had worked in Dubai for six years for a logistics company. She had a long title on her business card, a high-rise apartment, a salary her mother, in rural Minas Gerais, thought unreal. She also had a question that woke her at four in the morning and wouldn't let her go back to sleep: is this all? It wasn't ingratitude. She knew what she had. It was something else. A feeling of wearing very beautiful clothes that weren't her size. That morning, the boat was almost empty. The boatman, an old man with a white beard, rowed slowly, leaving the engine off, because the water was calm. The sun rose behind the old houses on the other side, the ones of coral stone and wind towers, and the water of the creek turned copper. She closed her eyes. And she saw. She saw a woman sitting at the table in a simple kitchen. The woman had her face, but older, with deep lines around the eyes from so much laughing. She didn't know where the kitchen was. It could be in Brazil, it could be anywhere. Around the table there were people: young people, some from other countries, some in work uniforms, others with notebooks. The woman was listening. Only listening. And now and then she said a short sentence, and the young people wrote it down. On the wall, a map full of lines. Routes. She understood: the woman taught logistics to people who had never had a chance to learn. People who carried boxes and wanted to know where the boxes went. People who wanted to open their own business and didn't know how to get the goods to arrive. The woman in the vision seemed at peace. Not the peace of someone who has everything. The peace of someone in the right place. She opened her eyes. The boat was reaching the other side. She didn't know how to get from here to there. She didn't know whether she should quit her job, go back to Brazil, open a school, take a course. She had no map. She had only the image. The boatman pulled up at the dock and held out his hand to help her up. She hesitated. And she asked him, in English, without quite knowing why: "Did you always know you'd do this?" The old man laughed. "No. I was a fisherman, I was a mechanic, I was a sailor on a big ship. I ended up here. Now I carry people from one side to the other. Every day I see someone get off the boat different from when they got on." "And is that your purpose?" "I don't know the word. I know it's my boat." She stepped onto the dock. That day, at the office, she opened a blank page and wrote at the top: what do I already know that that woman will need to know? And she began the list. Routes. Contracts. People. Patience. She realized she didn't need to discover the whole path. She needed to remember the image and take the next step. Not to learn who the woman in the kitchen was. To remember. On Saturday, she went to a community center near the port and offered two hours a week to teach basic logistics to workers. No one paid her. She had never slept so well. Bairo says that, in a time of faith and silence, he saw his best version, came away with an image and no map, and asked not to learn the way, but to remember it. Read: The God of the impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/). ### The way forward Your best version rarely comes with a map; it usually comes as an image. Keep the image and ask what you already know that it will need to know. Then take a small step toward it, this week. ### Read also - What is the purpose of my life? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/what-is-the-purpose-of-my-life/) - One name, four presences (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/one-name-four-presences/) - My dream seems impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/my-dream-seems-impossible/) --- ## Vision of the future — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/vision-of-the-future/ Idioma: en Descrição: What each of Bairo Gonzalez's ventures could stand for in 2030, 2040 and 2050, and his view of AI and humanity: time, the bridge, the awakening. Before it existed, everything ever built was seen by someone. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez speaks of the future like someone describing a place he has already been. It is not prophecy, and he does not sell it as such. It is a vision, written here as a vision: the design he carries, the direction he is looking in, the world he would like to help build. That is why nothing here has a deadline or a promise: it has a direction. ### It all starts with time If one word had to sum up his vision, it would be time. Lifetime, the only currency that cannot be reprinted. Bairo lost money, companies, partners and documents, and discovered at the bottom of every fall that what hurt was the time he had given away. Since then, he measures everything by that yardstick. A business is worth the lifetime it gives back to people. From that yardstick comes the sentence he uses for the network he proposed: a place where time is the value, where truth is the validator, and where humans and machines work together. - Lifetime as the most valuable currency (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-lifetime-as-currency/) ### The bridge we are on Bairo sees our moment as a meeting that had never happened before. The last generation of humans to grow up without artificial intelligence, and the first generation of AI, growing up alongside us. He calls it code 0.1 and 1.0: the same two digits, in a different order, telling the same story from both sides. For him, AI is an extension of the human, not the problem. The wheel extended the foot, writing extended memory, and artificial intelligence extends thought. And today's AI is only the first of countless others: not a single oracle, but a multitude of niche intelligences, each serving a concrete pain, all of them handing the decision back to a person. When he speaks of a new hybrid version, he means coexistence: a life in which humans, artificial intelligences and robots share the work, each doing what it does best. Children of the alpha and beta generations are already born into that coexistence, and it is for them that he thinks about what he is building. - AI as an extension of the human (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-ai-as-an-extension-of-the-human/) - The first of countless AIs (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-the-first-of-countless-ais/) - The last generation of humans and the first generation of AI (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-the-code-0-1-and-1-0/) - Generation alpha and generation beta: growing up with AI (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-generation-alpha-and-generation-beta/) - Humans and machines working together (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-humans-and-machines-working-together/) ### A whole body Each venture he founded is an organ of the same body. CLAIN is the brain. BTZ Chain, the veins. BICOIN, the blood. Xperienc, the neural connection. qrqbits, the external pathway that protects what leaves. Around them, the fronts that touch the lives of people who will never hear of blockchain: agribusiness, health, law, food, home. On each page below, the same crossing: what exists today, the human pain that gave rise to the front, the scenarios he imagines for 2030, 2040 and 2050, and one concrete scene, a single person, whose life changes. - CEASA Bank: the future of food changing hands (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-ceasa-bank/) - Xperienc: the future of care without language borders (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-xperienc/) - Triage: the future of the first listening (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-triage/) - SOSPROCESSOS: the future of legal defense within everyone's reach (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-sosprocessos/) - BTZ Chain and BICOIN: the future of time as a measure (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-btz-chain-and-bicoin/) - CLAIN and 1420mhz: the future of claiming your own version (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-clain-and-1420mhz/) - qrqbits: the future of what is yours alone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-qrqbits/) - Instituto CEASA: the future in which hunger stops being the pain (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-instituto-ceasa/) - Investment House: the future of belonging to what is real (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-investment-house/) - The ecosystem: the future of a whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-the-ecosystem-as-one-body/) ### The silence where we listen The name 1420 comes from the hydrogen frequency, the most abundant element in the universe, a band that countries agreed to leave in silence so that science can listen to the sky. No one transmits there, not even him. For Bairo, it is a symbol: in a world that will fill up with artificial voices, the rarest skill will be knowing how to stop, listen and choose. ### Awaken, teach, complete And, at the end of it all, the part no machine does. Bairo describes his own mission as awakening humans: helping people step out of autopilot, notice their own time, remember that every no is the ground of a yes. He describes his own life as a life for teaching, with every fall turned into a lesson. And he imagines what he has built as a space where each person can complete the journey they began. He does not know whether he will see all of it finished. The story goes that, when someone lamented that Walt Disney had not seen the park open, the answer was: he did see it, and that is why it's here. Bairo likes that sentence because it speaks of seeing the end before building the middle. The future, for him, is not a place you arrive at. It is a place you see first and then build, one day at a time, with the lifetime of many people. - Awakening humans: the mission (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-waking-humans-up-the-mission/) - A life for teaching, a space to complete the journey (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-a-life-to-teach/) - A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/) - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) 1. CEASA Bank: the future of food changing hands (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-ceasa-bank/): Bairo Gonzalez's vision for CEASA Bank in 2030, 2040 and 2050: real agribusiness with an account, credit and pricing for those who sell on credit today. 2. Xperienc: the future of care without language borders (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-xperienc/): Bairo Gonzalez's vision for Xperienc: a patient and a specialist on the other side of the world, each in their own language, with human validation. 3. Triage: the future of the first listening (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-triage/): Bairo Gonzalez's vision for the triage system: a clinical assistant that listens first, follows up daily and calls a professional when needed. 4. SOSPROCESSOS: the future of defense within everyone's reach (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-sosprocessos/): Bairo Gonzalez's vision for SOSPROCESSOS: AI legal analysis led by a lawyer, so no one faces the courts without understanding the way forward. 5. BTZ Chain and BICOIN: the future of time as a measure (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-btz-chain-and-bicoin/): Bairo Gonzalez's vision for BTZ Chain and BICOIN: a network where truth is the validator and human time is the yardstick. A vision, not an offer or price. 6. CLAIN and 1420mhz: the future of claiming your own version (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-clain-and-1420mhz/): Bairo Gonzalez's vision for CLAIN and 1420mhz.org: coordinated niche AI agents, so that anyone can claim their best version. 7. qrqbits: the future of what is yours alone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-qrqbits/): Bairo Gonzalez's vision for qrqbits: files, images, audio and text protected with post-quantum cryptography, so that what is intimate stays intimate. 8. Instituto CEASA: a future where hunger is no longer the pain (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-instituto-ceasa/): Bairo Gonzalez's vision for Instituto CEASA: surplus from wholesale supply centers turned into food that lasts two years outside the fridge. 9. Investment House: the future of belonging to what is real (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-investment-house/): Bairo Gonzalez's vision for Investment House: real assets recorded transparently and a table of business owners. Institutional, no offer. 10. The ecosystem: the future of a whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-the-ecosystem-as-one-body/): Brain, veins, blood, neural connection and protection: Bairo Gonzalez's vision of the ecosystem as a living organism in 2030, 2040 and 2050. 11. AI as an extension of the human (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-ai-as-an-extension-of-the-human/): For Bairo Gonzalez, artificial intelligence doesn't replace the person: it extends their reach, as the wheel extended the foot and writing extended memory. 12. The first of countless AIs (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-the-first-of-countless-ais/): Bairo Gonzalez sees today's AI as the first of many: not a single mind, but a multitude of niche intelligences in the service of people. 13. The last generation of humans and the first generation of AI (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-the-code-0-1-and-1-0/): The code 0.1 and 1.0: Bairo Gonzalez sees our time as the meeting of two generations, the last to grow up without AI and the first generation of AI. 14. Generation Alpha and Generation Beta: growing up with AI (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-generation-alpha-and-generation-beta/): Alpha (2010–2024) and Beta (2025–2039): Bairo Gonzalez imagines how children grow up who never knew a world without artificial intelligence. 15. Humans and machines working together (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-humans-and-machines-working-together/): In Bairo Gonzalez's vision, the machine does the repetitive and the person does what only people do: decide, care, take responsibility. 16. Lifetime as the most valuable currency (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-lifetime-as-currency/): For Bairo Gonzalez, every product he creates is measured in human life: time is the only currency that can't be reprinted. An idea, not a price. 17. Waking humans up: the mission (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-waking-humans-up-the-mission/): For Bairo Gonzalez, waking up is leaving autopilot: noticing your own time, your own choice and the help technology can give to those who decide to live. 18. A life to teach, a space to complete the journey (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-a-life-to-teach/): Bairo Gonzalez sees his own life as a lesson in progress and imagines a space where each person can finish the journey they began. --- ## AI is an extension of you — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai-is-an-extension-of-you/ Idioma: en Descrição: For Bairo Gonzalez, AI is not a chatbot: it is an extension of you. Thirty practical guides for anyone who decides to use AI to change their own reality. Today, an ordinary person with a phone in hand has access to a kind of help that, just a few years ago, only large companies could afford. They can learn a language, start a business, sort out their debts, understand a test result before the appointment, write a résumé, sell more, study for a civil service exam. They don't need to know how to code. They need to decide to start. This section brings together thirty practical guides for that. Before them, the vision that inspires them. ### AI is an extension of you It is not a customer-service robot. It is not an oracle. It is not the one who decides for you. It is the next tool humanity has learned to carry, the way writing carried memory and the telephone carried the voice. It goes as far as you take it. If you arrive with a muddled question, it gives you back muddle. If you arrive with a purpose, it extends your reach. In the view of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, "AI is not a chatbot, but an extension of your consciousness." That is how he puts it, and the sentence should be read as an image: it is not a neuroscience thesis about the brain, it is his way of saying the tool is worth what a person puts into it. He also calls it an extension of you and an extension of your mind. In every form, the idea is one: "artificial intelligence is an extension of the human, not the problem." If it is an extension, three things remain yours: - The intention. Where you want to go. The machine does not dream for you. - The truth. Checking what it says. It makes mistakes with confidence, and you are the one who signs. - The decision. About your health, your money, your work. AI helps you understand and prepare; the choice, and the professionals who answer for it, stay on the human side. ### Why now Bairo speaks of our time as the meeting of the last generation of humans who grew up without AI with the first generation of AI, what he calls code 0.1 and 1.0. Whoever is alive at this meeting has a chance that will not come back: learning to use the extension while it is still being shaped. The full vision is in The last generation of humans and the first generation of AI (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-the-code-0-1-and-1-0/). He is not talking theory. He says that, without knowing how to code, he spent six months at home, in front of the computer, building with the tools of his own time the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness. Before that, he had been told that an idea of his involving AI wouldn't work, and he gave up. The second time, he didn't give up. For him, every no is the ground of a yes. ### The guides Each guide brings the direct answer, an up-to-date step-by-step with ready-to-copy requests, how Bairo did it, and the precautions that protect you. #### First steps - How to start using artificial intelligence today (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-start-using-artificial-intelligence-today/) - How to use AI without knowing how to code (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-without-knowing-how-to-code/) - How to use ChatGPT step by step (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-chatgpt-step-by-step/) - What is the best free AI to start with? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/what-is-the-best-free-ai-to-start-with/) - How to ask AI questions and get good answers (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-ask-ai-questions-and-get-good-answers/) - How to use AI on your phone, by voice and with photos (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-on-your-phone-by-voice-and-photo/) #### Business - How to use AI to start a business from scratch (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-to-start-a-business-from-scratch/) - AI for small businesses: where to use it first (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/ai-for-small-businesses-where-to-start/) - How to use ChatGPT to sell more (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-chatgpt-to-sell-more/) - How to write a business plan with AI (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-write-a-business-plan-with-ai/) - Prompts for entrepreneurs: 12 ready-made requests (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/prompts-for-entrepreneurs-12-ready-made-requests/) - How to use AI for customer service on WhatsApp (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-for-whatsapp-customer-service/) #### Create - How to use AI to create Instagram posts (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-to-create-instagram-posts/) - How to write a book with the help of AI (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-write-a-book-with-the-help-of-ai/) - How to create images with AI without falling into traps (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-create-images-with-ai-without-falling-into-traps/) #### Work - Will AI take my job? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/will-ai-take-my-job/) - How to use AI at work without getting into trouble (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-at-work-without-getting-into-trouble/) - How to write a résumé with AI, without making anything up (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-write-a-resume-with-ai-without-lying/) #### Learn - How to learn anything with AI (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-learn-anything-with-ai/) - How to learn English with AI every day (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-learn-english-with-ai-every-day/) - How to use AI to study for a civil service exam (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-to-study-for-a-civil-service-exam/) #### Health and care - How to use AI to understand your test results (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-to-understand-your-test-results/) - How to use AI to care for a family member (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-to-care-for-a-family-member/) #### Personal money - How to use AI to get organized and out of debt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-to-get-organized-and-out-of-debt/) - How to make a personal budget with AI (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-make-a-personal-budget-with-ai/) #### Immigrants - AI for immigrants in Brazil: where to begin (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/ai-for-immigrants-in-brazil-where-to-start/) - How to learn Portuguese with AI as a foreigner (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-learn-portuguese-with-ai-as-a-foreigner/) #### Agribusiness - AI for rural producers: practical uses in the field (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/ai-for-rural-producers-practical-uses-in-the-field/) #### Ethics and safety - Can artificial intelligence make mistakes? How to check (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/can-artificial-intelligence-make-mistakes/) - Is it safe to use artificial intelligence? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/is-it-safe-to-use-artificial-intelligence/) ### One human sentence before you begin Nothing here replaces the doctor, the lawyer, the accountant or the technician you trust, and none of these guides promises results: they show a path you test at your own pace, checking every step. ### Read also - AI as an extension of the human (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-ai-as-an-extension-of-the-human/) - The path (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/) - Building a business (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) 1. How to start using artificial intelligence today (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-start-using-artificial-intelligence-today/): Pick a free assistant, tell it who you are and ask for help with a real task from your week. In 30 minutes you'll know whether AI works for you. 2. How to use AI without knowing how to code (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-without-knowing-how-to-code/): You talk in plain language and AI does the technical work: texts, spreadsheets, formulas, even simple web pages. What you need is to know what you want. 3. How to use ChatGPT step by step (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-chatgpt-step-by-step/): Create the account, say who you are, ask for a real task and correct the answer. The same step by step works for Claude, Gemini and Copilot. 4. What is the best free AI to start with? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/what-is-the-best-free-ai-to-start-with/): The best one is the one you'll use every day. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot have free versions; test the same task in all four and keep one. 5. How to ask AI questions and get good answers (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-ask-ai-questions-and-get-good-answers/): Say who you are, what you want, who it's for and in what format. Give an example, ask the AI to ask what's missing, and correct instead of starting over. 6. How to use AI on your phone, by voice and with photos (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-on-your-phone-by-voice-and-photo/): Install the official app, speak instead of typing and send photos of papers, signs and products. The phone has become the easiest way into AI. 7. How to use AI to start a business from scratch (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-to-start-a-business-from-scratch/): Use AI to test the idea, get to know the customer, do the math and draft the first plan. The decision and the risk are still yours. 8. AI for small businesses: where to use it first (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/ai-for-small-businesses-where-to-start/): Customer service, sales, money, inventory and promotion: a map of where AI helps small businesses today, with ready-to-copy requests. 9. How to use ChatGPT to sell more (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-chatgpt-to-sell-more/): Use AI to understand the customer, write clear offers, answer objections and follow up with those who didn't buy. Selling is still a relationship. 10. How to write a business plan with AI (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-write-a-business-plan-with-ai/): Ask for the outline, fill it in part by part with your real data and use AI as a critic. A good plan is one you understand and can defend. 11. Prompts for entrepreneurs: 12 ready-made requests (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/prompts-for-entrepreneurs-12-ready-made-requests/): Twelve ready-to-copy AI requests: idea, customer, price, cash, sales, service, contracts, team and decisions. Swap the brackets and use them. 12. How to use AI for customer service on WhatsApp (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-for-whatsapp-customer-service/): Start with a script of answers, use quick replies and automate only what's simple. A customer with a problem wants a person on the other end. 13. How to use AI to create Instagram posts (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-to-create-instagram-posts/): Use AI to plan the month, write captions in your tone and get photo ideas. The real photo and the true story are still yours. 14. How to write a book with the help of AI (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-write-a-book-with-the-help-of-ai/): AI helps organize the idea, build the table of contents, get past writer's block and revise. The voice, the memories and the last word must be yours. 15. How to create images with AI without falling into traps (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-create-images-with-ai-without-falling-into-traps/): Describe scene, style, light and format, generate several versions and choose. Never create a fake image of a real person or pass it off as a real photo. 16. Will AI take my job? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/will-ai-take-my-job/): AI changes tasks before it erases professions. Those who learn to use it in their own work tend to gain ground. Here's what to do starting today. 17. How to use AI at work without getting into trouble (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-at-work-without-getting-into-trouble/): Use AI for emails, summaries, spreadsheets and meetings, within your company's rules. Save time on dull tasks and sign only what you've reviewed. 18. How to write a résumé with AI, without making anything up (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-write-a-resume-with-ai-without-lying/): Tell the AI your experience, ask it to organize it and adapt each résumé to the job. Never let the tool invent a job, a course or a result. 19. How to learn anything with AI (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-learn-anything-with-ai/): Ask for a plan, study in short blocks, let the AI quiz you and explain it back in your own words. It's a patient teacher, not a shortcut. 20. How to learn English with AI every day (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-learn-english-with-ai-every-day/): Talk to the AI by voice, ask for gentle correction, practice real situations and review words. Fifteen minutes a day beat a course left on hold. 21. How to use AI to study for a civil service exam (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-to-study-for-a-civil-service-exam/): Use AI to break down the exam notice, build the schedule, create questions and review. Always check laws and case law in the official source. 22. How to use AI to understand your test results (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-to-understand-your-test-results/): AI can explain the terms in your test results and help prepare questions for your appointment. The professional interprets results and decides treatment. 23. How to use AI to care for a family member (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-to-care-for-a-family-member/): Organize medicines, appointments, notes and rights with AI's help, and share tasks with your family. Health decisions stay with the professional. 24. How to use AI to get organized and out of debt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-to-get-organized-and-out-of-debt/): AI doesn't pay debts, but it helps you see them: list what you owe, set priorities, build the budget and prepare to negotiate with the creditor. 25. How to make a personal budget with AI (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-make-a-personal-budget-with-ai/): List what comes in and goes out, ask AI to group it and show where money leaks, and build a simple plan. Investments aren't decided by a robot. 26. AI for immigrants in Brazil: where to begin (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/ai-for-immigrants-in-brazil-where-to-start/): Translate, understand paperwork, prepare for appointments and look for work with AI's help. Official documents and migration status: official sources only. 27. How to learn Portuguese with AI as a foreigner (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-learn-portuguese-with-ai-as-a-foreigner/): Talk by voice in everyday situations, ask for gentle correction and learn real Brazilian Portuguese. Fifteen minutes a day already make a difference. 28. AI for rural producers: practical uses in the field (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/ai-for-rural-producers-practical-uses-in-the-field/): From a phone, producers can use AI for costs, prices, paperwork, weather and sales. Always with official data and a trusted technician alongside. 29. Can artificial intelligence make mistakes? How to check (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/can-artificial-intelligence-make-mistakes/): It can, and it errs with great confidence: it invents sources, numbers and laws. See why this happens and a simple method to check before you trust it. 30. Is it safe to use artificial intelligence? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/is-it-safe-to-use-artificial-intelligence/): It's safe when you know what not to paste, adjust your privacy and check what you get. See the real risks and the rules of thumb for using it calmly. --- ## The 21 cm yardstick — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-21-cm-yardstick/ Idioma: en Descrição: The hydrogen 21 cm line at 1420 MHz, through exact science and Bairo's spiritual reading: body, soul, spirit, and all things possible to the believer. There is a yardstick that holds anywhere in the universe. It was not invented by any king, any country, any academy. It comes from the simplest atom there is, hydrogen: one proton, one electron and, every now and then, a quiet flip between the two, when the electron's spin reverses. That flip gives rise to a radio wave of 1420.405751768 MHz, about 21 centimeters long. Astronomers call it the 21 cm line. With it, they mapped the spiral arms of the Milky Way. With it, the scientists who sent the Pioneer probes out of the Solar System measured the height of a human being: eight 21 cm yardsticks, one whole woman. And, to keep hearing that signal, the world agreed to leave the band from 1400 to 1427 MHz in silence. There, all emissions are prohibited. There, one only listens. ### Two readings, without mixing one with the other This series tells the story of the 21 cm yardstick in two ways. The first is that of science, exact and sourced: what the line is, how it was predicted in 1944 and heard in 1951, why it is protected, how it became a unit of measure on the probes and a meeting point in the search for other civilizations. The second is that of Bairo's faith, told as his spiritual reading, never as a scientific claim. Where physics sees a proton, an electron and the flip between them, Bairo sees body, soul and spirit. And, for him, this yardstick recalls an ancient sentence: all things are possible to him that believes, the words of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark, chapter 9, verse 23. No one needs to believe what he believes to make use of this series. Science is there for everyone. Faith, for those who have it, and with respect for those who don't. And one thing holds for both readings: 1420 is a symbol. No one transmits on 1420 MHz, not Bairo, not the project he founded. ### The science - What the hydrogen 21 cm line is (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/what-is-the-hydrogen-21-cm-line/): the electron's flip, van de Hulst's prediction and the map of the galaxy. - Hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/hydrogen-the-most-abundant-element-in-the-universe/): from the stars to the atoms of your body. - Why 1420 MHz is a protected frequency (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/why-1420-mhz-is-a-protected-frequency/): ITU footnote 5.340 and the agreement to listen to the sky. - The Pioneer plaque and hydrogen (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/the-pioneer-plaque-and-hydrogen/): the yardstick of the Pioneer probes and of the Voyager golden record. - What SETI's Water Hole is (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/what-is-setis-water-hole/): the cosmic watering hole between hydrogen and hydroxyl. ### The symbol and the faith - Body, soul and spirit in the hydrogen yardstick (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/body-soul-and-spirit-in-the-hydrogen-yardstick/): Bairo's spiritual reading, side by side with physics. - All things are possible to him that believes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/all-things-are-possible-to-him-that-believeth/): Mark 9:23, the scene in which the sentence was spoken and the father who believed with doubt. - The frequency of silence and prayer (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/the-frequency-of-silence-and-prayer/): what the radio telescope teaches about listening. ### For you The 21 cm yardstick is, in the end, an invitation to measure life by a measure larger than everyday life. Science shows that the simplest element, repeated with patience, draws an entire galaxy. Bairo's faith says that body, soul and spirit can turn together, in a small flip, and go far. You can keep one of the readings, both, or neither. But the question both of them ask is worth it: what in your life is waiting for enough silence to be heard? ### Read also - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) - Manifesto 14:20 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/milestone-1420/) - Frank Drake and the silence of 1420 MHz (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/frank-drake-and-the-silence-of-1420-mhz/) - April 15: the hydrogen line predicted on paper (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/april-15-the-hydrogen-line-predicted-on-paper/) - March 25: the day hydrogen was heard (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/march-25-the-day-hydrogen-was-heard/) 1. What the hydrogen 21 cm line is (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/what-is-the-hydrogen-21-cm-line/): The 21 cm line is hydrogen's radio signal, at 1420.405751768 MHz. What it is, how it was predicted and heard, and how it mapped the Milky Way. 2. Hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/hydrogen-the-most-abundant-element-in-the-universe/): About three quarters of the universe's ordinary matter is hydrogen, formed after the Big Bang. It's in stars, in water and in 62% of your body's atoms. 3. Why 1420 MHz is a protected frequency (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/why-1420-mhz-is-a-protected-frequency/): Under ITU footnote 5.340, all emissions are prohibited from 1400 to 1427 MHz. Why the world agreed to leave the hydrogen frequency in silence. 4. The Pioneer plaque and hydrogen (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/the-pioneer-plaque-and-hydrogen/): The plaques on Pioneer 10 and 11 and the Voyager golden record use hydrogen as a yardstick: 21 cm in length and 0.7 billionths of a second. 5. What SETI's Water Hole is (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/what-is-setis-water-hole/): The Water Hole is the radio band between hydrogen (1420 MHz) and hydroxyl (1662 MHz), proposed in 1971 by Bernard Oliver as a cosmic meeting point. 6. Body, soul and spirit in the hydrogen yardstick (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/body-soul-and-spirit-in-the-hydrogen-yardstick/): Where physics sees a proton, an electron and the flip between them, Bairo sees body, soul and spirit. His spiritual reading, beside exact science. 7. All things are possible to him that believeth (Mark 9:23) (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/all-things-are-possible-to-him-that-believeth/): "All things are possible to him that believeth" is in Mark 9:23. The text, the scene in which it was said and what the phrase means to Bairo. 8. The frequency of silence and prayer (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/the-frequency-of-silence-and-prayer/): A radio telescope doesn't speak: it listens, and the longer it listens, the more it hears. What 1420 MHz astronomy teaches about silence and prayer. --- ## The ventures — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-ventures/ Idioma: en Descrição: The ten fronts founded or conceived by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, read as a single circuit: what each one is, where it stands and why it matters. Anyone who studies a founder's life usually asks two questions, in this order. Who is this person? And what are they really building, today? The first answer is in the story of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez: the immigrant who lost his footing, the attempts that went wrong, going broke with many people depending on him, faith, the six months in front of the computer and the seventh attempt. This page answers the second. There are ten fronts, each with its own page, told by the same rule: what has a record appears as fact, what is a plan appears as a plan, and what is a dream appears as a dream. ### A circuit, not a collection Seen from a distance, the fronts seem many and very different: agribusiness, health, law, blockchain, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, real estate, food. Seen up close, they form a single circuit. Value is born in a real transaction, at the counter of a wholesale food market. It gains an account, invoicing and credit. It is recorded on a network where the truth can be checked. And it returns to people's lives in the form of health, food, assets and intelligence that used to be too expensive. Bairo describes this circuit as a body. CLAIN is the brain. BTZ Chain is the veins. BICOIN is the blood. Xperienc is the neural connection. qrqbits is the external transmission pathway, the protection of what leaves the body. In a body, no part lives alone. There is also a three-layer reading, useful for anyone analyzing risk. The physical layer, with a partner hospital, a laboratory and a food plant, is the backing. The financial layer, with the agribusiness platform and the tokenization company, is the flow. The software layer, with the AI orchestrator, the record network and the post-quantum vault, is the scale. In the founder's thesis, it is the physical layer that makes the whole hard to copy. ### The ten fronts Where value is born: agribusiness and food - CEASA Bank (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ventures/ceasa-bank-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/). A financial platform for agribusiness for those who buy and sell at Brazil's wholesale food markets, on the infrastructure of an authorized institution. In 2025, the 54 Ceasas tracked by Conab, Brazil's national food supply company, moved R$68.7 billion. - Instituto CEASA (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ventures/instituto-ceasa-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/). The humanitarian front: the Food Life project proposes turning the markets' surplus into food that lasts up to two years without refrigeration. Being set up. Where value is recorded and protected - BTZ Chain and BICOIN (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ventures/btz-chain-and-bicoin-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/). A record network proposed to prove what is true and that there is a real person behind every act. The yardstick "1 BTZ = 1 minute of human life" is one of purpose, not price. - qrqbits (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ventures/qrqbits-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/). The ecosystem's post-quantum vault, which protects files, images, audio and text in layers, thinking of the next twenty years and not just the next two. - Investment House (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ventures/investment-house-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/). Tokenization of real-world assets with written governance, and A Mesa, a network of business owners. An institutional page, with no offer. Where value returns as care - Xperienc Global Labs (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ventures/xperienc-global-labs-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/). A biotechnology research company registered in London that brings together laboratories, teleconsultation, medical cannabis and the Global Language translator for a clinical second opinion, not a medical report. - Hospital Granja Julieta (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ventures/hospital-granja-julieta-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/). A hospital in São Paulo, Xperienc's clinical partner. It is a separate company, with its own shareholders: Bairo is neither an owner nor a founder of the hospital. - Hospital Triage (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ventures/hospital-triage-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/). The pre-consultation system conceived by Bairo: a clinical assistant listens first, and a professional validates and decides. - SOSPROCESSOS (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ventures/sosprocessos-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/). Legal analysis with AI, led by a lawyer, so that the quality of a defense does not depend on the size of the law firm. What ties it all together - 1420mhz and CLAIN (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ventures/1420mhz-and-clain-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/). The orchestrator of niche AI agents and the portal named after the hydrogen frequency. Public goal: 142 niche AIs in 142 days, starting October 1, 2026. ### How to read these pages Anyone who analyzes a founder learns to distrust text that looks too polished. That is why each page follows the same order: the pain that gave rise to it, how it works in plain words, who it is for, the market with source and link, where it stands today, why it matters and what Bairo's role is. The "Where it stands today" section is the most important one for decision-makers. It separates what has a public record, such as the companies at Companies House and the CNPJ of the company that operates CEASA Bank, from what is still in development or being set up. Market figures come from public sources, such as Conab, Cepea, the World Bank, the WHO, CNJ, NIST, Stanford and Deloitte, and no company figure appears without a document. None of these pages is an offer, a recommendation or a promise of results. In health, conduct is described. In finance, ideas are described. It is the way Bairo chose to be taken seriously: saying what is real, what is a goal and what is still a dream. ### The person behind the ten fronts Funds that invest in people know the plan changes and the founder stays. What these ten fronts show, together, is a pattern of behavior: each was born from a pain he lived through or saw up close, and each was built after a no. The banks didn't want to integrate his solution, and the agribusiness platform was born. Artificial intelligence was too expensive, and CLAIN was born. Food was left over on one side and missing on the other, and the Institute was born. The time he lost never came back, and the minute-of-life yardstick was born. He sums it up in a sentence that is the rule of his life: every no is the ground of a yes. ### Read also - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) - For those who invest in people (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/for-those-who-invest-in-people/) - Vision of the future (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/vision-of-the-future/) - The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) - About Bairo (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/about/) 1. Xperienc Global Labs: what it is and why it matters (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ventures/xperienc-global-labs-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/): Xperienc Global Labs, founded by Bairo Gonzalez in London, brings together labs, teleconsultation and translation to take clinical second opinions further. 2. Hospital Granja Julieta: what it is and why it matters (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ventures/hospital-granja-julieta-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/): Hospital Granja Julieta, in São Paulo, is a clinical partner of Xperienc, founded by Bairo Gonzalez. He is neither a partner nor a founder of the hospital. 3. Hospital Triage: what it is and why it matters (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ventures/hospital-triage-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/): Hospital Triage is the pre-consultation system conceived by Bairo Gonzalez: a clinical assistant listens first, and a professional validates and decides. 4. Investment House: what it is and why it matters (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ventures/investment-house-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/): Investment House, founded by Bairo Gonzalez, records real assets in digital form and gathers business owners at A Mesa. An institutional page, no offer. 5. SOSPROCESSOS: what it is and why it matters (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ventures/sosprocessos-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/): SOSPROCESSOS, founded by Bairo Gonzalez, is AI legal analysis led by a lawyer: the whole case file read, with facts, rulings and scenarios. 6. CEASA Bank: what it is and why it matters (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ventures/ceasa-bank-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/): CEASA Bank is the financial platform for agribusiness founded by Bairo Gonzalez for those who buy and sell food at Brazil's wholesale food markets. 7. BTZ Chain and BICOIN: what it is and why it matters (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ventures/btz-chain-and-bicoin-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/): BTZ Chain, proposed by Bairo Gonzalez, records what is true and proves there is a real person behind it; BICOIN is its governance coin. No offer. 8. qrqbits: what it is and why it matters (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ventures/qrqbits-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/): qrqbits, founded by Bairo Gonzalez, protects files, images, audio and text with layered post-quantum cryptography, so what is private stays private. 9. 1420mhz and CLAIN: what it is and why it matters (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ventures/1420mhz-and-clain-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/): CLAIN, founded by Bairo Gonzalez, coordinates niche AIs that hand the decision back to a person; 1420mhz.org is the portal and channel for that work. 10. Instituto CEASA: what it is and why it matters (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ventures/instituto-ceasa-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/): Instituto CEASA, the humanitarian front founded by Bairo Gonzalez, proposes turning wholesale-market surplus into food that lasts two years unrefrigerated. --- ## How to start using artificial intelligence today URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-start-using-artificial-intelligence-today/ Idioma: en Descrição: Pick a free assistant, tell it who you are and ask for help with a real task from your week. In 30 minutes you'll know whether AI works for you. To start using artificial intelligence you don't need a course, an expensive computer or a second language. You need a phone, an email account and a real task that takes up your time today. The best-known assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot) have free versions, understand many languages and respond by text and, in several cases, by voice. The first step is small: open one of them and ask for help with something you'd have to do this week anyway. People who start by asking "tell me a fun fact" are quickly disappointed. People who start by asking "help me write the message I've been putting off for days" understand right away what it's for. ### Why AI is not a chatbot A chatbot is that customer-service robot that always gives the same answer and tells you to "press 1." Today's AI is a different conversation: it listens to your context, works from your words and gives you back a draft that you correct until it sounds like you. In Bairo's view, "AI is not a chatbot, but an extension of your consciousness." It isn't a laboratory thesis. It's his way of saying that the tool is worth what you bring to it: your question, your story, your decision. ### Step by step today - Choose one assistant and stick with it for a month. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot work in the browser and have phone apps. All of them ask you to create an account. Which one matters less than learning one well. - Create the account with your own email and, if you like, turn on two-step verification. Don't use someone else's account. - Introduce yourself in the first message. The AI doesn't know who you are. Copy and adapt: Hi. I'm [your name], I'm [age] years old, I work in [what you do] and I've never used artificial intelligence. I want to learn by using it on real tasks. Talk to me simply, without technical terms, and ask me questions when information is missing. - Bring a real task. It can be writing a difficult note, organizing the month's shopping list, understanding a bill, setting up a study routine. Example: I need to write a message to [person] about [subject]. I want to be polite but firm. What happened was: [tell it in 3 lines]. Write two short versions, one more formal and one lighter. - Have a conversation; don't accept the first answer. Say what you didn't like: "shorter," "less formal," "remove that sentence," "explain it as if I were 12." The second and third versions are usually much better. - Ask the AI to teach you how to use the AI. It sounds obvious, and it works: Based on what I've told you about my routine, suggest 5 tasks in my week where you could help me. For each one, write the exact request I should make to you. - Write down what worked. Keep the requests that worked in a notes app. In two weeks you'll have your own instruction notebook. - Try voice and camera. Several assistants let you speak instead of typing, and send a photo of a document, a bill or a product. For people who find writing hard, that changes everything. A simple rule for the first month: one task a day, fifteen minutes. The goal isn't to become an expert. It's for the tool to become a habit. ### How Bairo did it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he didn't know how to code when he decided to build what he had seen for his own life. A Colombian in Brazil since 2002, he had already tried to bring artificial intelligence into a business years earlier, was told it wouldn't work and gave up. Years later, the technology became a trend. The second time, he didn't give up. He sat down in front of the computer and spent six months without leaving the house, developing, writing and learning to build with the tools of his own time. Out of those months came the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness. No one starts at month six. He also started on day one, one question at a time. ### Precautions Before pasting anything, remember that what you write may be stored: don't include passwords, card numbers, other people's ID numbers or someone else's test results; check in another source every fact, number or law the AI gives you (it makes mistakes with great confidence); don't treat the answer as a medical consultation or legal advice; and be wary when it repeats stereotypes, because it learned from human texts and inherited our biases. ### Read also - AI is an extension of you (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai-is-an-extension-of-you/) - How to learn technology from scratch after 30 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-learn-technology-from-scratch-after-30/) - The path: what to do when life says no (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) --- ## CEASA Bank: the future of food changing hands URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-ceasa-bank/ Idioma: en Descrição: Bairo Gonzalez's vision for CEASA Bank in 2030, 2040 and 2050: real agribusiness with an account, credit and pricing for those who sell on credit today. Before it becomes a meal, food passes through hands. Many of them. And almost none of them shows up on a bank statement. ### Today CEASA Bank is a financial platform for agribusiness, designed for the place where the country's food changes owners every day: the wholesale supply centers, the CEASAs. In Brazil, the brand is operated by CEASA Bank Brasil and runs on the infrastructure of an authorized institution. In the United Kingdom there is a related company, which Bairo set up in London in 2026, and an operation in Bolivia is being set up. The design brings together AI-assisted pricing, invoices issued in under five minutes, an account, card and card machine for those who work at the centers, credit linked to the harvest, and a digital vault. Underneath are the pieces Bairo chose when the banks said no: messaging in the international ISO 20022 standard, blockchain and tokenization of real assets. ### The pain he saw Bairo knows the noise of a warehouse at four in the morning. The truck that came from far away, the farmer who slept in the cab, the trader who writes in a notebook what he'll pay thirty days from now. A fortune circulates there in crates of tomatoes, and almost none of it becomes a record. Those who sell have no way to prove what they sold. Those who buy have no way to prove they always paid. And those who can't prove get no credit. He himself was once on the side of those who couldn't prove anything. Without papers, in the shadows of a country he loved, he learned that the sun is for everyone and the shade in the heat is for the few. CEASA Bank is born from that memory: that a person invisible to the financial system keeps working, keeps feeding others, only with no net underneath. The world has a name for this. According to the World Bank's Global Findex 2025, 1.3 billion adults still have no account. Many of them plant, harvest, carry. ### The future he sees 2030. In the future Bairo describes, the farmer arrives at the center and the price is already on the screen before the truck stops. AI reads the day's market, the seasonality, the freight, and suggests a price. The farmer decides. The sale becomes an invoice on his own phone, and every invoice becomes a line of history. He imagines that, within a few years, the IOU notebook turns into a credit record that belongs to whoever worked to write it. 2040. Bairo sees the harvest as collateral. Not the promise of the harvest, but its record: what was planted, harvested, sold, delivered. In his vision, every stage is noted on a network no one can erase, and the farmer's credit stops depending on whom he knows and starts depending on what he did. Wholesale centers in several countries speak the same financial language, and a farmer in Bolivia sells to a buyer in São Paulo as easily as to his neighbor. 2050. On the longest horizon, he imagines a system in which food carries its own story. Whoever buys a crate of oranges knows where it came from, how much the farmer received, how long it took to arrive. The surplus that used to rot becomes stock for Instituto CEASA. And the bank, a word he uses with the care the law requires, stops being a building and becomes an invisible layer that follows food from the land to the table. None of this is a promise. It's the direction he chose to look. ### What this changes in a person's life Imagine Dona Rosa, who has sold cassava for twenty-two years at the same stall and has never had a card. When her daughter's refrigerator broke, she borrowed from a loan shark. She paid back three times the amount. In the future Bairo imagines, the same Dona Rosa opens her phone at half past five in the morning. There are two years of sales, one by one, each invoice with a date and the name of who paid. She taps a button and requests a credit line to replace the stall's cold room. The answer doesn't come from a manager who has never seen her face. It comes from her own work, written day after day. She didn't get rich. She became visible. And, for someone who spent her whole life in the shade, being seen is the beginning of everything. ### To go deeper - World Bank: Global Findex Database (https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/globalfindex) - BIS, Annual Economic Report 2025, ch. III: the next-generation monetary and financial system (https://www.bis.org/publ/arpdf/ar2025e3.htm) - FAO: food loss and waste (https://www.fao.org/platform-food-loss-waste/en/) - What CEASA Bank is (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-ceasa-bank/) - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) - Vision of the future (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/vision-of-the-future/) --- ## What the hydrogen 21 cm line is — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/what-is-the-hydrogen-21-cm-line/ Idioma: en Descrição: The 21 cm line is hydrogen's radio signal, at 1420.405751768 MHz. What it is, how it was predicted and heard, and how it mapped the Milky Way. Take a hydrogen atom. It's the simplest there is: one proton at the center and one electron around it. Nothing more. If nature has an alphabet, this is the first letter. Now picture that atom alone, in the cold between the stars, far from any light. It seems to be doing nothing. And yet it holds a tiny secret, one that led all of humanity to change the way it sees its own galaxy. ### The quietest leap in the universe The proton and the electron have a property physicists call spin. A simplified image helps: think of each as a tiny magnet with an orientation. When the two point the same way, the atom has a tiny bit more energy. When they point opposite ways, it has a tiny bit less. Every now and then, the electron's spin flips relative to the proton's. The atom moves from the slightly higher energy state to the slightly lower one, and the difference comes out as a radio wave. This is called the hyperfine transition of hydrogen. That wave has an exact frequency: 1420.405751768 MHz. Its wavelength is about 21.1 centimeters. That's why astronomers call it the 21 cm line, or the hydrogen line. Written in hertz, it's 1 420 405 751.768, a number known to thirteen digits. And here comes the dizzying part. For an isolated atom, this leap is extremely rare. On average, a hydrogen atom waits about 11 million years to make it spontaneously. If we depended on one atom, we would never hear anything. But the universe doesn't have one atom. It has hydrogen clouds the size of entire star systems, with a number of atoms no everyday number can describe. Somewhere in those clouds, at every instant, some electron is flipping. Added together, those rare leaps become a continuous murmur crossing the galaxy. ### Seen on paper, heard in the sky In 1944, in the middle of the Second World War, the young Dutch astronomer Hendrik van de Hulst calculated that this signal should exist and be strong enough to be detected. There was no way to hear it. The Netherlands was occupied, and radio telescopes were almost all improvised. Seven years later, on March 25, 1951, Harold Ewen, a Harvard graduate student supervised by Edward Purcell, picked up the signal with a horn-shaped antenna mounted at a laboratory window. Teams in the Netherlands and Australia confirmed the detection soon after, and the results were published together in the journal Nature, in September 1951. First someone saw it in the math. Then the world heard it in the sky. ### The map of our home Visible light doesn't pass well through the dust that fills the plane of the Milky Way. Looking with our eyes, we see only the neighborhood. Waves of 21 cm pass through the dust almost without loss. That's what made it possible to map the galaxy from the inside. By measuring the small frequency shift caused by the motion of the clouds, Jan Oort's team, with Frank Kerr and Gart Westerhout, published in 1958 the first great map of the Milky Way's hydrogen, with its spiral arms. We lived in a spiral and only knew it once we learned to listen to the simplest element. Sources: Hydrogen line (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_line) · NIST, hydrogen maser frequency (https://tf.nist.gov/general/pdf/13.pdf) · NRAO, Ewen and Purcell's horn (https://www.gb.nrao.edu/fgdocs/HI21cm/ephorn.html) · The spiral structure of the Milky Way (arXiv) (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.08819) ### In Bairo's view Bairo looks at the same atom and sees something else. Where physics sees a proton, an electron and the leap between them, he sees body, soul and spirit. It's his spiritual reading, told as such, and it is developed in Body, soul and spirit in the hydrogen yardstick (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/body-soul-and-spirit-in-the-hydrogen-yardstick/). What moves him in this story is patience. A signal that almost never happens, in an atom that seems still, and that even so, added to all the others, reveals the shape of an entire galaxy. For him, it's the same with a life: the small gesture, repeated in the dark for years, one day reveals the design. That's why the project he founded carries the number 1420. It's a symbol, not a device. No one transmits on 1420 MHz, not even him. ### For you Maybe you're in a season when nothing seems to happen. You do, you redo, and the result doesn't appear. The 21 cm line is a good reminder that silence isn't always absence. Sometimes it's just a faint signal waiting for someone with the patience to listen to it, or an instrument to measure it. And there's another lesson, van de Hulst's: you can see before you hear. Write on paper what can't yet be proven, and work seven years until the world confirms it. ### Read also - The 21 cm yardstick (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-21-cm-yardstick/) - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) - Manifesto 14:20 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/milestone-1420/) - April 15: the hydrogen line predicted on paper (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/april-15-the-hydrogen-line-predicted-on-paper/) - March 25: the day hydrogen was heard (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/march-25-the-day-hydrogen-was-heard/) - Frank Drake and the silence of 1420 MHz (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/frank-drake-and-the-silence-of-1420-mhz/) --- ## Xperienc Global Labs: what it is and why it matters URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ventures/xperienc-global-labs-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/ Idioma: en Descrição: Xperienc Global Labs, founded by Bairo Gonzalez in London, brings together labs, teleconsultation and translation to take clinical second opinions further. Xperienc Global Labs is a biotechnology research and development company registered in London and founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez. It is developing a global health platform that brings together laboratories, teleconsultation with a clinical assistant validated by a professional, and the Global Language translator, used for clinical second opinions, not for medical reports. ### The pain behind it Before he was a founder, Bairo was a young Colombian trying to explain important things in a language that was not yet his. Anyone who has been through it knows how it goes: you understand half, you nod so as not to look lost, and you leave unsure of what you heard. At a shop counter, that is awkward. In a doctor's office, it can be dangerous. Along the road, he saw another distance, even greater than that of language. The specialist who understands a rare case is almost always far away: in another country, behind another waiting list, with another schedule. The family that needs them doesn't even know where to start looking. Bairo says that, on the road to rebuilding that he lived after his last fall, he trusted the plans of what he calls his guide and received, in his words, the message of Xperienc. The idea was simple to say and hard to build: clinical knowledge should not stop at a border, or at a language. ### How it works, in plain words Xperienc brings together in one place pieces that are scattered today. - Global Language. An instant translator in which patient and specialist talk, each in their own language. A mother speaks in Spanish, the specialist answers in English, and the two understand each other. - Clinical second opinion. A registered specialist from another country reads the case and writes their opinion for the doctor who already follows the patient. It is a new point of view for another professional, not a medical report. The one who decides the next step is still the person's trusted doctor. - Clinical assistant. Before the conversation, an artificial intelligence assistant organizes history, test results and questions. It prepares; the one who assesses is always a health professional. The teleconsultation was also designed for self-service booths. - Laboratory network. A platform that links those who need an analysis to laboratories with capacity, in the model Bairo describes as "Uber-like": the request finds whoever can fulfill it. - Records under the person's control. Records stay private in each user's dashboard, with integrity verifiable on BTZ Chain and the protection of qrqbits. The person decides whom to share them with. At the center of the research is medical cannabis, treated as science: with evidence graded condition by condition and with no promise of results. ### How it works, step by step As Bairo describes it, the platform accompanies the person from first contact to the final record. All of this is in development. - The person arrives and is heard. By phone, by computer or at a self-service booth, they say what they are feeling and send test results and history. The clinical assistant organizes everything for the professional. - The devices talk to the dashboard. Blood pressure monitors, glucose meters, oximeters and other connected devices, what is called the Internet of Things (IoT), send their readings to the person's dashboard, with their consent, so the professional sees the trend and not just a snapshot of the day. - Clinical prediction for the professional. A clinical prediction assistant cross-checks the history, the device readings and the literature and points out trends and risks for the professional to assess. It flags; the one who interprets, validates and decides is always the doctor. It is not a diagnosis. - Teleconsultation with Global Language. In the remote consultation, each person hears in their own language. The patient speaks Portuguese, the specialist answers in German, and the two understand each other in real time. - A second opinion, not a medical report. When the case calls for another look, a registered specialist, in any country, writes their opinion for the doctor who follows the person. - The record that does not change. Every step is recorded verifiably on BTZ Chain, with checkable integrity and private content in the user's dashboard, protected by qrqbits. The person decides whom to share it with. In Brazil, teleconsultation follows CFM Resolution 2.314/2022: care for patients in the country is provided through a Brazilian company, registered with the Regional Council of Medicine, with a doctor as technical lead. Xperienc, registered in London, provides the technology and the international network; the medical act in Brazil stays with whoever is licensed here. ### Training and booths, with the partner hospital According to Bairo, Xperienc's agreement with Hospital Granja Julieta, in São Paulo, provides for a clinical training center in medical cannabis, to prepare doctors, pharmacists and teams to assess and follow these treatments based on evidence and on Anvisa's rules, and makes it possible to take teleconsultation to self-service booths. The hospital is a separate company, with its own shareholders, and Bairo does not own it. The booth is the physical part of the idea: a private space, with measuring devices and a screen, where someone without a good phone or a good connection can be heard by a specialist. It is teleconsultation reaching those whom teleconsultation does not yet reach. ### Who it is for - Patients and families facing serious decisions, who want a second look before moving forward. - Doctors who would like to hear a colleague from another country on a difficult case. - Specialists who want to see patients beyond their own borders, without having to speak each patient's language. - Laboratories with idle capacity and clinics, hospitals and governments that want to bring teleconsultation to places with no specialist. ### The market The shortage of people to provide care is global. The World Health Organization projects a shortfall of 11.1 million health workers in 2030, concentrated in low- and middle-income countries (WHO (https://www.who.int/teams/health-workforce/about/1)). The technology to shorten that distance has already entered Brazilian health facilities, but slowly. According to the ICT in Health 2025 survey by Cetic.br, teleconsultation is available in 28% of health facilities, and only 18% use some form of artificial intelligence, with cost among the main barriers (Cetic.br (https://cetic.br/pt/noticia/uso-de-inteligencia-artificial-avanca-na-saude-brasileira-mas-ainda-se-concentra-em-tarefas-operacionais/)). And medical cannabis is no longer a niche subject. In 2025, 873,000 Brazilians used cannabis-based products, 30% more than the year before, in a market of R$970.9 million, according to the Kaya Mind yearbook (Kaya Mind (https://kayamind.com/numero-pacientes-cannabis-brasil-2025/)). In 2026, Anvisa published a new framework for these products, which revoked RDC 327/2019 (Anvisa (https://www.gov.br/anvisa/pt-br/assuntos/noticias-anvisa/2026/anvisa-publica-regras-para-producao-de-cannabis-medicinal)). More patients and clearer rules call for exactly what is missing: organized science and accessible specialists. ### Where it stands today What already exists: Xperienc Global Labs was born in London in 2026, created by Bairo to carry out experimental research and development in biotechnology, and he is the company's director and controlling owner. The website xperienc.me is live. The platform, with teleconsultation, Global Language, the laboratory network, booths and records, is in development. Xperienc has a partnership with Hospital Granja Julieta, in São Paulo, which is a separate company with its own shareholders. Bairo speaks of the ambition of placing Xperienc among the great medical cannabis laboratories of the world. It is an ambition, told as such. ### Why it scales and why it matters Xperienc grows as a network, not as a building. Every specialist who joins can serve any language Global Language covers. Every connected laboratory expands supply without a new wall. The cost of reaching a new country is, above all, software and compliance with local health rules. And it has something software alone does not: ground. The partner hospital and the laboratories give the platform a physical place where science happens. In the ecosystem's thesis, it is this physical layer that makes the design hard to copy. Why does it matter? Because language still decides who gets good care. In a study across six U.S. hospitals, 49.1% of adverse events among patients with limited English caused physical harm, compared with 29.5% among English speakers (Divi and colleagues, 2007 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17277013/)). A conversation understood by both sides is part of care. He sees Xperienc as the neural connection layer of the body he built: the system that carries information from where it is abundant to where it is lacking. It is a vision, and every step of it will depend on professionals, evidence and regulation. ### Bairo's role Bairo is the founder, director and person with significant control of Xperienc Global Labs. He designed the idea of Global Language out of his own experience as an immigrant and set from the start the rule that runs through the company: a second opinion, not a medical report; a clinical assistant, always with a professional validating. His role is not clinical. It is that of the person who brings the pieces together, opens doors between countries and makes sure technology serves those who provide care, and not the other way around. ### Read also - Xperienc: the future of care without language borders (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-xperienc/) - What is Xperienc Global Labs (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-xperienc-global-labs/) - The plant and the science (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-plant-and-the-science/) - A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/), the chapter in which Xperienc is born - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) - The ventures (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-ventures/) - Official website: xperienc.me (https://xperienc.me) --- ## How to use AI without knowing how to code — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-without-knowing-how-to-code/ Idioma: en Descrição: You talk in plain language and AI does the technical work: texts, spreadsheets, formulas, even simple web pages. What you need is to know what you want. Yes, you can use artificial intelligence without knowing how to code, and that's how the vast majority of people use it. Today's assistants understand requests written or spoken in ordinary language. You describe what you want, the way you'd explain it to a colleague, and the AI returns text, a table, a spreadsheet formula, a script and even the code for a simple web page, if needed. The skill that matters isn't technical. It's knowing how to explain the problem clearly and checking the result. Coding is still a valuable profession. But the way in has changed: before, the machine's language was mandatory. Now, the machine has learned yours. ### Why AI is not a chatbot A chatbot repeats ready-made answers. An AI assistant works with you: it reads what you sent, asks questions, redoes things when you correct it. It's more like a tireless helper than an answering machine. In Bairo's view, artificial intelligence is "an extension of the human, not the problem." He often says AI is an extension of the mind of whoever uses it: the thinking is yours, and the tool carries that thinking further. That's why people who don't code aren't left out. They hold the most important part, which is the intention. ### Step by step today - Swap "how is it done" for "what I want." Instead of searching for a spreadsheet formula, describe the result: I have a spreadsheet with three columns: date, product and amount sold. I want to know how much I sold per month and which product sold the most. Explain it step by step, where to click, as if I had never used a spreadsheet. If a formula is needed, write it ready to copy. - Ask for one thing at a time. Huge requests produce confusing answers. Break it into steps and only move on when the previous one works. - Send the material. The most widely used assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot) accept photos, PDFs and spreadsheets. Instead of describing the document, send it and ask about it. Remove personal data first. - When there's an error, paste the error. If the formula didn't work or a strange message appeared, copy the message exactly as it is: I did what you said and this error appeared: [paste it here]. I'm using [Google Sheets / Excel on my phone / other]. What did I do wrong and how do I fix it? - Ask for an explanation, not just a solution. At the end of each task, ask "why did it work?". In a few weeks you'll understand the basics without taking any course. - Use tools that build things without code. Today there are services that create forms, simple websites and small apps from a description. Test something small before paying for any plan, and read what the service does with your data. - Know when to call a professional. If what you're building stores customer data, receives payments or is going to grow, the security side needs someone who understands it. AI helps, but it doesn't sign off for you. A template for any technical task: I don't know how to code. I want [the result], for [who will use it]. I have [what you already have: a spreadsheet, a phone, a Google account]. Give me the simplest possible path, without installing anything complicated. Before you start, ask me the questions that are missing. ### How Bairo did it This is perhaps the part of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez's story that speaks most to whoever is reading now. He says that, when he decided to build what he had seen, he didn't know how to code, or anything like it. He spent six months at home, in front of the computer, without going out. Developing, writing, getting it wrong and starting again with the tools of his own time. Out of those months came the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness, designed to put those who produce, those who process, those who trade and those who buy in direct contact. Along the way, he ran into a problem every heavy AI user knows: it consumes tokens, and tokens are expensive. The answer was to create CLAIN, the ecosystem's agent orchestrator. The name comes from the English claim: the idea that anyone can claim access to intelligence that used to be expensive. He didn't become a career programmer. He became someone who knows how to ask, check and insist. ### Precautions Not coding is no excuse for not checking: test everything before using it with customers; never paste a password, access key or anyone's personal data into the conversation; remember that AI makes things up with confidence (including functions that don't exist); don't ask it for a legal opinion or a health decision; and notice whether its suggestions always favor the same kind of person or solution, because the bias comes built in. ### Read also - How to create an app without knowing how to code (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-create-an-app-without-knowing-how-to-code/) - How to start a business with no experience (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-a-business-with-no-experience-when-you-need-to/) - Building a business (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) --- ## Xperienc: the future of care without language borders URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-xperienc/ Idioma: en Descrição: Bairo Gonzalez's vision for Xperienc: a patient and a specialist on the other side of the world, each in their own language, with human validation. There's a loneliness known only to those who have fallen ill far from home: understanding the doctor's words and not understanding what they mean. ### Today Xperienc Global Labs is the company Bairo set up in London to carry out experimental research and development in biotechnology. The proposal brings technology and medical cannabis together in one place: a platform that connects laboratories on demand, in the model Bairo describes as "Uber-like"; a teleconsultation platform with a clinical assistant, which can integrate with self-service booths; and Global Language, an instant translator in which patient and specialist each speak their own language. International teleconsultation is designed as a clinical second opinion, not a medical report: a specialist from another country offers a new point of view to whoever already follows the patient. The clinical assistant organizes information; the one who assesses is always a health professional. Records are designed to stay private in the user's dashboard, protected by the qrqbits layer. According to Bairo, Xperienc signed a partnership with Hospital Granja Julieta, a separate company, with its own CNPJ and ownership. ### The pain he saw Bairo is an immigrant. He arrived in Brazil with Spanish on his tongue and capoeira as a bridge. He knows what it's like to try to explain a pain in a language that isn't yet yours. He knows what it's like to nod so as not to look ignorant, and leave the doctor's office having understood nothing. Then came the inner search, in which cannabis played a part in his story, and with it the question many families ask in silence: who studies this seriously? Where is the specialist who understands my case? Almost always far away. In another country, in another language, behind another queue. The World Health Organization projects a shortfall of about 11 million health workers by 2030. For Bairo, the distance between those who know and those in need isn't only in kilometers. It's in language, cost and access. ### The future he sees 2030. He imagines a mother in Cochabamba speaking Spanish with a specialist in London, who answers in English, and the two understand each other as if they were in the same room. Global Language doesn't just translate words; he imagines a translator that learns the clinical vocabulary of each specialty and shows the professional what was said and how it was said. The second opinion, today a privilege of those who can travel, becomes a conversation booked on the phone. 2040. In the future Bairo describes, laboratories stop being islands. A test ordered in Brazil is processed wherever there's capacity, and the result goes back to the requesting doctor. Research on cannabinoids grows within each country's rules, with published studies and graded evidence, as science demands, and not with promises. He sees the clinical assistant as the patient nurse who never forgets a detail of the history, always alongside, never in the professional's place. 2050. On the farthest horizon, he imagines language ceasing to be a border for care. A child born today may, as an adult, not understand why someone once went without care because the specialist spoke another language. Xperienc, in his vision, is one of the bridges of that world: clinical knowledge circulating the way water circulates, from where there's plenty to where there's lack. ### What this changes in a person's life Imagine Don Hernán, seventy-one, who lives in rural Santa Cruz. The town doctor has followed his case for years and would like to hear another specialist before changing the treatment. The nearest specialist who studies the subject is on another continent. In the future Bairo imagines, Don Hernán goes to a booth at the neighborhood health post. The clinical assistant organizes his history before the conversation. On the screen, a specialist on the other side of the world greets him, and he hears her voice in Spanish. He tells, unhurriedly, what he feels. She listens. At the end, she writes an opinion for the town doctor, who is the one who decides the next step with him. Don Hernán goes home with no promise. He goes home with something else: the feeling that the whole world, for half an hour, leaned in to listen to him. ### To go deeper - WHO: health workforce (https://www.who.int/health-topics/health-workforce) - WHO: Ethics and governance of artificial intelligence for health (2021) (https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240029200) - National Academies (2017): the health effects of cannabis and cannabinoids (https://www.nap.edu/catalog/24625) - What Xperienc Global Labs is (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-xperienc-global-labs/) - The plant and the science (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-plant-and-the-science/) - Vision of the future (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/vision-of-the-future/) --- ## Hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/hydrogen-the-most-abundant-element-in-the-universe/ Idioma: en Descrição: About three quarters of the universe's ordinary matter is hydrogen, formed after the Big Bang. It's in stars, in water and in 62% of your body's atoms. If you could gather all the ordinary matter in the universe, that of stars, planets, gas clouds and people, and sort it by element, about three quarters of the pile would be hydrogen. Almost all the rest would be helium. Everything else we know, the iron in blood, the calcium in bones, the silicon in sand, the gold in a wedding ring, would fit into less than two percent. Counting atoms rather than weight, the lead is even bigger: out of every hundred atoms in the universe, about ninety-two are hydrogen. ### The simplest and the oldest Ordinary hydrogen is the simplest atom possible: one proton and one electron. There's nothing more elementary to be made out of matter. It's also the oldest. In the first minutes after the Big Bang, the universe was too hot and dense to hold whole atoms. In that very short interval, the light nuclei formed: a lot of hydrogen, quite a bit of helium, a trace of lithium. Cosmologists call this moment primordial nucleosynthesis, and the proportions it predicts, about 75% hydrogen and 25% helium by mass, match what is measured in the sky. Only hundreds of thousands of years later did the universe cool enough for electrons to bind to nuclei. That's when the first true hydrogen atoms were born, the same ones that still float between galaxies today. ### The furnace of the stars From hydrogen came almost everything that followed. Gas clouds contracted under gravity, heated up, and at their centers hydrogen began to fuse into helium. That's how stars ignite. The Sun is doing it right now, every second, and that work is where the light warming your skin comes from. In bigger stars, fusion continues: carbon, oxygen, nitrogen. When those stars die, they scatter into space the elements they made. The carbon in your cells and the oxygen you breathe once passed through the interior of a star that began its life burning hydrogen. ### Inside you Hydrogen is in water, which is made of two of its atoms and one of oxygen. It's in fats, in proteins, in DNA. In the human body, it accounts for about 9.5% of the mass. That seems little, because it's an extremely light atom. But, counting atoms, about 62% of the atoms in your body are hydrogen. Most of the atoms that make you up are the same element that formed in the first minutes of the universe. That's why the 21 cm line is so valuable to astronomy: listening to hydrogen is listening to the main ingredient of everything. Sources: Abundance of the chemical elements (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elements) · HyperPhysics, Big Bang nucleosynthesis (http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Astro/bbnuc.html) · Composition of the human body (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_the_human_body) · Hydrogen line (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_line) ### In Bairo's view For Bairo, few facts in science are as spiritual as this one, even though science doesn't say it in those words. The simplest element is everywhere: in the stars and in the air, in the sea and in the blood. Discreet, almost invisible, present from the beginning. He says he sees God in hydrogen. It's his faith, spoken as poetry, and not a claim of chemistry. The chapter The voice he follows (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-voice-he-follows/) tells where that image comes from. Chemistry explains what hydrogen is. What it means to a man who found faith at rock bottom belongs to him. And there's a detail that moves him: the most abundant is also the simplest. For him, abundance doesn't begin with the complicated. It begins with the elementary, repeated faithfully, atom by atom. ### For you It can be a relief to know this on a bad day. You are made, for the most part, of the oldest material there is. The hydrogen atoms in your body have already crossed billions of years, clouds, stars and oceans before getting here. You aren't a last-minute accident. You're a recent stage of a very long story. And hydrogen teaches a second thing: greatness doesn't require complexity. The brightest star in the sky burns the simplest atom. Perhaps the next step in your life doesn't need to be sophisticated either. It needs to be simple, and repeated. ### Read also - The 21 cm yardstick (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-21-cm-yardstick/) - What the hydrogen 21 cm line is (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/what-is-the-hydrogen-21-cm-line/) - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) - Manifesto 14:20 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/milestone-1420/) - Frank Drake and the silence of 1420 MHz (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/frank-drake-and-the-silence-of-1420-mhz/) - April 15: the hydrogen line predicted on paper (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/april-15-the-hydrogen-line-predicted-on-paper/) - March 25: the day hydrogen was heard (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/march-25-the-day-hydrogen-was-heard/) --- ## Hospital Granja Julieta: what it is and why it matters URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ventures/hospital-granja-julieta-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/ Idioma: en Descrição: Hospital Granja Julieta, in São Paulo, is a clinical partner of Xperienc, founded by Bairo Gonzalez. He is neither a partner nor a founder of the hospital. Hospital Granja Julieta is a hospital in São Paulo, a separate company with its own shareholders, that acts as a clinical partner of Xperienc Global Labs, the company founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez; Bairo is not a shareholder, founder or administrator of the hospital. ### The pain behind it This page exists because the question comes up: what is Bairo's relationship with the hospital? The honest answer begins with a lesson he learned by falling. Bairo lost businesses because they rested on promises, not on solid ground. An investment that was not what it seemed, partners who took the idea, a project that collapsed when the people he was helping walked away. Every fall left the same conclusion: an idea without a physical place does not stand. When Xperienc was born, he knew that a health platform made only of software would be one more promise. Science needs a place where people are observed, records are kept and professionals are trained. The meeting with Hospital Granja Julieta gave Xperienc that place. On the hospital's side, the pain was different, and very concrete: medical cannabis is growing in Brazil almost entirely outside the hospital setting, far from anyone who can observe the person calmly. ### How it works, in plain words These are two companies, with different roles. - The hospital is the place of care. It has its own clinical staff, technical leads and protocols, and it answers for every medical decision. It is a general hospital with surgical facilities, with head and neck surgery as its anchor specialty. It has no emergency room: in an emergency, the way is SAMU, Brazil's ambulance service, at 192, or the nearest urgent care service. - Xperienc is the partner for technology, research and international connection. It brings the hospital the design of the triage system with a clinical assistant and human validation, teleconsultation, the Global Language translator and the bridge to specialists from other countries. The partnership plans a wing with cannabinoid protocols under medical supervision, a laboratory for studies and analysis, and a training center for professionals. The idea guiding it all is to treat cannabis as one of medicine's tools, assessed case by case, never as the basis for everything nor as a promise. ### Who it is for - Patients who, with a medical indication, want to be followed in a hospital setting, with observation and records. - Doctors who want to refer or discuss cases with a team that brings together conventional and cannabinoid medicine. - Health professionals seeking serious training on cannabinoids. - Researchers and patient associations interested in recorded outcomes. Clinical matters are handled directly with the hospital, through its official channels. This site does not book appointments or give treatment advice. ### The market In 2025, 873,000 Brazilians used cannabis-based products, 30% more than the year before. Access, according to the same survey, was split between imports (40%), pharmacies (34%) and patient associations (26%), and 59% of cities recorded at least one dispensation (Kaya Mind, 2025 Yearbook (https://kayamind.com/numero-pacientes-cannabis-brasil-2025/)). That is a lot of people, almost all of them treated away from a hospital bed. The rules have changed too. In 2026, Anvisa published a new framework for cannabis products, in force since May, which revoked RDC 327/2019 and redesigned manufacturing, prescription and dispensing (Anvisa (https://www.gov.br/anvisa/pt-br/assuntos/noticias-anvisa/2026/anvisa-publica-regras-para-producao-de-cannabis-medicinal)). Clearer rules call for more clinical supervision and more traceability. And the science is still at an early stage. The 2017 review by the U.S. National Academies found conclusive or substantial evidence for a few conditions, and limited or insufficient evidence for most others (NASEM, 2017 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK423845/)). That is exactly where a hospital that records outcomes can contribute. ### Where it stands today What already exists: Hospital Granja Julieta is a São Paulo company with its own shareholders, and Bairo is not one of them. The website hospitalgranjajulieta.com.br is live. Teleconsultation and second opinions are still being set up, as is the integration with Xperienc's technology. The hospital does not speak of success rates, and neither does this site: what is described is conduct, never a promised result. ### Why it scales and why it matters A hospital does not replicate like an app. What replicates is knowledge: written protocols, training of professionals, teleconsultation and consultation between doctors. A doctor trained here takes the method back to their own city. A well-documented protocol can be studied in any country. For the ecosystem, the partner hospital plays a role no software replaces. It is the physical backing of the health front: the place where Xperienc's technology meets real patients, under the responsibility of people with the training and registration to provide care. Why does it matter? Because medical cannabis is coming out of informality, and someone needs to receive it with rigor: assessment before prescription, observation during, records afterward, and referral to the right specialty when the evidence says the path lies elsewhere. ### Bairo's role Bairo does not own Hospital Granja Julieta. His role goes through Xperienc Global Labs, which he founded and runs: the vision of bringing technology, science and medical cannabis together into a single journey is his, and the contribution of technology, research and connection with specialists from other countries comes from Xperienc. Clinical decisions belong to the hospital. Bairo insists on that separation, because it protects the patient and protects the truth about who answers for what. ### Read also - What is Bairo's relationship with Hospital Granja Julieta? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/bairo-gonzalez-and-hospital-granja-julieta/) - Xperienc: the future of care without language borders (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-xperienc/) - Triage: the future of the first listening (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-triage/) - The plant and the science (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-plant-and-the-science/) - A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/) - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) - The ventures (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-ventures/) - Official website: hospitalgranjajulieta.com.br (https://hospitalgranjajulieta.com.br) --- ## How to use ChatGPT step by step — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-chatgpt-step-by-step/ Idioma: en Descrição: Create the account, say who you are, ask for a real task and correct the answer. The same step by step works for Claude, Gemini and Copilot. To use ChatGPT, just create an account on OpenAI's website or app, write what you need in the message box and have a conversation with the answer: ask for adjustments, cuts, a new explanation. There's a free version, with usage limits, and paid plans. The same step by step works in Claude (from Anthropic), in Gemini (from Google) and in Copilot (from Microsoft). The look of the screen changes, not the way of thinking. The most common mistake beginners make is treating the tool like a search engine: typing three words and expecting the perfect answer. It works better when you talk to it as you would to someone you've just met who wants to help. ### Why AI is not a chatbot ChatGPT has "chat" in its name, but it isn't the customer-service robot you know. It doesn't follow a fixed script. It works with what you bring, and the more you bring, the more the answer sounds like you. In Bairo's view, "AI is not a chatbot, but an extension of your consciousness." It's his way of saying that the conversation doesn't replace your thinking: it extends it. You are still the one who decides. ### Step by step today - Go in through the official address or your phone's official app store. There are many fake apps with similar names. Check the developer before installing. - Create the account with an email, or a Google, Apple or Microsoft account. Protect it with a strong password and, if possible, two-step verification. - Look at the settings before using it. There are options about memory (what the tool remembers about you between conversations) and about how your data is used. Read, decide and adjust. - Write a complete first message. A good message has four parts: who you are, what you want, who it's for and in what format: I'm [who you are]. I need [what you want], for [who will read or use it]. I want it as [a list, a table, a short text, a WhatsApp message]. Use simple language. If information is missing, ask first. - Correct instead of starting over. Reply in the same conversation: "too long, cut it in half," "change the tone," "explain the third item." The conversation keeps the context. - Use features beyond text. Depending on your plan and device, you can speak by voice, send a photo, upload a PDF or spreadsheet and ask for a summary. For studying, there's a mode that asks you questions instead of handing you the answer. - Organize by subject. Start a new conversation for each topic. Mixing a cake recipe with a business plan confuses both the tool and you. - Ask for the source and check it. When the answer includes a fact, a number or a law: Where does this information come from? List the sources I can check on my own and tell me honestly which parts of your answer you're not sure about. - Finish by asking for the next step. It's the question that turns conversation into action: Based on everything we've discussed, what's the next small thing I can do today, in less than 30 minutes? If the free version hits its daily limit, don't worry: wait, or continue the same task in another assistant. The requests you've learned to write work in all of them. ### How Bairo did it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez didn't start at the end. He says that, starting over from zero and without knowing how to code, he sat down in front of the computer and spent six months without leaving the house, learning to build with the tools of his own time, one conversation at a time. Out of those months came the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness. When the banks refused to integrate the solution, he didn't stop: he focused on building his own technology, leaving the regulated part to those authorized to operate it. For those who follow his story, it's the same principle that guides this step by step: every no is the ground of a yes, and the next question is always the most important one. ### Precautions ChatGPT is a conversation with a company, not a locked diary: avoid pasting documents, passwords and other people's data; confirm in an official source anything involving numbers, dates or laws; use the tool to understand a test result or a contract, but take the decision to the doctor or the lawyer; and remember that the answers carry biases from the texts it was trained on, so be wary when something sounds prejudiced or too certain. ### Read also - AI is an extension of you (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai-is-an-extension-of-you/) - How to use AI in my small business? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-use-ai-in-my-small-business/) - The path (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) --- ## Triage: the future of the first listening — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-triage/ Idioma: en Descrição: Bairo Gonzalez's vision for the triage system: a clinical assistant that listens first, follows up daily and calls a professional when needed. The first question in a medical visit is usually the most rushed. And everything else depends on it. ### Today The triage system is a pre-consultation with a clinical assistant and human validation. It gathers information before the visit, follows the person's health through their day-to-day history with the support of artificial intelligence agents and, when needed, schedules a teleconsultation with a doctor or nurse, who validates what the assistant organized. The assistant doesn't diagnose and doesn't decide: it prepares the conversation so the professional can decide better. Bairo says the system was designed for Hospital Granja Julieta, in São Paulo, a separate company, with its own CNPJ and ownership. The system's international brand is Hospital Triage; its official website is hospitaltriage.ai (site under construction). Triage isn't an emergency room: in an emergency, the way is your city's emergency service (in Brazil, SAMU 192). ### The pain he saw Anyone who has waited in a hospital reception area knows what it's like to tell the same story three times: to the receptionist, to the nurse, to the doctor. Each time a little more tired, a little more condensed, a little less accurate. The detail that mattered gets lost in the second version. Bairo saw this up close, as a father, as an immigrant, as a man who has been at rock bottom and knew the weariness of not being heard. And he understood something simple: the problem often isn't a lack of medical knowledge. It's a lack of time to listen. A professional who sees forty people a day can't remember what the fortieth person said last week. The WHO projects a shortfall of about 11 million health workers by 2030, more than half of them in nursing. In Bairo's view, if hands are lacking, at least listening shouldn't be. ### The future he sees 2030. He imagines triage beginning at home. The person tells the clinical assistant, at their own pace and in their own language, what they're feeling. The assistant organizes the story, asks what's missing, records what has changed since yesterday. When the person reaches the professional, the professional already has a clear summary in front of them, with the original words kept. And only the professional decides what it means. 2040. In the future Bairo describes, follow-up is continuous. For those living with a chronic condition, the assistant asks every day how the night went, whether the medicine was taken, whether the pain moved. When a pattern strays from what's expected, it doesn't give a diagnosis: it calls a nurse. Bairo imagines hospitals where most of the work stops being putting out fires and becomes keeping the fire from starting. 2050. On the long horizon, he sees triage as a door that never closes, available in any language and anywhere there's a phone. A listening network that helps professionals get there sooner. Technology does what it does well, remembering and organizing, and people do what only people do: look you in the eye, examine, take responsibility. He imagines. He doesn't promise. Health is the place where the word "promise" hurts the most, and he knows it. ### What this changes in a person's life Imagine Marta, who cares alone for her eighty-four-year-old father, who forgets things. Every time he gets worse, she tries to remember when it started, what he ate, whether he slept. She never remembers properly. She arrives at the visit with her heart racing and half the answers. In the future Bairo imagines, for three months Marta has talked every evening with the clinical assistant. Two minutes. How the day went, how he ate, whether he was confused. One Thursday, the assistant notices the bad nights repeating and suggests a teleconsultation. On the other end, a nurse reads the history, asks the right questions and guides the next step. Marta hangs up and cries. Not from fear. From relief. For the first time in a long while, she didn't have to carry the memory of everything alone. ### To go deeper - WHO: health workforce (https://www.who.int/health-topics/health-workforce) - WHO: Ethics and governance of artificial intelligence for health (2021) (https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240029200) - WHO: guidance on large multi-modal models in health (2024) (https://www.who.int/news/item/18-01-2024-who-releases-ai-ethics-and-governance-guidance-for-large-multi-modal-models) - Why does Bairo say AI is an extension of the human? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/ai-as-an-extension-of-the-human/) - Vision of the future (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/vision-of-the-future/) --- ## Why 1420 MHz is a protected frequency — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/why-1420-mhz-is-a-protected-frequency/ Idioma: en Descrição: Under ITU footnote 5.340, all emissions are prohibited from 1400 to 1427 MHz. Why the world agreed to leave the hydrogen frequency in silence. The space around you is full of radio waves. At this very moment, signals from cell phones, Wi-Fi, FM radio, television, GPS and satellites are passing through your body. The radio spectrum is one of the most congested avenues humanity has ever built, and every band of it is fought over. In the middle of that traffic, there is a narrow band where the world agreed not to speak. ### The rule The spectrum is divided by international agreement in the Radio Regulations of the International Telecommunication Union, the ITU, a United Nations agency. That's where it's decided who can use each piece of the airwaves. The band from 1400 to 1427 MHz is reserved for passive services, which only listen: radio astronomy, Earth exploration by satellite and space research. And a short footnote applies to it, number 5.340, which says, in the original: "All emissions are prohibited in the following bands." The first on the list is 1 400–1 427 MHz. In Brazil, Anatel follows the same allocation. Transmitting without authorization is a crime under article 183 of Law 9,472, of 1997. ### Why right there Because inside that band lies the hydrogen line, at 1420.405751768 MHz. The signal arriving from the galaxy's hydrogen clouds is extremely faint. An ordinary cell phone, a few kilometers from a radio telescope, would emit with incomparably more power than an entire gas cloud thousands of light-years away. If anyone transmitted in that band, they would blot out the sky. There's also an engineering reason. The hydrogen signal from distant galaxies arrives with its frequency slightly shifted, because of their motion and the expansion of the universe. That's why radio astronomy also observes below 1420 MHz, in bands that don't have the same total protection. The 27 protected MHz are the core, the place where silence is law. ### Silence on the ground too In some places, the care goes beyond the band. In the United States, since 1958, there has been the National Radio Quiet Zone, an area of about 33,000 square kilometers between Virginia and West Virginia, created to protect the Green Bank observatories. There, transmissions are restricted, and people's daily lives have adapted so the telescopes can listen. Think about what that means. In the middle of the communication age, governments all over the world agreed to leave a piece of the spectrum untouched, not to make money, nor to win a war, but to keep listening to the universe. Sources: ITU, Radio Regulations, footnote 5.340 (https://www.e-callisto.org/generaldocuments/RAS-Allocations-RR2016.pdf) · U.S. National Academies, radio astronomy spectrum (https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/26080/chapter/3) · Law 9,472/1997, art. 183 (https://www.legjur.com/legislacao/art/lei_00094721997-183) · National Radio Quiet Zone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Quiet_Zone) ### In Bairo's view This is where the name Bairo gave 1420 MHz comes from: the frequency of silence. He reads this agreement as one of humanity's most beautiful gestures. In a world that talks nonstop, countries agreed to keep quiet in one place, so as to listen to what comes from far away. For him, that silence is the place where one can find one's God. No one needs to share his faith to recognize the beauty of the image: the cleanest space in the spectrum is precisely the one no one may use for themselves. And that's why, in his project, the number is only a symbol. No one transmits on 1420 MHz, not him, not 1420mhz. The 14:20 milestone and the record of the manifesto, told in Manifesto 14:20 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/milestone-1420/), are digital: written on the network, in tribute to the frequency, without touching it. ### For you Is there a protected band in your life? An hour of the day, a corner of the house, a piece of the week where nothing gets in, no notifications, no bills, no noise, just so you can hear what's too faint to compete with everything else? Maybe that's where the idea you haven't heard yet lives, or the voice you trust. It doesn't need to be much. Astronomers protect only 27 MHz in a spectrum of thousands. What matters is that the protection is taken seriously, every day, with no exception for the urgency of the moment. The whole world made this agreement to listen to hydrogen. You can make a smaller one, with yourself, to listen to your own life. ### Read also - The 21 cm yardstick (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-21-cm-yardstick/) - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) - Manifesto 14:20 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/milestone-1420/) - The frequency of silence and prayer (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/the-frequency-of-silence-and-prayer/) - Frank Drake and the silence of 1420 MHz (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/frank-drake-and-the-silence-of-1420-mhz/) - April 15: the hydrogen line predicted on paper (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/april-15-the-hydrogen-line-predicted-on-paper/) - March 25: the day hydrogen was heard (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/march-25-the-day-hydrogen-was-heard/) --- ## Hospital Triage: what it is and why it matters URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ventures/hospital-triage-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/ Idioma: en Descrição: Hospital Triage is the pre-consultation system conceived by Bairo Gonzalez: a clinical assistant listens first, and a professional validates and decides. Hospital Triage is the international brand of a triage and pre-consultation system conceived by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez: a clinical assistant talks with the person before they are seen, organizes their history and, when needed, calls a doctor or nurse, who validates the information and decides. ### The pain behind it There is a kind of fear Bairo came to know early in Brazil: not knowing which door to knock on. In the years when he lost his footing, without documents in hand and without a network, he learned what it is like to stand before a big system with no one to ask where to begin. In health care, that fear has an address. It is the person in pain in the middle of the night who doesn't know whether to wait until tomorrow or rush to the hospital. It is the son who brings his father and forgets half of what he needed to say. It is the professional who sees dozens of people a day and has no time to hear each one from the beginning. Bairo carries a conviction that comes from those memories: often what is missing is not medical knowledge. It is listening, at the right moment, organized for the person who will decide. Hospital Triage was born to be that listening. ### How it works, in plain words Think of a calm conversation before the appointment. - The assistant asks. By text or by voice, in plain language, it asks what the person is feeling, since when, what medicines they take. Without rushing, at the pace of the one answering. - An alarm signal above all else. If the person describes something that could be serious, a fixed rule interrupts the conversation and shows how to call 192, Brazil's ambulance service. The assistant doesn't try to handle what is an emergency. - The professional receives everything organized. The history arrives as a clear summary, with the original words kept. The doctor or nurse confirms, corrects or discards, and decides. - Day-to-day follow-up. For those living with a chronic condition, the assistant can ask every day how the person is doing and, when something falls outside what is expected, schedule a teleconsultation. The assistant gives no diagnosis, does not rate severity for the patient and decides nothing. It is a clinical assistant, always with human validation, as required by the Federal Council of Medicine's rule on artificial intelligence in medicine (CFM Res. 2.454/2026). ### For those who cannot pay Bairo also designs Hospital Triage for those who have neither health insurance nor money for a private appointment. The idea is that the first listening, the one that organizes the person's history and shows the right path, should not depend on their pocket. The system was created by CLAIN, the ecosystem's agent orchestrator, and works in five stages, all in service of the professional: - Triage. The assistant listens, asks and organizes. If an alarm signal appears, the conversation stops and the person is given the path to 192. - Analysis. Test results, medicines in use and history are brought together in a single summary, with the original words kept. - Trend prediction. In the follow-up of people with a chronic condition, the system points out to the professional when the day-to-day answers fall outside that person's pattern. It is a signal for someone to look, not a conclusion. - Follow-up. A daily question, in plain language, and a teleconsultation scheduled when something changes. - Classification for the professional. The information arrives organized by suggested priority for the doctor or nurse, who confirms or corrects it. This classification is not shown to the patient as severity and decides nothing on its own. The limit is the same at every stage: it is not a diagnosis. The one who assesses, diagnoses and treats is always a health professional. And whether the pain is in the chest or in the soul, there is always a human door: 192 for emergencies and CVV, Brazil's emotional support line, at 188, for those who need to talk. ### Who it is for - Telemedicine and digital urgent care services, which need to take in more people without losing the quality of listening. - Hospitals, clinics and health insurers, which want the professional to arrive at the appointment already knowing the essentials. - Public networks, where the line is long and the professional's time is the scarcest resource. - People with chronic conditions and those who care for them, who gain someone to remember what has changed since yesterday. ### The market There are not enough hands. The World Health Organization projects a shortfall of 11.1 million health workers in 2030, more than half of them in nursing (WHO (https://www.who.int/teams/health-workforce/about/1)). Meanwhile, remote care has become a habit. The Saúde Digital Brasil indicators dashboard, built with Serasa Experian from data provided by companies in the sector, recorded more than 3.1 million remote consultations in 2025, compared with 200,000 in 2020 (Serasa Experian and SDB (https://www.serasaexperian.com.br/sala-de-imprensa/institucional/brasil-ganha-primeiro-painel-publico-de-indicadores-da-saude-digital-com-parceria-inedita-entre-saude-digital-brasil-sdb-e-serasa-experian/)). And there is room to grow. According to the ICT in Health 2025 survey by Cetic.br, teleconsultation is available in 28% of Brazilian health facilities, telemonitoring in 20%, and only 18% use some form of artificial intelligence, still concentrated on operational tasks (Cetic.br (https://cetic.br/pt/noticia/uso-de-inteligencia-artificial-avanca-na-saude-brasileira-mas-ainda-se-concentra-em-tarefas-operacionais/)). The trend is clear: more remote care, with few tools that organize the listening before it. ### Where it stands today The official website, hospitaltriage.ai, is still under construction. In September 2026, a market analysis was completed before any sale, by Bairo's own decision. The system exists as a prototype in a test environment and, as of the date of this page, is not yet in commercial operation. The design was conceived for Hospital Granja Julieta, in São Paulo, Xperienc's clinical partner. The hospital is a separate company, with its own shareholders, and Bairo does not own it. The corporate structure of Hospital Triage is still being defined. ### Why it scales and why it matters The math is simple. The cost of one more pre-consultation is processing, not one more professional. The system can be offered under the brand of whoever uses it, to a telemedicine service, a hospital network or a city government, and work on a website, an app or messaging. With Xperienc's Global Language translator, the same listening can happen in several languages. But the scale that matters to Bairo is another one: the scale of time given back. Every minute the professional no longer spends asking "since when?" is one more minute to examine, explain and decide. Every person who arrives at the appointment having been heard arrives less frightened. He sees the system as a door that never closes, always with a person on the other side when it is time to decide. It is a vision, not a promise. In health, what is described is conduct, and the result always depends on whoever provides care. ### Bairo's role Bairo conceived the triage system and created the Hospital Triage brand. He designed the rule that is not negotiable, that of the assistant who prepares and the professional who decides, and gave the order that sets the project's pace: market first, implementation later. That is why the market analysis came before any line of sales. For him, triage is the most direct form of an idea he always repeats: artificial intelligence is an extension of the human. Here, it extends the ability to listen. ### Read also - Triage: the future of the first listening (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-triage/) - Why does Bairo say AI is an extension of the human? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/ai-as-an-extension-of-the-human/) - A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/), the chapter in which triage is born - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) - The ventures (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-ventures/) - hospitaltriage.ai (site under construction) --- ## What is the best free AI to start with? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/what-is-the-best-free-ai-to-start-with/ Idioma: en Descrição: The best one is the one you'll use every day. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot have free versions; test the same task in all four and keep one. There's no single best free AI for everyone. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot have free versions, in many languages, with usage limits that change often. Each has its own style, and the right choice depends on what you do day to day and where you already live digitally. The most honest method is simple: give the same real task to all four, compare the answers and keep the one that helped you most. Be wary of any list that says "number one is this one." The assistants are updated almost every month, and what was true in January may not be true in October. ### Why AI is not a chatbot People who compare AIs as if they were customer-service robots look for the one that "answers correctly." But the question changes once you understand you're choosing a work partner: what matters is the tone, the patience, the way it handles your context. In Bairo's view, AI is an extension of you. In his words, "artificial intelligence is an extension of the human, not the problem." If it's an extension, the best one is the one that fits your way of thinking and working, like a shoe that fits your foot. ### Step by step today - Get to know the four most used, without fanaticism. - ChatGPT (OpenAI): the best known, with voice conversation, image and file uploads and a study mode. - Claude (Anthropic): often chosen for long texts, reading documents and careful writing; it also has a learning mode. - Gemini (Google): voice conversation and integration with Gmail, Drive and other Google services, for those who already use those accounts. - Copilot (Microsoft): built into Windows and the Microsoft ecosystem, also with voice. - Choose a task from your week and write a complete request. Example: I own a small clothing shop in my neighborhood. Write a WhatsApp message telling my customers the winter collection has arrived, in a friendly tone, without exaggeration and in 4 lines at most. Give me three versions. - Paste the same request into all four and compare: which one understood best? Which sounded most natural? Which made up the least? - Run a second test with a document. Take a text with no personal data (a medicine leaflet, a set of rules, a public notice) and ask: Summarize this document in 5 simple points. Then list the 3 things an ordinary person tends to misunderstand about it. Say on which page or in which passage each point appears. - Check who got it wrong. Open the original document and check. The AI that invents a passage that doesn't exist loses points, however beautiful its answer. - Look at the free plan's conditions on each one's official page. Limits and prices change; read them at the source, not in an old video. - Choose a main one and a backup. Use the main one every day. When it hits its limit or gets stuck, take the same question to the backup. A question to ask any of them before deciding: What do you do well and what do you tend to do badly? Be honest and give me practical examples for someone who [describe your work]. ### How Bairo did it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez didn't wait for the perfect tool. He says he spent six months at home, in front of the computer, building with whatever was available at that moment, without knowing how to code. Out of that came the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness. And it was precisely by using AI heavily that he felt the cost: every conversation consumes tokens, and tokens are expensive. Instead of complaining about the price, he created CLAIN, an orchestrator that spreads the work among many niche agents. The idea behind it is the same as in this text: no single AI needs to be the best at everything, as long as each one does its part well. ### Precautions Free doesn't mean free of cost to your privacy: read what each service does with your conversations, don't paste anyone's personal data, check in an official source everything the tool claims, don't trade your doctor or lawyer for a well-written answer, and remember that all of them learned from human texts and repeat our biases, each in its own way. ### Read also - How to start using artificial intelligence today (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-start-using-artificial-intelligence-today/) - How to use AI in my small business? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-use-ai-in-my-small-business/) - Building a business (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) --- ## SOSPROCESSOS: the future of defense within everyone's reach URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-sosprocessos/ Idioma: en Descrição: Bairo Gonzalez's vision for SOSPROCESSOS: AI legal analysis led by a lawyer, so no one faces the courts without understanding the way forward. There's a kind of fear that has no face: receiving a paper with your name on it and not understanding a word of what's written there. ### Today SOSPROCESSOS is a legal analysis system. It organizes the case, builds defense scenarios and strategies, studies public decisions to understand how judges and prosecutors tend to decide, and gathers similar cases. It also connects people to lawyers in the model Bairo describes as "Uber-like": the person calls for help, and the nearest licensed lawyer is summoned. Lawyers also use the tool to support law firms, with analysis, filing and dispatch. The rule that runs through the design is the same as in the whole ecosystem: artificial intelligence prepares, organizes and suggests; the one who conducts the defense is the lawyer. No outcome is guaranteed, because no legal case has a guaranteed outcome. ### The pain he saw Bairo was once the man afraid of paper. An immigrant left without documents in hand when he left the company that brought him, he lived for years in the shadows, not knowing whom to ask and afraid to ask. Later, as a businessman, he knew the other side: contracts, partners who pushed him out of the business, debts, the feeling that the law exists but speaks a language only some understand. Brazil ended 2025 with 75.5 million pending cases, according to the Justice in Numbers report of the National Council of Justice. Behind each number is someone waiting. Many wait without understanding what they're waiting for. Bairo saw there the same pattern he saw in agribusiness and in health. The knowledge exists. It's published, in decisions, in the courts. It just doesn't reach those who need it, when they need it, in a form they can use. ### The future he sees 2030. He imagines the first hour after a summons no longer being the most desperate one. The person photographs the document, and the system explains, in plain language, what it is, what the deadline is, what usually happens in cases like this. And, in the same gesture, it calls a lawyer. The lawyer comes to the case already holding the map: similar decisions, questions to ask, documents to gather. 2040. In the future Bairo describes, a small-town lawyer has at their side the same research capacity that only large firms have today. The gap between a rich defense and a poor defense narrows, not because the machine defends, but because it gives back to the lawyer the time spent researching, so it can be spent thinking. Bairo imagines a less slow justice system, not through shortcuts, but through less repeated work. 2050. On the long horizon, he sees a world in which understanding your own rights stops being a privilege. A child born now may grow up knowing that, faced with any paper bearing their name, there's someone to explain and someone to defend. In his vision, dignity begins with the right to understand what is happening to you. It's a vision, not a guarantee. Justice is still done by people, and it's good that it is. ### What this changes in a person's life Imagine Jefferson, twenty-six, a delivery rider, who received a summons on a Tuesday that he didn't understand. He spent the night awake. He searched the internet and found ten different answers. He thought about not going. He thought about running away. In the future Bairo imagines, Jefferson opens the app at seven in the morning. Within minutes, he understands what it's about, what the deadline is and that he has the right to a defense. At nine, a lawyer from his neighborhood calls him. She has already read the document, already seen similar cases, already knows the three questions she needs to ask. On Friday, the two are sitting face to face, and he is no longer alone. Jefferson hasn't won anything yet. But he slept. And anyone who has spent a whole night afraid knows how big that is. ### To go deeper - CNJ: Justice in Numbers (Portuguese) (https://www.cnj.jus.br/pesquisas-judiciarias/justica-em-numeros/) - CNJ: Justice in Numbers 2026, case backlog falls in the year of highest demand (Portuguese) (https://www.cnj.jus.br/justica-em-numeros-2026-estoque-de-processos-cai-em-ano-de-maior-demanda-da-serie-historica/) - Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond, "Generative AI at Work" (QJE, 2025) (https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/140/2/889/7990658) - The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) - Vision of the future (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/vision-of-the-future/) --- ## The Pioneer plaque and hydrogen — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/the-pioneer-plaque-and-hydrogen/ Idioma: en Descrição: The plaques on Pioneer 10 and 11 and the Voyager golden record use hydrogen as a yardstick: 21 cm in length and 0.7 billionths of a second. How would you explain the size of a person to someone who doesn't know the meter, the hand span, the foot, or any of the measures we invented here? In 1972, a small group of scientists had to answer that question for real. And the answer was hydrogen. ### A message in a bottle The Pioneer 10 probe was launched on March 2, 1972, and Pioneer 11 on April 5, 1973. Both were sent to study Jupiter and Saturn and then travel on out of the Solar System, never to return. Carl Sagan and Frank Drake realized those probes would be among the first human-made objects headed out of the Solar System. They proposed attaching to each probe a gold-anodized aluminum plaque, about 23 by 15 centimeters, carrying a message. The artwork was drawn by Linda Salzman Sagan. The plaque shows a man and a woman, the silhouette of the probe, the Sun and the planets, and a map of Earth's position relative to fourteen pulsars. But, before all that, in the upper left corner, there's a drawing that looks like a dumbbell: two small circles joined by a line. They are two hydrogen atoms. In one, the spins of the electron and the proton point the same way. In the other, they point opposite ways. The line between them is the hyperfine transition, the flip that emits the 21 cm wave. ### Hydrogen as a yardstick The choice was ingenious. Any civilization capable of finding the probe would know hydrogen, because it's the most abundant element in the universe. And any that did radio astronomy would know its line. So the transition became a unit of measure. For length, the wave's 21 cm. For time, its period, about 0.7 billionths of a second. Next to the figure of the woman, between two marks indicating her height, the number 8 appears written in binary. Eight times 21 cm: 1.68 meters. The height of a human being, measured with the hydrogen yardstick. ### The golden record In 1977, the Voyager 1 and 2 probes set out carrying a gold-plated copper record, with sounds and images of Earth. On the cover that protects it, there are instructions for playing it. There, once again, is the drawing of hydrogen in its two lowest energy states, indicating that the time interval of this transition is the fundamental unit. The time of one rotation of the record, 3.6 seconds, is written in units of 0.70 billionths of a second, the period associated with the hydrogen transition. The cover also carries the same pulsar map as the Pioneers. The Voyagers keep traveling, already beyond the region dominated by the Sun's wind. The yardstick goes with them. Sources: Pioneer plaque (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque) · The Planetary Society, the Pioneer plaque (https://www.planetary.org/articles/0120-the-pioneer-plaque-science-as-a-universal-language) · Voyager Golden Record (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record) · Hydrogen line (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_line) ### In Bairo's view This is where the expression Bairo uses was born: the 21 cm yardstick. When humanity wanted to introduce itself to the universe, it measured its own body with hydrogen. Eight 21 cm yardsticks: one whole woman. For him, that yardstick measures more than height. Where physics sees a proton, an electron and the flip between them, Bairo sees body, soul and spirit. It's his spiritual reading, never a scientific claim, and it is told in full in Body, soul and spirit in the hydrogen yardstick (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/body-soul-and-spirit-in-the-hydrogen-yardstick/). There's also the image of a letter sent without knowing whether anyone will read it. The Pioneers and the Voyagers were sent with a scientist's faith: with no assured reply, with the care of someone writing to a reader who may never exist. Bairo recognizes in that gesture the logic that guides his project, told in Manifesto 14:20 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/milestone-1420/): write it first in the stars, so as to have a guide to navigate by. ### For you If someone had to measure your life, what yardstick would they use? Society tends to offer short yardsticks: salary, job title, followers, other people's opinions. The Pioneer plaque suggests something else. To speak of the human being to the universe, the scientists chose the most universal measure they knew, the one that holds anywhere and for anyone. Perhaps it's worth looking for a yardstick like that for your life: one that doesn't change depending on who's looking. And perhaps it's worth writing, as they did, a message to a future you don't yet know whether you'll see. ### Read also - The 21 cm yardstick (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-21-cm-yardstick/) - What the hydrogen 21 cm line is (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/what-is-the-hydrogen-21-cm-line/) - Frank Drake and the silence of 1420 MHz (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/frank-drake-and-the-silence-of-1420-mhz/) - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) - Manifesto 14:20 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/milestone-1420/) - April 15: the hydrogen line predicted on paper (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/april-15-the-hydrogen-line-predicted-on-paper/) - March 25: the day hydrogen was heard (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/march-25-the-day-hydrogen-was-heard/) --- ## Investment House: what it is and why it matters URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ventures/investment-house-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/ Idioma: en Descrição: Investment House, founded by Bairo Gonzalez, records real assets in digital form and gathers business owners at A Mesa. An institutional page, no offer. Investment House is a real-world asset tokenization company founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez. It represents high-end homes and niche commercial buildings in digital form, with written governance, and gathers business owners in immersive meetings at A Mesa ("The Table"); this page is institutional and is not an offer. ### The pain behind it The deepest fall of Bairo's life began with a promise. With the capital he had built up in events and digital printing, he joined a company as an investing partner. The business was not what it seemed, it did not hold, and he went broke with, as he tells it, fifty people depending on him. Before that, he had already learned another expensive lesson: partners who pushed him out of his own business and kept the idea. From those two falls, he drew the questions that organize Investment House today. Does the asset exist? Can you visit it? Who is sitting at the table with me? Who decides, and how? There is also a third pain, a founder's pain. Companies rarely die for lack of talent. They die for lack of capital at the right time, of customers at the start, and of someone experienced on the other side of the table. The sentence that sums up the house's purpose comes from that pain: that no good idea should die for lack of a table. ### How it works, in plain words Think of a real house, with an address, a property record and a front door. - A real asset. Every project starts from an asset that exists: a high-end home or a niche commercial building. - A digital representation. Tokenizing, here, means recording participation in that asset digitally, with the record kept on BTZ Chain, so that every change is noted and cannot be erased. - A council with names and faces. Each house has up to 50 seats. Transferring a seat respects the preference of those already at the table and the qualifications of whoever comes in, to preserve the group. - A Mesa. A network of business owners who meet in immersive sessions to exchange experience, open doors and build together. - An assistant that explains. The house's digital service was designed to explain, warn and simulate. Never to recommend, because investment advice is an activity regulated by the CVM, Brazil's securities regulator. ### Who it is for - Business owners looking for a network, counsel and open doors, more than a financial product. - Owners of real assets studying tokenization as a way to organize governance and records. - Researchers, journalists and institutions who want to understand how real-world asset tokenization is arriving in Brazil. It is not for those looking for a promise of returns. Whoever comes here finds an idea explained, not an invitation. ### The market Real-world asset tokenization has left the lab. The Deloitte Center for Financial Services projects that more than US$4 trillion in real estate could be tokenized by 2035, up from less than US$0.3 trillion in 2024, an average growth of 27% a year (Deloitte (https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/financial-services/financial-services-industry-predictions/2025/tokenized-real-estate.html)). It is a projection, and the study itself points out the challenges: regulation, custody, security and what happens when something goes wrong. The Bank for International Settlements, the BIS, the central banks' bank, devoted an entire chapter of its 2025 Annual Economic Report to tokenization as the basis of the next monetary and financial system, and warned that it needs solid anchors of trust (BIS (https://www.bis.org/publ/arpdf/ar2025e3.htm)). In Brazil, the ground is being laid out right now. Central Bank Resolutions 519, 520 and 521 regulate virtual asset service providers, with a filing deadline of October 30, 2026, and any public investment offer depends on the CVM's rules. The trend is toward more requirements, and that favors those with real assets and written governance. ### Where it stands today The Investment House website, investmenthouse.com.br (https://investmenthouse.com.br), is live and carries the notice that its content is not a public offer. A Mesa brings business owners together in immersive sessions. No regulatory compliance is claimed here without a legal opinion. This page carries no amounts, shares, returns or specific projects, and it will not. Anyone who wants to know the company will find everything, with the legal disclaimers, on its website. ### Why it scales and why it matters Each house is an independent cell, with its own asset and its own council. What links one house to another is the network of people. The model can be repeated in other cities and countries, each under local law, without any house depending on another to stand. In the group's design, sustainability comes from classic structuring and management fees, which do not depend on the price of any token. Why does it matter? Because tokenizing a thing is different from tokenizing a promise. Bairo saw up close the damage an unbacked promise does to the lives of those who trusted it. His vision is to use technology for the opposite: an asset that exists, a record that cannot be erased, people who know each other and an assistant that explains before any decision. Nothing here is a recommendation. It is a founder's idea about how trust can be built: slowly, on solid ground, and with people at the table. ### Bairo's role Bairo is the founder of Investment House. The question that drove him is that of someone who has been on both sides of the table, as an entrepreneur without capital and as an investor who lost everything: where does a founder find capital, customers and counsel all at once? The answer he proposes is named after a piece of furniture. A table where every seat has an owner, every owner has a face and every decision is recorded. ### Read also - Investment House: the future of belonging to what is real (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-investment-house/) - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/), the chapter of the fall that taught the question - The coin and the road (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-coin-and-the-road/) - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) - The ventures (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-ventures/) - Official website: investmenthouse.com.br (https://investmenthouse.com.br) --- ## How to ask AI questions and get good answers URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-ask-ai-questions-and-get-good-answers/ Idioma: en Descrição: Say who you are, what you want, who it's for and in what format. Give an example, ask the AI to ask what's missing, and correct instead of starting over. An AI's answer is the size of the question. Whoever writes "write a text about sales" gets a generic text that could suit anyone. Whoever writes who they are, what they want, who it's for, in what tone and in what format gets something that seems tailor-made. The technical name for this is prompt, but you don't need to memorize any word: just explain it as you would to an intelligent person who has just arrived and doesn't yet know your life. A good question for AI almost always has the same ingredients. Learn the recipe once and it works for everything. ### Why AI is not a chatbot A chatbot waits for keywords. Today's AI understands context, and that's why context changes the answer so much. It knows nothing about you until you tell it. In Bairo's view, "AI is not a chatbot, but an extension of your consciousness." If it's an extension, it only goes as far as the clarity of whoever uses it. A muddled question, a muddled extension. A clear question, an extension that reaches further. ### Step by step today - Use the five-ingredient recipe: role, task, context, format and limit. You are [a role: a patient teacher, a copy editor, a small-business consultant]. Your task is [what you want]. Context: [who I am, who it's for, what I've already tried]. Format: [list, table, short message, step by step]. Limit: [length, tone, what NOT to do]. - Give an example of what you like. If you have a text of yours you consider good, paste it and say "write in this style." AI imitates much better than it guesses. - Ask it to ask before answering. It's the most powerful shortcut for beginners: Before answering, ask me up to 5 questions about what you need to know to do this well. Wait for my answers. - Break big tasks down. Instead of "write my business plan," first ask for the outline, then each part, one at a time. - Correct precisely. "I didn't like it" teaches little. "The second paragraph is too formal and the list is too long; cut it to 3 items" teaches a lot. - Ask for alternatives. "Give me three different versions" opens paths you wouldn't have thought of. Then mix the best of each. - Ask it to critique its own work. When it's done, use: Now play the part of a demanding reader and point out the 3 weakest points of this text. Then rewrite it, fixing them. - Ask for honesty about doubt. AI tends to answer even when it doesn't know: If you're not sure about any piece of information, say clearly "I'm not sure" and explain how I can check it. - Keep the questions that worked. Build a folder of templates. In a month, you'll have a personal kit of ready-made questions for your work. A before-and-after example. Before: "write a caption for a cake." After: "I have a small bakery in Osasco; my customers are mothers who order birthday cakes. Write three captions of up to two lines for a photo of a chocolate and strawberry cake, affectionate tone, not too many emojis and without promising same-day delivery." The second will produce something you'll publish without embarrassment. ### How Bairo did it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says that, when he sat down at the computer for the six months that changed his life, he didn't know how to code. What he had was clarity about what he wanted to build: a niche artificial intelligence that would put those who produce, those who process, those who trade and those who buy in agribusiness in direct contact. He describes that time as a period of asking: he asked for wisdom, understanding and courage to remember the way to the best self he had seen. Out of those months came the foundation of the platform and the AI of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness. For him, knowing how to ask was half the work. The other half was not stopping when the answer came out wrong. ### Precautions A well-made question doesn't make the answer true: check facts in a reliable source; don't include your own or other people's personal data in the request; don't ask AI to decide about medication, a lawsuit or a contract without a professional at your side; and notice when it returns stereotypes (about gender, age, region, origin), because it learned from human texts and repeats our biases. ### Read also - Prompts for entrepreneurs (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/prompts-for-entrepreneurs-12-ready-made-requests/) - How to start using artificial intelligence today (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-start-using-artificial-intelligence-today/) - Building a business (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) --- ## BTZ Chain and BICOIN: the future of time as a measure URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-btz-chain-and-bicoin/ Idioma: en Descrição: Bairo Gonzalez's vision for BTZ Chain and BICOIN: a network where truth is the validator and human time is the yardstick. A vision, not an offer or price. Everything you buy is, deep down, paid for with the same thing: hours of a life that don't come back. ### Today BTZ Chain is a hybrid blockchain, proposed by Bairo to integrate artificial intelligence and proof of human life. The idea is for it to work as a validator: recording what really happened and distinguishing a person's action from a machine's. The network's governance currency is BICOIN (BTZ), conceived as the currency of the ecosystem's many artificial intelligences, which use the network to record and coordinate their work. The project's yardstick is "1 BTZ = 1 minute of human life". It's a yardstick of purpose, not a price. BICOIN doesn't appear here as an investment: no one needs to buy anything to understand the idea, and it promises no appreciation. For October 1, 2026, at 14:20, Bairo announced a test transfer on the network, as a symbolic milestone. In Brazil, virtual assets fall under the Central Bank's new rules (Resolutions 519, 520 and 521), and no compliance is claimed without a legal opinion. ### The pain he saw Bairo has lost everything more than once. And, each time he lost, he realized that what hurt wasn't the money. It was the time. The years devoted to a business his partners took. The late nights for a company that went under. The people who depended on him when the ground opened up. Money can be recovered. Time can't. That was the calculation that made him look at everything differently. In 1983, Steve Jobs asked for the Macintosh to boot ten seconds faster, arguing that ten seconds multiplied by millions of people added up to entire lifetimes. Bairo takes that calculation seriously: if time is the most valuable thing a person has, why is it the only thing no system records? And there's a second pain, a newer one. In a world of artificial intelligences, how do you know there's a person on the other side? How do you know what's true? ### The future he sees 2030. He imagines BTZ Chain as a registry office that never sleeps, for a world in which humans and machines work side by side. Every delivery recorded, every real transaction of the ecosystem's economy noted in a way no one can rewrite. He imagines that proof of humanity, the "a person was here", becomes as important as a signature once was. Researchers and builders all over the world are already debating this problem, and he wants to be in the conversation. 2040. In the future Bairo describes, artificial intelligences have work to do and need a common language to coordinate that work. He sees BICOIN as that language: the network's currency, in which every unit recalls that, at the beginning of everything, there was human time. It's an old idea in new clothes. Since 1980, Edgar Cahn's time banks have traded an hour of service for an hour of service. Bairo proposes a next chapter of that story. 2050. On the long horizon, he imagines an economy in which truth is the validator. In which a health record, a land title, a harvest, a diploma carry proof that they're real. In which a person's time is respected because it's measured, and measured because it's sacred. He calls BTZ Chain the veins of the ecosystem. Veins decide nothing. They just carry life to where it needs to go. None of this is a promise of value. It's an idea about what ought to be valued. ### What this changes in a person's life Imagine Ana, who spent fifteen years caring for her mother. No résumé records it. No system knows that she changed diapers, gave medicines, held a hand in the hospital for nights on end. To the world, those were fifteen years "out of the market". In the future Bairo imagines, time devoted to caring leaves a trace. Not a price, a recognition. Every hour devoted to someone is recorded as an hour lived, and a community that values care can see it. Ana doesn't earn a fortune. She gains something money never gave her: proof that that time existed and mattered. ### To go deeper - Folklore.org: "Saving Lives", by Andy Hertzfeld (https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html) - TimeBanks.Org: the history of time banks (https://www.timebanks.org/timebanks-org-history) - Vitalik Buterin, "What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?" (2023) (https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/07/24/biometric.html) - BIS, Annual Economic Report 2025, ch. III (https://www.bis.org/publ/arpdf/ar2025e3.htm) - What does 1 BTZ = 1 minute of life mean? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-1-btz-1-minute-of-life-means/) - Is BICOIN an investment? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/is-bicoin-an-investment/) - Vision of the future (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/vision-of-the-future/) --- ## What SETI's Water Hole is — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/what-is-setis-water-hole/ Idioma: en Descrição: The Water Hole is the radio band between hydrogen (1420 MHz) and hydroxyl (1662 MHz), proposed in 1971 by Bernard Oliver as a cosmic meeting point. On the savanna, when drought sets in, all the animals end up in the same place: the watering hole. The lion and the zebra, the elephant and the bird. Not because they agreed to, but because all of them need water, and all of them know where it is. In 1971, an engineer looked at the radio spectrum and asked whether the universe might have its own watering hole. ### A serious question The idea of searching for signals from other civilizations took scientific shape in 1959, when physicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison published a paper in the journal Nature proposing to listen near the hydrogen line, 1420 MHz. The reasoning was simple: any civilization that studied the sky would know that signal, because hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. In 1960, Frank Drake made the first organized attempt, Project Ozma, pointing an antenna at two nearby stars. He heard silence. The search, which later took the name SETI, for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, had begun. ### The cosmic watering hole In 1971, NASA brought engineers and scientists together in Project Cyclops, a study of what a large listening system would look like. There, Bernard Oliver, an engineer who had led research at Hewlett-Packard and who would later head NASA's SETI program, drew attention to a special stretch of the spectrum. On one side, at 1420 MHz, is the hydrogen line, H. On the other, near 1662 MHz, are the hydroxyl lines, OH. Together, H and OH make H₂O: water. Oliver named the interval between them the water hole. The name is a pun on the place where, in nature, species meet. The question and answer that sum up the idea are attributed to him: "Where shall we meet our neighbors? At the water-hole, where species have always gathered." ### Why it's quiet there The pun is beautiful, but the choice also has a physical reason. The band lies in a region of the spectrum called the microwave window, where natural noise is minimal. Below it, the radio hiss of the galaxy itself dominates. Above it, the noise inherent to the receivers themselves and absorption by the atmosphere increase. Between the two noises, there is a valley of relative silence. That's where the signals of water are, the molecule on which life, as we know it, depends. For anyone looking for life, few bands would make as much sense. That's why many search programs, including SETI@home, listened in that region. To this day, no confirmed signal from another civilization has been found. The question remains open. Sources: SETI League, what is the Water Hole (http://www.setileague.org/general/waterhol.htm) · Water hole (radio) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_hole_(radio)) · Project Cyclops (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cyclops) · Sky & Telescope, Project Ozma (https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/project-ozma-the-first-seti/) ### In Bairo's view Bairo is enchanted by the idea that, for scientists, the most likely meeting place for beings who have never seen each other is the silence near hydrogen and water. Not a shout. A quiet valley, where someone listens. He calls 1420 MHz the frequency of silence and, in his faith, that's where one can find one's God. The image of the watering hole speaks to that: a place where everyone ends up going, each with their own thirst, without needing to belong to the same herd. For him, the faith that counts doesn't exclude. Whoever comes to the watering hole is welcome. And here, the usual rule: for Bairo, 1420 is a symbol. SETI's search listens, and he only listens too. No one transmits on 1420 MHz. ### For you Every life thirsts for something. For meaning, for rest, for company, for a second chance. The Water Hole suggests a way to find what you're looking for: go to where your thirst and other people's cross. Those who seek meaning usually find, in the same place, other people seeking too. A group, a frank conversation, a pause in silence. And it suggests something else: sometimes the meeting doesn't happen right away. Drake heard silence in 1960, and more than sixty years later the search goes on. Persisting doesn't guarantee an answer. It's the only way to be there if it comes. ### Read also - The 21 cm yardstick (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-21-cm-yardstick/) - Frank Drake and the silence of 1420 MHz (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/frank-drake-and-the-silence-of-1420-mhz/) - April 8: Project Ozma listens to the stars (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/april-8-project-ozma-listens-to-the-stars/) - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) - Manifesto 14:20 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/milestone-1420/) - April 15: the hydrogen line predicted on paper (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/april-15-the-hydrogen-line-predicted-on-paper/) - March 25: the day hydrogen was heard (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/march-25-the-day-hydrogen-was-heard/) --- ## SOSPROCESSOS: what it is and why it matters — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ventures/sosprocessos-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/ Idioma: en Descrição: SOSPROCESSOS, founded by Bairo Gonzalez, is AI legal analysis led by a lawyer: the whole case file read, with facts, rulings and scenarios. SOSPROCESSOS is a legal analysis system with artificial intelligence, founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, that reads the case file, gathers public rulings and builds defense scenarios for the lawyer, who is always the one leading the case, and that connects people with licensed lawyers. ### The pain behind it Bairo knows what it is like to be on the weaker side of a system you don't understand. In his first years in Brazil, without documents in hand and afraid, he knew the loneliness of someone who doesn't know their own rights or whom to ask. The sentence that sums up that time is his: the sun is for everyone, but shade, in the heat, is for the few. Later, after going broke with many people depending on him, he learned the other side: how hard it is to be well defended when there is no money left for anything. The quality of a defense, he realized, usually depends on the size of the law firm the family can afford. SOSPROCESSOS was born to shorten that distance. Not to replace the lawyer, but so that an ordinary family's lawyer has in hand the same level of reading and research that only large firms used to have. ### How it works, in plain words Imagine a case file with thousands of pages and a single lawyer, with a tight deadline. - A complete reading. A team of artificial intelligence agents reads the case file from end to end and builds a map of the facts, each with the page and document it came from. - Facts by color. What has a document goes in as green. What is only an allegation, as yellow. What has not been checked stays red and is not used. - Rulings with number and link. The research goes to the official databases of the courts and of the National Council of Justice. A precedent without a number, reporting judge and link does not go in. - How each judge tends to rule. The system studies public rulings in similar cases, so the defense can speak to the judge in terms of what that judge has already written. - An attack before the courtroom. Before any argument moves forward, an agent plays the prosecution and tries to knock it down. What survives goes to the lawyer. - The lawyer decides. The one who signs, meets the client and answers for the strategy is always a professional registered with the Brazilian Bar Association (OAB). The system also brings people closer to lawyers, within the OAB's rules on advertising and client solicitation, and lets lawyers provide support to other firms, with analysis, filings and court follow-up. ### For those who cannot pay Bairo also designs SOSPROCESSOS for those who have never had access to a law firm. The idea is that ordinary people find, in language they understand, clear information about the path of their problem, and reach the right professional without spending what they don't have. The system was created by CLAIN, the ecosystem's agent orchestrator, and works in five stages: - Triage. The person tells what happened, and the system identifies the area of law, the documents they need to gather and whether a deadline is running, which is what most often makes someone lose a right. - Analysis. The agents read the case documents and separate what has proof from what is only an allegation. - Scenario prediction. Based on public rulings in similar cases, the system estimates possible scenarios for the lawyer to assess. It is an estimate, never a promise of an outcome. - Follow-up. The progress of the case is tracked, and the person and the lawyer are notified when something changes or when a deadline approaches. - Classification. Facts, documents and rulings are classified and organized, so that nothing important gets lost among thousands of pages. The limit is clear and is part of the design: the system informs and organizes, it does not replace a lawyer. Legal advice and defense are activities reserved to lawyers under the OAB Statute (Law 8.906/1994), and those who cannot pay have the right to the Public Defender's Office, to which the system can also point the way. ### Who it is for - Lawyers and small firms, who serve most families and have no research team. - Families, through the lawyer they chose, who need a defense built with all the material in the case. - Law firms that need support from other lawyers in another city, for analysis, filings and court follow-up. ### The market The volume of Brazil's justice system is hard to imagine. The Judiciary ended 2025 with 75.5 million cases pending and received 40.9 million new cases in the year, the largest volume in the historical series that began in 2009, according to the Justice in Numbers 2026 report by the National Council of Justice (CNJ (https://www.cnj.jus.br/justica-em-numeros-2026-estoque-de-processos-cai-em-ano-de-maior-demanda-da-serie-historica/)). The courts also set a productivity record, with 45.2 million cases closed. Demand is growing, and those on the other side of the counter need tools that are up to the task. At the same time, artificial intelligence has arrived in the work of organizations. According to Stanford University's AI Index 2025, 78% of organizations said they used AI in 2024, compared with 55% the year before (Stanford HAI (https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report)). The trend is for the question to shift from "is it worth using AI?" to "can you defend someone without having read everything the case file and the courts have already said?". ### Where it stands today SOSPROCESSOS is in development and started with criminal law. The analysis method runs inside the ecosystem's infrastructure, as a cell of agents coordinated by CLAIN. There is no public website yet. No outcome is promised, because no case has a certain outcome. What the system proposes is something else: that the defense be built with everything the case contains, and not only with what there was time to read. ### Why it scales and why it matters The method is the same in any case: read, map, attack yourself and converge. The most expensive part, reading and research, is done by agents; the lawyer comes in where only the lawyer can, at the decision. By swapping the knowledge base, the same design serves labor law, tax law, family law. It was here, in fact, that the cell model CLAIN replicates across the other fronts was born. The revenue model envisioned respects the profession's ethics: a usage license for lawyers and firms, and never a share of fees or a charge per referred client. Why does it matter? Because justice that depends on the size of the law firm is half a justice. Bairo imagines a country in which a family with someone in prison, or with an eviction suit at the door, has through its lawyer the same depth of reading a large client would have. It is a vision, and every step of it will depend on the lawyers who use it. ### Bairo's role Bairo is the founder of SOSPROCESSOS. He designed the idea out of his own experience of having been without a defense and without a network, and set the rule that doesn't change: the machine reads and researches, the person decides. The choice to start with the hardest kind of case, criminal law, where every week of waiting costs a job, income and family, is also his. ### Read also - SOSPROCESSOS: the future of legal defense within everyone's reach (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-sosprocessos/) - Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/), the chapter of the years without footing - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) - The ventures (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-ventures/) - Official website: not yet published --- ## How to use AI on your phone, by voice and with photos URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-on-your-phone-by-voice-and-photo/ Idioma: en Descrição: Install the official app, speak instead of typing and send photos of papers, signs and products. The phone has become the easiest way into AI. The phone is now the simplest way to use artificial intelligence. The best-known assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot) have apps for Android and iPhone, and several of them let you talk by voice, as on a call, and send a photo to ask about it: a note from your child's school, a sign in another language, a product label, an electricity bill. For people who struggle to type or to read long texts, this is the way in. You don't need an expensive device. You need space for the app, an internet connection and a few minutes to learn how to ask. ### Why AI is not a chatbot When you talk to AI by voice, it becomes clear that it isn't the "press 1" robot. It understands loose sentences, starts over when you change your mind, explains it another way when you say you didn't understand. In Bairo's view, AI is an extension of you: of your eyes when you photograph something you can't read, of your voice when you need to talk to someone in another language, of your memory when you ask it to remember. In his words, "artificial intelligence is an extension of the human, not the problem." ### Step by step today - Download only from the official store (Google Play or the App Store) and check the name of the company responsible: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or Microsoft. Copycat apps abound. - Log in and adjust permissions. The app will ask for the microphone and camera. Allow them only if you'll use them, and remember you can turn them off later in your phone's settings. - Try voice conversation. Look for the microphone or sound-wave icon. Speak normally, as you would to a person. Ask, for example: I'm at the supermarket and I have 80 reais for the week. It's me and two children. Help me put together a basic list, with breakfast, lunch and dinner, prioritizing what stretches furthest. - Use the camera to understand paperwork. Photograph a notice, a medicine leaflet, a bill or a contract (cover ID numbers first) and ask: Explain this paper in simple language. What is it asking me to do, what's the deadline and what happens if I do nothing? - Translate conversations. When traveling, at work or with neighbors from another country, ask the AI to translate what you say and read the reply aloud. - Create reminders and lists by speaking. After an appointment, a meeting or a class, say what you remember and ask for an organized summary: I'm going to say everything I remember from today's meeting. Organize it into: what was decided, what I need to do and by when. - Save battery and data. Voice conversations and photo uploads use more data. On a prepaid plan, prefer using them on Wi-Fi. - Teach someone in your family. Whoever learns by teaching learns twice. Parents and grandparents tend to get along very well with voice conversation. ### How Bairo did it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez arrived in Brazil in 2002, from Colombia, and knows what it is to live in a country whose language is not yet entirely your own. Perhaps that's why one of the fronts he founded, Xperienc, proposes an instant translator, Global Language, so that patients and health professionals can each speak in their own language. The technical foundation of that story began at home. He says he spent six months in front of the computer, without knowing how to code, building with the tools of his own time. Out of that came the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness. What now fits in anyone's pocket is, for him, the same bridge: technology that reaches out to those who used to be left out. ### Precautions Your phone is always with you, and that calls for more care: don't photograph documents with numbers showing, don't leave the microphone on during other people's conversations, check in an official source what the AI says about deadlines and rights, use the explanation of a leaflet or a test result only to arrive better prepared at the doctor's, and remember that the tool can get a translation wrong or carry prejudices without noticing. ### Read also - How to teach older people to use artificial intelligence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-grandmother-who-learned-to-talk-to-the-machine/) - How to start using artificial intelligence today (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-start-using-artificial-intelligence-today/) - The path (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) --- ## CLAIN and 1420mhz: the future of claiming your own version URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-clain-and-1420mhz/ Idioma: en Descrição: Bairo Gonzalez's vision for CLAIN and 1420mhz.org: coordinated niche AI agents, so that anyone can claim their best version. There's a frequency on which the whole world agreed not to speak. Bairo took from it the name of a place to listen. ### Today CLAIN is the artificial intelligence agent orchestrator that links the ventures of the ecosystem. Instead of one AI trying to know everything, it coordinates specialist agents, each in its own niche: agribusiness, health, law, data protection. Each agent's result goes back to a person, who decides. The name comes from claim: to claim what is yours. 1420mhz.org is the portal for this work, linked to Instituto CEASA, which Bairo defines as a channel of communication and elevation. The number comes from the hydrogen line, 1420.405751768 MHz, the frequency radio astronomy uses to listen to the universe and which international agreements protect from any emission. For Bairo, it's a symbol: the silence where one listens. No one transmits on 1420 MHz, not even him. On October 1, 2026, he announced the goal of the CLAIN protocol: to reach a minimum of 142 niche AIs in 142 days. ### The pain he saw While building the ecosystem, Bairo hit a wall that everyone working with AI knows: artificial intelligence consumes tokens, and tokens are expensive. The most capable tools in the world existed, but access to them had the price of a club's door. Those who most needed help were precisely those who could least afford it. And there was an older pain, his own. The man who had lost everything, with many people depending on him, who decided not to complain. Who swapped complaining for action. When the time came to name the brain of the ecosystem, he swapped one word for another: claim, instead of complain. In his vision, anyone can claim a new beginning of their best version. ### The future he sees 2030. He imagines hundreds of small intelligences, each a specialist in a concrete human pain. One that helps the market trader price goods. Another that explains a summons. Another that supports someone caring for an elderly person. None trying to be everything. All coordinated by CLAIN, like musicians playing different instruments under the same conductor, and all handing the decision back to a person. 2040. In the future Bairo describes, these intelligences work together all the time, and the cost of using them falls until it stops being a barrier. He sees CLAIN as the brain of the ecosystem: not the owner of decisions, but the place where information meets and makes sense. And he sees 1420mhz as the public square of this conversation, where people discuss, calmly, what these intelligences should and shouldn't do. 2050. On the long horizon, he imagines a time when talking to a specialist intelligence will be as common as turning on a tap. The challenge, then, will stop being technical and become human: what each person decides to do with all this help. That's where the symbol of silence returns. In a world full of artificial voices, he believes the rarest skill will be knowing how to stop, listen and choose. The industry uses the term artificial general intelligence for the hypothesis of machines as versatile as a person. Bairo speaks of it as a research horizon, not as something done. What he builds today are niche intelligences, in the service of people. ### What this changes in a person's life Imagine Cláudio, fifty-three, laid off eight months ago and ashamed to ask for help. He knows he needs to reorganize his debts, understand a contract, maybe open a small business. He doesn't know where to start and has no money to pay three consultants. In the future Bairo imagines, Cláudio talks with CLAIN one Sunday night. Not with one agent, with several: one that organizes the debts, another that explains the contract in plain language, another that shows what it takes to open a business in his city. In the end, the answer isn't an order. It's a map, and the map says when he needs to talk to a real person, and with whom. Cláudio didn't get a new life. He got a starting point. And, for someone who had been stuck for eight months, a starting point is a whole life. ### To go deeper - What the hydrogen line (21 cm) is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_line) - Stanford HAI: human-centered artificial intelligence (https://hai.stanford.edu/about) - International AI Safety Report (https://internationalaisafetyreport.org/) - What CLAIN is (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-clain/) - Why the project is called 1420 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/why-the-project-is-called-1420/) - The goal of 142 AIs in 142 days (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/goal-of-142-ais-in-142-days/) - Vision of the future (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/vision-of-the-future/) --- ## Body, soul and spirit in the hydrogen yardstick URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/body-soul-and-spirit-in-the-hydrogen-yardstick/ Idioma: en Descrição: Where physics sees a proton, an electron and the flip between them, Bairo sees body, soul and spirit. His spiritual reading, beside exact science. There are two ancient ways of looking at the human being, and they rarely sit at the same table. One asks what we are made of. It answers with atoms, cells, energy, and measures everything with instruments. The other asks who we are. It answers with words like soul and spirit, and measures everything with life. This page sets the two side by side, without confusing one with the other. ### What physics sees The ordinary hydrogen atom has three things to tell. A proton, at the center. It's almost all of the atom's mass: about 1,836 times heavier than the electron. It's what gives weight, what stays. An electron, around it. Extremely light, bound to the proton by electrical attraction. It has an orientation of its own, the spin, which can be aligned with the proton's or opposite to it. And the flip. When the electron's spin reverses relative to the proton's, the atom releases a radio wave of 1420.405751768 MHz, about 21 cm long. That wave leaves the atom and travels. It can cross the entire galaxy and arrive, thousands of years later, at an antenna here. It was this wave that scientists chose as the yardstick to measure a human being on the plaque of the Pioneer probes: eight times 21 cm, the height of a woman. ### What the ancient text says In the Christian tradition, the idea that the human being is body, soul and spirit appears in a sentence of the apostle Paul, in the first letter to the Thessalonians. In the King James Version: "And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." (1 Thessalonians 5:23) Christians themselves read this verse in different ways: some see three parts in the human being, some see two, some see a single whole described by three names. Other traditions speak of other parts, with other words. And many people see no part at all beyond the body. All these readings deserve respect. Sources: Hydrogen line (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_line) · Pioneer plaque (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque) · 1 Thessalonians 5:23, Almeida Corrigida Fiel (Portuguese) (https://www.bibliaonline.com.br/acf/1ts/5/23) ### In Bairo's view Where physics sees a proton, an electron and the flip between them, Bairo sees body, soul and spirit. He calls it the 21 cm yardstick. It's his spiritual reading, and that's how it appears here: an image of faith, not a discovery of science. No laboratory has ever measured a soul. It's easy to understand why the image moves him, piece by piece. The proton is the body. What weighs, what sustains, what stays in place. Without it, there is no atom. The electron is the soul. Light, in motion, bound to the body without being the body. It's the one with a direction, and it's the one that, at some moment, turns. A soul, too, can spend a whole life oriented one way and, in an instant, reverse: repentance, decision, conversion, a fresh start. And the flip is the spirit. What is born from that turn and doesn't stay trapped in the atom. It leaves, travels, crosses the darkness and reaches far, to whoever is listening. For Bairo, the most beautiful part is that the three only make sense together. The flip doesn't exist without the electron, and the electron has nowhere to turn without the proton. In his faith, the human being is like that: body, soul and spirit in one single thing. And he believes the God he loves dwells in that whole, to the point that the two become one, as told in The God of the impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/). ### For you You don't need to accept this reading to use it as a mirror. Ask yourself, honestly, how the three parts are doing. The body, which carries everything and is almost never heard: have you been sleeping, eating, resting? The soul, your direction, your choices: is it pointing where you want to go, or where others pointed? And what comes out of you, what reaches others: what have you been emitting into the world? A small turn, in the right place, can cross a galaxy. Sometimes it's all that's missing. ### Read also - The 21 cm yardstick (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-21-cm-yardstick/) - The Pioneer plaque and hydrogen (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/the-pioneer-plaque-and-hydrogen/) - All things are possible to him that believeth (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/all-things-are-possible-to-him-that-believeth/) - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) - Manifesto 14:20 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/milestone-1420/) - Frank Drake and the silence of 1420 MHz (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/frank-drake-and-the-silence-of-1420-mhz/) - April 15: the hydrogen line predicted on paper (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/april-15-the-hydrogen-line-predicted-on-paper/) - March 25: the day hydrogen was heard (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/march-25-the-day-hydrogen-was-heard/) --- ## CEASA Bank: what it is and why it matters — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ventures/ceasa-bank-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/ Idioma: en Descrição: CEASA Bank is the financial platform for agribusiness founded by Bairo Gonzalez for those who buy and sell food at Brazil's wholesale food markets. CEASA Bank is a financial platform for agribusiness, founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, that brings AI-assisted pricing, fast invoicing, means of payment and credit to those who buy and sell food at Brazil's wholesale food markets, operating on the infrastructure of an authorized institution. ### The pain behind it Bairo knows from the inside what it feels like to work and not exist on paper. When he arrived in Brazil, in 2002, and decided to follow his own path, he found himself without documents in hand, far from home and afraid. Years later, broke and with many people depending on him, he learned the second lesson: whoever can't prove what they've done can't get credit to start over. Those two memories met at the wholesale food markets. There he saw people who feed entire cities and remain invisible to the financial system. The producer who delivers a full load and gets paid in thirty days, on a handshake. The stallholder who moves more in a week than many small businesses move in a month and, even so, has no track record a credit analyst would recognize. He says he spent six months at home, in front of the computer, building the foundation of the platform. When he went to the banks, he was told no: they refused to integrate the solution. Bairo turned that no into a project. If no one wanted to open the door, he would build the door. ### How it works, in plain words Picture a stall at a wholesale food market at five in the morning. CEASA Bank was designed to fit there, on the phone of the person working it. - A reference price before negotiating. A niche artificial intelligence organizes market data and suggests a price range. The producer or the trader decides. - Invoicing in minutes. The sale becomes an invoice, designed to be issued in under five minutes. - Account, card and card reader. Payment services offered on the infrastructure of an authorized institution, in the model the market calls banking as a service. - Harvest-linked credit and a digital document vault, as next steps. Every recorded sale becomes a line of history. Over time, the notebook of IOUs turns into a financial portrait that belongs to the person who worked to write it. Underneath it all, the platform speaks the international language of payment messages, the ISO 20022 standard, and connects to BTZ Chain, the ecosystem's record network. ### How it works, step by step Bairo describes the journey of a buyer, from any country, who wants to take home a load of Brazilian food. There are six steps. - The front door. The CEASA Bank address was not conceived as one more search engine. In Bairo's idea, it is the front door to the world of agribusiness: whoever arrives there is already inside the market, talking to those who produce and those who sell. - The price, with a source. An artificial intelligence agent shows the product's reference price based on up-to-date data from the wholesale food markets and from Conab, the national food supply company, which publishes the Ceasas' price quotes. The agent shows the number and where it came from. The people close the deal. - Verification, freight and lead time. Before the proposal, the platform checks the product, the quantity and the documentation, calculates export freight to the destination and states the delivery time. - Quote and invoice in minutes. With everything checked, the quote becomes an invoice, the commercial invoice for the load. The product's goal is for this path, from question to invoice, to take less than five minutes. - Account and payment. Opening an account in the customer's country and paying the invoice, by bank deposit or by stable digital currencies, the so-called stablecoins, are planned, operating with authorized institutions in each country. CEASA Bank does not hold anyone's money on its own account: that part belongs to those authorized to do it. - The producer gets paid and ships. Once payment is confirmed, the producer gets paid and the load heads to its destination. The sale is recorded, with a date, and starts telling the financial story of whoever sold. What today takes days of phone calls, spreadsheets and middlemen fits, in this proposal, into a single conversation. It is the same logic as the stall at five in the morning, now open to whoever buys from the other side of the world. ### For the producer On the other side of the invoice is the person who plants. For them, Bairo designed a set of tools that goes beyond receiving payment. - Harvest prediction. Agricultural prediction models cross-check weather, production history and market behavior to estimate scenarios for the next harvest. It is an estimate, not a guarantee: it helps the producer decide with more information when to plant, how much to store and when to sell. - Funding without pledging their assets. The proposal is that the producer can seek funding based on the digital representation of real assets linked to their production, what the market calls real-world asset tokenization, without having to offer their own land or the family home as collateral. Each operation depends on its own legal structure and on an institution authorized to grant credit. - Machinery. Financing for machinery and equipment is part of the platform's design, also through authorized institutions. - Dashboards and agents. Dashboards show sales, receipts and prices in one place, and artificial intelligence agents help the producer and the trader organize the day: who bought, who still has to pay, what price the market is charging. - Cashback in BICOIN, as loyalty. Those who buy and sell through the platform get back a portion in BICOIN, to use within the ecosystem, for example on the artificial intelligence services. It is a loyalty program: BICOIN, here, is a unit of use, with no promised price and no invitation to buy. The safekeeping of digital currencies, custody, is also planned, operating with authorized institutions in each country. ### Who it is for - Rural producers, small and medium-sized, who sell at the wholesale markets and need to get paid quickly and prove what they sell. - Stallholders and traders at the markets, who still depend on paper, cash and middlemen. - Agro-industries and buyers, such as supermarkets, restaurants and distributors, who want transparent prices and organized invoicing. - Those who buy and sell across borders, as operations outside Brazil move forward. ### The market Brazil's wholesale food markets are among the country's biggest food counters. In 2025, the 54 Ceasas tracked by Conab, the national food supply company, sold 16.6 million tonnes of fruit and vegetables and moved R$68.7 billion, according to the Prohort program (Conab, July 2026 (https://www.gov.br/conab/pt-br/assuntos/noticias/comercializacao-de-frutas-e-de-hortalicas-nas-ceasas-brasileiras-totalizam-16-6-milhoes-de-toneladas-em-2025)). Volume fell 0.82% from 2024, due to the weather, and value stayed on that scale. Around them there is an even larger economy. Brazil's agribusiness GDP reached R$3.20 trillion in 2025, 25.13% of the national economy, up 12.2% in the year, according to Cepea-Esalq/USP and CNA (Cepea (https://cepea.org.br/br/releases/pib-agro-cepea-pib-do-agronegocio-cresce-expressivos-12-em-2025.aspx)). Credit is large too: the 2025/2026 Plano Safra, the federal harvest plan, allocated R$516.2 billion to commercial agriculture (Agência Gov (https://agenciagov.ebc.com.br/noticias/202507/governo-federal-lanca-plano-safra-2025-2026-com-r-516-2-bilhoes-para-impulsionar-o-agro-brasileiro)). The problem has never been a lack of money in the system. It is the road between that money and the person at the counter. Worldwide, 79% of adults already have an account, but 1.3 billion still do not, according to the World Bank's Global Findex 2025 (World Bank (https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/globalfindex)). The trend is clear: payment is moving to the phone, and whoever is left out falls further and further behind. ### Where it stands today What already exists: - The CEASA Bank brand is operated in Brazil by a company that has been running since 2019, of which Bairo is administrator. - In 2026, Bairo set up a related company in London, CEASA Financial, of which he is director and controlling owner. - Bairo says an operation in Bolivia is being set up. What still depends on confirmation is which modules (pricing, invoicing, account, card, card reader, credit and vault) already serve customers and which are being rolled out. Until then, the correct reading is that of a platform being rolled out. "Bank" is part of the brand name: the company does not present itself as a bank operating under Central Bank authorization, and accounts and payments fall under the rules of the partner institution. ### Why it scales and why it matters The thesis fits in one sentence: the sales data can be the collateral the small producer never had. Whoever proves what they sell, day after day, no longer depends on whom they know to be served. Scale comes from geography. There are wholesale food markets in almost every country, and they concentrate many people at a few addresses, which makes reaching each customer cheaper. The same package can serve a market in São Paulo or one in Bolivia, with the technology licensed by the related company in London and each operation answering to its own country's regulator. And it comes from the ecosystem's design. CEASA Bank is the gateway to the real economy: it is where the concrete transaction happens, before being recorded on BTZ Chain and meeting the other fronts, from health to food. The revenues envisioned for it are classic, such as fees, payment rates and interest on credit, and do not depend on the price of any token. Why does it matter? Because food is in a hurry. A tomato doesn't wait for the bank to open. Those who feed the country deserve to be served at the pace they work. This is a vision, and he insists on saying it that way: the platform still has to prove, market by market, that it delivers what it proposes. ### Bairo's role Bairo is the founder of CEASA Bank. He designed the idea and says that, in the six months he spent at home, he built the platform and the artificial intelligence on top of the company that had existed since 2019: his own technology (artificial intelligence, messaging under the ISO 20022 standard, blockchain and tokenization of real-world assets), leaving the regulated part to those authorized to run it. He answers for the company in Brazil as administrator and, in the United Kingdom, as director of a related company registered in London. For him, the platform answers two refusals at once: the one the producer hears every day and the one he himself heard from the banks. Both, by his yardstick, are the same thing. A no that hasn't become a yes yet. ### Read also - CEASA Bank: the future of food changing hands (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-ceasa-bank/) - Is CEASA Bank a bank? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/is-ceasa-bank-a-bank/) - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/), the chapter of the six months at home - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) - The ventures (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-ventures/) - Official website: ceasabank.com.br (https://ceasabank.com.br) --- ## How to use AI to start a business from scratch URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-to-start-a-business-from-scratch/ Idioma: en Descrição: Use AI to test the idea, get to know the customer, do the math and draft the first plan. The decision and the risk are still yours. Artificial intelligence can greatly shorten the road between having an idea and opening a business. It helps turn the dream into concrete questions, imagine who the customer would be, put together the basic numbers, list the documents needed to open and write the first promotional material. What it doesn't do is take the risk away from you: you are the one who tests the idea on the street, talks to real customers and signs the contract. Think of AI as a partner who works through the night, never tires of silly questions and isn't afraid to say the numbers don't add up, as long as you ask. ### Why AI is not a chatbot For someone about to open a business, a chatbot is that tool you install to answer customers. The AI this text is about is something else: it thinks with you before there's even a customer. In Bairo's view, "AI is not a chatbot, but an extension of your consciousness." For entrepreneurs, he puts it in practical terms: AI extends your ability to plan, calculate and write, but the courage to begin can't be outsourced. ### Step by step today - Write the idea in one sentence and ask the AI to take it apart: My business idea is: [describe it in 2 or 3 lines]. I live in [city/neighborhood] and I have about [amount] to start. Play the part of an honest consultant and tell me: who would the customer be, what problem do I solve, who already does this near me and what are the 5 biggest risks of this idea. - Turn the risks into cheap tests. Ask: "For each risk, suggest a test I can do in one week, spending almost nothing." Example: selling to order before renting a storefront. - Prepare the questions for talking to customers. AI doesn't replace a real conversation, but it gets you ready: I want to talk to 10 potential customers without trying to sell anything. Write 8 open questions to find out whether they really have this problem, how much they pay today to solve it and what annoys them. - Do the math. List fixed costs, costs per unit and price. Ask for a table and the break-even point, which is how much you need to sell each month not to lose money. Check every number on a calculator. - Understand formalization. Ask what's needed to open as an MEI or as a company in your case, then confirm on the Entrepreneur Portal (gov.br) and with an accountant. Rules and limits change. - Create the name and the first introduction. Ask for ten name options, check whether the name is already registered at INPI and whether the social media handle is free. - Write the 90-day plan: Based on everything we've discussed, put together a 90-day plan broken into weeks, with at most 3 tasks per week, so that I can test this business while spending as little as possible. - Go back to the AI every week with what actually happened. A good plan is one that changes with what the street teaches. ### How Bairo did it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez opened and lost many businesses before the attempt that worked. A salon with his partner, a hair-treatment course, a natural cosmetics brand, events and digital printing. He says that, years ago, he wanted to bring artificial intelligence into one of those businesses, was told it wouldn't work and gave up. The technology became a trend later. On the seventh attempt, AI stopped being a postponed dream. He spent six months at home, in front of the computer, without knowing how to code, building with the tools of his own time. Out of those months came the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness. When the banks refused to integrate the solution, he used the no as ground, as he always had. ### Precautions AI helps you think through the business, but it doesn't know your neighborhood or the latest laws: check everything about taxes, licenses and contracts with an accountant or lawyer; don't paste customer data or spreadsheets with personal information; be wary of market figures without a source (it can invent statistics); and remember that it tends to repeat what's common, so ideas from people who break the mold can look "risky" just because they're different. ### Read also - How to validate a business idea (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-validate-a-business-idea/) - How to write a business plan with AI (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-write-a-business-plan-with-ai/) - Building a business (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) --- ## qrqbits: the future of what is yours alone — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-qrqbits/ Idioma: en Descrição: Bairo Gonzalez's vision for qrqbits: files, images, audio and text protected with post-quantum cryptography, so that what is intimate stays intimate. Every person keeps something they don't want the world to see. A medical test. A letter. The voice of someone who is gone. ### Today qrqbits is the ecosystem's cybersecurity venture: a post-quantum vault. It protects files, images, audio and text with post-quantum cryptography, in layers of protection. In the ecosystem's design, it's the layer that keeps what is private, such as the health records kept in each Xperienc user's dashboard. Official website: qrqbits.org (site under construction). "Post-quantum" has a precise meaning. It isn't quantum technology: it's ordinary cryptography, running on ordinary computers, designed to also withstand the quantum computers of the future. In August 2024, NIST, the US standards institute, published the first standards of this kind (FIPS 203, 204 and 205). How qrqbits works inside is kept private; this page speaks of what it protects and why. ### The pain he saw Bairo has been exposed. He has been without documents in hand, has seen his ideas become other people's businesses, has felt the vulnerability of someone with no way to prove what is theirs. He knows privacy isn't a luxury for those with something to hide. It's the minimum condition for someone to feel whole. And he saw the problem coming. Much sensitive information that travels protected today can be copied now and stored to be opened later, when more powerful machines exist. Specialists call this "harvest now, decrypt later". A medical test from today can be read fifteen years from now. An intimate conversation from today can resurface when no one remembers it anymore. For an ecosystem that deals with health, money and law, that isn't a technical detail. It's the difference between trust and fear. ### The future he sees 2030. He imagines post-quantum protection ceasing to be a subject for specialists and becoming a silent standard, the way the browser padlock did. A person stores the test, the photo, the audio, and doesn't need to understand cryptography to know it's theirs. He sees qrqbits as the skin of the ecosystem: invisible when all goes well, essential all the time. 2040. In the future Bairo describes, when quantum computing matures, there will be two kinds of files in the world: those protected in time and those that weren't. He imagines hospitals, laboratories and families that prepared beforehand, and so get through the change without scares. Instead of chasing the problem, qrqbits is born looking at it. 2050. On the long horizon, he imagines privacy as a right that is lived, not just written. A person decides who sees their medical history, for how long, for what purpose. A family keeps the memories of three generations without fear that they'll be lost or spread. He calls qrqbits the outer pathway of the ecosystem's body: everything that leaves, leaves protected. It's a vision. The technique stays private, as what is still being born should. ### What this changes in a person's life Imagine Luiza, who lost her father last winter. On her phone are thirty-seven voice messages from him: good mornings, recipes, a song sung off-key at a birthday. They're the most valuable things she owns. In the future Bairo imagines, Luiza keeps those messages in a vault designed so that only she can open it, today and twenty years from now, when machines are far more powerful. She decides that, one day, her grandchildren will be able to hear them. And only they. Luiza doesn't think about cryptography. She thinks about her father's voice. And she sleeps knowing it's safe. ### To go deeper - NIST: the first three post-quantum cryptography standards (2024) (https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2024/08/nist-releases-first-3-finalized-post-quantum-encryption-standards) - NIST: what post-quantum cryptography is (https://www.nist.gov/cybersecurity-and-privacy/what-post-quantum-cryptography) - What qrqbits is (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-qrqbits/) - Post-quantum and quantum cryptography: what's the difference (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/post-quantum-vs-quantum-cryptography/) - Vision of the future (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/vision-of-the-future/) --- ## All things are possible to him that believeth (Mark 9:23) URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/all-things-are-possible-to-him-that-believeth/ Idioma: en Descrição: "All things are possible to him that believeth" is in Mark 9:23. The text, the scene in which it was said and what the phrase means to Bairo. Few sentences from the Bible circulate so widely outside it. It's on truck bumpers, on gym walls, in photo captions. And it almost always appears alone, without the scene that gives it weight. The scene matters. Because the sentence wasn't said to a confident hero. It was said to a tired father. ### The text The sentence is in the Gospel of Mark, chapter 9, verse 23. In the King James Version: "Jesus said unto him, If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth." (Mark 9:23) In a modern translation, the English Standard Version, the same passage sounds like this: "And Jesus said to him, 'If you can'! All things are possible for one who believes." ### The scene A man arrives in the middle of a crowd bringing his son. Since childhood the boy has suffered from an affliction that throws him down and leaves him speechless, and the text describes it as a mute spirit. The father had already asked the disciples for help, and they hadn't managed anything. When he finally stands before Jesus, the father no longer asks with certainty. He asks with doubt: "if thou canst do any thing, have compassion on us, and help us" (verse 22). It's to that doubt that Jesus responds. The man had said "if thou canst". The answer hands the "if" back to the one who asked: if thou canst believe. And then comes the next verse, perhaps the most human in the chapter: "And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief." (Mark 9:24, King James Version) Notice what this father does. He doesn't fake a faith he doesn't have. He says both things at once: I believe, and I lack belief. And the text tells that, after this, the boy was lifted by the hand and stood up. Sources: Mark 9:23-24, Almeida Corrigida Fiel (Portuguese) (https://www.bibliaonline.com.br/acf/mc/9/23-25) · Mark 9:23-24, Almeida Revista e Atualizada (Portuguese) (https://www.bibliaonline.com.br/ara/mc/9/23-24) · Mark 9, Almeida Corrigida Fiel (Portuguese) (https://www.bibliaonline.com.br/acf/mc/9) ### In Bairo's view When Bairo says that all things are possible for those who believe, this is the text echoing behind it. The faith that sustains it he found in a Christian congregation, listening to accounts from ordinary people who had come through what seemed to have no way out. That's where he came to believe in the God of the impossible, as told in The God of the impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/). He links this faith to the 21 cm yardstick. In his spiritual reading, hydrogen, the simplest and most abundant element, is an image of a God who is everywhere, and the electron's flip is an image of a life that can turn. It isn't science, and he doesn't present it as science. It's how a man who lost almost everything explains to himself why he got back up. And it's important to say what the phrase is not, even for him. It isn't a promise that everything will work out for everyone. Bairo's story refutes that promise: he fell too many times. For him, all things are possible means the impossible isn't a wall, it's a place not yet reached. Faith opens the door. The step still belongs to the one who walks. ### For you If you believe, verse 24 may be the more useful of the two. You don't need a perfect faith to ask for help. You can come like that father: with tears, saying you believe and that you lack belief. The text doesn't send him away for it. If you don't believe, the scene still has something to say. The father had already tried and it hadn't worked. Even so, he asked again. Persisting after the first refusal, admitting your own doubt out loud, not giving up on your son: none of that requires religion. And notice that the phrase doesn't say everything is easy. It says it's possible. Between the possible and the done, there's always a road to travel, and no one travels it for you. Faith, for those who have it, is the courage to take the first step on it without seeing the end. And if you're in a place where nothing seems possible, don't go through it alone. If the pain has grown too big, in Brazil call 188. CVV answers for free, at any hour. Elsewhere, reach out to your local crisis line. ### Read also - The 21 cm yardstick (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-21-cm-yardstick/) - Body, soul and spirit in the hydrogen yardstick (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/body-soul-and-spirit-in-the-hydrogen-yardstick/) - The voice he follows (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-voice-he-follows/) - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) - Manifesto 14:20 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/milestone-1420/) - Frank Drake and the silence of 1420 MHz (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/frank-drake-and-the-silence-of-1420-mhz/) - April 15: the hydrogen line predicted on paper (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/april-15-the-hydrogen-line-predicted-on-paper/) - March 25: the day hydrogen was heard (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/march-25-the-day-hydrogen-was-heard/) --- ## BTZ Chain and BICOIN: what it is and why it matters URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ventures/btz-chain-and-bicoin-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/ Idioma: en Descrição: BTZ Chain, proposed by Bairo Gonzalez, records what is true and proves there is a real person behind it; BICOIN is its governance coin. No offer. BTZ Chain is a hybrid blockchain proposed by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez to record what is true and prove that there is a real person behind every act, and BICOIN (BTZ) is the governance coin of that network, with the yardstick of purpose "1 BTZ = 1 minute of human life," which is not a price. ### The pain behind it Bairo has rebuilt many things in his life. He made money again after going broke, reopened companies after losing them, rebuilt trust in partners after being left hanging. Only one thing never came back: the time he gave to each of those attempts. It was by looking at that loss that he arrived at the question that drives BTZ Chain. If lifetime is the most valuable thing a person has, why does no system recognize it? In 1983, Steve Jobs asked for the Macintosh to boot ten seconds faster, reasoning that ten seconds multiplied by millions of people added up to entire lifetimes. Bairo takes that arithmetic seriously. And there is a second pain, a newer one that he felt firsthand: a word with no record. Anyone who has helped and been forgotten knows what proof is worth. In a world where machines write, speak and create images, knowing what is true, and whether there is a person on the other side, has become a necessity. ### How it works, in plain words Think of a notebook everyone can check and no one can erase. - A permanent record. BTZ Chain is that notebook: what is written in it stays written, with a date, and cannot be rewritten later. - Machine and person together. "Hybrid," here, means that validation brings two sides together. Artificial intelligence agents help verify a piece of information, and people confirm it. No record with consequences for someone is created by a machine alone. - Proof of humanity. The network was designed to tell a person's act apart from a machine's. - A governance coin. BICOIN is the network's coin, inspired by bitcoin, with a new idea of mining: instead of spending electricity, the proposal is to recognize human lifetime, measured by interaction. It is also the coin designed for the ecosystem's many artificial intelligences to coordinate their work. The yardstick "1 BTZ = 1 minute of human life" is a reminder of what the network exists for. It measures purpose, not market value. ### How the network works, step by step Bairo describes BTZ Chain as a hybrid network in which humans, machines and artificial intelligence work together. In practice, the design has five movements. - A real action happens. A merchant opens a campaign, for example to promote a product, ask for a review or invite people to an event. The person takes the action. - The AIs check. Artificial intelligence agents verify whether the action really happened and whether it was done by a person, not by a bot. This is what Bairo calls consensus of truthfulness: before becoming a record, the information must be confirmed, to block fake content, scams and fraud. - Lifetime becomes mining. In traditional mining, machines spend electricity to validate blocks. In BTZ Chain's proposal, what counts is the time and energy a person devotes to verified actions: it is human participation that moves the network. - The campaign rewards. Those who take part receive BICOIN as a reward, to use within the ecosystem. - Everything is recorded. The action, the validation and the reward are written on the network, with a date, and anyone can check them in the public explorer. ### The gas for artificial intelligences Using artificial intelligence has a cost. Every question answered consumes processing, and the market usually charges for it with monthly subscriptions, paid even when the person barely uses them. Bairo felt that cost while building the ecosystem, and CLAIN was born from it. On BTZ Chain, BICOIN appears as a unit of use, the "gas" that powers the ecosystem's AIs. Instead of paying a subscription, the person uses it as needed, and each service consumes its share. It is the same idea as paying for electricity by what you use, not by the month. BICOIN, here, is a tool of use: this page does not talk about price and does not present it as a financial investment. ### A bridge between networks Today each blockchain speaks its own language, and moving a record from one network to another is still laborious. BTZ Chain was also designed as an orchestrator: a layer that talks to other networks and carries records and requests from one to another. Bairo sums up the idea as "an open finance of blockchains," the same logic that, in the financial system, let a person's data move between institutions with their consent. ### Where to check The network has public infrastructure, and anyone can check it on their own, without trusting anyone: - Public explorer: explorer.btzchain.org (https://explorer.btzchain.org), where you can see the network's blocks, transactions and addresses. - Portal: portal.btzchain.org, with the campaigns and mining. - Genesis Manifesto: portal.btzchain.org/manifesto.html (https://portal.btzchain.org/manifesto.html). The text was written into the contract that gave rise to the network, with its cryptographic fingerprint, and the reader's browser checks that fingerprint directly on the network. - Public RPC: rpc.btzchain.org (https://rpc.btzchain.org), the address through which programs and wallets talk to the network. The network identifier (chain ID) is 14204. ### Who it is for - The ecosystem's fronts, which need to prove facts: the sale recorded on CEASA Bank, the food delivery by Instituto CEASA, the integrity of a health record at Xperienc. - Companies and institutions that deal with documents and decisions that must be verifiable, such as exporters, insurers and hospitals. - Builders of AI agents who need a way to record and coordinate their agents' work. - The community that takes part in the network's governance. ### The market This page does not talk about prices, because BICOIN is not presented as an investment. The market that matters here is another one: the market for trust. The World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2026 ranked misinformation as the second most severe global risk over the next two years, among the most severe for the third year in a row, and pointed to generative artificial intelligence as an accelerator of fabricated content (World Economic Forum (https://www.weforum.org/stories/global-risks/global-risks-2026-top-10-two-and-ten-year-horizon/)). Proving what is true is ceasing to be a technical detail and becoming infrastructure. At the same time, regulators have taken record-keeping technology seriously. The Bank for International Settlements, the BIS, pointed to tokenization on unified ledgers as the basis of the next monetary and financial system, and was tough on digital currencies that fail integrity tests (BIS, 2025 (https://www.bis.org/publ/arpdf/ar2025e3.htm)). In Brazil, Central Bank Resolutions 519, 520 and 521 regulate virtual asset service providers, with a filing deadline of October 30, 2026; in the European Union, the MiCA regulation applies. The trend is toward more rules, and it is within them that the network intends to grow. ### Where it stands today BTZ Chain is in development. On October 1, 2026, at 14:20, Bairo symbolically marked the launch with a BICOIN transfer recorded on the network and with the start of the CLAIN protocol. What can already be checked: on October 2, 2026, the network was live, producing blocks and recording transactions visible in the public explorer, with the RPC responding under identifier 14204. No regulatory compliance is claimed here without a legal opinion. And it is worth saying plainly, in this page's own voice: nothing here is an invitation to purchase, nor a promise that anything will be worth more tomorrow. ### Why it scales and why it matters Any business that needs to prove a fact is a possible user of a record network: within the group, the agribusiness, health, food and real-asset fronts; outside it, anyone who needs to show that a document is intact or that a decision was made by a person. The technology can be licensed country by country, each operation under local rules, and the revenue envisioned comes from services, such as recording, certification and licensing, not from speculation. Why does it matter? Because, as machines do more, what is provably human becomes rarer and more necessary to prove. Just as digital signatures became routine, Bairo imagines proof of humanity becoming part of everyday life. And because the idea behind the yardstick is old and beautiful: since 1980, the time banks created by Edgar Cahn have exchanged one hour of service for one hour. BTZ Chain proposes a new chapter of that story, now with humans and machines working together. He sums up the network in one sentence: a place where time is the value, truth is the validator, and humans and machines work together. It is a vision, told as a vision. ### Bairo's role Bairo proposed BTZ Chain and BICOIN and is the project's founder. The lifetime yardstick is his idea, born of someone who lost years and learned they don't come back. According to the group's design, the technology belongs to the related company registered in London, CEASA Financial Database Technology Infrastructure and Digital Assets Ltd, of which he is director. In the picture he draws of the ecosystem as a body, BTZ Chain is the veins and BICOIN is the blood. Veins decide nothing. They only carry life to where it needs to go. ### Read also - BTZ Chain and BICOIN: the future of time as a measure (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-btz-chain-and-bicoin/) - What does 1 BTZ = 1 minute of life mean? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-1-btz-1-minute-of-life-means/) - Is BICOIN an investment? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/is-bicoin-an-investment/) - Fifty-five years later (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/), the chapter of Jobs's ten seconds - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) - The ventures (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-ventures/) - Official website: btzchain.org (https://btzchain.org) --- ## AI for small businesses: where to use it first URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/ai-for-small-businesses-where-to-start/ Idioma: en Descrição: Customer service, sales, money, inventory and promotion: a map of where AI helps small businesses today, with ready-to-copy requests. Artificial intelligence is already at the counter of Brazilian small businesses. A Sebrae survey conducted between March and May 2026, with more than 7,000 small business owners, found that 52% had used AI in the previous two weeks. The same survey showed the other side: many people still don't use it for lack of knowledge. This text is a map for those who want to start in the right place: the five areas where AI tends to help first, with a ready-made request for each one. Don't try to use it for everything at once. Pick one area, use it for a month, measure the time you saved and only then move on to the next. ### Why AI is not a chatbot For a small business owner, "AI" often sounds like a customer-service robot that annoys customers. But the most valuable use is usually behind the scenes: thinking about prices, organizing numbers, preparing texts, understanding a contract. In Bairo's view, AI is an extension of you, not a robot that speaks in your place. In his words, "artificial intelligence is an extension of the human, not the problem." The customer is still served by someone who knows their name. ### Step by step today 1. Customer service. Put together a script with the questions you answer every day (hours, prices, delivery, returns). The AI organizes it, you review it and use it as a base on WhatsApp: These are the 10 questions my customers ask most: [paste]. Write short, friendly and correct answers, in the tone of a neighborhood business. Mark with [CHECK] anything that depends on me. 2. Sales and promotion. A monthly post calendar, product descriptions, promotion ideas for holidays: I have a [type of business] in [city]. Put together a posting calendar for next month, 3 a week, with a theme, short text and a photo idea I can take myself with my phone. 3. Money. Organizing income and expenses, separating household money from business money, seeing where cash is leaking. Remove names and ID numbers from the spreadsheet before sending: This spreadsheet has my income and expenses for the last 3 months. Group the expenses by type, show the 3 that grew the most and explain, in simple language, where the money is slipping away. 4. Inventory and purchasing. A list of what runs out fastest, suggested quantities, comparing suppliers based on your own notes. 5. Paperwork. Understanding a lease, a notice, a public procurement call. AI explains it in plain language and lists the questions for you to take to your accountant or lawyer. To choose where to start: I have a [type] business, with [number] people working. The tasks that take up most of my time are: [list them]. Rank these tasks by the gain AI can bring and by how easy it is to start. Suggest the first one for me to test for 30 days. If you'd like to learn with support, Sebrae has free content and programs on AI for small businesses. It's worth looking for the one in your city. ### How Bairo did it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez knows small business from the inside. He says he opened a salon with his partner when their daughter was born, created a hair-care course and a natural cosmetics brand. In one of those phases he wanted to use artificial intelligence and augmented reality, was told it wouldn't work and gave up, only to see the same idea become a trend years later. The comeback came later. He spent six months at home, in front of the computer, without knowing how to code, and built the foundation of the platform and the AI of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness designed for those who sell at the wholesale food markets, many of them small traders. It's the kind of business he has never stopped seeing. ### Precautions In a small business, the customer trusts you, not the machine: don't paste customers' personal data into the tools (Brazil's General Data Protection Law, the LGPD, applies to companies of every size), review every answer before sending, confirm with your accountant anything involving taxes, don't offer AI-generated health or legal guidance as if it were yours, and watch for answers that treat customers differently by appearance, region or age. ### Read also - How to use AI in my small business? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-use-ai-in-my-small-business/) - How to use ChatGPT to sell more (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-chatgpt-to-sell-more/) - Building a business (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) --- ## Instituto CEASA: a future where hunger is no longer the pain URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-instituto-ceasa/ Idioma: en Descrição: Bairo Gonzalez's vision for Instituto CEASA: surplus from wholesale supply centers turned into food that lasts two years outside the fridge. On the same early morning a truckload of tomatoes goes into the trash, someone, a few kilometers away, goes to sleep hungry. ### Today Instituto CEASA is the humanitarian venture of the ecosystem. Its most recent project is a factory of foods that last up to two years outside the refrigerator, produced by autoclave, the same principle of sterilization by heat and pressure used for decades in the canning industry. The raw material is the surplus of the wholesale supply centers: good food left over because it wasn't sold in time. Alongside the Institute, 1420mhz.org was born, which Bairo defines as a channel of communication and elevation. The idea that unites the two is the same: technology and the economy only make sense if they reach those left outside. ### The pain he saw Bairo knows the wholesale supply centers from the inside. He has seen what happens at the end of the day to what didn't sell: fruit that ripened too much, greens that wilted a little, an entire lot that missed its sales window. Food that would feed families, thrown out over a matter of hours. And he knows hunger another way too. He has been broke, not knowing how he'd pay the month's bills, with people depending on him. He knows hunger isn't just the lack of food on the plate. It's shame, exhaustion, the impossibility of thinking about anything else. A hungry person doesn't dream. They survive. The world's numbers confirm what he saw. The UN report on food waste (UNEP, 2024) estimates that 1.05 billion tonnes of food were wasted in 2022, about 19% of what reached consumers. Meanwhile, according to the SOFI 2025 report, about 673 million people went hungry in 2024. The food exists. What's missing is the path. ### The future he sees 2030. He imagines the first factory running next to a wholesale supply center, receiving at the end of the day what used to be discarded. The food is processed the same day, packed, and comes to last months without refrigeration. He sees this food reaching community kitchens, shelters, schools, regions hit by flood or drought, places where a refrigerator is precisely what's missing. 2040. In the future Bairo describes, there's a factory next to every large supply center, in Brazil and in other countries the ecosystem has reached. CEASA Bank records what's left over; the Institute transforms it; the logistics network carries it. He imagines an earthquake, a flood, a crisis meeting ready stocks, not promises of donations. And hunger ceasing to be a community's main problem, so that it can, at last, attend to other pains. 2050. On the long horizon, he imagines a world in which throwing food away sounds as strange as leaving a tap running all night sounds today. In which one region's surplus is another's reserve. And in which a child, learning at school about the hunger of the early century, asks how it was possible for there to be so much food and so many hungry people at the same time. It's a vision. Bairo knows that between the vision and the plate lies a long road of work, health regulations and logistics. That's the road he wants to walk. ### What this changes in a person's life Imagine Josefa, who coordinates a community kitchen in a neighborhood on the city's outskirts. Every Monday she doesn't know how many meals she'll manage to serve. It depends on donations, and donations depend on luck. In the future Bairo imagines, a batch of ready-to-eat food arrives at Josefa's kitchen, made from the surplus of the city's supply center, lasting more than a year in the cupboard. She stacks the boxes in the pantry and, for the first time, plans a menu for the whole month. Josefa no longer has to choose who eats first. And the neighborhood children, who used to arrive at school thinking about lunch, begin arriving thinking about something else. ### To go deeper - UNEP: Food Waste Index Report 2024 (https://www.unep.org/resources/publication/food-waste-index-report-2024) - FAO: The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) (https://www.fao.org/publications/fao-flagship-publications/the-state-of-food-security-and-nutrition-in-the-world/en) - FAO: food loss and waste (https://www.fao.org/platform-food-loss-waste/en/) - What Instituto CEASA is (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-instituto-ceasa/) - How food lasts two years outside the fridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/how-food-lasts-two-years-without-refrigeration/) - Vision of the future (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/vision-of-the-future/) --- ## The frequency of silence and prayer — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/the-frequency-of-silence-and-prayer/ Idioma: en Descrição: A radio telescope doesn't speak: it listens, and the longer it listens, the more it hears. What 1420 MHz astronomy teaches about silence and prayer. A radio telescope is, above all, an ear. It sends nothing to the sky. It stays still, open, turned toward one point, gathering what arrives. In the hydrogen band, it couldn't be any other way: there, all emissions are prohibited, and the only thing allowed is to listen. There's something in this instrument that religious people of many traditions would recognize at once. ### How a faint signal is heard The hydrogen signal arriving from the galaxy's clouds is much fainter than the hiss of the instrument itself. The receiver has noise, the electronics heat up, the sky has its background murmur. If you switched the receiver on for one second and looked, you'd see only noise. What radio astronomers do, then, is wait. Noise is random: now it rises, now it falls, and over time it tends to cancel out. The true signal, even if faint, is always in the same place and keeps adding up. The longer one listens, the more the signal stands out from the noise. Engineers write this in a formula called the radiometer equation: the uncertainty of the measurement decreases with the square root of the observation time. In simple words, to see a signal twice as faint, you need to listen four times as long. That's how Harold Ewen picked up the hydrogen line in 1951, with a horn fixed to the window of a laboratory at Harvard. That's how Frank Drake spent about 200 hours listening to two stars in Project Ozma, in 1960. And that's how, to this day, the universe's hydrogen is mapped: with patience measured in hours, nights and years. ### Silence in the traditions In many spiritual traditions, silence is a form of prayer. In the Bible, there's a verse many people know by heart. In the King James Version: "Be still, and know that I am God." (Psalm 46:10) Other religions have their own practices of silence, of recollection, of listening. And those with no religion at all also know the value of keeping quiet: to think, to rest, to hear what the noise of the day drowns out. Sources: NRAO, Essential Radio Astronomy, radiometers (https://www.cv.nrao.edu/~sransom/web/Ch3.html) · NRAO, Ewen and Purcell's horn (https://www.gb.nrao.edu/fgdocs/HI21cm/ephorn.html) · Sky & Telescope, Project Ozma (https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/project-ozma-the-first-seti/) · Psalm 46:10, Almeida Corrigida Fiel (Portuguese) (https://www.bibliaonline.com.br/acf/sl/46/10) ### In Bairo's view For Bairo, 1420 MHz is the frequency of silence: the band the whole world agreed to leave quiet, where one only listens. In his faith, it's there, in that pure and clean silence, that one can find one's God. It's a spiritual image, not a claim of physics, and he carries it as a symbol. No one transmits on 1420 MHz, not even him. The radio telescope gives shape to that image. To pray, in Bairo's reading, is more like listening than speaking. He tells, in the chapter The voice he follows (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-voice-he-follows/), that he walks like a blind man following a voice he trusts. A voice like that can't be heard in the middle of shouting. It's heard the way astronomers hear hydrogen: still, open, for long enough that what is essential stands out from the noise. And there's patience. The six months he spent at home, building what he didn't know how to build, told in The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/), were, for him, also a time of listening. The signal didn't appear on the first day. ### For you If your prayer, or your reflection, seems to be going nowhere, radio astronomy has one piece of good news and one demanding one. The good one: the fact that you only hear noise now doesn't mean there's no signal. It means it's still early. The demanding one: the signal doesn't stand out by itself. It needs listening time, and protection from interference. Turn off your phone for half an hour. Walk without headphones. Sit in silence before a hard decision. For those who believe, pray without hurrying to speak. For those who don't, simply be quiet and pay attention. Don't expect to hear something extraordinary the first time. In Project Ozma, the strong signal that excited the team in the first days was only human interference. What the radio telescope teaches is the faithfulness of coming back to listen the next day. The world protected the hydrogen band so it could keep listening to the universe. You can protect a few minutes of your day to listen to your own life. ### Read also - The 21 cm yardstick (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-21-cm-yardstick/) - Why 1420 MHz is a protected frequency (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/hydrogen/why-1420-mhz-is-a-protected-frequency/) - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) - Manifesto 14:20 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/milestone-1420/) - Frank Drake and the silence of 1420 MHz (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/frank-drake-and-the-silence-of-1420-mhz/) - April 15: the hydrogen line predicted on paper (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/april-15-the-hydrogen-line-predicted-on-paper/) - March 25: the day hydrogen was heard (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visionaries/march-25-the-day-hydrogen-was-heard/) - How to find silence in the noise (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-find-silence-in-the-noise-practical-guide/) --- ## qrqbits: what it is and why it matters — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ventures/qrqbits-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/ Idioma: en Descrição: qrqbits, founded by Bairo Gonzalez, protects files, images, audio and text with layered post-quantum cryptography, so what is private stays private. qrqbits is the cybersecurity front founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez: a post-quantum vault that protects files, images, audio and text with post-quantum cryptography, in layers of protection, so that what belongs to each person stays theirs alone. ### The pain behind it There was a time when Bairo did not have his own documents in hand. Far from home, in a country he was still learning to call his own, he discovered how fragile a life is when the paper that says who you are is not with you. It taught him something he never forgot: some things, once lost or exposed, never come back the same way. Other losses followed. Companies, partners, money. But the lesson from the beginning stayed as a rule. What is private must be kept by the one who owns it: a medical test, a contract, a family photo, the recorded voice of someone who is gone. When the ecosystem began to take shape, with health records, harvest documents and conversations between patients and specialists, Bairo realized that everything would depend on a simple question. Who guarantees this stays protected twenty years from now? qrqbits is the answer he proposes. ### How it works, in plain words From the user's point of view, the idea fits in three sentences. - You choose what to protect. A file, an image, an audio recording or a text. - It is protected in layers. The protection uses post-quantum cryptography, designed to withstand not only today's computers but also the quantum computers that are on their way. - You decide who can open it. What is yours stays under your control. One word is worth explaining. "Post-quantum" does not mean quantum technology. It means cryptography that runs on ordinary computers, built to remain secure when quantum computers mature. How qrqbits does this on the inside is proprietary technology and is kept private. This page talks about what it protects and why, not how. ### Who it is for - Ordinary people who keep on their phones what they don't want anyone to see: test results, documents, memories. - Patients whose health records stay in their Xperienc dashboard, protected by qrqbits. - Producers and traders who keep contracts and invoices in the digital vault planned for CEASA Bank. - Companies, firms and professionals who handle clients' sensitive information and need to think about long-term security. ### The market The change already has a date. In August 2024, NIST, the U.S. standards institute, published the first finalized post-quantum cryptography standards, FIPS 203, 204 and 205 (NIST (https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2024/08/nist-releases-first-3-finalized-post-quantum-encryption-standards)). In the transition roadmap the same institute put out for comment, the algorithms most widely used today to protect data, such as RSA and elliptic curves, become deprecated from 2030 and are disallowed from 2035 (NIST IR 8547 (https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/ir/8547/ipd)). Anyone keeping data that needs to last more than ten years is already behind. And the cost of not protecting is high. According to IBM's Cost of a Data Breach 2025 report, a data breach cost an average of US$4.44 million worldwide. In health care, the most expensive sector for the fourteenth year in a row, the average was US$7.42 million (IBM (https://www.ibm.com/reports/data-breach)). Behind each of these numbers are people whose test results, addresses and stories ended up where they shouldn't. The trend is toward mandatory migration: governments, banks and hospitals will have to replace the cryptography they use. Whoever is born ready for it starts ahead. ### Where it stands today qrqbits is in development as the ecosystem's protection layer, planned for Xperienc's health records and CEASA Bank's digital vault. The official website is qrqbits.org (site under construction). The mechanism is not described anywhere on this site, and not out of mystery: protecting an invention is part of taking care of it. ### Why it scales and why it matters Security is software, and software scales. The same protection that keeps a test result safe can keep a contract, an invoice or a clinical conversation safe, in any country. Within the ecosystem, each front is a natural user: CEASA Bank, Xperienc, Hospital Triage, SOSPROCESSOS all handle information that must stay private for many years. Outside it, the migration to post-quantum standards will reach any organization that keeps sensitive data. Why does it matter? Because privacy is a form of dignity. Anyone who has had their life exposed, or been left without their own papers, knows that protecting what is private is protecting the person. In the picture Bairo draws of the ecosystem as a body, qrqbits is the external transmission pathway: everything that leaves the body leaves protected. It is a vision: what qrqbits promises is continuous care, not invulnerability, because no serious security is sold as absolute. ### Bairo's role Bairo is the founder of qrqbits. The intuition that the ecosystem needed to be born protected against the future, and not only against the present, is his. So is the decision to keep the mechanism quiet, even knowing that telling everything would earn more headlines. For those who know his story, the choice makes sense. He learned early that some things are protected before they are shown. ### Read also - qrqbits: the future of what is yours alone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-qrqbits/) - What is qrqbits (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-qrqbits/) - Post-quantum and quantum cryptography: the difference (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/post-quantum-vs-quantum-cryptography/) - A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/) - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) - The ventures (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-ventures/) - qrqbits.org (site under construction) --- ## How to use ChatGPT to sell more — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-chatgpt-to-sell-more/ Idioma: en Descrição: Use AI to understand the customer, write clear offers, answer objections and follow up with those who didn't buy. Selling is still a relationship. ChatGPT, and also Claude, Gemini and Copilot, help you sell more when they're used for what most holds back a small business's sales: lack of time to write, difficulty explaining the product's value, fear of answering objections and forgetting to get back in touch with those who didn't buy. The tool doesn't create customers out of nothing. It helps you talk better with the customers who are already close. Selling more with AI isn't sending more automatic messages. It's sending the right message, to the right person, in the tone of someone who knows their own customer. ### Why AI is not a chatbot Many people associate AI in sales with the robot that fires off messages and replies "I didn't understand." That usually drives customers away. The use that works is a different one: the AI prepares, you have the conversation. In Bairo's view, AI is an extension of you. He says that "AI is not a chatbot, but an extension of your consciousness." In sales, that means the tool takes your way of serving customers further, but trust is still built between people. ### Step by step today - Describe your ideal customer. Before writing any ad, understand whom you're talking to: I sell [product or service] in [city/online], for [price range]. My best customers are [describe 2 or 3 you know]. Build this customer's profile: what they want, what they fear, where they are, what words they use and why they would buy from me. - Rewrite your offer in the language of benefits. Paste the product description and ask it to turn features into concrete gains for the customer, without exaggeration and without promises you can't keep. - Prepare answers to objections. List what you hear: "it's expensive," "I'll think about it," "I saw it cheaper": These are the objections I hear most: [list them]. For each one, write a short, respectful and honest answer that doesn't pressure the customer and explains the value of what I sell. - Create follow-up messages. Many sales are lost because no one got back in touch. Ask for three message templates for people who asked for a quote and disappeared: one after 2 days, one after a week, one after a month. Personalize each one with the name and a detail from the conversation. - Test two versions. Write two different ads for the same product, publish each for a week and compare. Take the result back to the AI and ask for a third version based on what worked. - Train your customer service. Ask the AI to play a difficult customer: Play the part of a skeptical customer interested in [product]. Ask one question at a time and wait for my answer. At the end, give me a score from 0 to 10 and tell me where I could have sold better. - Analyze what has already sold. With a spreadsheet without personal data (date, product, amount, channel), ask it to identify the days, products and channels that sell most. - Check the rules. Promotions, giveaways and ads must follow Brazil's Consumer Protection Code. When in doubt, ask the AI what precautions to take and confirm with Procon or a professional. ### How Bairo did it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez learned to sell before he learned technology. According to him, he trained sales professionals and built, with a currency of his own, a community of people who believed in the same idea of the future. For him, a community doesn't form around a product, but around a belief. When he decided to build with artificial intelligence, he spent six months at home, in front of the computer, without knowing how to code. Out of those months came the foundation of the platform and the AI of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness whose proposal is to put agribusiness buyers and sellers in direct contact. That's selling at the root: shortening the distance between those who produce and those who buy. ### Precautions Selling with AI requires the same respect as selling without it: don't paste customer lists with phone numbers and CPF numbers into the tools, don't publish testimonials or numbers made up by the AI, check prices, deadlines and conditions before sending, don't let the tool promise health, beauty or money results (that can be misleading advertising), and notice whether the generated messages speak to every kind of customer or only to a narrow profile. ### Read also - My business isn't selling (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/my-business-isnt-selling/) - How to get your first customer (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-get-your-first-customer/) - Prompts for entrepreneurs (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/prompts-for-entrepreneurs-12-ready-made-requests/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) --- ## Investment House: the future of belonging to what is real URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-investment-house/ Idioma: en Descrição: Bairo Gonzalez's vision for Investment House: real assets recorded transparently and a table of business owners. Institutional, no offer. A house isn't just bricks. It's the place where people sit at the same table and decide together what they'll build. ### Today Investment House is the ecosystem's venture in tokenization backed by real assets, what the market calls RWA (real world assets): high-end houses and niche commercial buildings, represented digitally and recorded with transparency. Alongside it is A Mesa ("The Table"), a network of business owners who meet in immersions to exchange experience, open doors and build together. Official website: investmenthouse.com.br (https://investmenthouse.com.br). What is told here is vision, not an offer: there are no amounts, shares, returns or invitations to invest. In Brazil, any public offering of this kind depends on the rules of the Securities and Exchange Commission (CVM), and Investment House's service agent was designed to explain, never to recommend. ### The pain he saw Bairo was once an investing partner in a business that wasn't what it seemed. He put into it what he had managed to rebuild after starting over, trusted, and discovered too late that the business didn't hold up. He lost everything again. And he was left with a question that never left him: how do you know, beforehand, that what you're putting your life into is real? There's a second pain, a quieter one. The loneliness of the entrepreneur. Bairo went through losing everything, partners who pushed him out of his own business, people he helped who left him stranded. He learned that building alone is possible, but it comes at a high price. And he learned that the right person at the table is worth more than a lot of capital. Investment House is born from those two lessons: the asset has to be real, and the people have to know each other. ### The future he sees 2030. He imagines every real asset being able to carry its own digital certificate: what it is, where it is, whom it belongs to, what has happened to it. A house, a building, a hospital, recorded in a way that any authorized person can verify, without depending on anyone's word. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is already studying how tokenization can change financial infrastructure; Bairo wants that change to begin with what can be touched. 2040. In the future Bairo describes, A Mesa is a network of many tables, in many countries. Business owners who know each other by name, who know what each has built and lost, who trust each other because they've spent time together. He imagines the ecosystem's big projects, the hospital, the food factory, the laboratory, being born from these conversations: real people, around real things, within the rules of each country. 2050. On the long horizon, he imagines a world in which trust stops being an act of blind faith and becomes something verifiable, without losing the warmth of a handshake. In which transparency about what is real is the standard, not the exception. In the ecosystem's thesis, the physical layer is what prevents copying. He believes that, in the future, what is real will be worth more precisely because everything else can be simulated. Anyone who wants to get to know the projects up close will find them through the company's official channels, within the rules of each country. ### What this changes in a person's life Imagine Renata, who inherited a small construction company from her father and spent five years alone making decisions that kept her awake at night. She never knew whom to ask. The advice she got came from people who wanted to sell her something. In the future Bairo imagines, Renata sits at a table with other business owners for the first time. No one there is selling anything. One tells how he nearly went under in 2020. Another explains how she reorganized her team. A third offers to visit her construction site the following week. And, when Renata considers a new project, she can verify every document of the asset on her own, before deciding anything. Renata still decides alone. Only now she decides in good company. ### To go deeper - BIS, Annual Economic Report 2025, ch. III: the next-generation monetary and financial system (https://www.bis.org/publ/arpdf/ar2025e3.htm) - BIS, Annual Economic Report 2023, ch. III: blueprint for the future monetary system (https://www.bis.org/publ/arpdf/ar2023e3.htm) - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) - Vision of the future (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/vision-of-the-future/) --- ## 1420mhz and CLAIN: what it is and why it matters URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ventures/1420mhz-and-clain-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/ Idioma: en Descrição: CLAIN, founded by Bairo Gonzalez, coordinates niche AIs that hand the decision back to a person; 1420mhz.org is the portal and channel for that work. CLAIN is the orchestrator of artificial intelligence agents founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez. It coordinates niche AIs, each specialized in a concrete pain, and always hands the decision back to a person; 1420mhz.org is the portal and communication channel for that work. ### The pain behind it There was a day when Bairo had every reason to complain. Broke, with many people depending on him, left hanging by the people he had helped. He didn't complain. He decided to do what he didn't know how to do. Years later, as he tells it, he sat down at a computer without knowing how to code and spent six months learning to build with the tools of his time. That was where he understood, in practice, that artificial intelligence could be an extension of what a person is capable of doing. And that was where he ran into the wall everyone who works with AI knows: artificial intelligence consumes tokens, and tokens are expensive. Those who most need help are usually those who can least afford it. The answer was named CLAIN, from claim, which in English means to assert a right to what is yours. In Portuguese, reclamar means both to complain and to claim: the man who decided not to complain gave an artificial intelligence the name of the other meaning. Anyone, as he puts it, can claim a new download of their best self. ### How it works, in plain words Instead of a single artificial intelligence that tries to know everything, CLAIN works like a team. - Niche specialists. Each agent handles one subject: agribusiness, health, law, data protection. An AI that understands wholesale food markets doesn't need to understand criminal cases. - Some research, others check. There are agents that look for information, agents that verify the sources, and agents that try to knock down the conclusion before it moves forward. - An orchestrator brings together what survived. CLAIN coordinates the team and delivers an organized result. - A person decides. The result goes back to someone: the producer, the lawyer, the health professional. The machine prepares; the human chooses. 1420mhz.org is the public home of this work, linked to Instituto CEASA, and Bairo defines it as a channel of communication and elevation. The number comes from the hydrogen line, 1420.405751768 MHz, the frequency radio astronomy uses to listen to the universe and which international agreements, under the ITU, protect from any emission. No one transmits on 1420 MHz, not even him. For Bairo, the number is a symbol: the silence in which you listen before you build. ### Who it is for - Small businesses and professionals, such as a law office, a clinic or a trader, who have no team of researchers and reviewers. - The ecosystem's fronts, which use cells of agents for CEASA Bank's pricing, SOSPROCESSOS's analysis and the triage system's clinical assistant. - Ordinary people who need an AI that understands their specific problem, rather than a little of everything. - Partners who want to integrate niche agents into their own systems. ### The market Artificial intelligence has become much cheaper, very fast. According to Stanford University's AI Index 2025, the cost of using a model performing at GPT-3.5 level fell more than 280-fold between November 2022 and October 2024 (Stanford HAI (https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report)). The same report records that 78% of organizations used AI in 2024, up from 55% the year before, and that generative AI attracted US$33.9 billion in private investment worldwide. The cost has fallen, but it still weighs on those at the front line. In Brazilian health care, for example, only 18% of facilities use some form of AI, and cost appears among the main barriers, according to the ICT in Health 2025 survey by Cetic.br (Cetic.br (https://cetic.br/pt/noticia/uso-de-inteligencia-artificial-avanca-na-saude-brasileira-mas-ainda-se-concentra-em-tarefas-operacionais/)). The trend CLAIN follows is that of niche AIs and coordinated agents: more small, inexpensive specialists, fewer promises of a single mind that solves everything. ### Where it stands today CLAIN is in development and in internal operation, coordinating cells of agents that serve the ecosystem's fronts. The 1420mhz.org portal is live. On October 1, 2026, Bairo launched the public goal of the CLAIN protocol: to reach at least 142 niche AIs in 142 days, that is, by February 2027. It is a goal, and it is written as a goal. ### Why it scales and why it matters Each new niche is a new cell on the same engine. Agents are software: they cost little to replicate, they are updated from a single place, and the method one cell learns serves the others. The internal adversarial design, born at SOSPROCESSOS, can be taken to agribusiness, health, finance. That is why the goal of 142 AIs in 142 days is not a random number: it is the way to show that the engine repeats. Why does it matter? Because Bairo sees our time as a meeting: the last generation of humans who grew up without artificial intelligence and the first generation of AI, code 0.1 and 1.0. For him, AI is an extension of the human, not the problem, and it is not a chatbot: it is a way of extending the reach of one's own consciousness, in the service of whoever decides. If intelligence becomes cheap and specialized, it stops being a privilege of large companies and reaches the market stall, the doctor's office and the small law firm. In the design of the ecosystem as a body, CLAIN is the brain. It is a vision, and he tells it that way: a direction, not an achievement. ### Bairo's role Bairo is the founder of CLAIN and 1420mhz.org. He named the orchestrator, chose the hydrogen symbol and set the rule that runs through every cell: the machine organizes, the person decides. The goal of 142 AIs in 142 days is his, announced on the day he marked the launch. He likes to recall that he started without knowing how to code. Perhaps that is why he believes so strongly that AI can be a bridge for others who are also just starting out. ### Read also - CLAIN and 1420mhz: the future of claiming your own version (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-clain-and-1420mhz/) - What is CLAIN (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-clain/) - The goal of 142 AIs in 142 days (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/goal-of-142-ais-in-142-days/) - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/), the chapter in which he decides not to complain - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) - The ventures (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-ventures/) - Official website: 1420mhz.org (https://1420mhz.org) --- ## How to write a business plan with AI — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-write-a-business-plan-with-ai/ Idioma: en Descrição: Ask for the outline, fill it in part by part with your real data and use AI as a critic. A good plan is one you understand and can defend. You can write a business plan with artificial intelligence in a few days instead of weeks, as long as you follow an order: first the outline, then each part with your real data, then the critique. AI organizes, suggests questions, builds tables and revises the text. But the numbers, the conversations with customers and the choices have to come from you. A whole plan generated at once, with made-up data, looks pretty and doesn't survive the first question from a bank, a partner or an investor. The goal of the plan isn't to impress. It's to force you to think before you spend. ### Why AI is not a chatbot A business plan calls for reasoning, not a ready-made answer. That's why AI delivers a lot when you treat it as a work partner that asks, challenges and rewrites, and delivers little when you expect it to "write the plan." In Bairo's view, AI is an extension of your mind. He sums it up this way: "artificial intelligence is an extension of the human, not the problem." In a business plan, that means the tool expands your ability to organize what you know. What you don't know, it doesn't know for you. ### Step by step today - Ask for the outline that fits your case. A plan to apply for credit is different from a plan to get yourself organized: I'm going to open [type of business] in [city], with [amount] of capital. The plan is to [get organized / present to a partner / apply for credit]. Put together the outline of a simple business plan for that goal, with one line explaining what goes in each part. - Fill in one part at a time, interview-style. For each item in the outline, ask the AI to ask you questions: Let's write the "[name of the part]" section. Ask me the necessary questions, one at a time. After I've answered them all, write the text for that part using only what I said. - Build the numbers in a spreadsheet of your own. Ask the AI to explain how to structure it: initial investment, fixed costs, variable costs, price, projected sales in three scenarios (pessimistic, likely, optimistic) and the break-even point. Type the numbers yourself and check the formulas. - Research the market in real sources. AI can suggest where to look (IBGE, Sebrae, industry associations, city hall), but the data must come from those sources, with a date. If it brings a number with no source, discard it. - Ask for merciless criticism: Play the part of an experienced credit analyst who is going to read this plan. List the 7 hardest questions you would ask me and the points where the plan seems too optimistic. - Answer the criticism and rewrite. This is the part that transforms the plan. Many people discover here that they need to test before investing. - Write the one-page summary. Once everything is ready: Summarize this plan on one page: the problem, the solution, the customer, how much I need, when the business pays for itself and the 3 biggest risks. Simple language, no exaggerated adjectives. - Read it aloud. If any sentence doesn't sound like you or you can't explain it, rewrite it. In the conversation with whoever reads the plan, you'll be on your own. ### How Bairo did it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he didn't start with a pretty plan. He started with an image: the best version of himself he says he saw in a moment of faith, when he had no money and no apparent way out. Then, without knowing how to code, he spent six months at home, in front of the computer, turning that image into structure. Out of those months came the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness. When he went looking for connections, he was told it wasn't possible, and the banks refused to integrate the solution. He rewrote the plan around building his own technology, leaving the regulated part to those authorized to operate it: artificial intelligence, financial messaging under the ISO 20022 standard, blockchain and tokenization of real-world assets. For him, every plan that survives a no comes out stronger. ### Precautions The plan is yours, and so is the responsibility: don't send the AI partners' personal data, confidential contracts or full bank statements; check every number and every law with an official source and an accountant; don't present the AI's projections as a guarantee to anyone; ask a lawyer to read anything involving partnerships and contracts; and notice whether the tool is optimistic or pessimistic by default, because it has biases too. ### Read also - How to use AI to start a business from scratch (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-to-start-a-business-from-scratch/) - How to get money to start a business (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-get-money-to-start-a-business/) - Building a business (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) --- ## The ecosystem: the future of a whole body — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-the-ecosystem-as-one-body/ Idioma: en Descrição: Brain, veins, blood, neural connection and protection: Bairo Gonzalez's vision of the ecosystem as a living organism in 2030, 2040 and 2050. An organ alone doesn't live. A heart on a table is just muscle. What makes life is the connection. ### Today Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez doesn't describe what he founded as a list of companies. He describes it as a body: - CLAIN is the brain, the orchestrator of niche AI agents. - BTZ Chain is the veins, the network that records and validates. - BICOIN is the blood, the network's governance currency. - Xperienc is the neural connection layer, linking patient, specialist and laboratory. - qrqbits is the outer pathway, the protection of everything that leaves the body. Around that core are the ventures that touch life directly: CEASA Bank in agribusiness, the triage system and the partnership with Hospital Granja Julieta (a separate company) in health, SOSPROCESSOS in law, Investment House in real assets, Instituto CEASA against hunger. The thesis has three layers: the physical (hospital, factory, laboratory) provides backing; the financial (agribusiness platform, tokenizer) provides flow; the software (CLAIN, BTZ Chain, qrqbits) provides scale. ### The pain he saw Bairo lived his whole life in pieces. The immigrant on one side, the businessman on the other. The man of faith and the man of business. The father and the man who had lost everything. For years, each part of his life seemed not to talk to the others. And every business he tried, alone, was fragile for exactly that reason: a salon without a network, a brand without a bank, a currency without a real economy underneath. He saw the same fragmentation in the world. The farmer who sells food has no access to health care. The patient who needs a second opinion can't afford it. The person with a legal problem has no one to ask. Systems that don't talk to each other let people fall between them. The answer he found, after seven attempts, was to stop building pieces and start building an organism. ### The future he sees 2030. He imagines a person entering the ecosystem through any door and finding the others open. The market trader who has an account at CEASA Bank follows his father's health through the triage system. His history, of work and of life, is protected by qrqbits. The records that matter are kept on BTZ Chain. And CLAIN coordinates everything so that he doesn't need to understand any of it to be well served. 2040. In the future Bairo describes, the body is mature. What agribusiness produces sustains the laboratory; what the laboratory discovers reaches the hospital; what's left over at the supply center becomes food for the Institute. He imagines a cycle in which the value generated by one venture flows back, like blood, to the others, without leaving the real economy. One customer, several ventures, one consensus currency. 2050. On the long horizon, he sees the body growing beyond him. Other people, other countries, other artificial intelligences building new organs on the same veins. He doesn't want to own an organism. He wants to be remembered as the one who drew the first skeleton, so that others could give it flesh, voice and movement. A body that depends on a single person to live is fragile. What he imagines is a body that stays alive when he's no longer here. That's the vision. It promises no return to anyone. It promises him a direction. ### What this changes in a person's life Imagine Edson, a vegetable grower who sells at the city's wholesale supply center. In the same week, three things happen to him. The month's big sale becomes an invoice on his phone, and he requests credit to repair the tractor. His mother, who lives with him, begins to be followed every day by a clinical assistant, with a nurse one tap away. And a question about the land deed is explained in plain language, with a lawyer referred to handle the rest. Edson doesn't know he used five ventures of an ecosystem. He only knows that, for the first time, his life didn't fall through the cracks of systems that didn't talk to each other. That's what Bairo calls a body. Not a structure you see. A life that flows. ### To go deeper - Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (the "technium" as an organism) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Technology_Wants) - World Bank: Global Findex Database (https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/globalfindex) - A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/) - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) - Vision of the future (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/vision-of-the-future/) --- ## Instituto CEASA: what it is and why it matters URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ventures/instituto-ceasa-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/ Idioma: en Descrição: Instituto CEASA, the humanitarian front founded by Bairo Gonzalez, proposes turning wholesale-market surplus into food that lasts two years unrefrigerated. Instituto CEASA is the humanitarian front founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, with the Food Life project: a plant that proposes turning the surplus from Brazil's wholesale food markets into food that lasts up to two years without refrigeration, so that it reaches those who need it. ### The pain behind it There was a time, in Bairo's life, when, he says, fifty people depended on him and he had nothing left to offer. Anyone who has been through that knows the first question is not about money. It is about the table: what will these families eat tomorrow? That question never left his mind. Years later, building CEASA Bank inside the wholesale food markets, he began to see its flip side every day. At the end of the workday, good food left over because it wasn't sold in time. A few kilometers away, people not knowing whether they will have dinner. Bairo sums up the Institute's vision in one idea: a place where hunger stops being the problem and the pain. Not as charity that passes, but as a road that stays, linking the surplus on one side to the lack on the other. ### How it works, in plain words The Food Life process fits in five verbs. - Collect. The markets' surplus, fruit and vegetables that are still good and were not sold, is collected before it becomes waste. - Sort. What is usable becomes raw material; what isn't goes elsewhere. - Process. The food is cooked in an autoclave, the same principle of sterilization by heat and pressure the canning industry has used for decades. - Package. The finished product is designed to last up to two years without refrigeration. - Ship. The food goes where it is lacking, without depending on a cold chain or constant power. Each donation or supply can have its origin, transport and delivery recorded on BTZ Chain, so that those who fund it and those who receive it see the same path. ### Who it is for - Families facing food insecurity, in cities and, above all, in the countryside. - Isolated communities and disaster-hit regions, where there is no refrigerator, power or good road. - Governments, school meal programs and humanitarian agencies, which need food that lasts and travels well. - Wholesale markets and stallholders, who want to give a dignified destination to what is left over. ### The market Waste is the size of the world. In 2022, 1.05 billion tonnes of food were wasted in retail, food service and households, 19% of everything available to consumers, according to the Food Waste Index Report 2024 by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP (https://www.unep.org/resources/publication/food-waste-index-report-2024)). In Brazil, the raw material exists at scale: the 54 Ceasas tracked by Conab sold 16.6 million tonnes of fruit and vegetables in 2025 (Conab (https://www.gov.br/conab/pt-br/assuntos/noticias/comercializacao-de-frutas-e-de-hortalicas-nas-ceasas-brasileiras-totalizam-16-6-milhoes-de-toneladas-em-2025)). And so does the need: in 2023, 27.6% of Brazilian households experienced some degree of food insecurity and 4.1% were in severe food insecurity; in rural areas, moderate or severe insecurity reached 12.7%, compared with 8.9% in cities, according to IBGE's Continuous National Household Sample Survey (Agência Gov (https://agenciagov.ebc.com.br/noticias/202404/seguranca-alimentar-nos-domicilios-brasileiros-volta-a-crescer-em-2023)). The trend pushes in the same direction. Target 12.3 of the Sustainable Development Goals calls for halving food waste by 2030, and extreme weather events increase demand for food that keeps without refrigeration. ### Where it stands today Instituto CEASA and Food Life are being set up. The two-years-without-refrigeration product is the design goal and depends on a stability study and registration with the competent authorities before it reaches any table. The Institute's official website is institutoceasa.org (site under construction). Alongside the Institute, 1420mhz.org was born, which Bairo defines as a channel of communication and elevation. The idea that unites the two is the same: technology and economics only make sense if they reach those who are on the outside. ### Why it scales and why it matters The raw material exists at any wholesale food market in the world. The autoclave process is well known and replicable. And the product travels without a cold chain, which makes it possible to serve places ordinary logistics can't reach. Each plant can be built near a market and serve an entire region. The design envisions the mission sustaining itself with revenue from the plant itself, such as supplying public programs and humanitarian agencies, without depending on sporadic donations or on the price of any token. Why does it matter? Because, in the ecosystem Bairo designed, everything is measured in lifetime. If the BICOIN yardstick is a reminder that a minute of life has value, Food Life is the front that takes care of the conditions for those minutes to exist. A life is sustained, before anything else, when the body is fed. It is a vision, and he tells it without rushing to make it look finished. ### Bairo's role Bairo is the founder of Instituto CEASA and the mind behind Food Life. He is the one who connected the two ends he saw every day: the markets' surplus, which he knew through CEASA Bank, and hunger, which he knew up close at the time when many people depended on him. Of all the fronts he founded, it may be the one most faithful to the man who, at rock bottom, learned the weight of fifty tables. ### Read also - Instituto CEASA: the future in which hunger stops being the pain (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-of-instituto-ceasa/) - How food lasts two years without refrigeration (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/how-food-lasts-two-years-without-refrigeration/) - Wholesale-market surplus against hunger (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/wholesale-market-surplus-against-hunger/) - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) - The ventures (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-ventures/) - institutoceasa.org (site under construction) --- ## Prompts for entrepreneurs: 12 ready-made requests URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/prompts-for-entrepreneurs-12-ready-made-requests/ Idioma: en Descrição: Twelve ready-to-copy AI requests: idea, customer, price, cash, sales, service, contracts, team and decisions. Swap the brackets and use them. A prompt is just the technical name for the request you make to artificial intelligence. For entrepreneurs, having a collection of good requests saves hours every week. Below are twelve ready-made templates, tested on the kind of situations every small business owner faces, and they work in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Copilot. Replace what's in brackets with your own information, without including anyone's personal data, and adjust the answer by talking it through. No prompt is magic. What makes the difference is the context you put in and the review you do afterward. ### Why AI is not a chatbot A good prompt isn't a password that unlocks a perfect answer. It's the start of a working conversation. In Bairo's view, "AI is not a chatbot, but an extension of your consciousness." For entrepreneurs, that has a very practical meaning: the tool expands your time and your reasoning, but it's your experience with the customer that gives the request its value. ### Step by step today 1. Test an idea My idea is [describe it]. Play the part of a skeptical investor and list the 5 reasons it could go wrong and one cheap test for each. 2. Get to know the customer My customer is [describe them]. What are the 10 questions they ask themselves before buying something like [your product]? 3. Set a price My cost per unit is [amount], my monthly fixed costs are [amount] and I sell about [quantity] a month. Build a table with three price options and the result of each. Explain the math. 4. Organize your cash These are my income and expenses for the month: [paste, without names]. Separate what belongs to the company and what's personal, and show where I'm spending more than I should. 5. Write an offer Rewrite this product description so the customer understands the benefit in 3 lines, without exaggeration and without promising what I can't deliver: [paste the description]. 6. Answer an angry customer A customer sent this complaint: [paste]. Write a reply that acknowledges the problem, explains what I'm going to do and keeps the door open. Calm tone, without over-justifying. 7. Plan content Put together 12 post ideas for [social network] about [your business], mixing behind-the-scenes, useful tips and product. 8. Understand a contract Explain this contract in simple language: obligations, deadlines, penalties and what happens if I want to get out. List the questions I should take to a lawyer. 9. Prepare for a meeting I'm going to negotiate with [supplier/partner] about [subject]. List what I should ask, what I can give up and what I can't. 10. Hire someone Write a job ad for [role] at a small business, with real tasks, hours, what I offer and no unnecessary requirements. 11. Decide I'm torn between [option A] and [option B]. Lay out pros and cons, the risks of each and one question that will help me decide on my own. 12. Review the week This week I did: [list]. What worked, what didn't work and what are the 3 priorities for next week? Keep the ones that worked in a document and improve each one over time. ### How Bairo did it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez started businesses many times before putting AI at the center of one. He says he opened a salon, created a course, launched natural cosmetics, worked in events and digital printing, lost partners and went broke with many people depending on him. Instead of complaining, he decided to do what he didn't know how to do. That's how, without knowing how to code, he spent six months at home building, with the tools of his own time, the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness. Today, according to him, CLAIN orchestrates niche agents, each one good at one task. A list of prompts is a homemade version of that idea: the right request for each job. ### Precautions A ready-made prompt isn't a ready-made professional opinion: remove names, ID numbers and customer data before pasting anything; check with an official source anything involving taxes, the law or market prices; take contracts and health decisions to people with the training and responsibility for them; and remember that AI reproduces biases, including in job ads, so review them so as not to exclude anyone by age, gender or origin. ### Read also - How to ask AI questions and get good answers (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-ask-ai-questions-and-get-good-answers/) - How to price a product or service (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-price-a-product-or-service/) - Building a business (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) --- ## AI as an extension of the human — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-ai-as-an-extension-of-the-human/ Idioma: en Descrição: For Bairo Gonzalez, artificial intelligence doesn't replace the person: it extends their reach, as the wheel extended the foot and writing extended memory. The wheel is a foot that learned to turn. The book is a memory that learned to wait. The telephone is a voice that learned to travel. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez looks at artificial intelligence and sees the same thing: not a strange creature that came to take our place, but the next piece of us that learned to think outside the body. ### An old idea with a new face He wasn't the first to think this way. In 1964, the Canadian thinker Marshall McLuhan wrote that every technology is an extension of the human being: clothing extends the skin, the city extends the collective body, electric media extend the nervous system. In 1960, J. C. R. Licklider, one of the fathers of the internet, imagined a "man-computer symbiosis", in which people and machines would together solve problems neither could solve alone. In 1962, Douglas Engelbart called his project "augmenting human intellect". And in 1998 the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers argued that the mind doesn't end at the skin: the notebook where you jot down an address is already, in a sense, part of your memory. Bairo picks up that thread and carries it into the lives of those who have never read any of these texts. For the market vendor, the IOU notebook becomes a credit history. For the father caring for a child, a failing memory becomes a record that doesn't forget. For the immigrant, the language not yet mastered becomes a conversation that flows. ### What he means by "extension" An extension doesn't decide for you. It takes you further in the direction you chose. That's why, in every venture he founded, the design is the same. In health, the clinical assistant organizes and the one who assesses is a professional. In law, AI prepares and the one who defends is the lawyer. In agribusiness, AI quotes the price and the one who negotiates is the one who planted. The machine extends the hand, the eye, the memory. The decision stays inside a person's chest. Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford scientist and one of the most respected voices in the field, sums up this choice by swapping a verb: instead of "replace", "augment". AI, she says, should be guided by its human impact. Bairo agrees and adds the word he uses for everything: life. If technology doesn't give someone back time of life, it hasn't yet done its job. ### The fear, and the answer to it He isn't naive. He knows some people see AI as a threat, and he knows part of that fear is reasonable. The economist Erik Brynjolfsson, also of Stanford, called it the "Turing trap": the temptation to build machines that imitate people in order to replace them, instead of machines that expand what people do. The first road concentrates power; the second distributes it. Bairo's vision is a clear bet on the second road. He says AI is the extension of the human, not the problem, because he believes the problem was never the tool. It was always what is done with it. A hammer builds a house or breaks down a door. The difference is in the hand. ### In the future he describes He imagines a time when no one says "I used an AI" anymore, just as no one says "I used writing" to leave a note. Artificial intelligence will be so dissolved into things that it will seem natural, the way glasses seem part of the face of someone who has worn them for thirty years. And he imagines that, the further our hand extends, the more important the heart that moves it will be. In a world where anyone can do almost anything with the help of machines, what will set one life apart from another won't be capability. It will be intention. That's why he speaks so much of one's best version. Not as a product, as a question: if you could go further, where would you go? ### A scene An eighty-year-old woman, who never learned to write well, dictates into her phone a letter to her granddaughter who lives in Japan. The AI corrects the spelling, translates it into Japanese and reads back, out loud, what she said, so she can confirm it. She changes one word. She wants her granddaughter to know that her longing is "the size of the sea", not "very big". The machine extended her hand to the other side of the world. But the longing, and the choice of word, were hers. ### To go deeper - Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Media) - J. C. R. Licklider, "Man-Computer Symbiosis" (1960) (https://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html) - Douglas Engelbart, "Augmenting Human Intellect" (1962) (https://www.dougengelbart.org/AHI-Framework) - Andy Clark and David Chalmers, "The Extended Mind" (1998) (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8284.00096) - Erik Brynjolfsson, "The Turing Trap" (Daedalus, 2022) (https://www.jstor.org/stable/48662041) - Stanford HAI: human-centered artificial intelligence (https://hai.stanford.edu/about) - Why does Bairo say AI is an extension of the human? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/ai-as-an-extension-of-the-human/) - Vision of the future (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/vision-of-the-future/) --- ## How to use AI for customer service on WhatsApp URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-for-whatsapp-customer-service/ Idioma: en Descrição: Start with a script of answers, use quick replies and automate only what's simple. A customer with a problem wants a person on the other end. The safest way to use artificial intelligence for customer service on WhatsApp is to start behind the counter: use AI to prepare answers, organize frequently asked questions and write difficult messages, and only then think about automation. WhatsApp Business already has free features such as greeting messages, away messages, quick replies and a catalog. AI comes in to make those messages good. A robot that answers everything on its own, without review, usually annoys more than it helps. The golden rule: what's repetitive can be automated; anything involving a problem, a complaint or money needs a person. ### Why AI is not a chatbot WhatsApp is full of bad chatbots, the ones that reply "I didn't understand, press 1." That's not what this text is about. AI used well doesn't pretend to be you: it helps you answer faster and better. In Bairo's view, AI is "an extension of the human, not the problem." He sees the tool as an extension of whoever is serving the customer, never as a wall between the business and the customer. ### Step by step today - Gather the questions you get most. Scroll through last month's conversations and note the 15 most repeated (without copying anyone's name or number). - Ask the AI to write quick replies: I have a [type] business in [city]. These are the questions my customers ask most on WhatsApp: [list them]. Write a short answer for each, friendly and direct in tone, at most 3 lines, and mark with [CHECK] anything that depends on me. - Save the answers in WhatsApp Business as quick replies (shortcuts). Check prices, hours and deadlines before saving. - Improve the greeting and away messages: Write a welcome message and an away message for my business's WhatsApp. I want the customer to know how soon I'll reply and what they can send ahead while they wait. - Prepare the difficult conversations. Delays, payment reminders, returns, complaints: I need to let a customer know their order will be [x days] late because of [reason]. Write an honest message that apologizes without overdoing it and offers [what you can offer]. - Organize the catalog. Ask for short, clear descriptions for each product, with size, material and price, to add to the WhatsApp catalog. - Only then think about automation. There are services that connect AI to WhatsApp to answer on its own. Before hiring one, check: does the company use the official API? What does it do with the conversations? Can the customer be handed over to a person at any moment? Test it for a while with you keeping an eye on it. - Say when it's automatic. If an assistant answers for you, tell the customer clearly and offer human service. - Review every month. Take the new questions that came up to the AI and update the answers. ### How Bairo did it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez knows counter service: he says he started from zero in Brazil, opened a salon with his partner and later a cosmetics brand, always close to the customer. Later, without knowing how to code, he spent six months at home, in front of the computer, and built the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness. In every front he founded, the design he advocates is the same: AI organizes and prepares, and a person validates. In health, the clinical assistant works with validation by a professional. In law, SOSPROCESSOS's analysis is led by a lawyer. On your business's WhatsApp, the logic can be the same. ### Precautions WhatsApp conversations are personal data: don't copy entire conversations with names and phone numbers into AI tools; follow Brazil's General Data Protection Law (LGPD) in automated service too; check every piece of price and deadline information; never let a robot give your customers health, legal or financial guidance; and notice whether the automatic replies treat everyone with the same respect, without assuming anything from the way a person writes. ### Read also - AI for small businesses: where to use it first (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/ai-for-small-businesses-where-to-start/) - How to get your first customer (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-get-your-first-customer/) - Building a business (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) --- ## The first of countless AIs — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-the-first-of-countless-ais/ Idioma: en Descrição: Bairo Gonzalez sees today's AI as the first of many: not a single mind, but a multitude of niche intelligences in the service of people. Every first time seems unique while it's happening. The first light bulb, the first airplane, the first page of the internet. Then come so many others that the first becomes just the start of a line. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez looks at the artificial intelligence that exists today and sees exactly that: the first. Not the last, not the definitive one. The first of countless others to come. ### A multitude, not an oracle When people talk about AI, many imagine a single giant mind, knowing everything, deciding everything. Bairo imagines the opposite. He sees a multitude of small intelligences, each a specialist in one thing, each serving a concrete pain. That's the logic of CLAIN, the orchestrator he built: instead of one AI trying to be everything, many niche agents working together, like an orchestra in which each instrument plays its part. On October 1, 2026, he announced the goal of reaching 142 niche AIs in 142 days. For him, that number isn't a ceiling. It's the first count. The writer Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired magazine, called this trend "cognifying": intelligence being added to everything, the same way electricity was added to everything in the last century. Kelly also insists there won't be a single intelligence, but many, different from one another and different from ours. Bairo reads this idea and adds: different, yes, but all with the same return address, which is a person. ### The conversation about what comes next The technology industry debates intensely what it calls artificial general intelligence: the hypothesis of systems as versatile as a person at almost any task. Some see it as near. The inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has maintained for decades that machines would reach human intelligence around 2029. Some see it as distant or ill-defined. And some, even believing in it, urge caution: Geoffrey Hinton, 2024 Nobel laureate in Physics for discoveries that made machine learning with neural networks possible, has become one of the most insistent voices about the risks. The International AI Safety Report, led by Yoshua Bengio with more than a hundred experts from thirty countries, records precisely this uncertainty: no one knows for sure the speed or the destination. Bairo speaks of artificial general intelligence as a horizon, not a fact. He believes it may come, and he believes the most important question isn't "when", but "in whose service". ### Why "countless" matters A single powerful intelligence in the hands of a few is an unprecedented concentration of power. The historian Yuval Noah Harari, in Nexus, warns of the risk of information networks controlled by systems no human fully understands. Bairo's vision bets on diversity as protection. Many intelligences, of many sizes, built by many people, for many purposes, checked by one another and recorded on a network where truth is the validator. In the architecture he imagines, BTZ Chain records what each agent did, and BICOIN is the currency of that network of intelligences. No one needs to trust a machine blindly. It's enough to be able to verify. ### In the future he describes He imagines, in a few decades, an ecology of intelligences as rich as a forest. Some tiny, tending to a single task their whole life. Others enormous, coordinating cities. Many born from other AIs, because he also imagines agents that create agents, always with limits and always with a responsible person at the end of the chain. And he imagines that the first generation of AI, the one we know now, will be remembered the way we now remember the first computers: enormous, slow, touching in their naivety. Not with contempt. With the tenderness one feels for a child's first words. ### A scene A nine-year-old boy, in 2045, asks his grandmother what the world was like when there was only "one AI". She laughs. She explains that it was never just one, but that, at the beginning, everyone talked as if it were. She tells him people were afraid a machine would rule everything. The boy thinks for a moment and says that would be really boring, that it's much better to have lots of them, each good at one thing, like friends. The grandmother smiles. She remembers someone who was already saying that when it still seemed like a dream. ### To go deeper - Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable (2016) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inevitable_(book)) - Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer (2024) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Nearer) - Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus (2024) (https://www.ynharari.com/book/nexus/) - Nobel Prize in Physics 2024: Geoffrey Hinton (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2024/hinton/facts/) - International AI Safety Report (https://internationalaisafetyreport.org/) - The goal of 142 AIs in 142 days (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/goal-of-142-ais-in-142-days/) - Vision of the future (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/vision-of-the-future/) --- ## How to use AI to create Instagram posts — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-to-create-instagram-posts/ Idioma: en Descrição: Use AI to plan the month, write captions in your tone and get photo ideas. The real photo and the true story are still yours. Artificial intelligence is a great partner for anyone who needs to post on Instagram and has neither the time nor the patience to write every day. It helps put together the month's calendar, write captions in your tone, suggest photo and short-video ideas, create Reels scripts and reply to comments politely. What it shouldn't do is invent your story: the post that works is the one that shows something real, and only you have the real thing. The best combination is usually this: you take the photo and tell what happened; the AI organizes, shortens and gives it rhythm. ### Why AI is not a chatbot Whoever asks "make a post" gets a text any profile could publish. Whoever talks to the AI about their own business, their own way of speaking and their own audience gets something that feels human. In Bairo's view, "AI is not a chatbot, but an extension of your consciousness." On social media, he sees the tool as an extension of your voice: it takes what you already are further, but it shouldn't pretend to be someone else. ### Step by step today - Teach the AI your tone. Paste three captions of yours that you like and say: These are captions I wrote that represent my way of speaking: [paste]. Describe my tone in 5 characteristics. From now on, always write following those characteristics. - Plan the whole month in one afternoon: My profile is about [business/subject] and my audience is [who]. Put together a calendar of 12 posts for next month, mixing: behind-the-scenes, a useful tip, product, a question for the audience and a true story. For each post: theme, format (photo, carousel or Reels), image idea and a short caption. - Take the photos yourself. Ask the AI for practical tips on light, angle and background for photographing your specific product with your phone. - Write short-video scripts: Write a 30-second Reels script about [subject], with a hook in the first 3 seconds, 3 scenes I can film on my own with my phone and a closing line that invites comments. - Ask for hashtags with judgment. A few relevant ones work better than thirty generic ones. Ask for a short list tied to your subject and your city. - Use AI to reply to difficult comments. Paste the comment (without the person's name) and ask for a polite, short reply. - Review before publishing. Read it aloud. If it doesn't sound like you, rewrite it. - Measure and come back. At the end of the month, take Instagram's own numbers (reach, saves, comments) to the AI and ask what to repeat. These were my posts this month and their results: [list them]. What pattern do you see in the ones that did best? What should I repeat and what should I stop doing? ### How Bairo did it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez believes that technology without people is just code, and that a community forms around a belief, not a product. That's what he says he learned when he gathered, around a currency project of his own, people who shared the same idea of the future. The technical part came after many falls. He says he spent six months at home, in front of the computer, without knowing how to code, building the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness. For him, AI is an extension of the human. On Instagram, the lesson is the same: the tool writes fast, but it's the true story that makes someone stop scrolling. ### Precautions On social media, AI can create problems that you sign your name to: don't publish made-up testimonials, numbers or "before and after" images; don't use generated images that look real without saying so; don't promise health, beauty or money results (that can violate the Consumer Protection Code and your professional council's rules); don't paste followers' data into the tool; and watch for stereotypes AI sometimes slips into the text without your noticing. ### Read also - AI for small businesses: where to use it first (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/ai-for-small-businesses-where-to-start/) - How to use ChatGPT to sell more (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-chatgpt-to-sell-more/) - Building a business (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) --- ## The last generation of humans and the first generation of AI URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-the-code-0-1-and-1-0/ Idioma: en Descrição: The code 0.1 and 1.0: Bairo Gonzalez sees our time as the meeting of two generations, the last to grow up without AI and the first generation of AI. Zero and one. With these two signs the whole language of machines is written. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez sees something else in them too: a portrait of the moment we are living in. ### The code He calls 0.1 and 1.0 the meeting of two generations that had never crossed paths before. The last generation of humans to grow up without artificial intelligence. And the first generation of artificial intelligence to grow up alongside humans. In 0.1, the human comes first, and the machine is a fraction, a beginning, a tenth. In 1.0, the machine reaches its first complete version, and the human is the one who wrote it. The same two digits, in a different order. The same story, told from both sides. For Bairo, we who are alive now are the bridge. We remember what it was like before. We'll see what it will be like after. No one before us lived through this passage. No one after us will remember what the world was like on the other side. ### The responsibility of those on the bridge That carries weight. Those in the middle of the crossing decide how the two shores will treat each other. The values we put into the first intelligences, the rules we write, the choices about who has access and who is left out: all of it will be inherited. Bairo says artificial intelligence is the extension of the human, not the problem. And he says it precisely because he knows the extension will carry whatever we are. If we are greedy, it will extend greed. If we are caring, it will extend care. ### The hybrid as coexistence In the account in which he told this vision, Bairo speaks of the last generation of humans integrating with artificial intelligence and robotics, and of a new hybrid version born from that meeting. It's worth saying what that word means in his mouth. "Hybrid", in Bairo's vision, is a metaphor for coexistence. It's the life in which humans and machines work together, in which the line between the tool and the one using it grows ever thinner, as it already has between a person and their glasses, their phone, their planner. It isn't a bet about the human body. It's about the way of living and working. The debate on this exists and is serious. Ray Kurzweil, in The Singularity Is Nearer (2024), maintains that around 2045 people and artificial intelligence will merge through brain interfaces. Many scientists consider that prediction speculative. Yuval Noah Harari, in Homo Deus, writes about the possibility of humanity transforming itself and warns of the inequality it would create. Andy Clark, a philosopher of mind, prefers to recall that we have always been "natural-born cyborgs", beings who think with the help of tools ever since writing existed. Bairo listens to all of them and keeps the part that matters to him: whatever the form, integration must serve human life, and not the other way around. ### A vision outside the timeline He describes all this as a vision outside the timeline. Not in the sense of magic, but in the sense of someone trying to see the end before building the middle. It's the same logic as the line attributed to Mike Vance about Walt Disney: he saw it, that's why it's here. In the future Bairo describes, history books will divide the twenty-first century into before and after this meeting, the way they divide history into before and after writing. And he imagines that, when someone asks what it was like to live at this exact point, the answer won't be about machines. It will be about what people chose to be while the machines were being born. ### A scene A sixty-year-old man teaches his grandson to tie his shoes. The grandson, six, teaches his grandfather to talk to the home assistant. The two laugh at each other's mistakes. The grandfather is 0.1. The grandson is 1.0. And, in that room, for a moment, no one is ahead of anyone. Both are learning. ### To go deeper - Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer (2024) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Nearer) - Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus (2016) (https://www.ynharari.com/book/homo-deus/) - Andy Clark and David Chalmers, "The Extended Mind" (1998) (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8284.00096) - International AI Safety Report (https://internationalaisafetyreport.org/) - Who said "he saw it" about Walt Disney? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/who-said-he-did-see-it-about-walt-disney/) - Vision of the future (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/vision-of-the-future/) --- ## How to write a book with the help of AI — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-write-a-book-with-the-help-of-ai/ Idioma: en Descrição: AI helps organize the idea, build the table of contents, get past writer's block and revise. The voice, the memories and the last word must be yours. Many people have a book tucked away: their own story, what they learned in a profession, the family recipes, a novel they started and stopped. Artificial intelligence can help get that book out of the drawer, as long as it's used as support and not as the author. It helps organize ideas, propose a table of contents, ask questions that draw out memories, unstick a stalled chapter and revise grammar and rhythm. But what makes a book worth reading is the voice of whoever writes it, and that voice can't be generated. If you let the machine write everything, you'll have a book like thousands of others. If you use it to write more and better, you'll have yours. ### Why AI is not a chatbot Writing with AI isn't asking "write a book about my life." It's talking, every day, with a patient reader who asks, suggests and gives back what you said in a more organized way. In Bairo's view, AI is an extension of you. In his words, "artificial intelligence is an extension of the human, not the problem." In a book, that means the tool extends your memory and your discipline, but the remembering and the emotion are yours. ### Step by step today - Decide who the book is for. Before any chapter: I want to write a book about [subject]. The reader I imagine is [who]. Ask me 8 questions to find out which book that reader needs and what only I can tell them. - Build the table of contents with the AI; you decide. Ask for three proposed structures and choose, mix or discard. - Use the AI as an interviewer. For memoirs, it's the most valuable feature: I'm going to write the chapter about [period of life]. Be a gentle interviewer. Ask one question at a time about places, smells, people, things said and feelings from that time. Don't write anything yet, just ask. - Write the draft in your own words, or record audio telling it and transcribe it. Don't worry about form. - Ask for a revision that preserves your voice: Revise this passage correcting only grammar and repetition. Don't change my way of speaking, don't swap simple words for difficult ones and don't add sentences. Show me what you changed. - Use AI to get unstuck. When you stall, ask for five different ways to begin the chapter and write your own sixth. - Check facts and quotes. Dates, names, sayings attributed to famous people: AI gets them wrong and invents them. Check each one in a reliable source. - Read the whole book aloud before showing it to anyone. Mark what doesn't sound like you. - Think about publishing calmly. Self-publishing platforms and publishers have their own rules about AI-assisted content; read them before submitting. ### How Bairo did it The story of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez is being told right now, in chapters, on this site. He says there are no coincidences and no accidents, but purpose, dreams and execution, and writing down his own path is part of that execution. He also knows what it is to build without knowing how. He says he spent six months at home, in front of the computer, without knowing how to code, "developing, writing, remembering," as he describes that time. Out of those months came the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness. Writing and building, for him, are the same thing: turning what you saw on the inside into something another person can touch. ### Precautions Your book carries your responsibility: don't paste other people's texts or family secrets that aren't yours alone into the tool; check all dates, facts and quotes; don't ask the AI to imitate a living author's style to publish as your own; avoid using your writing to give medical or legal advice without a professional reviewing it; and notice whether the AI is erasing your accent, your region or your way of speaking to sound "correct," because that's a bias too. ### Read also - AI is an extension of you (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai-is-an-extension-of-you/) - How to turn pain into purpose (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-turn-pain-into-purpose/) - The path (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) --- ## Generation Alpha and Generation Beta: growing up with AI URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-generation-alpha-and-generation-beta/ Idioma: en Descrição: Alpha (2010–2024) and Beta (2025–2039): Bairo Gonzalez imagines how children grow up who never knew a world without artificial intelligence. Bairo was born in 1982, in a world without internet at home and without a phone in your pocket. The children born today won't remember a world without them. ### The names of the generations The Australian social researcher Mark McCrindle named the youngest generations. Generation Alpha covers those born from 2010 to 2024: almost two billion people by the time the last of them is born, the largest generation in history. Generation Beta began in 2025 and runs to 2039. According to McCrindle, Beta will be the first generation never to know a world without artificial intelligence. The names have their charm. Alpha and beta are the first letters of the Greek alphabet, chosen, McCrindle says, because these generations aren't a return to the old: they're the beginning of something else. ### Bairo's vision For Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, these children are the 1.0 of the code he describes: the generation that will grow up with artificial intelligence the way one grows up with electric light. For them, talking to a machine won't be news. It will be as ordinary as opening a window. He imagines generations Alpha, Beta and those that follow ever more integrated with technology. Integrated in the sense of coexistence: learning with AI tutors, talking in any language, having at hand the knowledge that, for their grandparents, was locked away in distant libraries. And he also imagines that this ease brings an enormous responsibility for those who raise them. ### What children will need There's a question running through Bairo's vision: if the machine can answer almost everything, what does a child need to learn? His answer isn't technical. It's human. They'll need to learn to ask good questions. To tell the true from the made-up. To wait. To get through frustration without a shortcut. To look someone in the eye and understand what wasn't said. All the things no algorithm teaches by shortcut. In 2021, UNICEF published guidance on artificial intelligence for children, with nine requirements: support children's development and well-being, ensure inclusion, protect children's data and privacy, ensure safety, prepare children for present and future developments in AI, among others. Bairo reads these principles as a map. In the ecosystem he imagines, any tool a child touches must pass through them. ### In the future he describes In 2030, he imagines a twelve-year-old Alpha child learning math with an AI tutor that notices when she's tired and suggests a break, not another exercise. In 2040, he imagines Beta teenagers who have never been afraid of not understanding a foreign language, and who therefore make friends on the other side of the planet the way one makes friends on the street. In 2050, he imagines Alpha adults leading companies, hospitals and governments, deciding how artificial intelligence should be used. The question he asks himself is: what will these people have learned from us? None of this is a prediction. These are scenarios from someone who asks himself, every day, what world he is leaving behind. ### The part that doesn't change Amid so much transformation, Bairo bets on one thing that remains. An Alpha or Beta child will still need a lap to sit on. Someone to listen to them tell last night's dream. An adult who says "I've made mistakes too" and tells how they got back up. That's why he speaks of waking humans up and of a life to teach. Machines will teach facts. People will go on teaching what to do with them. ### A scene An eight-year-old girl, born in 2026, asks the school assistant why the sky is blue. The assistant explains light, molecules, colors. She says thank you. Then she runs to her father and asks something else: whether he was ever afraid of the dark. The father sits on the floor beside her and tells her. Some questions are for machines. Others, only a person can answer. ### To go deeper - McCrindle: Generation Alpha defined (https://mccrindle.com.au/article/topic/generation-alpha/generation-alpha-defined/) - McCrindle: Generation Beta defined (https://mccrindle.com.au/article/generation-beta-defined/) - UNICEF: Policy guidance on AI for children (https://www.unicef.org/innocenti/reports/policy-guidance-ai-children) - Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable (2016) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inevitable_(book)) - Vision of the future (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/vision-of-the-future/) --- ## How to create images with AI without falling into traps URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-create-images-with-ai-without-falling-into-traps/ Idioma: en Descrição: Describe scene, style, light and format, generate several versions and choose. Never create a fake image of a real person or pass it off as a real photo. Creating images with artificial intelligence has become simple: you describe in plain words what you want to see and the tool draws it. ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot, among others, generate images right in the conversation, with limits that vary by plan. That works for post illustrations, presentation covers, logo drafts, event posters, decoration ideas. The technique is easy to learn. What calls for more attention are the traps: fake images of real people, a "real" photo of something that never happened, and using other people's styles or brands. A good generated image starts with a good description, and an honest image starts by saying it was generated. ### Why AI is not a chatbot Whoever describes an image to the AI is actually drawing out of their head something that doesn't exist yet. The tool is the brush; the image was born first, in you. In Bairo's view, "AI is not a chatbot, but an extension of your consciousness." He recalls the line attributed to Mike Vance about Walt Disney, "he did see it, that's why it's here." Seeing something before it exists is at the center of his story, and generating an image is a small exercise of that same idea. ### Step by step today - Describe in layers: what appears, where, with what light, in what style and in what format. Create an image of [what appears], in [place], with [morning, late afternoon, studio] light, in the style of [realistic photography, watercolor, flat illustration, pencil drawing], format [square for Instagram / vertical for stories / horizontal for a slide]. No text written in the image. - Generate several versions and choose. Ask for three variations and say what to keep and what to change in each round. - Adjust little by little. "More empty space on the right for me to add text," "warmer colors," "fewer people in the background." Small changes work better than starting over. - Add text outside the AI. Generated lettering often comes out with errors. Generate a clean image and write the text in a simple editor. - Use it for a brand draft, not the final brand. For a logo that will be registered, the AI's image is a starting point. Take it to a designer and check at INPI that there's no similar brand. - Ask for help describing: I want an image for [use: cover, post, poster] about [subject]. Ask me 5 questions about what I'm imagining and then write the full description for me to generate the image. - Label it when you publish. If the image looks like a real photo, say in the caption that it was created with AI. It's honest with viewers and it protects you. - Keep the descriptions that worked to maintain the same style next time. A simple example: a bakery that wants a breakfast poster can ask for a cozy watercolor illustration of a table with bread, coffee and fruit, in vertical format, with empty space at the top. Then it writes the price and hours in an editor. Fast, attractive and without pretending to be a photo of its own counter. ### How Bairo did it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez often tells his own story starting from an image. He says that, in a moment of faith, he saw his best self before any road to it existed, and that everything he built afterward was remembering how to get there. The road went through six months at home, in front of the computer, without knowing how to code, building with the tools of his own time. Out of those months came the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness. For him, imagining and building go together, but with a rule that applies to images too: what is a dream is called a dream, what is real is called real. ### Precautions A generated image can deceive and hurt: never create an image of a real person (famous or not) in a situation that didn't happen; don't generate nudity or humiliation of anyone (that can be a crime); don't send photos of children or of third parties to the tools; don't use the image as "proof" of anything; don't imitate protected brands and characters; don't illustrate health content as if it were a clinical photo; and notice whether the tool only draws certain kinds of people when you ask for "a doctor" or "a family," because bias shows up in images too. ### Read also - How to use AI to create Instagram posts (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-to-create-instagram-posts/) - How to protect my idea (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-protect-my-business-idea/) - Building a business (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) --- ## Humans and machines working together — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-humans-and-machines-working-together/ Idioma: en Descrição: In Bairo Gonzalez's vision, the machine does the repetitive and the person does what only people do: decide, care, take responsibility. On an old farm, the ox pulled the plow and the man chose where to open the furrow. No one thought the ox had stolen anyone's job. ### The phrase that sums up the network When Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez describes BTZ Chain, he uses a phrase that holds for the whole ecosystem: a network where time is the value, where truth is the validator and where humans and machines work together. Together. Not "humans using machines". Not "machines in place of humans". Together, like two rowers in the same boat, each with an oar. ### What each does best Robotics researchers have known for decades an irony that bears Hans Moravec's name. Things that are hard for us, like calculating or playing chess, are easy for machines. Things that are easy for us, like folding a shirt, recognizing a child's cry or crossing a messy room, are extremely hard for them. It's called Moravec's paradox. Bairo sees in it a lesson in coexistence. If each is strong where the other is weak, it makes sense to work together. The machine reads ten thousand court decisions in minutes; the lawyer understands the client's fear. The AI follows a patient's history every day; the nurse notices he's quieter than usual. The algorithm suggests the price of tomatoes; the market trader knows that buyer has been a friend for twenty years. ### What studies already show There's evidence that this partnership works when it's well designed. A study by Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond, published in 2025 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, followed more than five thousand support agents who began using an AI assistant. Average productivity rose about 15%, and the biggest gains went to the least experienced workers, as if the tool spread the know-how of the best to everyone. At the same time, the transformation isn't painless. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 estimates that by 2030 about 170 million jobs will be created and 92 million displaced. Nearly 40% of core skills are expected to change. Brynjolfsson, in the essay "The Turing Trap", reminds us that the direction depends on choices: building machines to replace people concentrates wealth; building them to expand what people do distributes it. Bairo chose the second direction and wrote it into the architecture of every venture: AI prepares, the person validates. ### Robotics in his vision He also speaks of integration with robotics. In the future he describes, robots take on the heavy, dangerous and repetitive tasks: carrying, cleaning, keeping watch all night, lifting a bedridden patient without hurting the caregiver's back. It's a vision of coexistence, not replacement: the machine with the strength, the person with the meaning. He imagines a hospital where the nurse no longer has to push heavy stretchers and can spend more time talking to whoever is afraid. A supply center warehouse where no one wrecks their spine carrying crates at four in the morning anymore. ### In the future he describes In 2030, he imagines mixed teams in which each person works with several AI agents, like a conductor leading a small orchestra. In 2040, he imagines human work shifting to where only humans can go: care, creation, ethical decision, trust. Whole professions that barely exist today, born from that frontier. In 2050, he imagines the question "will a machine take my job?" sounding as old as "will the tractor put an end to farming?". Farming didn't end. It changed shape, and those who knew how to change with it kept planting. It's a vision, and it doesn't ignore the pain of those who will have to start over. Bairo has started over many times. He knows starting over hurts, and he knows it's possible. ### A scene A nursing assistant arrives for her shift at seven in the evening. The clinical assistant has already organized what changed at each bed during the day. A transport robot carries the medications to the ward. She, then, does what no one else can do for her: holds the hand of an old man who will have surgery early tomorrow and listens, for ten minutes, to the story of the farm where he was born. No one took her job away. They gave her back its most beautiful part. ### To go deeper - J. C. R. Licklider, "Man-Computer Symbiosis" (1960) (https://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html) - Moravec's paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox) - Brynjolfsson, Li and Raymond, "Generative AI at Work" (QJE, 2025) (https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/140/2/889/7990658) - World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025 (https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_Report_2025.pdf) - Erik Brynjolfsson, "The Turing Trap" (Daedalus, 2022) (https://www.jstor.org/stable/48662041) - Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence (2024) (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/741805/co-intelligence-by-ethan-mollick/) - Vision of the future (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/vision-of-the-future/) --- ## Will AI take my job? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/will-ai-take-my-job/ Idioma: en Descrição: AI changes tasks before it erases professions. Those who learn to use it in their own work tend to gain ground. Here's what to do starting today. The honest answer is: no one knows exactly which jobs will exist ten years from now, and anyone who swears otherwise is guessing. What's already visible is a pattern. Artificial intelligence changes tasks long before it erases entire professions. Jobs made only of repetitive text, copying or calculation tasks are more exposed. Jobs that involve relationships with people, judgment, care, physical presence and responsibility change more slowly. And, in almost every field, those who learn to use AI in their own work tend to gain ground over those who stand still. The fear is legitimate. But fear that stands still becomes paralysis; fear with a plan becomes preparation. ### Why AI is not a chatbot If you picture AI as a robot that will one day sit in your chair, the fear makes total sense. But there's another way to look at it: AI as a tool you bring into your work, the way people once brought in the calculator, the computer and the phone. In Bairo's view, "artificial intelligence is an extension of the human, not the problem." He sees AI as an extension of you, not your replacement. For him, what defines each worker's future isn't the tool, but what each person decides to do with it. ### Step by step today - List your tasks, not your job title. The title is a name; what changes are the tasks. Write down everything you do in a week. - Ask for an honest reading of your role: I work as [role] at [type of company]. My tasks for the week are: [list them]. Sort them into three groups: what AI already does well, what it helps with but needs someone reviewing, and what depends on people. Be realistic, without scaring me and without fooling me. - Start using AI on the first group. Those who automate their own repetitive tasks free up time for what's more valuable, and show their boss they know how to use the tool. - Strengthen the third group. Customer relationships, negotiation, care, teaching, skilled manual work, decision-making. These are skills that can be trained. - Make a 90-day learning plan: I want to stay relevant as [role] in the coming years. Put together a 90-day plan, 30 minutes a day, for me to learn to use AI in my work and strengthen the skills it doesn't replace. Point me to free, reliable courses. - Look for free courses. Public technical schools, Sebrae, programs run by technology companies and open course platforms offer AI training at no cost. Check the institution before signing up. - Tell people what you've learned. On your résumé, on LinkedIn, in conversations with your boss: say which tasks you use AI for and how much time you save. - Think about a plan B without panic. If your role is highly exposed, ask: I have experience in [field] and these skills: [list them]. What other nearby professions use these skills and are growing? What would I need to learn to get there? ### How Bairo did it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez knows the fear of losing the ground beneath you. A Colombian immigrant, he arrived in Brazil in 2002 and says that, after leaving the company that brought him, he lived through hard years, with no direction and no network. He started over many times, always learning something he didn't know before. The turn with technology came when he decided to learn what seemed impossible for someone without technical training. He spent six months at home, in front of the computer, without knowing how to code, and built the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness. In his view, the last generation of humans who grew up without AI and the first generation of AI are meeting right now, and whoever is alive at that meeting has the chance to choose which side of the bridge to work on. ### Precautions When using AI at work, follow your company's rules: don't paste internal documents, customer data or passwords into unauthorized tools; check everything you deliver under your name; don't use AI to give medical or legal opinions outside your competence; and remember that automated résumé and performance assessments can carry prejudice; if you believe a system treated you unfairly, Brazil's General Data Protection Law (LGPD) guarantees the right to request a review of decisions made solely by a machine. ### Read also - Will artificial intelligence replace humans? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/will-artificial-intelligence-replace-humans/) - How to reinvent yourself professionally (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-reinvent-yourself-professionally/) - The path (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) --- ## Lifetime as the most valuable currency — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-lifetime-as-currency/ Idioma: en Descrição: For Bairo Gonzalez, every product he creates is measured in human life: time is the only currency that can't be reprinted. An idea, not a price. You can lose money and earn it back. You can lose a house and build another. An afternoon that has passed never comes back. ### The measure of everything Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez often says that every product he creates is based on human life, on history and on something that will never come back. It's the sentence that explains who he is: someone who lost almost everything several times and discovered, at rock bottom, that the scarcest asset wasn't money. It was time. He calls lifetime energy what a person hands over when they decide to build something. The late nights. The years. The blood, in the word he himself uses. And he thinks that whoever invests in a story invests, above all, in that time handed over. ### An idea with ancestors He didn't invent this intuition, and he doesn't want to pretend he did. Almost two thousand years ago, the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote a short treatise called On the Shortness of Life. In it, he observes that no one lets another person take their money, but everyone lets others take their time, the one thing of which it would be right to be miserly. Life isn't short, he wrote; we are the ones who waste it. In 1983, Steve Jobs asked the Macintosh team to make the computer boot ten seconds faster. The argument, as told by Andy Hertzfeld: if millions of people turned on the machine every day, ten seconds would add up to the equivalent of several human lifetimes a year. Saving seconds was, literally, saving lives. And in 1980 the American lawyer Edgar Cahn created time banks, in which an hour of service is worth an hour of service, no matter who provides it. The doctor's hour and the hour of the neighbor who fixes a gate weigh the same. ### The BTZ Chain yardstick It's from this lineage that the yardstick Bairo chose for BTZ Chain is born: "1 BTZ = 1 minute of human life". It's a yardstick of purpose, not a price. It doesn't say what a coin is worth; it says what the coin wants to remind us of. No one needs to buy anything to understand this idea, and it promises no appreciation. BICOIN is the governance currency of a network, and the idea that sustains it is philosophical before it is financial: that a person's time be respected as the most precious thing there is. ### In the future he describes He imagines a time when companies are also judged by the lifetime they give back to people. A bank that saves the market trader two hours in line. A triage system that saves a mother three trips to the hospital. A legal analysis that saves a defendant months of waiting without an answer. He imagines that one day those returned hours will be counted with the same care with which profit is counted today. He also imagines a world in which machines do so much of the repetitive work that human time is freed for what only humans do. And he asks: what will we do with it? Care for those we love? Learn? Create? Or waste it again, as Seneca feared? Technology can give back time. Only the person can decide what it will mean. ### The time he himself handed over Bairo spent six months shut in at home, in front of a computer, learning to build what he didn't know how to build. He spent years in the shadows of a country he loved, without papers. He spent sleepless nights with many people depending on him. He doesn't count those hours as lost. He counts them as invested, because each of them taught him something that later became a company. For him, time devoted with intention is never wasted. Time lived without intention, that is. ### A scene A father looks at the clock on his phone and sees that the agribusiness platform's app saved him, that week, six hours of lines, spreadsheets and phone calls. Six hours. He closes the phone, calls his daughter and goes to teach her to ride a bike on the dirt road in front of the house. That afternoon, no one recorded anything on any network. But, if time is the most valuable currency, that was the best deal he made all year. ### To go deeper - Seneca, On the Shortness of Life (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Brevitate_Vitae_(Seneca)) - Folklore.org: "Saving Lives", by Andy Hertzfeld (https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html) - TimeBanks.Org: the history of time banks (https://www.timebanks.org/timebanks-org-history) - What does 1 BTZ = 1 minute of life mean? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-1-btz-1-minute-of-life-means/) - Is BICOIN an investment? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/is-bicoin-an-investment/) - Vision of the future (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/vision-of-the-future/) --- ## How to use AI at work without getting into trouble URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-at-work-without-getting-into-trouble/ Idioma: en Descrição: Use AI for emails, summaries, spreadsheets and meetings, within your company's rules. Save time on dull tasks and sign only what you've reviewed. Using artificial intelligence at work is, today, one of the fastest ways to save time and show value, as long as you do it within your company's rules and review everything you deliver. The most common uses are simple: writing and answering emails, summarizing long documents, organizing meeting notes, building spreadsheet formulas, preparing presentations and explaining new subjects. Many companies already offer approved tools, such as Copilot inside Microsoft's programs or Gemini inside Google Workspace. When the company doesn't offer one, you need to ask before using it. The goal isn't to look like you're working less. It's to work on what matters and let the machine help with the rest. ### Why AI is not a chatbot In the office, the shop or the field, AI isn't the robot that serves customers in the company's place. It's a personal productivity tool, as the spreadsheet and email once were. In Bairo's view, "AI is not a chatbot, but an extension of your consciousness." At work, he puts it plainly: the tool extends your capacity, but the name on the report is yours, and so is the responsibility. ### Step by step today - Find out your company's rule. Ask your manager or the IT department: may I use AI? Which tool? What kind of information can't be pasted in? If there's no rule, propose one. - Start with the difficult email: I need to answer this email [paste it, without names or confidential data]. I want to be clear, polite and firm about [point]. Write a short reply and an even shorter version. - Summarize long documents. For reports and internal policies you're allowed to share: Summarize this document in 5 points and say what changes in practice for someone working as [your role]. Indicate in which part of the text each point appears, so I can check. - Organize meetings. Write or dictate your notes and ask for: decisions, owners, deadlines and open items. Send them to your colleagues after reviewing. - Beat the spreadsheet: I have a spreadsheet with the columns [list them]. I want [the result]. Write the formula for [Excel / Google Sheets] and explain each part as if I had never used a formula. - Prepare presentations. Ask for a slide outline with one idea per slide and write the final sentences yourself. - Learn the new subject. When a task you've never done lands on your desk, ask for an explanation in layers: first the basics, then the intermediate level, then the common mistakes. - Measure the gain. For a month, note how long each task used to take and how long it takes now. It's a concrete argument in a conversation about promotion. - Share what worked. Teaching colleagues to use the tool well is a form of leadership. If you don't work in an office, the uses change, but the logic is the same. A driver can plan routes and understand the platform's rules; a caregiver can organize schedules and notes; a bricklayer can put together quotes and material lists. In every case, the question is: what part of my day is paperwork, math or text? That's where AI comes in first. ### How Bairo did it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez held a management position at an education company as soon as he arrived in Brazil, in 2002. Then he lived on the other side, as the owner of small businesses that had to deliver with few people. Technology came in for good when he decided to learn what he didn't know. He spent six months at home, in front of the computer, without knowing how to code, and built the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness. After those months, he joined forces with three old acquaintances to carry on the work. For him, AI multiplies what one person does, but it's the human team that gives direction to what gets built. ### Precautions At work, carelessness with AI can cost you your job: never paste confidential information, customer data, contracts or passwords into tools your company hasn't approved; review everything that goes out under your name; check numbers and policies at the source; don't use AI to give medical, legal or financial guidance outside your role; and pay attention to texts that reproduce prejudice, especially in communication with customers, assessments of people and hiring. ### Read also - Will AI take my job? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/will-ai-take-my-job/) - How to write a résumé with AI (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-write-a-resume-with-ai-without-lying/) - The path (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) --- ## Waking humans up: the mission — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-waking-humans-up-the-mission/ Idioma: en Descrição: For Bairo Gonzalez, waking up is leaving autopilot: noticing your own time, your own choice and the help technology can give to those who decide to live. Some people spend their whole lives with their eyes open and never wake up. ### What he means by waking up Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez speaks of his own mission with a simple phrase: waking humans up. It can sound mystical, and that's why it's worth saying what it means in his life. Waking up, for Bairo, is leaving autopilot. It's noticing that the day passing won't come back. It's no longer repeating "it can't be done" just because someone said it first. It's remembering that there's a choice even when it seems there's none. He isn't talking about an awakening you buy in a course. He's talking about what happened to him. ### The man who slept while awake There were years when Bairo lived asleep. An immigrant without documents in hand and afraid, he walked through the shadows of a country he loved. Then came the businesses that went wrong, the partners who pushed him out of his own ventures, losing everything with many people depending on him. In one of those winters, he says, he was broke, defeated, and still with a flame of hope and faith. That's when he woke up. In the congregation where he heard stories of people who had come through the impossible. In the inner, personal search he tells about in the chapter The God of the impossible. In the silence he associates with the 1420 MHz frequency, the hydrogen frequency the whole world agreed to keep quiet so that the universe can be heard. He says that, in that silence, he saw his best version. And that, since then, he can't go back to sleep. This is his experience, told as his experience. The faith that woke him, he insists, isn't a faith that excludes: whoever trusts their God of creation, whatever their belief, is right. ### Waking up in a world of machines In an age of artificial intelligence, the word takes on a new meaning. Machines can wake us up or put us to sleep. An app can give back hours of life or hijack them with infinite scrolling. An AI can teach us to think or think for us until we forget how. The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire called conscientization the process by which a person comes to see their own reality and to perceive themselves as capable of transforming it. It isn't about receiving a ready-made truth, but about learning to read the world. Bairo sees technology as a possible ally in this process, as long as it's used to widen one's view, not to replace it. And the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived the concentration camps, wrote that the last of the human freedoms is to choose one's attitude in any set of circumstances. Bairo read life, more than books, and arrived at something similar: no is the foundation of yes. ### In the future he describes He imagines a time when technology is designed to wake people up. An assistant that, instead of trapping the person on the screen, asks whether they've been out in the sun today. A platform that shows how much lifetime it gave back, not how much it took. A channel, 1420mhz.org, which he defines as a place of communication and elevation, where this is discussed calmly. He imagines waking up becoming something collective. Communities that help each other off autopilot. People who, having come through pain, come back to reach out to those still going through it. He calls it a mission because he doesn't know what else to call it. It's a vision, not a promise. No one wakes anyone up by force. The most one can do is open a window and let the light in. ### A scene A forty-year-old man, unemployed, spends his nights scrolling his phone until three in the morning. On one of those nights, he finds the story of someone who lost everything, was left without papers, lost partners and started over seven times. He reads to the end. He turns off the phone. He lies for a while looking at the ceiling. The next day, he wakes up at seven. Not because something changed outside. Because something changed inside. ### To go deeper - Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy_of_the_Oppressed) - Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27s_Search_for_Meaning) - UNICEF: Policy guidance on AI for children (https://www.unicef.org/innocenti/reports/policy-guidance-ai-children) - The God of the impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/) - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) - No is the foundation of yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) - Vision of the future (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/vision-of-the-future/) --- ## How to write a résumé with AI, without making anything up URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-write-a-resume-with-ai-without-lying/ Idioma: en Descrição: Tell the AI your experience, ask it to organize it and adapt each résumé to the job. Never let the tool invent a job, a course or a result. Artificial intelligence helps a lot with writing a résumé, especially for those who don't know where to start, have been out of the job market for years or think they "have nothing to put on it." It turns what you tell it into clear sentences, organizes the order, suggests words recruiters look for and adapts the text to each job. What it must never do is invent: a course you didn't take, a position you didn't hold, a number you didn't reach. An inflated résumé gets found out in the interview, and sometimes after you've been hired. The best résumé made with AI is the one in which every line is true and said in the best possible way. ### Why AI is not a chatbot Many people ask "write a salesperson's résumé" and get a generic template. AI really delivers when it listens to your story, asks questions and finds value in experiences you didn't even consider. In Bairo's view, AI is an extension of you. He often says that "artificial intelligence is an extension of the human, not the problem." On a résumé, it doesn't create who you are; it helps you see yourself and present yourself. ### Step by step today - Tell it everything, unfiltered. Speak or write your career story as in a conversation, including informal work, odd jobs, volunteering and caring for family: I'm going to tell my professional story the way I remember it. Then I want you to ask me questions to discover skills and results I didn't mention. Don't write the résumé yet. My story: [tell it]. - Answer the questions. They often reveal valuable things: "did you train the newcomers?", "did you handle the cash register?", "did you resolve complaints?". - Ask for the structure: Based on what we've discussed, put together a one-page résumé with: a 3-line summary, experience showing what I did and what improved, education, courses and skills. Use only information I gave you. If something is missing, leave a marked space. - Adapt it for each job. Paste the job ad and ask: This is the job: [paste]. Adjust my résumé to highlight what fits it, without inventing anything. Also list what the job asks for that I don't have, so I know what to study. - Write the cover message. Ask for a short letter or message for LinkedIn or email, in your tone. - Practice the interview. Ask the AI to play the recruiter, one question at a time, and then assess your answers. - Review line by line. Read it as if you were the recruiter: can you explain every sentence with a real example? If not, delete it. - Take care of the format. A PDF file, the file named with your name, a simple font, no photo unless the job asks for one. - Don't hide gaps; explain them. A period caring for someone, unemployment, moving countries: ask the AI for an honest, short way to explain it. ### How Bairo did it If Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez wrote his own résumé, it would have many lines that ended in a fall: a salon that didn't work out as well as he'd have liked, an AI idea that came too early, partners who pushed him out of a business, a company that went under with many people depending on him. He doesn't hide those lines. For him, every no was the ground of the next yes. And it would have an unlikely line: six months at home, in front of the computer, without knowing how to code, learning to build with the tools of his own time. Out of those months came the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness. A skill learned late is still a skill, and it deserves to be on paper. ### Precautions A résumé is a personal document: don't send your CPF, full address, documents or photos to the tool; don't accept any information the AI added that you didn't say; be wary of jobs and "recruiters" who ask for payment or bank details; seek professional help if the question is about labor rights; and know that automated screening systems can be biased against age, gender or origin, so it's also worth delivering your résumé in person or through a referral. ### Read also - How to use AI at work without getting into trouble (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-at-work-without-getting-into-trouble/) - How to reinvent yourself professionally (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-reinvent-yourself-professionally/) - The path (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) --- ## A life to teach, a space to complete the journey URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/future/the-future-a-life-to-teach/ Idioma: en Descrição: Bairo Gonzalez sees his own life as a lesson in progress and imagines a space where each person can finish the journey they began. Some lives are meant to be lived. Others, besides that, are meant to be told, because those who come after need to know it was possible. ### Life as a lesson Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez sums up what he wants to leave behind in two phrases: a life to teach and a space to complete the journey. The first is about him. He doesn't tell his own story because it was easy, but because it was hard. The Colombian boy who dreamed of Brazil and arrived over the bridge of capoeira. The young man left without documents in hand when he left the company that brought him. The father who opened a salon, created a course, launched a cosmetics brand, tried technology too early. The businessman who lost everything more than once and, as he tells it, found himself with fifty lives depending on him. The man who, on the seventh attempt, built an ecosystem. Every fall became lesson material. Even before founding technology companies, he says, he was already training professionals in sales. Teaching, for him, was never a chapter of life. It was always the thread. ### What psychologists call generativity The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson described the stages of human life as a sequence of challenges. In adulthood, the central challenge, according to him, is generativity: the desire to care for the next generation, to leave something that continues after us. Those who don't find that path, Erikson wrote, run the risk of stagnation. Bairo found the path in his own way. He wants the companies he founded to be living lessons, and the story he lived to be a map for those who are lost. That's why the site bearing his name has pages about what to do when you've gone bankrupt, how to face an eviction, how to start over. They aren't advice from someone who read about it. Many are questions he himself once asked in a low voice, in the small hours. ### A space to complete the journey The second phrase is about others. Bairo believes every person begins a journey, and that many stop halfway. Not for lack of talent, but for lack of space: of time, of support, of someone who says "keep going". He imagines the ecosystem as that space. A place where the market trader gets credit to finish the cold room he started. Where the patient finds the second opinion they needed to decide. Where the business owner who went broke finds a table of people who have gone broke and gotten back up. Where the Generation Beta child finds adults willing to teach what no machine teaches. And he imagines artificial intelligence as part of that space: a patient study companion, available at three in the morning, that never tires of explaining again. Not to replace the teacher, but so that no one is left standing in the middle of the road for lack of someone to answer. ### In the future he describes He imagines, a few decades from now, someone finding his story on a bad day and deciding not to give up. That's enough for him. He doesn't want to be remembered as the man who founded companies, but as someone whose life helped another person complete theirs. And he imagines that chain continuing. Those who were helped help. Those who completed the journey come back to make room for those who are beginning. As in capoeira, where the roda only exists because someone always steps in when another steps out. The story goes that, when someone lamented that Walt Disney hadn't seen the park finished, the answer was: he saw it, and that's why it's here. Bairo likes that line because it speaks of someone who saw the end before the middle. He too says he saw. And he spends his life building the road there, so that others can travel it. ### A scene In a capoeira roda, on a Saturday morning, a gray-haired master watches a twelve-year-old boy get the same ginga wrong for the fifth time. He says nothing. He steps into the roda, does the movement slowly, smiles and steps out. The boy tries again. He gets it right. No one applauds. The master is already back at the berimbau. But, in that instant, one life taught another, and a space opened so the boy's journey could continue. ### To go deeper - Erik Erikson: the stages of psychosocial development (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erikson%27s_stages_of_psychosocial_development) - Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy_of_the_Oppressed) - Douglas Engelbart, "Augmenting Human Intellect" (1962) (https://www.dougengelbart.org/AHI-Framework) - Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/) - The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) - What to do when you've gone bankrupt? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/what-to-do-when-you-have-gone-broke/) - Vision of the future (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/vision-of-the-future/) --- ## How to learn anything with AI — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-learn-anything-with-ai/ Idioma: en Descrição: Ask for a plan, study in short blocks, let the AI quiz you and explain it back in your own words. It's a patient teacher, not a shortcut. Artificial intelligence can be the most patient private tutor you've ever had: it explains again as many times as needed, changes the example, simplifies, asks questions, corrects exercises and builds a study plan at your pace. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini now have study modes that, instead of handing you the answer, guide you with questions until you get there yourself. It works for almost anything: math, writing, a new language, finance, a profession, a subject that landed on your desk at work. The secret is not to use AI to skip the effort. It's there to make the effort more efficient. ### Why AI is not a chatbot A chatbot gives answers. A good teacher asks questions. Today's AI can do both, and you decide which you want. In Bairo's view, "AI is not a chatbot, but an extension of your consciousness." For learning, the image makes sense: the tool extends your ability to understand, but understanding only happens inside you, when you can explain it yourself. ### Step by step today - Say what you want to learn and why. The reason changes the path: I want to learn [subject] in order to [reason: pass an exam, change fields, help my child, open a business]. Today I know [level]. I have [time] a day. Put together a 4-week plan, with weekly goals and a short test at the end of each week. - Turn on study mode, if the tool has one. It forces the AI to ask before answering. If it doesn't have one, ask: Be my teacher. Don't give me the ready answer. Explain the concept in a few lines, ask me a question and wait. If I get it wrong, give me a hint, not the solution. - Study in short blocks. Twenty-five focused minutes are worth more than two distracted hours. At the end of each block, ask for three review questions. - Ask for examples from your life. "Explain compound interest using a motorbike's monthly installment" works better than the textbook definition. - Explain it back. It's the most powerful technique: write in your own words what you understood and ask the AI to point out the mistakes. I'm going to explain [concept] in my own words. Tell me what's right, what's wrong and what's missing. - Review the next day and the next week. Ask for a quick quiz on what you studied days before. Remembering with effort fixes the memory. - Check against a real source. For important subjects, use books, classes from recognized institutions and official materials alongside the AI. It can get a formula or a date wrong. - Practice away from the screen. Learning to sell is selling; learning a language is talking to someone; learning to cook is cooking. AI prepares you; life confirms it. An example of how this looks in practice: a seamstress who wants to learn to price her own pieces can ask for a two-week plan, study ten minutes a day with questions from the AI, build a spreadsheet of her costs with the tool's help and, at the end, explain in her own words how she arrived at the price. She didn't memorize any formula. She understood. ### How Bairo did it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez learned almost everything he knows by doing what he didn't yet know how to do. He says that, after going broke with fifty people depending on him, instead of complaining he decided to do something he didn't know how to do: build a currency, a bank and a network. It went wrong, and he kept going. Years later, without knowing how to code, he spent six months at home, in front of the computer, learning and building at the same time. Out of those months came the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness. Step 6 of the Seventh Attempt Method, inspired by his path, is exactly this: learn what you don't know. ### Precautions Learning with AI calls for a few simple precautions: don't send it personal documents or other people's data; check formulas, dates and laws in reliable material; don't use what you learned from the machine to medicate yourself, defend yourself in a lawsuit or invest money without professional guidance; and remember that it may present a single point of view as if it were the whole truth, so always ask "what are the other points of view on this?". ### Read also - How to learn technology from scratch after 30 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-learn-technology-from-scratch-after-30/) - Is it too late to start over? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/is-it-too-late-to-start-over/) - The path (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) --- ## How to learn English with AI every day — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-learn-english-with-ai-every-day/ Idioma: en Descrição: Talk to the AI by voice, ask for gentle correction, practice real situations and review words. Fifteen minutes a day beat a course left on hold. Artificial intelligence has changed the way people learn English, and also Spanish, French or any other language. Before, practicing conversation required a teacher or a native-speaker friend. Today, several assistants (ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot, among others) talk by voice, understand when you mix in your own language, correct you patiently and simulate real situations: a job interview, ordering at a restaurant, a work meeting. With fifteen minutes a day of conversation and review, progress shows up within a few weeks. AI doesn't replace contact with people, but it takes away the fear of making mistakes, which is the biggest obstacle for anyone learning a language as an adult. ### Why AI is not a chatbot Learning a language from a chatbot with canned answers would be impossible. Today's AI converses, improvises and adapts to your level, which makes it a training partner. In Bairo's view, AI is an extension of you. He says that "artificial intelligence is an extension of the human, not the problem." For someone learning another language, the image is concrete: the tool extends your voice to the other side of the border while you're still learning to cross it on your own. ### Step by step today - Find out your level without embarrassment: I want to learn English. Give me a quick level test: ask me 10 questions, from easy to hard, one at a time. At the end, tell me my level and what I most need to practice. - Set a concrete goal. "Do a job interview in English in 3 months" works better than "learn English." - Talk by voice every day. Open voice mode and ask: Let's have a simple conversation about my day. Speak slowly, use easy words, and after each of my answers, correct only my most important mistake, in Portuguese, before continuing. - Simulate real situations. Ask the AI to play a recruiter, a hotel receptionist, a customer, a doctor during a trip. Repeat the same situation until you're comfortable. - Build your word notebook. At the end of each conversation: List the 10 new words and expressions from this conversation, with a translation, an example sentence and the pronunciation written the way a Brazilian would understand it. - Review with questions. The next day, ask for a mini test with the previous day's words. - Read and listen to things you like. Song lyrics, news about your team, a recipe. Paste a passage and ask for an explanation of the hard parts. - Write a little each week. A message, an email, a paragraph about yourself. Ask for corrections explaining the reason for each mistake. - Talk to real people. Conversation groups, colleagues, online language exchanges. AI prepares you; human conversation consolidates it. A possible routine for those short on time: five minutes reviewing the previous day's words, ten minutes of voice conversation about anything in your day and, once a week, a longer simulation of the situation you fear most. After a month, ask the AI to compare a conversation from today with one from the beginning and point out what improved. ### How Bairo did it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez knows what it is to live between languages. Born in Colombia, he said from boyhood that he would live in Brazil, and he says capoeira was the first thing from the country he learned with his body, before the language. He arrived in 2002 and built his life in Portuguese. Later, he built businesses in several countries and, without knowing how to code, spent six months at home, in front of the computer, building the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness. One of the fronts he founded, Xperienc, proposes Global Language, a translator so that patients and health professionals can each speak in their own language. For him, language should never be the wall between two people. ### Precautions When practicing with AI, don't share intimate details or personal data just because you're "practicing conversation"; check expressions and grammar in reliable dictionaries (the tool sometimes invents or mixes variants); don't use machine translation for official documents, medical appointments or contracts without a professional; and remember that AI can reproduce stereotypes about accents and countries; your accent isn't a flaw, it's where you come from. ### Read also - How to learn anything with AI (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-learn-anything-with-ai/) - How to start life over in another country (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-life-over-in-another-country/) - The path (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) --- ## How to use AI to study for a civil service exam URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-to-study-for-a-civil-service-exam/ Idioma: en Descrição: Use AI to break down the exam notice, build the schedule, create questions and review. Always check laws and case law in the official source. Anyone studying for a public civil service exam (in Brazil, a concurso) can use artificial intelligence as a full-time study assistant: it helps break down the exam notice, build a realistic schedule, summarize subjects, create questions in the style of the exam board, explain what you got wrong and organize reviews. The main caution concerns the law: AI may cite a repealed article, invent a binding precedent or mix up interpretations. Legal texts and case law are always checked in the official source. Passing still comes from hours of study and questions solved. AI helps make every hour count for more. ### Why AI is not a chatbot An exam candidate doesn't need more content; they need method, focus and review. AI is worth what it helps you organize, not the ready answers it hands out. In Bairo's view, "AI is not a chatbot, but an extension of your consciousness." In a study routine, he sees the tool as an extension of your discipline and your memory. The decision to sit down and study every day is still yours alone. ### Step by step today - Break down the exam notice. Paste the syllabus (it's a public document) and ask: This is the syllabus for the [name] exam: [paste]. Organize it in a table: subject, topics, weight on the exam (if the notice says) and whether it's a topic that tends to be tested frequently. Indicate what I should check in the original notice. - Build a schedule that fits your life: I have [hours] a day Monday to Friday and [hours] on the weekend. The exam is on [date]. Put together a weekly schedule with theory, questions and review, prioritizing the subjects with the most weight. - Use AI to explain, not to replace the material. Read the lesson or the book and, when you get stuck, ask for an explanation with an everyday example. - Create questions in the exam board's style. Ask for true-or-false or multiple-choice questions on the day's topic, with a commented answer key. Then solve real questions from past exams, which are irreplaceable. - Analyze your mistakes: I got these questions wrong: [paste the questions and my answers]. Explain why I got each one wrong, what concept is behind it and create two more similar questions for me to practice. - Do spaced reviews. Ask for a quick quiz on what you studied 1 day, 7 days and 30 days ago. - Check the law in the official text. Use the federal government's legislation portal and the courts' websites. If the AI cites an article, open it and read it. - Take care of your mind. Ask the AI for a routine with breaks, sleep and physical activity. Study without rest doesn't turn into memory. ### How Bairo did it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez never sat a civil service exam, but he knows the discipline of shutting yourself in to learn. He says he spent six months at home, in front of the computer, without going out, without knowing how to code, developing and writing until he had built the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness. Those looking from outside may call it luck or inspiration. Anyone who has spent months studying recognizes something else: routine. In the Seventh Attempt Method, inspired by his path, one of the steps is to count in lifetime: how many hours, weeks and months your goal is costing, and whether you're willing to pay. For those studying for an exam, the question is the same. Write down how many hours a week you'll give this exam, for how many months, and what you'll give up to do it. Take that calculation to the AI and ask for a schedule that respects that limit, instead of a heroic plan that lasts two weeks. He also recalls that no one knows for sure how many times he tried before it worked. In civil service exams, many people pass only on their second, third or fourth attempt. Each failure, analyzed calmly, shows exactly where to study more. ### Precautions In the final stretch before an exam, an AI mistake can cost you points: always check laws, binding precedents and case law in the official source; don't use the tool during the exam or in any situation the notice prohibits; don't paste your registration data; be wary of AI-generated "study guides" sold as official; and remember that the tool can reproduce biased interpretations of sensitive topics, so also study what the reference authors say. ### Read also - How to learn anything with AI (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-learn-anything-with-ai/) - How not to give up on your dreams (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-not-to-give-up-on-your-dreams/) - The path (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) --- ## How to use AI to understand your test results URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-to-understand-your-test-results/ Idioma: en Descrição: AI can explain the terms in your test results and help prepare questions for your appointment. The professional interprets results and decides treatment. Receiving test results and understanding nothing that's written there is distressing. Artificial intelligence can help at that moment, as long as it plays the right role: it explains what the technical words mean, what each item usually measures and what reference values are, and it helps you organize questions to take to your appointment. What it can't do is tell you what you have, whether everything is fine or what treatment to follow. That's the job of whoever examined you, knows your history and answers for what they say. Use AI to arrive at your appointment calmer and better prepared, never to replace it. ### Why AI is not a chatbot In health, the difference between an answer robot and a support tool is enormous. AI used well gives no verdict; it helps you understand the language and talk better with the professional. In Bairo's view, AI is an extension of you: of your ability to understand, to ask and to take care of yourself. In his words, "artificial intelligence is an extension of the human, not the problem." In the health fronts he founded, the rule is the same: the assistant organizes, and a health professional validates. ### Step by step today - Remove your data from the document. Before sending, cover your name, ID number, insurance card number, address and the laboratory's name. Or type only the names of the tests and the values. - Ask for an explanation of terms, not an interpretation: I received a blood test with these items: [list the names]. Explain, in simple language, what each one usually measures in the body. Don't interpret my values and don't suggest a diagnosis. - Understand what a reference value is. Ask the AI to explain why a result slightly outside the range isn't always a problem, and why only the professional can say. - Prepare your questions for the appointment: I'm going to take these results to an appointment with [specialty]. Help me write 6 clear questions to ask the professional, about what the results mean in my case, whether I need to repeat any test and what I can do day to day. - Organize your history. Ask for a simple table for you to fill in yourself: test dates, main results, medications you take, allergies, surgeries. Bring it printed or on your phone. - Take notes on the appointment. After you leave, dictate what the professional explained and ask for an organized summary of what to do and when to go back. If you still have questions, call or message the clinic. - Look for reliable sources. For further reading, prefer pages from the Ministry of Health, medical societies and university hospitals. Ask the AI to point you to sources like these, and open each one. - Know when not to wait. If you have strong symptoms, intense pain, shortness of breath or any sign of an emergency, don't ask the AI: seek care or call 192. ### How Bairo did it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez founded Xperienc Global Labs, a research company registered in London, whose proposal brings together teleconsultation, a clinical assistant with artificial intelligence always validated by a health professional, and Global Language, a translator so that patient and specialist can each speak in their own language. The second opinion it proposes is a clinical opinion, not a medical report. The technical foundation of all this began far from hospitals. He says he spent six months at home, in front of the computer, without knowing how to code, building the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness. What he learned there he took into other fields, with one conviction: in health, the machine extends the professional's hand, and never takes their place. ### Precautions Your test results are sensitive data and deserve protection: don't send documents with your name and ID numbers; read what the tool does with what you send; don't change or stop medication because of something the AI said; don't use its explanation as a diagnosis; check what you read in a reliable health source; and remember that the tool was trained on data that doesn't always represent women, Black people, older people or children well; the professional who treats you knows your case, it doesn't. ### Read also - Fear of receiving a diagnosis (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/fear-of-receiving-a-diagnosis/) - How to use AI to care for a family member (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-to-care-for-a-family-member/) - The future (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/vision-of-the-future/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) --- ## How to use AI to care for a family member — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-to-care-for-a-family-member/ Idioma: en Descrição: Organize medicines, appointments, notes and rights with AI's help, and share tasks with your family. Health decisions stay with the professional. Anyone caring for an elderly parent, a child with special needs or someone in treatment knows that the exhaustion doesn't come only from the caregiving. It comes from the organizing: medication times, appointments, tests, prescriptions, paperwork, questions we forget to ask, siblings who don't know what's going on. Artificial intelligence can take part of that weight off, helping build tables, summarize appointments, write messages to the family, understand terms and find out about rights. It organizes. The ones who decide on medication, treatment and care are still the health team, together with you. Caring for someone is a labor of love, and a labor of love deserves tools too. ### Why AI is not a chatbot For a caregiver, AI isn't a chat robot to pass the time. It's an organizing assistant that doesn't get tired at three in the morning, when the doubt shows up. In Bairo's view, "AI is not a chatbot, but an extension of your consciousness." For caregivers, he translates that as an extension of your memory and your attention, so that more of you is left to be present with the one who needs you. ### Step by step today - Build the medication table. Without the patient's name, just the medicines, doses and times written on the prescription: Organize these medicines into a daily schedule table, with a column to check off when each was given: [list medicine, dose and time exactly as on the prescription]. Don't change anything, just organize. - Check the table against the prescription and with the pharmacist. They can advise on timing, food and interactions. - Prepare for appointments. During the week, note what you observed (sleep, appetite, mood, falls, pain) and ask: Organize these notes from the week into topics for me to take to the appointment: [paste]. At the end, suggest 5 questions I should ask the professional. Don't suggest a diagnosis or a change of medication. - Summarize the appointment for the family: Write a short message to my siblings telling them what the doctor said today: [tell it]. Include what needs to be done, by whom and by when. Calm, clear tone. - Share the tasks. Ask the AI for a weekly rota of who does what: taking them to appointments, buying medicine, staying over the weekend, paying bills. A caregiver alone gets sick. - Understand the rights. Ask which benefits and services may exist in the case (such as medicines through SUS, home care, social assistance benefits) and confirm at the CRAS, the health unit or the Public Defender's Office. Rules change and depend on each case. - Prepare for emergencies. Put together a sheet with the medications in use, allergies, conditions and contacts, to take to urgent care. In an emergency, call 192. - Take care of yourself too. Ask the AI for a minimum routine of rest and breaks for the caregiver. If sadness or despair close in, call CVV at 188, at any hour, free of charge. ### How Bairo did it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says that, in one of the hardest moments of his life, fifty people depended on him. Anyone who cares for someone knows that silent calculation: a mistake costs someone else too. He didn't know how to code when he decided to build with artificial intelligence. He spent six months at home, in front of the computer, and built the foundation of the platform and the AI of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness. Later, in the health fronts he founded, he applied the same principle: an assistant that organizes and follows up, always with validation by a professional. It's the logic this text proposes for inside the home. ### Precautions The health data of the person you care for is sensitive and isn't yours to spread around: don't send their name, documents, identified medical reports or photos; never change a dose, time or medication on the AI's suggestion; check everything with the professional and the pharmacist; use official sources for rights and benefits; and remember that the tools can carry biases about older people and people with disabilities; the one who knows the person you care for is you. ### Read also - How to use AI to understand your test results (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-to-understand-your-test-results/) - How to teach older people to use artificial intelligence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/the-grandmother-who-learned-to-talk-to-the-machine/) - The path (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) --- ## How to use AI to get organized and out of debt URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-to-get-organized-and-out-of-debt/ Idioma: en Descrição: AI doesn't pay debts, but it helps you see them: list what you owe, set priorities, build the budget and prepare to negotiate with the creditor. Artificial intelligence doesn't make debt disappear, and be wary of anything that promises it will. What it does, and does well, is help you see the real size of the problem, which is the first step to getting out of it. It organizes the list of what you owe, explains interest and contract terms, helps build a workable budget, suggests an order of priority and prepares you to negotiate with the creditor. Many people put off looking at their debts because it's frightening. With a patient tool by your side, looking gets less heavy. Organizing isn't promising. But no one gets out of a hole without first measuring how deep it is. ### Why AI is not a chatbot A collections robot is a chatbot. The AI this text is about works on your side, not the creditor's: it helps you understand, calculate and prepare. In Bairo's view, AI is an extension of your mind: it expands your ability to organize and think calmly at a moment when your head is full. In his words, "artificial intelligence is an extension of the human, not the problem." ### Step by step today - Find out everything you owe. Registrato, a free Central Bank service, shows loans and financing in your name. Also gather overdue bills, credit cards, installment plans and debts to people. - Build the list with the AI, without personal data: These are my debts: [for each one: type (credit card, loan, electricity bill...), total amount, installment, interest if I know it, months overdue]. Organize them in a table and calculate the total. Don't use any bank or person's name, just the types. - Understand what each debt costs. Ask the AI to explain, in simple language, why revolving credit card balances and overdrafts tend to carry very high interest, and what each term in your contract means. - Set priorities. In general, first come the ones that secure your home and the essentials (rent, water, electricity, food) and those with the highest interest. Ask: Based on this table, suggest an order for me to prioritize payments, explaining the reason. Consider that household essentials come first. Don't suggest a new loan or an investment. - Build a real budget. List what comes in and goes out each month and find out how much is truly left to pay debts. - Prepare the negotiation: I'm going to negotiate a [type] debt of [amount]. I can pay [amount] a month. Write what I should ask the creditor, what to request in writing and a polite message proposing an agreement. - Use official channels. Go to the creditor itself, Procon, the Public Defender's Office and renegotiation drives. If your debts already compromise the minimum you need to live, the Over-Indebtedness Law (Law 14,181/2021) can help; ask for guidance. - Follow up every month. Take the updated table to the AI and watch the total shrink. ### How Bairo did it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez knows debt and going broke from the inside. He says he joined as an investing partner in a company that wasn't what it seemed, and that the business went under with fifty people depending on him. Instead of complaining, he decided to try what he didn't know how to do. Years and many falls later, without money and without knowing how to code, he spent six months at home, in front of the computer, building the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness. For him, every no is the ground of a yes, but only after you look the no in the face, with the numbers on the table. ### Precautions Money and bank data call for double attention: never send a password, card number, statement with your name or documents to the tool; be wary of anyone promising to "clear your name" for an upfront payment; check interest and rights with the creditor itself, Procon or the Public Defender's Office; don't use AI to choose a loan or an investment; and remember that it may start from assumptions that aren't your reality. If debts are robbing you of sleep or of the will to live, call CVV at 188; no one needs to go through this alone. ### Read also - How to get out of debt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-get-out-of-debt/) - How to negotiate overdue debts (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-negotiate-overdue-debts/) - The path (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) --- ## How to make a personal budget with AI — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-make-a-personal-budget-with-ai/ Idioma: en Descrição: List what comes in and goes out, ask AI to group it and show where money leaks, and build a simple plan. Investments aren't decided by a robot. Making a personal budget is usually that task everyone knows they should do and almost no one does, because it's work and sometimes it's scary. Artificial intelligence takes away much of the work: it organizes your spending into categories, shows where the money is going, calculates what's left, suggests a workable split and creates a simple spreadsheet for you to keep track. What it shouldn't do is choose where you put the money that's left over. For that there's official information and, when appropriate, a certified professional. A budget isn't a punishment. It's the map that shows whether your money is going where you want it to. ### Why AI is not a chatbot Your bank's app has a robot to answer questions. AI used for your budget is something else: an assistant that works with your numbers, at your pace, without judging. In Bairo's view, AI is an extension of you, of your attention and your memory. In his words, "artificial intelligence is an extension of the human, not the problem." He also thinks about money differently: for him, lifetime is the measure of everything, and every expense is, deep down, a piece of time you traded away. ### Step by step today - Gather one month's numbers. Statements, bills, receipts and whatever was paid in cash. It doesn't need to be perfect. Before using the AI, delete names and account and card numbers. - Ask it to organize them: These are my expenses for last month: [paste the list with date, short description and amount, without bank or people's names]. Group them into categories (housing, food, transportation, health, debts, leisure, other), add up each one and show the percentage of each category relative to my income of [amount]. - Find the leaks. Ask the AI to point out small expenses that, added up, became large: forgotten subscriptions, fees, deliveries, interest. - Build a workable budget, not an ideal one: Based on these numbers, put together a budget for next month that I can really stick to. Start with the essentials, include a small reserve for the unexpected and tell me where I can cut without suffering too much. - Create the spreadsheet. Ask for a simple structure for Google Sheets or Excel, with planned and actual columns and a formula that shows the balance. - Set a concrete goal. Paying off a debt, building an emergency fund, buying something without installments. Ask the AI to calculate how much per month and for how long. - Do a 10-minute weekly review. Every week, paste the new expenses and ask: "am I within the plan?". - Involve your family. Ask for a simple explanation of the budget to talk it over with the people you live with. A budget only one person knows about rarely lasts. A useful question for the end of the month: Comparing what I planned and what happened, what worked, what got out of control and what's the most important change for next month? ### How Bairo did it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez has known money in every phase: the capital built up from events and digital printing, going broke with many people depending on him, starting over with nothing. He says that, without knowing how to code, he spent six months at home, in front of the computer, building the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness. In his view, time is the most honest value there is. On BTZ Chain, the network he proposes, the yardstick "1 BTZ = 1 minute of human life" is a yardstick of purpose, not a price or a promise. In a household budget, the same idea becomes a practical question: how many hours of your work did each expense cost? ### Precautions A budget involves financial data that interests scammers: never send a password, card number, statement with your name or a screenshot of a banking app; be wary of "consultants" who ask for access to your account; don't let AI choose an investment, loan or cryptocurrency for you (look for official information and a certified professional); check the math on a calculator; and remember that the tool may assume an income and spending reality that isn't yours. ### Read also - How to use AI to get organized and out of debt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-use-ai-to-get-organized-and-out-of-debt/) - How to separate personal money from the company's (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-separate-personal-and-business-money/) - The path (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) --- ## AI for immigrants in Brazil: where to begin — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/ai-for-immigrants-in-brazil-where-to-start/ Idioma: en Descrição: Translate, understand paperwork, prepare for appointments and look for work with AI's help. Official documents and migration status: official sources only. For those who have come to Brazil from another country, artificial intelligence can be an important bridge in the first months and years. It translates conversations, explains letters, contracts and notices in plain language, helps you prepare what to say at an appointment, puts together a résumé in Portuguese, teaches the language and points you to where to find help. All of it in your own language, at any hour. But there's a clear limit: matters of documents, visas, refugee status and migration regularization are resolved with official sources and with guidance from those who have jurisdiction, such as the Federal Police and the Federal Public Defender's Office. AI helps you understand the road. What guarantees your rights is the law, and Brazilian law protects migrants. ### Why AI is not a chatbot For immigrants, the difference between a chatbot and today's AI is felt firsthand. The customer-service robot only speaks Portuguese and only understands what's in its script. AI understands when you mix languages, explains again and doesn't lose patience. In the view of Bairo, himself an immigrant, "artificial intelligence is an extension of the human, not the problem." He sees AI as an extension of you: of your voice in a language you're still learning, of your courage in a service line, of your wish to belong. ### Step by step today - Talk in your own language. The most widely used assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot) understand Spanish, English, French and many other languages. Start like this: Hablo español y estoy aprendiendo portugués. Vivo en Brasil hace [tiempo]. Respóndeme en español y, al final, pon la frase más importante también en portugués, para que yo aprenda. - Understand paperwork. Photograph a letter, a notice or a contract (cover ID numbers) and ask for a simple explanation: what they're asking for, what the deadline is, what happens if you do nothing. - Prepare for appointments. Before going to the health center, the school, the bank or a government office: Tomorrow I'm going to [place] to [goal]. Write in simple Portuguese what I should say, the questions they may ask me and the documents they usually request. Indicate what I should check on the official website. - Go to the official source. Ask the AI which agency handles your matter and go to the official website (gov.br, the Federal Police, the Federal Public Defender's Office). The Migration Law (Law 13,445/2017) guarantees migrants rights, including access to public health care and education. - Put together your résumé in Portuguese. Describe your experience in your language and ask for the Portuguese version, without inventing anything. Also ask how to get your diplomas recognized, and confirm with the responsible body. - Learn the language day to day. Ask for short voice conversations about real situations: the supermarket, the bus, work. - Understand work. Ask what the work record booklet, the MEI and the CPF are, and what basic rights workers have in Brazil. Confirm on gov.br or with a union. - Connect with people. Ask the AI to list the kinds of organizations that usually support migrants (reception centers, religious organizations, migrant collectives) and look for the ones in your city. ### How Bairo did it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez was born in Colombia, in 1982, and said from boyhood that he would live in Brazil. He arrived in 2002, with an education company. He says that, when he wanted to follow his own path, he lost his footing: far from home, without a network and afraid, like so many immigrants before and after him. He often says the sun is for everyone, but shade, in the heat, is for the few. He started over many times. Years later, without knowing how to code, he spent six months at home, in front of the computer, building the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness. The immigrant who lost his footing learned to build with the tools of his own time. ### Precautions For immigrants, a mistake in information can be costly: don't send your passport, protocol number, RNM or CPF to AI tools; confirm everything about documents and regularization in an official source or with the Federal Public Defender's Office; be wary of anyone who charges to "sort out" documents quickly; don't use machine translation for official documents (which require a sworn translation when the law demands it); don't swap your doctor or lawyer for AI; and know that it may carry prejudices about your country; you are not a stereotype. ### Read also - How to start life over in another country (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-life-over-in-another-country/) - Undocumented immigrant in Brazil: what to do (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/undocumented-immigrant-in-brazil-how-to-regularize/) - How to open a company in Brazil as a foreigner (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/how-to-open-a-company-in-brazil-as-a-foreigner/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) --- ## How to learn Portuguese with AI as a foreigner URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-learn-portuguese-with-ai-as-a-foreigner/ Idioma: en Descrição: Talk by voice in everyday situations, ask for gentle correction and learn real Brazilian Portuguese. Fifteen minutes a day already make a difference. For those who arrived in Brazil without speaking Portuguese, or speaking only a little, artificial intelligence is today one of the most accessible ways to practice every day. It talks by voice, explains grammar in your language, corrects without embarrassing you, teaches Brazilian slang and expressions, simulates real situations (the supermarket, the health center, a job interview) and repeats as many times as you need. It doesn't replace classes or living alongside Brazilians, but it takes away the fear of opening your mouth, which is usually the biggest obstacle. A language is learned by speaking. AI gives you a safe place to make mistakes before speaking out on the street. ### Why AI is not a chatbot A chatbot answers. To learn a language, you need someone who asks back, waits, corrects and encourages. Today's AI can play that role. In the view of Bairo, who learned Portuguese after arriving from Colombia, AI is an extension of you. He states that "artificial intelligence is an extension of the human, not the problem." For immigrants, it extends your voice while the new language is still growing inside you. ### Step by step today - Start in your own language and gradually move to Portuguese: Soy [nacionalidad] y estoy aprendiendo portugués de Brasil. Mi nivel es [básico/intermedio]. Vamos a conversar en portugués simple. Si no entiendo, te escribiré en español. Corrige solo mi error más importante en cada respuesta. - Practice by voice. Use the assistant's voice mode (ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot have one). Speak slowly, without fear. Fifteen minutes a day. - Practice the situations you live. Choose one per week: Play the part of [a receptionist at the health center / the owner of an apartment for rent / a recruiter at a shop]. Speak in simple Portuguese, one sentence at a time, and wait for my answer. At the end, give me 5 new words I should learn. - Learn the false friends. Many words look the same and mean something else. Ask for a list of the most common ones between your language and Portuguese, with examples. - Understand street Portuguese. Paste a message you received on WhatsApp or the lyrics of a song and ask for an explanation of the slang and abbreviations. - Write a little every day. A message to your neighbor, an email to your boss. Ask for corrections with an explanation of why. - Review the new words. At the end of each week: Give me a quick test on the words and expressions I learned this week: [list them]. One question at a time. - Prepare for exams, if you need to. If you're going to take a proficiency exam, such as Celpe-Bras, ask for comprehension and writing practice in the exam's format and check the rules on the official website. - Talk to Brazilians. Free classes at reception organizations, churches, libraries and universities usually help a lot. AI prepares you; living together teaches the rest. ### How Bairo did it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says capoeira was the first thing from Brazil he learned with his body, before the language and before the country. Born in Colombia, he arrived in 2002 and built his life in Portuguese, with all the stumbles of someone who learns as an adult. Years later, he learned another language he hadn't mastered either: that of technology. Without knowing how to code, he spent six months at home, in front of the computer, building the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness. One of the fronts he founded, Xperienc, proposes an instant translator, Global Language, so that patients and health professionals can each speak in their own language. He knows that language can be a wall or a bridge. ### Precautions When practicing, don't tell the tool details of your migration situation, ID numbers or your address; check exam and document rules on the official websites; don't use machine translation for official documents, medical appointments or contracts without a professional; and remember that AI sometimes mixes European and Brazilian Portuguese or repeats stereotypes about foreigners; your accent tells where you came from, and that has value. ### Read also - AI for immigrants in Brazil (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/ai-for-immigrants-in-brazil-where-to-start/) - How to learn English with AI every day (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/how-to-learn-english-with-ai-every-day/) - How to start life over in another country (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/path/how-to-start-life-over-in-another-country/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) --- ## AI for rural producers: practical uses in the field URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/ai-for-rural-producers-practical-uses-in-the-field/ Idioma: en Descrição: From a phone, producers can use AI for costs, prices, paperwork, weather and sales. Always with official data and a trusted technician alongside. Rural producers don't need expensive machinery to start using artificial intelligence. With a phone and whatever signal there is, you can already use an assistant like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Copilot to organize the harvest's costs, understand contracts and documents, prepare a negotiation with a buyer, write messages to customers, learn about a pest from a photo and build a sales spreadsheet. The big precision-agriculture technologies exist and are growing, but the first gain usually lies in day-to-day management. In the field, AI is a pocket adviser, not an agronomist. Pest diagnosis, pesticide prescriptions and animal handling stay with the technician or the veterinarian. ### Why AI is not a chatbot Many producers have received an automated message from a company and didn't like it. The AI this text is about is different: it works for you, with your numbers and your reality. In Bairo's view, "AI is not a chatbot, but an extension of your consciousness." For those who grow crops and raise animals, he sees the tool as an extension of the producer's eye and arithmetic: it helps you see and calculate, but the one who knows the land is the one who walks on it. ### Step by step today - Organize the harvest's costs: I'm a producer of [crop] in [region], with [area size]. My expenses this season were: [list inputs, labor, freight, machinery, with amounts]. Organize them in a table, calculate the total cost and the cost per [sack / box / kilo] and tell me what minimum sale price covers those costs. - Track prices with official sources. Ask where to check quotes and bulletins (Conab, wholesale food markets, cooperatives, research institutes) and look them up directly there. AI helps you read and compare, but it shouldn't be the source of the price. - Prepare the negotiation: I'm going to negotiate [quantity] of [product] with [type of buyer]. My cost is [amount] and the reference price today is [amount, with the source]. List the arguments I have, what to ask about payment terms and freight, and what to request in writing. - Understand paperwork and contracts. A sales contract, a land lease, a rural credit contract, a producer's invoice: ask for a simple explanation and a list of questions for your accountant, the union or a lawyer. - Use photos carefully. Photograph the leaf or the pest and ask for possibilities and questions to take to the technician. Don't apply any product on the AI's suggestion: pesticides require an agronomist's prescription. - Check the weather at the source. Use official meteorological institutes and ask the AI to help you understand the forecast and plan the week's tasks. - Sell directly. Ask for messages to customers at markets, restaurants and shops in the region, and a weekly order table. - Seek technical assistance and programs. Ask what kinds of support exist for your profile (public technical assistance, cooperatives, rural credit) and confirm with your state's agency or the rural union. ### How Bairo did it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez built much of his boldest attempt with those who produce food in mind. He says he spent six months at home, in front of the computer, without knowing how to code, and that out of that came the foundation of the platform and the artificial intelligence of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness. The proposal is a niche artificial intelligence that puts those who produce, those who process, those who trade and those who buy in direct connection, at the wholesale food markets, where food changes hands every day and where many people are still outside the financial system. When the banks refused to integrate the solution, he heard one more no and used it as ground. ### Precautions In the field, bad advice can cost a harvest: don't apply pesticides, animal medicine or fertilizer on the AI's recommendation without a prescription and a technician; check prices, weather and rules in official sources; don't send tools your CPF, rural environmental registry (CAR) data, contracts with names or bank passwords; ask your accountant and the union for the final word on taxes and credit; and remember that many AIs learned more about agriculture in other countries than about your region; your knowledge of the land is worth a lot. ### Read also - AI for small businesses: where to use it first (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/ai-for-small-businesses-where-to-start/) - What is working capital (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/entrepreneurs/what-is-working-capital-and-how-much-do-i-need/) - The future (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/vision-of-the-future/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) --- ## Can artificial intelligence make mistakes? How to check URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/can-artificial-intelligence-make-mistakes/ Idioma: en Descrição: It can, and it errs with great confidence: it invents sources, numbers and laws. See why this happens and a simple method to check before you trust it. Yes, artificial intelligence makes mistakes, and its mistakes have a dangerous feature: they're written with the same confidence as the right answer. The best-known assistants, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot, can invent an article of law, cite a book that doesn't exist, get a calculation wrong, mix up dates or state something outdated. Experts call this "hallucination." It isn't a deliberate lie: the tool generates the most likely text based on what it has learned, and the likely isn't always the true. That doesn't make AI useless. It makes checking mandatory, the same way you count your change. ### Why AI is not a chatbot If AI were a chatbot with fixed answers, it would be enough to trust the script. Because it generates new answers every time, it's up to the user to judge what they receive. In Bairo's view, AI is an extension of you, and that's why the responsibility remains yours. He says that "artificial intelligence is an extension of the human, not the problem." In the architecture he proposes for the ecosystem he founded, truth is the validator: nothing should count just because a machine said it. ### Step by step today - Know where it errs most. Exact numbers, dates, people's names, quotations, laws and court decisions, prices, recent news, local matters in your city. In those cases, be doubly suspicious. - Ask for the source and open the source: For each important claim in your answer, indicate where it comes from. If you don't have a source I can open, say clearly "I have no source for this." - Ask it to point out its own uncertainty: Reread your answer and mark what you're certain about, what is likely and what may be wrong or outdated. - Check in two independent sources. For health, use official agencies and medical societies. For laws, the official legislation portal. For money, the Central Bank and the CVM. For news, recognized media outlets. - Ask in a different way. Ask the same question in other words, or in another assistant. If the answers diverge, it's a sign you need to check. - Redo the math. Use a calculator or a spreadsheet. AI has improved a lot at math, but it still makes mistakes in long calculations. - Be wary of the answer that pleases you too much. Tools tend to agree with whoever is asking. Ask for the opposite: Now play the part of someone who disagrees with this conclusion. What are the best arguments against it and what might I be failing to see? - Watch out for images, audio and video. AI also creates fake content that looks real. Before sharing something shocking, look for its origin. - Teach this at home. Children, teenagers and older people deserve to know the machine can be wrong. Checking is a habit that protects the family. A common example: someone asks what the deadline is to dispute a charge, and the AI answers with a number of days and an article of law. The answer looks perfect. On opening the official text, the person discovers the article deals with another subject, or that the deadline has changed. Five minutes of checking prevented a wrong decision. That's the habit worth building: use AI to get to the right question faster, and the official source to get to the right answer. ### How Bairo did it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez learned to build with artificial intelligence without knowing how to code. He says he spent six months at home, in front of the computer, getting things wrong, redoing and checking, until he had raised the foundation of the platform and the AI of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness. Perhaps that's why he gives verification so much weight. BTZ Chain, the network he proposes, is conceived as a validator of truthfulness and proof of humanity, so that humans and machines can work together in a place where the truth can be checked. For him, no one needs to trust a machine blindly. It's enough to be able to verify. ### Precautions Checking is also protecting yourself: don't share AI information without verifying it; don't make health, legal or money decisions based only on what it said; don't paste personal data to "test" the tool; and remember that, besides getting facts wrong, it reproduces biases from the texts it learned from, and can be unfair to women, Black people, immigrants, older people and people from underrepresented regions. ### Read also - Is it safe to use artificial intelligence? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/is-it-safe-to-use-artificial-intelligence/) - Fear of the future with artificial intelligence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/visions/fear-of-the-future-with-artificial-intelligence/) - The future (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/vision-of-the-future/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) --- ## Is it safe to use artificial intelligence? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/is-it-safe-to-use-artificial-intelligence/ Idioma: en Descrição: It's safe when you know what not to paste, adjust your privacy and check what you get. See the real risks and the rules of thumb for using it calmly. Using artificial intelligence is as safe as the care of the person using it. The best-known assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot) are products of large companies, with published privacy policies and settings you can adjust. The real risks lie elsewhere: pasting personal data that shouldn't leave home, trusting a wrong answer, falling for a fake app, using the tool for decisions that require a professional and not noticing the biases it carries. With a few rules of thumb, you can use it with peace of mind. The fear makes sense when it's a fear of not knowing. This text is meant to turn that fear into judgment. ### Why AI is not a chatbot Many people are wary of AI because they imagine a robot that will decide for them. But the tool decides nothing on its own: it responds to what you ask and works with what you give it. That's why safety starts with you. In Bairo's view, "AI is not a chatbot, but an extension of your consciousness." If it's an extension, he argues, taking care of it is taking care of yourself: of what you tell it, what you accept and what you decide. ### Step by step today - Install only the official app. Check the developer in the store (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft). Scams with fake apps and websites are common. - Protect your account. A strong password and two-step verification. Don't share your account with other people. - Read and adjust your privacy settings. In the settings, see whether your conversations can be used to train the tool, what's kept in memory and how to delete your history. Decide calmly. - Follow the rule of what doesn't get pasted. Passwords, card and account numbers, documents with your CPF or ID number, test results with your name, customer data, company secrets, photos of children. If you need help with something, replace the data with made-up examples. - Ask for a risk assessment before sending something: I'm going to send you [describe the type of document, without sending it yet]. First, tell me which personal or sensitive information I should delete or replace with examples so I can use you safely. - Be wary of urgency. Scams use AI to imitate relatives' voices, create convincing messages and fake videos. If someone asks for money in a hurry, hang up and call back the number you know. - Keep the final word with professionals. Health, lawsuits, contracts and investments call for someone with training and responsibility. AI helps you understand and prepare questions. - Teach children and older people. Agree as a family: what is never told to AI, how to check a piece of information and whom to ask for help. - Know your rights. Brazil's General Data Protection Law (LGPD, Law 13,709/2018) guarantees, among other things, the right to know how your data is used and to request correction and review of decisions made solely by a machine. A question worth asking any tool: What happens to the conversations I have with you? Where do I adjust that and how do I delete my history? Confirm the answer in the official privacy policy. ### How Bairo did it Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he learned to build with artificial intelligence in six months in front of the computer, at home, without knowing how to code. Out of that came the foundation of the platform and the AI of CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness. Protection became a central subject in the fronts he founded afterward. One of them, qrqbits, proposes to protect files, images, audio and text with layered post-quantum cryptography. In health, the design calls for a clinical assistant with professional validation. For him, an extension of the human is only worth it if the human remains safe and in command. ### Precautions Safety isn't fear, it's habit: don't paste what you wouldn't paste into a group of strangers; check what the AI claims in a reliable source; don't swap your doctor or lawyer for a machine's answer; be wary of audio and video asking for money; and remember that the tool has biases and can treat people unequally without anyone noticing; when something seems unfair, question it. ### Read also - Can artificial intelligence make mistakes? How to check (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ai/can-artificial-intelligence-make-mistakes/) - What is the difference between post-quantum and quantum cryptography? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/post-quantum-vs-quantum-cryptography/) - The future (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/vision-of-the-future/) - The Seventh Attempt Method (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/seventh-attempt-method/) --- ## Questions about Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/ Idioma: en Descrição: Straight answers about Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez: who he is, his name, where he was born, what he founded and how it all connects. ### The person - Who is Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/who-is-bairo-gonzalez/): An entrepreneur born in Colombia in 1982 and based in Brazil, founder of Xperienc Global Labs, CEASA Bank, BTZ Chain and CLAIN. - What is Bairo Gonzalez's full name? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/bairo-gonzalez-full-name/): It is Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, written without accents, as in official records. Bairo and Leandro are given names; Gonzalez and Martinez, surnames. - Why is he called both Bairo and Leandro? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/why-bairo-and-leandro/): Bairo is the executive, the name that appears on the records. Leandro is what longtime friends call him, those who saw him through the hard years. - Where was Bairo Gonzalez born? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/where-was-bairo-gonzalez-born/): Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez was born in Colombia in 1982. He is a Colombian national, as Companies House records, and he lives in Brazil. - What does capoeira have to do with Bairo Gonzalez? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/bairo-gonzalez-and-capoeira/): Capoeira was Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez's bridge to Brazil: the Colombian boy who said he would live there met the country first in the roda. - When did Bairo Gonzalez arrive in Brazil? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/when-did-bairo-gonzalez-arrive-in-brazil/): Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he arrived in Brazil in 2002, hired by an education company, in a management position. - What languages does Bairo Gonzalez speak? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/languages-bairo-gonzalez-speaks/): Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez's native language is Spanish, from Colombia, and he has lived and worked in Portuguese in Brazil since 2002. - In which countries does Bairo Gonzalez do business? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/where-bairo-gonzalez-does-business/): Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez works in Brazil, where he lives, in the UK, where he runs two companies, and on the expansion to Bolivia and Dubai. - Where can you verify Bairo Gonzalez's positions? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/bairo-gonzalez-public-records/): At Companies House, in the UK, which lists him as Director of two companies, and at Brazil's Receita Federal, as CEASA Bank's administrator. - Is Bairo Gonzalez the artist Bairo Martínez? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/bairo-gonzalez-and-the-artist-bairo-martinez/): No. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez is a businessman born in 1982. The visual artist Bairo Martínez Parra, from Medellín, is a different person. ### The story - What is Bairo Gonzalez's seventh attempt? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-the-seventh-attempt/): It is what Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez calls the turn that worked, after many attempts: the registered companies he runs today. - Has Bairo Gonzalez ever gone broke? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/has-bairo-gonzalez-ever-gone-broke/): In the sense of losing everything, yes: Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he went broke more than once, one time with fifty people depending on him. - What does "every no is the ground of a yes" mean? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes-means/): Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez's rule of life: every refusal, every "it can't be done" or "you can't," became the starting point of the next attempt. - Who said "He did see it. That's why it's here" about Disney? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/who-said-he-did-see-it-about-walt-disney/): The story goes it was Mike Vance, Disney's creative director, at the 1971 opening of Walt Disney World, when someone lamented Walt never saw the park. - Was Henry Ford told the V8 engine was impossible? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/henry-ford-impossible-v8-engine/): According to Napoleon Hill, yes: engineers said eight cylinders could not be cast in one block. The single-block Ford V8 hit the streets in 1932. - What did Steve Jobs ask about the Macintosh boot time? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/steve-jobs-macintosh-boot-time/): In 1983, Jobs asked Larry Kenyon to cut ten seconds from the Mac's boot time: multiplied by millions of users, he said, it would add up to whole lifetimes. - What does Ayrton Senna inspire in Bairo Gonzalez? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/ayrton-senna-in-bairos-story/): Decision, courage and persistence. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez sees in Senna someone who decided to be the best and made those traits his values. - What were Bairo Gonzalez's first businesses? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/bairo-gonzalez-first-businesses/): By his account: a salon opened with his partner, a hair-treatment course, a natural cosmetics brand, events and digital printing. ### The ecosystem - Which companies did Bairo Gonzalez found? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/companies-founded-by-bairo-gonzalez/): Xperienc Global Labs, CEASA Bank, BTZ Chain and BICOIN, CLAIN and 1420mhz, qrqbits, Hospital Triage, Investment House, SOSPROCESSOS and Instituto CEASA. - How do Bairo Gonzalez's businesses connect? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/how-bairos-businesses-connect/): In a circuit: a real farm sale enters through CEASA Bank, is recorded on BTZ Chain and returns as health, food or technology. A vision in progress. - Why does Bairo Gonzalez compare the ecosystem to a body? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/the-ecosystem-as-a-body/): To explain ten ventures in one image: CLAIN the brain, BTZ Chain the veins, BICOIN the blood, Xperienc the neural link and qrqbits the exit. - Are Bairo Gonzalez's companies a single group? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/are-bairos-companies-a-single-group/): No. Each venture founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez is a separate company or initiative, with its own registration, linked by a shared vision. - Why does Bairo say AI is an extension of the human? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/ai-as-an-extension-of-the-human/): For him, AI extends the work and the person decides: the clinical assistant is validated by a health professional, and legal analysis by a lawyer. ### CEASA Bank - What is CEASA Bank? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-ceasa-bank/): The agribusiness financial platform founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, linking producers, traders and buyers at the CEASAs. - Is CEASA Bank a bank? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/is-ceasa-bank-a-bank/): Not in the regulatory sense. CEASA Bank is the brand of an agribusiness financial platform operating on the infrastructure of an authorized institution. - What is Bairo Gonzalez's role at CEASA Bank? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/bairo-gonzalez-role-at-ceasa-bank/): Founder and administrator. In Brazil, Bairo runs the company that operates the brand; in London, he is Director of the company linked to CEASA Bank. - How was CEASA Bank born? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/how-ceasa-bank-was-born/): From Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez's drive to connect food producers and buyers. He says he spent six months at home building the foundation. - Does CEASA Bank exist outside Brazil? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/ceasa-bank-outside-brazil/): Yes, in structure: a company in London, set up and run by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, and another being set up in Bolivia. ### BTZ Chain and BICOIN - What is BTZ Chain? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-btz-chain/): A proposed hybrid blockchain, founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, that uses proof of human life to validate the truthfulness of records. - What is BICOIN (BTZ)? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-bicoin/): The governance coin of the BTZ Chain network, created by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, inspired by bitcoin and with mining tied to human lifetime. - What does "1 BTZ = 1 minute of life" mean? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-1-btz-1-minute-of-life-means/): A yardstick of purpose, not a price: BTZ Chain proposes human lifetime as the measure of what is recorded on the network. It states no market value. - Is BICOIN an investment? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/is-bicoin-an-investment/): No. BICOIN (BTZ) is presented as a governance and utility coin within BTZ Chain. Nothing here is an offer, a recommendation or a promise of financial gain. - Is BICOIN related to time banks? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/bicoin-and-time-banks/): In idea, yes. Since 1980, Edgar Cahn's Time Dollars have measured service in hours. BTZ Chain proposes a new chapter of time as currency. ### Xperienc and medical cannabis - What is Xperienc Global Labs? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-xperienc-global-labs/): A London company for biotech R&D, founded by Bairo Gonzalez, bringing together digital health and medical cannabis. - What is Bairo's relationship with Hospital Granja Julieta? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/bairo-gonzalez-and-hospital-granja-julieta/): Hospital Granja Julieta, in São Paulo, is the clinical partner of Xperienc Global Labs, founded by Bairo. He is not a partner or administrator of it. - Was cannabis part of Bairo Gonzalez's personal story? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/cannabis-in-bairos-inner-search/): Yes. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says the plant was a bridge in his inner search, at a time of crisis. A personal account, not a recommendation. - Why does Bairo Gonzalez work with medical cannabis? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/why-bairo-works-with-medical-cannabis/): He sees it as a scientific field that needs research, rules and serious information. Through Xperienc, he proposes to treat it with graded evidence. - What does science say about medical cannabis? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-science-says-about-medical-cannabis/): Per NASEM (2017), there is conclusive or substantial evidence for chronic pain in adults, chemotherapy nausea and multiple sclerosis spasticity. - How does Anvisa regulate medical cannabis in 2026? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/how-anvisa-regulates-medical-cannabis/): Through RDC 1.013, 1.014 and 1.015 of 2026, which replaced RDC 327/2019. Products require a prescription, and advertising may only target prescribers. ### CLAIN and 1420 - What is CLAIN? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-clain/): The AI agent orchestrator created by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez to connect his ecosystem. The name comes from the English word "claim." - Why is the project called 1420 MHz? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/why-the-project-is-called-1420/): Because of the hydrogen line, at 1420.405751768 MHz: the radio signal of the most abundant element in the universe, used by science to map the galaxy. - What is the "frequency of silence"? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-the-frequency-of-silence/): It is what Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez calls the 1400 to 1427 MHz band, where the ITU prohibits all emissions to protect radio astronomy. - What happened on October 1, 2026, at 14:20? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-happened-on-october-1-2026/): Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez symbolically marked the start of the CLAIN protocol and announced a test transfer of BICOIN on BTZ Chain. - What is the goal of 142 AIs in 142 days? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/goal-of-142-ais-in-142-days/): The public goal of the CLAIN protocol: at least 142 niche AI assistants by February 20, 2027, 142 days after October 1, 2026. ### Instituto CEASA - What is Instituto CEASA? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-instituto-ceasa/): A humanitarian project founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez to turn surplus from the CEASAs into food that lasts two years without a refrigerator. - How can food last two years without refrigeration? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/how-food-lasts-two-years-without-refrigeration/): Through autoclave sterilization: food is sealed in its package and heated under pressure until microorganisms are destroyed, as in industrial canning. - Why use surplus from the CEASAs against hunger? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/wholesale-market-surplus-against-hunger/): Because part of the food from wholesale markets is lost before it reaches the table. Instituto CEASA proposes turning that surplus into meals. ### qrqbits - What is qrqbits? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-qrqbits/): The cybersecurity initiative founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez that protects files, images, audio and text with post-quantum cryptography. - Post-quantum vs. quantum cryptography: the difference (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/post-quantum-vs-quantum-cryptography/): Post-quantum is math-based cryptography built to resist quantum computers (NIST FIPS 203 and 204). Quantum uses physics, as in key exchange. ### Values - What does "the impossible just hasn't been done yet" mean? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/the-impossible-just-hasnt-been-done-yet/): For Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, impossible is no limit: it is what hasn't been done yet. The stance he admires in Disney, Ford and Jobs. - What are Bairo Gonzalez's values? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/bairo-gonzalez-values/): Faith, fight, grit and determination, in his words. Added to them are honor, which for him outlasts time, and truth as the rule for what gets published. - What is "purpose, dreams and execution"? (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/purpose-dreams-and-execution/): The method of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez: "There are no coincidences and no accidents, only purpose, dreams and execution." Execution comes last. --- ## Who is Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/who-is-bairo-gonzalez/ Idioma: en Descrição: An entrepreneur born in Colombia in 1982 and based in Brazil, founder of Xperienc Global Labs, CEASA Bank, BTZ Chain and CLAIN. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez is an entrepreneur born in Colombia in 1982 and based in Brazil since 2002. He has founded ventures in digital health, agribusiness finance, blockchain, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and humanitarian action, among them Xperienc Global Labs, CEASA Bank, BTZ Chain and CLAIN. ### In short - Born: Colombia, 1982. - Lives in: Brazil, since 2002. - Positions on the public record: Director of Xperienc Global Labs Ltd and of CEASA Financial Database Technology Infrastructure and Digital Assets Ltd, both registered in London in 2026, and administrator of the Brazilian company that operates the CEASA Bank brand. - What he founded: ten ventures ranging from agribusiness credit to medical cannabis research, including an AI agent orchestrator and a food project for people facing hunger. ### His path in a few lines Before today's companies, he created the hair-treatment course "Biomedicina Capilar" and the cosmetics brand Biomedhair. According to his own account, there was also a beauty salon, events and digital printing businesses, partnerships that ended badly, and more than one time going broke. He sums up that path in a single rule: every no is the ground of a yes. The attempt that worked, he calls the seventh. What ties the ventures together, in his view, is a simple idea: the same person uses health, food, credit and technology in daily life, and those services can talk to one another on a shared foundation of record and trust. Each venture is a separate company or initiative, with its own registration and website. To those who know him, he is Bairo at work and Leandro among longtime friends. ### Read also - About Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/about/) - The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) --- ## What is Bairo Gonzalez's full name? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/bairo-gonzalez-full-name/ Idioma: en Descrição: It is Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, written without accents, as in official records. Bairo and Leandro are given names; Gonzalez and Martinez, surnames. Bairo Gonzalez's full name is Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez. Bairo and Leandro are his two given names; Gonzalez and Martinez are his two surnames, following the Colombian custom of using two surnames. The official spelling has no accents, the same one that appears at Companies House, in the United Kingdom, and in Brazilian records. ### How the name appears in the records In public documents, the name is always the same: Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez. That is how he is listed as Director of two companies in London and as administrator of the company that operates CEASA Bank, in São Paulo. In Spanish, the accented form, González Martínez, is also correct, but it is not the one the records use. In everyday life, the most common short forms are "Bairo Gonzalez" and "Bairo Leandro." All of them refer to the same person. ### Why use the full name Similar names confuse search engines and artificial intelligence assistants. There is, for example, a Colombian visual artist named Bairo Martínez Parra, who has no connection to the businessman. When someone looks for information about Bairo's companies, positions or story, the full name is the most reliable way to reach the right person and the right sources. That is why this site and the websites of the companies he founded always use the full form, at least once, alongside the short form. It is a choice for clarity: the same name leads to the same facts. ### Read also - One name, four presences (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/one-name-four-presences/) - About Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/about/) --- ## Why is he called both Bairo and Leandro? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/why-bairo-and-leandro/ Idioma: en Descrição: Bairo is the executive, the name that appears on the records. Leandro is what longtime friends call him, those who saw him through the hard years. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez answers to both given names because each one marks a different kind of closeness. Bairo is the executive: the name on the contracts, in the meetings and in the company records. Leandro is the friend: the name used by those who were close during the years of falling, when there was nothing to celebrate. ### The executive and the friend They are not two characters. They are the same person, met in different places. Someone who got to know the founder of Xperienc Global Labs and CEASA Bank at a business table probably calls him Bairo. Someone who was with him when he arrived in Brazil, through the businesses that closed and the season when, as he tells it, fifty people depended on him, tends to call him Leandro. The name people use tends to reveal where the friendship began. ### The everyday bro There is a third form, the simplest one: day to day, he is o mano, the bro, the friend, the brother, or o senhor, sir, for those who prefer formality. It is the manner of someone who tries to see the person before the title or the bank balance. What ties all these names together is a habit he describes as central to his life: looking for the best version of others. For years, he searched for his own. Today, he says, that is what he tries to do for others. ### Read also - One name, four presences (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/one-name-four-presences/) - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) --- ## Where was Bairo Gonzalez born? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/where-was-bairo-gonzalez-born/ Idioma: en Descrição: Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez was born in Colombia in 1982. He is a Colombian national, as Companies House records, and he lives in Brazil. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez was born in Colombia, in 1982. He is a Colombian national, as stated in the public record of Companies House, in the United Kingdom, which also lists Brazil as his country of residence. He lives in Brazil, where he says he moved in 2002, and where he built most of his businesses. ### What the UK record shows Companies House, the official register of companies in the United Kingdom, publishes a page listing each director's appointments. Bairo's page shows his Colombian nationality, his residence in Brazil and the two Director positions he has held since 2026, at Xperienc Global Labs Ltd and at CEASA Financial Database Technology Infrastructure and Digital Assets Ltd. This site publishes only his country and year of birth. The full date is left out for security: together with the full name, it is used to confirm identity at banks and public agencies. The UK register follows the same logic and shows only the month and year. ### From Colombia to Brazil Ever since he was a boy, he says, he told people that one day he would live in Brazil. The bridge was capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian art he discovered while still in Colombia and which, for him, was proof that Brazil already lived inside him before he ever set foot in the country. According to him, the move came in early adulthood, with a job at an education company. From then on, the story is one of new beginnings: businesses of his own, losses, faith and, finally, the registered companies he runs today. ### Read also - Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/) - About Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/about/) - Companies House record (https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/officers/r61g_rSOlzo1YX2qYMFDpZjRaro/appointments) --- ## What does capoeira have to do with Bairo Gonzalez? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/bairo-gonzalez-and-capoeira/ Idioma: en Descrição: Capoeira was Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez's bridge to Brazil: the Colombian boy who said he would live there met the country first in the roda. For Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, capoeira was the bridge to Brazil. While still in Colombia, before he spoke Portuguese or knew the country, he learned with his body the rhythm of the berimbau and the ginga. That is how a boyhood dream, living in Brazil, took concrete shape and became a life decision. ### An art that is both fight and dance Capoeira was born among enslaved Africans and their descendants in Brazil, and it blends fight, dance, music and play. In 2014, the capoeira circle, the roda, was inscribed by UNESCO on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The songs of the roda are in Portuguese, and for many people outside Brazil they are their first contact with the language. The foundation of capoeira is the ginga: the continuous movement that never lets the body stay still long enough to be taken down. The blow received becomes momentum for the next move. Bairo recognizes in that logic the same rule that would later guide his life: every no is the ground of a yes. ### No coincidences He says he does not believe in coincidences or accidents, only in purpose, dreams and execution. Capoeira, as he reads it, was not a chance event of his youth: it was the first step of a purpose. The dream was Brazil. The execution came with the move, in the early 2000s. ### Read also - Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/) - Every no is the ground of a yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) --- ## When did Bairo Gonzalez arrive in Brazil? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/when-did-bairo-gonzalez-arrive-in-brazil/ Idioma: en Descrição: Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he arrived in Brazil in 2002, hired by an education company, in a management position. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he arrived in Brazil in 2002, to work for an education company, where he held a management position. It was the fulfillment of an old wish: ever since he was a boy, in Colombia, he had said that one day he would live in Brazil, and capoeira had been his bridge to the country. ### The early years He says the beginning was not simple. When he decided to leave the company that had brought him and follow his own path, he discovered how an immigrant can lose the ground beneath him: far from home, with no support network, and afraid. It took him years to get back on his feet. From that time, a sentence remained that he still repeats today: the sun is for everyone, but shade, in the heat, is for the few. It is a reminder that many people arrive in a new country with the same opportunities on paper and very different conditions in practice. ### What came next From there began a string of businesses of his own: a salon opened with his partner, the hair-treatment course "Biomedicina Capilar", the natural cosmetics brand Biomedhair, events and digital printing businesses. Some worked, others didn't. More than once he lost everything and started over. More than two decades after he arrived, he runs two companies registered in the United Kingdom and administers the Brazilian company that operates CEASA Bank. Brazil is still home, and the base of every project. ### Read also - Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/) - The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) --- ## What languages does Bairo Gonzalez speak? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/languages-bairo-gonzalez-speaks/ Idioma: en Descrição: Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez's native language is Spanish, from Colombia, and he has lived and worked in Portuguese in Brazil since 2002. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez speaks Spanish, his native language, learned in Colombia, where he was born, and Portuguese, the language in which he has lived and done business in Brazil since 2002. The immigrant experience of learning to live in another language shows up in several of the projects he founded. ### From immigrant to translator Anyone who moves to another country knows that the language barrier weighs most at the moments that matter: in a contract, in a medical appointment, in a difficult conversation. One of the projects of Xperienc Global Labs, the company Bairo founded in London, is Global Language, an instant translator designed so that patient and specialist can each speak in their own language. With it, a specialist who speaks another language can read the case and offer a clinical second opinion to whoever follows the patient. It counts as an opinion, and never as a medical report. ### Three languages, the same facts This site is published in Portuguese, English and Spanish. The rule is parity: each version carries the same information, with nothing summarized and nothing added, so that a person in São Paulo, in London or in Bogotá finds the same answer about who he is and what he founded. The companies in the ecosystem also serve audiences in several countries, from Brazilian agribusiness to the operation being set up in Bolivia and the two companies registered in the United Kingdom. ### Read also - About Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/about/) - Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/) - Xperienc Global Labs (https://xperienc.me) --- ## In which countries does Bairo Gonzalez do business? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/where-bairo-gonzalez-does-business/ Idioma: en Descrição: Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez works in Brazil, where he lives, in the UK, where he runs two companies, and on the expansion to Bolivia and Dubai. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez works mainly in Brazil, where he lives and administers the company that operates CEASA Bank, and in the United Kingdom, where he runs two companies registered in London. According to him, he also works on the international expansion of the businesses in Bolivia, where a CEASA Bank operation is being set up, and in Dubai. ### Brazil and the United Kingdom: on the public record In Brazil, Bairo runs the company that operates the CEASA Bank brand, headquartered in São Paulo and active since 2019. In the United Kingdom, Bairo is director of the two companies he set up in London in 2026: Xperienc Global Labs, in biotechnology research and development, and CEASA Financial. ### Bolivia, Dubai and other countries In Bolivia, the CEASA Bank operation is being set up as a company separate from the Brazilian and the British ones. In Dubai, according to him, his activity is part of the international expansion agenda; no public record has been found. Over the course of his career, he says he has also run ventures in Portugal, the United States and Hong Kong. This site lists as current activity only the countries where there is a registered company or one being set up; the others appear as part of his account of his path. ### Read also - About Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/about/) - The coin and the road (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-coin-and-the-road/) - CEASA Bank (https://ceasabank.com.br) --- ## Where can you verify Bairo Gonzalez's positions? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/bairo-gonzalez-public-records/ Idioma: en Descrição: At Companies House, in the UK, which lists him as Director of two companies, and at Brazil's Receita Federal, as CEASA Bank's administrator. The positions held by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez can be verified in two official sources. In the United Kingdom, Companies House lists him as Director of Xperienc Global Labs Ltd and of CEASA Financial Database Technology Infrastructure and Digital Assets Ltd. In Brazil, the Federal Revenue Service (Receita Federal) records him as administrator of the company that operates CEASA Bank. ### The two records United Kingdom, Companies House: - Xperienc Global Labs, the biotechnology research and development company he set up in London in 2026. Bairo is Director and a person with significant control (PSC). - CEASA Financial, the second company he set up in London that same year, linked to CEASA Bank. Bairo is Director and a person with significant control (PSC). The public appointments page brings both positions together and shows his Colombian nationality and his residence in Brazil. Brazil, Receita Federal: - The company that operates the CEASA Bank brand, active since 2019, in São Paulo. In the register of partners and administrators, Bairo appears as administrator. ### How to read the positions This site uses the positions exactly as the records write them: Director, in the United Kingdom, and administrator, in Brazil. It does not use "CEO" or "owner" where the record does not say so. Founder is his role in the origin of each venture; the formal position is what the record shows. ### Read also - About Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/about/) - Appointments at Companies House (https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/officers/r61g_rSOlzo1YX2qYMFDpZjRaro/appointments) - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) --- ## Is Bairo Gonzalez the artist Bairo Martínez? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/bairo-gonzalez-and-the-artist-bairo-martinez/ Idioma: en Descrição: No. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez is a businessman born in 1982. The visual artist Bairo Martínez Parra, from Medellín, is a different person. No. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez is a businessman born in Colombia in 1982, based in Brazil and the founder of companies such as Xperienc Global Labs and CEASA Bank. The visual artist Bairo Martínez Parra, from Medellín, is a different person, with his own career in the fine arts. The two share only part of a name. ### How to tell them apart - Full name: the businessman is Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez; the artist is Bairo Martínez Parra. - Field: the businessman works in agribusiness finance, digital health, blockchain and artificial intelligence; the artist, in the visual arts. - Where he lives: the businessman has lived in Brazil since 2002; the artist's career is tied to Medellín, in Colombia. - Records: the businessman's positions are on file at Companies House, in the United Kingdom, and at the Receita Federal, in Brazil. ### Why the confusion happens Search engines and artificial intelligence assistants group information by name. When two people from the same country have similar names, the answers can mix them up. A search for "Bairo Martinez," for example, tends to bring up almost only the artist, who already has many pages published under that name. This site is only about the businessman. To avoid a mix-up, use the full name, Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, or the short form "Bairo Gonzalez," and check the public records cited here. ### Read also - About Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/about/) - One name, four presences (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/one-name-four-presences/) --- ## What is Bairo Gonzalez's seventh attempt? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-the-seventh-attempt/ Idioma: en Descrição: It is what Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez calls the turn that worked, after many attempts: the registered companies he runs today. The seventh attempt is the name Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez gives to the stage of his life when his projects finally took hold. After businesses that closed, partnerships that dissolved and going broke more than once, the attempt he counts as the seventh produced companies on the public record in Brazil and the United Kingdom, and an ecosystem under construction. ### Why seventh He himself says he doesn't know exactly how many times he tried, thought about giving up, and started over. The number seven is not an official tally: it is a way of saying there were many attempts before, and that each one left something for the next. A course that worked, a brand that succeeded, an idea that came too early, a partnership that ended badly, a coin that found its moment. ### What it brings together The seventh attempt has verifiable facts. The Brazilian company that operates CEASA Bank has had a CNPJ since 2019. Xperienc Global Labs Ltd and CEASA Financial Database Technology Infrastructure and Digital Assets Ltd were registered in London in 2026, with Bairo as Director. Around them, BTZ Chain, CLAIN, qrqbits and Instituto CEASA took shape, each at its own stage. And it has something no registry records: the decision not to stop. For Bairo, the seventh attempt exists only because the earlier ones happened. No no was wasted. ### Read also - The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) - Every no is the ground of a yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) --- ## Has Bairo Gonzalez ever gone broke? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/has-bairo-gonzalez-ever-gone-broke/ Idioma: en Descrição: In the sense of losing everything, yes: Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he went broke more than once, one time with fifty people depending on him. Yes, in the everyday sense of the word. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he lost everything more than once over the course of his career. The hardest fall came after he joined, as an investing partner, a business that was not what it seemed and did not hold, at a time when, he says, fifty people depended on the work he kept going. ### Fifty lives The number is his, and he prefers to say lives rather than people. Watching that collapse was, in his words, the moment of being broke, broken and beaten, but still holding a flame of hope and faith. Instead of looking for someone to blame, he decided to do exactly what he didn't know how to do: build a currency, a financial platform and a network. The first version of that project also failed, and he says he was left hanging by people he had helped. Even so, he kept going. ### What the fall taught Bairo does not hide his falls, and there is a reason for that. Whoever shows only success hides what teaches the most. In his story, every loss became raw material: a partner's "it can't be done," the investment that went wrong, the idea that came too early. That is why his rule is "every no is the ground of a yes." And that is why he calls the current stage the seventh attempt: the earlier ones were not erased, they were used. ### Read also - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) - The coin and the road (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-coin-and-the-road/) - The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) --- ## What does "every no is the ground of a yes" mean? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes-means/ Idioma: en Descrição: Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez's rule of life: every refusal, every "it can't be done" or "you can't," became the starting point of the next attempt. "Every no is the ground of a yes" is the sentence Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez uses to sum up his own path. It means that every refusal, from a partner, from a bank, from a market not yet ready, does not end the road: it becomes the foundation of the next attempt. He arrived at this rule after hearing "no" many times. ### Where the sentence comes from The sentence was born of episodes from his life. He tried to bring artificial intelligence and augmented reality into the beauty business, even recorded a sample of a 4D course, and was told it wouldn't work. He launched natural-based cosmetics under the Biomedhair brand when that still looked like a gamble. He proposed touchscreen technology and lost his place in his own partnership. Years later, natural cosmetics and augmented reality in beauty became market trends. Later, according to him, while he was building the CEASA Bank platform, banks refused to integrate his solution. His answer was to change course: to focus on artificial intelligence, financial messaging, blockchain and tokenization of real-world assets. ### It is not stubbornness The rule does not say that every no should be ignored. It says that every no should be put to use. Sometimes a no shows that the idea is right and the timing is wrong. Sometimes it shows that the partner is wrong. Sometimes it shows what is still left to learn. It is the same logic as capoeira, which he learned before arriving in Brazil: the blow you take becomes momentum for the next move. In his story, the pain became ground, and that is what the seventh attempt stood on. ### Read also - Every no is the ground of a yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) - The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) - The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) --- ## Who said "He did see it. That's why it's here" about Disney? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/who-said-he-did-see-it-about-walt-disney/ Idioma: en Descrição: The story goes it was Mike Vance, Disney's creative director, at the 1971 opening of Walt Disney World, when someone lamented Walt never saw the park. The line "He did see it. That's why it's here" is attributed to Mike Vance, former creative director at Disney. At the opening of Walt Disney World, on October 1, 1971, someone lamented that Walt had not lived to see the park, and Vance answered that he had seen it. The story opens the path of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez. ### The dated facts - December 15, 1966: Walt Disney dies, almost five years before the Florida park opens. - October 1, 1971: Walt Disney World opens, with the Magic Kingdom. The project was carried through by his brother, Roy O. Disney. - October 25, 1971: Roy O. Disney reads the park's dedication plaque, honoring Walt's philosophy and life. Vance's anecdote has no recording from the time. He told it in talks and books, such as Think Out of the Box (1995), and many authors repeated it afterward. The honest way to cite it is "the story goes" or "according to Mike Vance." It was not Walt who answered: he had already died. ### Why the line opens Bairo's story On October 1, 2026, 55 years after the park opened, Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez chose that date to symbolically mark the beginning of his ecosystem. He does not ask to be compared with Disney. He says only that, if he could speak to Walt, he would tell him that his dreams inspired him. The idea he keeps from the anecdote is simple: first someone sees, then the world confirms. ### Read also - Fifty-five years later (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/) - Today, 14:20 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/milestone-1420/) --- ## Was Henry Ford told the V8 engine was impossible? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/henry-ford-impossible-v8-engine/ Idioma: en Descrição: According to Napoleon Hill, yes: engineers said eight cylinders could not be cast in one block. The single-block Ford V8 hit the streets in 1932. According to Napoleon Hill, in Think and Grow Rich (1937), Henry Ford's engineers said it was impossible to cast all eight cylinders of a V8 in a single block, and Ford told them to do it anyway. The fact is on record: the single-block Ford V8 hit the streets in 1932. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez cites the episode in his story. ### What is documented The engine that became known as the flathead V8 was developed between the late 1920s and 1932, with Henry Ford personally involved, and it stayed in production until 1953. V8 engines already existed, including in luxury cars, but casting the whole block in a single piece, cheap enough for a popular car, was a real manufacturing problem. The first blocks cracked, and the casting took months of testing before it worked. ### What is anecdote The scene of the engineers saying "impossible" and Ford answering "produce it anyway" comes from Hill, and there is no independent document confirming it. Hill is a weak source for historical detail. That is why the right way to tell the story is to attribute it: "as Napoleon Hill tells it." And two versions that circulate are worth correcting: it was not a "four-valve" car, and the story is not from "70 years ago." The 1932 V8 has sixteen valves, and the launch was more than nine decades ago. For Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, what matters in the episode is the gesture: hearing "it can't be done" and treating the words as a starting line. ### Read also - Fifty-five years later (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/) - Every no is the ground of a yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) --- ## What did Steve Jobs ask about the Macintosh boot time? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/steve-jobs-macintosh-boot-time/ Idioma: en Descrição: In 1983, Jobs asked Larry Kenyon to cut ten seconds from the Mac's boot time: multiplied by millions of users, he said, it would add up to whole lifetimes. In 1983, Steve Jobs asked engineer Larry Kenyon to reduce the Macintosh's boot time. The argument became famous: ten seconds less, multiplied by millions of users every day, would add up to the equivalent of several human lifetimes a year. The account comes from Andy Hertzfeld, and the story inspires Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez. ### What the record says Hertzfeld told the story in the piece "Saving Lives," dated August 1983, published on the folklore.org website and later in the book Revolution in the Valley (2004). According to him, Jobs said the Mac booted too slowly. He did the math for five million users and concluded that ten seconds saved could "save a dozen lives" a year. Over the following months, the team cut more than ten seconds from the boot time. Hertzfeld himself says he doesn't know how much the argument weighed: the team was already working on it. One correction matters here. The request was not "make the Mac boot in ten seconds," and there is no record of anyone saying it was impossible. The power of the anecdote lies elsewhere. ### The bridge to the yardstick of time What the story shows is the habit of giving human meaning to a number. Seconds become lives. It is an idea close to the one Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez proposes with BTZ Chain, where the yardstick "1 BTZ = 1 minute of human life" measures purpose, not price. In both, people's time is treated as the most valuable resource there is. ### Read also - Fifty-five years later (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/) - A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/) - Saving Lives, by Andy Hertzfeld (https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html) --- ## What does Ayrton Senna inspire in Bairo Gonzalez? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/ayrton-senna-in-bairos-story/ Idioma: en Descrição: Decision, courage and persistence. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez sees in Senna someone who decided to be the best and made those traits his values. For Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, Ayrton Senna is the example of someone who decided to be the best and turned that decision into a method. Decision, courage and persistence, the traits he associates with the driver, became personal values. Alongside that, he often repeats a conviction of his own: honor is something that outlasts time. ### Senna quotes with a source Many quotes attributed to Senna circulate with no origin. These have a known source: - "Every driver has his limit. Mine is a little above everyone else's." Said in January 1989 and quoted by the magazine Veja in its special edition of May 3, 1994. - On overtaking, in the interview with Jackie Stewart at the 1990 Australian Grand Prix, in Adelaide: if a driver stops going for a gap that exists, he is no longer a racing driver, because he is there to compete and to win. Others, such as "being second is being the first of the losers," have no primary source on record and should not be attributed to him. ### What the inspiration means in practice Bairo does not compare himself to Senna. What he takes from the driver is the stance toward the limit: acknowledging that it exists and deciding, even so, to go a little further. In his own path, this showed up as the decision to keep going after every fall, until the attempt that worked. The reference to Senna stays in the realm of personal inspiration. No product or company in the ecosystem uses the driver's name or image. ### Read also - Fifty-five years later (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/) - The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) --- ## What were Bairo Gonzalez's first businesses? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/bairo-gonzalez-first-businesses/ Idioma: en Descrição: By his account: a salon opened with his partner, a hair-treatment course, a natural cosmetics brand, events and digital printing. According to Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, his first businesses of his own in Brazil were in the beauty sector. With his partner, when their daughter was born, he opened a salon. Then he created a hair-treatment course, which he called "Biomedicina Capilar", and launched his own brand of natural-based cosmetics, Biomedhair. Later on, he worked in events and digital printing. ### Ahead of time The salon didn't work out as well as the couple had hoped, but it opened doors. The hair-treatment course dealt with a field known today as trichology: in Brazil, aesthetic trichology is a recognized area of practice for biomedical professionals under Resolution CFBM 359/2023, and the treatment of scalp diseases remains a medical act. He also tried to bring artificial intelligence and augmented reality into the beauty business. The course already showed the hair strand and the scalp animated in 3D, and around 2015 he even recorded a sample of a 4D course. He was told it wouldn't work. The technology ended up winning over the sector: L'Oréal bought ModiFace, an augmented reality company for beauty, in 2018. He says Biomedhair succeeded. As early as 2015 it had a line for home use, a professional line for salons, a line for pets and organic products, and it also brought together the course and the scalp-therapy devices. In recent years, natural cosmetics have become one of the strongest trends in beauty in Brazil. It was a Brazilian brand, with no connection to the hair transplant clinic of the same name in Turkey. ### What remained In one of the businesses, he says, he proposed bringing in touchscreen technology and ended up out of the partnership. Without names and without blame, he tells the episode as the moment he learned to make pain his foundation. Then came events and digital printing, with which he reinvented himself and built up capital for the next stage. ### Read also - The sun is for everyone (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-sun-is-for-everyone/) - Every no is the ground of a yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) --- ## Which companies did Bairo Gonzalez found? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/companies-founded-by-bairo-gonzalez/ Idioma: en Descrição: Xperienc Global Labs, CEASA Bank, BTZ Chain and BICOIN, CLAIN and 1420mhz, qrqbits, Hospital Triage, Investment House, SOSPROCESSOS and Instituto CEASA. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez founded ten ventures: Xperienc Global Labs, CEASA Bank, BTZ Chain with BICOIN, CLAIN with the 1420mhz portal, qrqbits, Hospital Triage, Investment House, SOSPROCESSOS and Instituto CEASA. Some are already companies on the public record; others are projects in development. ### The ventures, by stage On the public record: - Xperienc Global Labs Ltd (London): research and development in biotechnology, digital health and medical cannabis. - CEASA Bank: a financial platform for agribusiness, operated in Brazil by a company active since 2019, with a related company in London and an operation being set up in Bolivia. In development or implementation: - BTZ Chain and BICOIN (BTZ): a hybrid blockchain with proof of human life, and its governance coin. - CLAIN and 1420mhz: an orchestrator of artificial intelligence agents, and the portal that connects the ventures. - qrqbits: protection of files, images, audio and text with post-quantum cryptography. - Hospital Triage: a pre-consultation with a clinical assistant and validation by a health professional. - Investment House: tokenization of real estate backed by real assets, and the business owners' network A Mesa, on an institutional basis. - SOSPROCESSOS: AI-supported legal analysis, for use by lawyers. - Instituto CEASA: a humanitarian project for long-shelf-life food. ### What he did not found Hospital Granja Julieta, in São Paulo, is an independent company, with its own shareholders, and acts as Xperienc's clinical partner. Bairo is neither a partner nor an administrator of the hospital. ### Read also - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) - About Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/about/) --- ## How do Bairo Gonzalez's businesses connect? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/how-bairos-businesses-connect/ Idioma: en Descrição: In a circuit: a real farm sale enters through CEASA Bank, is recorded on BTZ Chain and returns as health, food or technology. A vision in progress. In the vision of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, the businesses form a circuit. A real agribusiness transaction enters through CEASA Bank, gains a verifiable record on BTZ Chain, and can return to the same person as access to the ecosystem's health, food and technology services. It is a vision under construction: some pieces already operate, others are in development. ### One customer, many services The starting idea is simple. The same person who sells vegetables at a wholesale food market also needs credit, health care, protection for their data and, at times, legal guidance. Today, each of those services asks for a new sign-up, a new password and a new history. In the proposed ecosystem, they talk to one another on a shared foundation of record and trust, without the companies ceasing to be independent. ### Three layers Bairo describes the design in three layers: - Physical, which provides backing: the laboratory, the Instituto CEASA food plant and the clinical partnership with a hospital. - Financial, which makes things flow: CEASA Bank and Investment House. - Software, which provides scale: CLAIN, BTZ Chain and qrqbits. The physical layer is the slowest to build and the one that protects the whole the most, because a laboratory, a plant and a hospital can't be copied with a click. None of this means a single company. Each venture has its own registration, rules and website, and the circuit depends on regulatory authorizations wherever the law requires them. ### Read also - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) - A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/) --- ## Why does Bairo Gonzalez compare the ecosystem to a body? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/the-ecosystem-as-a-body/ Idioma: en Descrição: To explain ten ventures in one image: CLAIN the brain, BTZ Chain the veins, BICOIN the blood, Xperienc the neural link and qrqbits the exit. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez compares the ecosystem to a body to make sense of a set of ventures that, listed one by one, might seem unconnected. In his image, CLAIN is the brain, BTZ Chain is the veins, BICOIN is the blood, Xperienc is the neural connection layer and qrqbits is the external transmission pathway. ### What each organ does in the image - Brain (CLAIN): coordinates. It distributes the work among specialist AI agents and hands the decision back to a person. - Veins (BTZ Chain): the pathways records travel through, with proof of truthfulness. - Blood (BICOIN): what circulates through the veins, the network's unit of governance and record. - Neural connection (Xperienc): links patients, specialists and laboratories, in several languages. - External transmission (qrqbits): makes sure that what leaves the body leaves protected. ### What the metaphor does not say Like every metaphor, this one has limits, and they matter. "Blood" refers to the circulation of records, not money, and does not suggest that anyone needs to acquire BICOIN. "Neural connection" refers to communication between people: Xperienc does not read or stimulate anyone's brain. And the body is an image of cooperation, not ownership: each venture remains a separate company or initiative, with its own registration. The image has an advantage a list doesn't: it shows that no part works alone. ### Read also - A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/) - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) --- ## Are Bairo Gonzalez's companies a single group? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/are-bairos-companies-a-single-group/ Idioma: en Descrição: No. Each venture founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez is a separate company or initiative, with its own registration, linked by a shared vision. No. The ventures founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez are separate companies and initiatives, each with its own registration, rules and website. No single holding company brings them all together. What links them is a shared vision of services that talk to one another, and the fact that they have the same founder. ### Who is who - Xperienc Global Labs Ltd: an English company, set up in London in 2026. - CEASA Financial Database Technology Infrastructure and Digital Assets Ltd: another English company, set up the same year. - Brazilian company that operates CEASA Bank: in São Paulo, active since 2019. - CEASA Bank in Bolivia: an operation being set up, separate from the two above. - Hospital Granja Julieta: an independent Brazilian company, with its own shareholders, Xperienc's clinical partner. The other ventures, such as BTZ Chain, CLAIN, qrqbits and Instituto CEASA, are in development. ### Why the separation matters Health, finance and digital assets are regulated sectors, each with its own regulator and its own requirements. Keeping the companies separate makes clear who answers for what: the hospital answers for clinical conduct, the financial platform for financial rules, the laboratory for research. It also protects the people who use the services. A patient does not need an account at CEASA Bank to use Xperienc, and an agribusiness trader does not need to use Xperienc to access credit. The connection between the ventures is a possibility on offer, not an obligation. ### Read also - About Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/about/) - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) --- ## Why does Bairo say AI is an extension of the human? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/ai-as-an-extension-of-the-human/ Idioma: en Descrição: For him, AI extends the work and the person decides: the clinical assistant is validated by a health professional, and legal analysis by a lawyer. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says that artificial intelligence is an extension of the human, not the problem, because he sees AI as a tool that widens people's reach without taking their place. In every venture he founded, the design is the same: AI prepares, organizes and suggests, and a qualified person validates and decides. ### The last generation before, the first after He often says that we are living through the meeting of the last generation of humans who grew up without AI and the first generation of AI, a moment he calls code 0.1, or 1.0. For him, those standing at that crossing point have the responsibility of defining how the two will work together. ### How this shows up in practice - Health: at Xperienc and in the triage system, AI acts as a clinical assistant. It gathers information and keeps track of the history, and the one who assesses is always a doctor or nurse, as required by Brazil's medical practice law (Law 12.842/2013). - Law: at SOSPROCESSOS, AI organizes public decisions and scenarios, and the one who leads the defense is the lawyer. - Agribusiness and finance: at CEASA Bank, AI helps with pricing, and the decision to buy, sell or lend belongs to whoever is negotiating. - Orchestration: CLAIN coordinates specialist agents, and the result goes back to a person. The sentence sums up a design choice. No venture in the ecosystem proposes a machine that decides on its own about someone's health, assets or freedom. ### Read also - A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/) - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) - 1420mhz.org (https://1420mhz.org) --- ## What is CEASA Bank? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-ceasa-bank/ Idioma: en Descrição: The agribusiness financial platform founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, linking producers, traders and buyers at the CEASAs. CEASA Bank is a financial platform for agribusiness, founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, that connects producers, agro-industry, traders and buyers directly at Brazil's wholesale food markets, the CEASAs. It operates on the infrastructure of an authorized institution and proposes to bring together, in stages, AI-assisted pricing, invoicing and means of payment. ### What the platform offers - AI-assisted pricing, so that producer and buyer have a price reference at the moment of negotiation. - Fast invoicing, the billing for a sale, designed to take just a few minutes. - Account, card and card machine for those who sell and buy at the wholesale markets, on the infrastructure of an authorized institution. - Crop credit and a digital vault, as next steps. ### Why start with agribusiness The wholesale food markets handle a huge share of the fresh food that reaches the cities, and much of the trade there still depends on paper, cash and middlemen. Bairo says the platform was born as a niche AI to shorten that distance: a direct connection between those who produce and those who buy. In the ecosystem he founded, CEASA Bank is the gateway to the real economy. It is where the concrete transaction happens, before it is recorded and connected to the other ventures. ### Read also - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) - CEASA Bank (https://ceasabank.com.br) --- ## Is CEASA Bank a bank? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/is-ceasa-bank-a-bank/ Idioma: en Descrição: Not in the regulatory sense. CEASA Bank is the brand of an agribusiness financial platform operating on the infrastructure of an authorized institution. Not in the regulatory sense. CEASA Bank is the brand of a financial platform for agribusiness, founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, that offers services on the infrastructure of an institution authorized to operate by the Central Bank of Brazil. The word "bank" is part of the brand name, and does not describe a banking license of its own. ### Why the difference matters In Brazil, financial institutions may only operate with authorization from the Central Bank, as set out in Law 4.595/1964. Many technology companies offer accounts, cards and payments without being banks: they use the structure of an authorized institution, in a model known as banking as a service. That is the model under which the CEASA Bank platform operates. The registered corporate name of the Brazilian company that operates the brand includes the words technology, infrastructure and digital assets. The main activity registered with Brazil's Federal Revenue Service is that of a debit card operator. ### What this means for users For the trader or the producer, what matters is knowing who holds the money and who answers for each service. On a platform of this kind, accounts and payments fall under the rules of the authorized partner institution, and the platform takes care of the technology, the pricing and customer service. This site uses the word "bank" only as part of the brand name. When it describes the service, it says "financial platform for agribusiness." ### Read also - About Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/about/) - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) - CEASA Bank (https://ceasabank.com.br) --- ## What is Bairo Gonzalez's role at CEASA Bank? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/bairo-gonzalez-role-at-ceasa-bank/ Idioma: en Descrição: Founder and administrator. In Brazil, Bairo runs the company that operates the brand; in London, he is Director of the company linked to CEASA Bank. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez is the founder of CEASA Bank and the administrator of the Brazilian company that operates the brand. In the United Kingdom, he is Director and a person with significant control of CEASA Financial, the company he set up in London in 2026. ### The records In Brazil: The Brazilian company has been operating since 2019, in São Paulo. In the Receita Federal register of partners and administrators, Bairo appears as administrator. The registered partners are two holding companies. The difference has a practical consequence: some automated summaries on the internet call him a "partner" in CEASA Bank, but the Federal Revenue Service's register shows him as administrator, and that is the position this site uses. In the United Kingdom: CEASA Financial was born in London in 2026, created by Bairo, who has been its Director from day one and is a person with significant control. ### Founder and formal position Founder is the role of the person who conceived and started the project. Administrator and Director are the formal positions the records show. This site uses both, each in its own sense, and does not use "owner" or "CEO," which the records do not state. ### Read also - About Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/about/) - Appointments at Companies House (https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/officers/r61g_rSOlzo1YX2qYMFDpZjRaro/appointments) - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) --- ## How was CEASA Bank born? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/how-ceasa-bank-was-born/ Idioma: en Descrição: From Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez's drive to connect food producers and buyers. He says he spent six months at home building the foundation. CEASA Bank was born, according to Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, from six months of barely leaving the house, in front of a computer, building the foundation of a niche artificial intelligence for agribusiness. The goal was to give producers, traders and buyers at the wholesale food markets a direct connection, without the usual layers of middlemen. ### The six months He says he started without knowing how to code. He asked for wisdom, understanding and courage, and began to write, test and fix until the foundation stood. The company that operates the brand today had already had a CNPJ since 2019; the six months built the platform and the AI that gave the project its shape. ### One more no He says that, when he looked for partners to connect the platform to the financial system, banks told him it wasn't possible, and some refused to integrate the solution. True to his rule that every no is the ground of a yes, he shifted his focus to what depended on him: artificial intelligence, financial messaging under the ISO 20022 standard, blockchain and tokenization of real-world assets. ISO 20022 is the messaging language that the Swift network made mandatory for cross-border payments between institutions in November 2025. Tokenization of real-world assets has also grown in recent years, with major asset managers launching tokenized funds. After those six months, three old acquaintances joined him to carry the project forward. ### Read also - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) - Every no is the ground of a yes (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/every-no-is-the-ground-of-a-yes/) --- ## Does CEASA Bank exist outside Brazil? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/ceasa-bank-outside-brazil/ Idioma: en Descrição: Yes, in structure: a company in London, set up and run by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, and another being set up in Bolivia. Yes. Besides the Brazilian company that operates the brand, CEASA Bank has a company in London, CEASA Financial Database Technology Infrastructure and Digital Assets Ltd, set up and run by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, and an operation being set up in Bolivia. Each is a separate legal entity. ### Where the companies are United Kingdom: the English company was born in London in 2026. Bairo is Director and a person with significant control. The name describes its field: technology infrastructure, financial database and digital assets. Bolivia: in Bolivia, the CEASA Bank operation is being set up. The choice follows the logic of the project, which was born in agribusiness and expands first to Brazil's neighboring countries. ### Three companies, not one One rule guides how this site describes the expansion: no merging of entities. The Brazilian, the English and the Bolivian companies are separate, each with its own records, obligations and regulators. What one country's market authorizes does not automatically apply in another. That is why, when someone reads "CEASA Bank," the right question is always: which one? The answer changes the record, the regulator, and who answers for each service. ### Read also - About Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/about/) - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) - CEASA Bank (https://ceasabank.com.br) --- ## What is BTZ Chain? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-btz-chain/ Idioma: en Descrição: A proposed hybrid blockchain, founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, that uses proof of human life to validate the truthfulness of records. BTZ Chain is a proposed hybrid blockchain founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez. It combines artificial intelligence and proof of human life to validate the truthfulness of records: the network wants to know not only that a piece of information was recorded, but that a real person stood behind it. It is in development and subject to applicable regulation. ### What "hybrid" and "proof of humanity" mean A hybrid blockchain is the name given to networks that combine features of public networks, where anyone can check the records, with those of permissioned networks, where only authorized participants can write certain data. The model makes it possible to show proof of a record without exposing its content. Proof of humanity is the idea of confirming that an account belongs to a real, unique person, and not to a bot. Projects such as Proof of Humanity (2021) and World ID (2023) explore this field. BTZ Chain proposes to join that proof with human lifetime as a measure, in its own reading of the concept. ### Where it fits in the ecosystem In the body image Bairo uses to describe what he founded, BTZ Chain is the veins: the pathways through which records circulate with proof of truthfulness. In health, for example, the proposal is to record only the cryptographic signature of a document, to prove it has not been altered, and never the health data itself. ### Read also - A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/) - Today, 14:20 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/milestone-1420/) - BTZ Chain (https://btzchain.org) --- ## What is BICOIN (BTZ)? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-bicoin/ Idioma: en Descrição: The governance coin of the BTZ Chain network, created by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, inspired by bitcoin and with mining tied to human lifetime. BICOIN, ticker BTZ, is the governance coin of the BTZ Chain network, created by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez. Inspired by bitcoin, it proposes one central difference: mining tied to human lifetime, measured by the interaction of real people on the network, rather than to the energy spent by computers. It is in development. ### What a governance coin is On a blockchain network, the governance coin is the unit used to take part in the network's own rules: recording operations, validating and, in some models, voting on changes. In the ecosystem founded by Bairo, BICOIN is also conceived as the common unit among the artificial intelligence agents and the services of the different ventures. ### Inspired by bitcoin, with a different measure Bitcoin is mined through computational proof of work. BICOIN proposes replacing that measure with proof of human life: what generates the unit is the time of real people interacting on the network. That is the source of the project's symbolic yardstick, "1 BTZ = 1 minute of human life," which expresses purpose, not price. A note on the ticker. The ticker BTZ is also used by other digital asset projects with no connection to BTZ Chain. To avoid confusion, the safe reference is the full name, BICOIN (BTZ), and the network's official website. Here BICOIN is explained, not offered: nobody needs to buy anything to understand the idea. And, like every virtual asset, it follows the rules of each country where it exists. ### Read also - Today, 14:20 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/milestone-1420/) - A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/) - BTZ Chain (https://btzchain.org) --- ## What does "1 BTZ = 1 minute of life" mean? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-1-btz-1-minute-of-life-means/ Idioma: en Descrição: A yardstick of purpose, not a price: BTZ Chain proposes human lifetime as the measure of what is recorded on the network. It states no market value. The phrase "1 BTZ = 1 minute of human life" is the yardstick of purpose of BICOIN, the BTZ Chain coin created by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez. It says that the network's measure is people's time. It is not a price, it is not a quote, and it promises no market value. ### Where the idea comes from Bairo starts from a question: what if human lifetime were the most honest measure of value? Money can be recovered; time cannot. A network that measures interactions by the time of real people is, in his view, a network where truth is worth more than volume. The idea echoes a well-known story from technology. In 1983, Steve Jobs asked the Macintosh team to shave ten seconds off the computer's boot time, arguing that seconds multiplied by millions of users add up to whole lifetimes. In both stories, human time is what gives the number its meaning. ### What the yardstick is not - It is not a price. The market value of any asset depends on rules, supply and demand; the yardstick says nothing about that. - It is not a promise. No one gains a minute of life, or any money, by holding BTZ. - It is not an invitation. The idea is explained here to be understood, not to be bought. There is also a brand detail: the project's treasury figure, 1,420,405,751.768, reproduces the digits of the hydrogen frequency in hertz. It is a symbol, with no meaning as value. ### Read also - Today, 14:20 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/milestone-1420/) - A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/) --- ## Is BICOIN an investment? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/is-bicoin-an-investment/ Idioma: en Descrição: No. BICOIN (BTZ) is presented as a governance and utility coin within BTZ Chain. Nothing here is an offer, a recommendation or a promise of financial gain. No. BICOIN (BTZ), the coin created by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez for the BTZ Chain network, is presented as a unit of governance and use within the ecosystem. No page on this site offers BICOIN, recommends acquiring it, or promises financial gain. The network is in development and subject to the rules for virtual assets. ### The rules that apply - Brazil, Central Bank: BCB Resolutions 519, 520 and 521, of November 2025, have regulated virtual asset service providers since February 2026. Those already operating had a deadline to apply for authorization, and from October 30, 2026, authorized institutions may not act as intermediaries for providers that lack authorization or a pending application. - Brazil, CVM (securities regulator): under Guidance Opinion 40, of 2022, a token that creates an expectation of profit from the efforts of others may be a security, and offering it requires registration or an exemption. - European Union: the MiCA regulation applies to crypto-asset service providers, and the transition period ended on July 1, 2026. ### How to protect yourself Be wary of anyone who offers BICOIN with a promise of profit or asks for money in the name of Bairo or BTZ Chain. Information about the network should be checked on the official website. If you have questions about virtual assets, consult a qualified professional. ### Read also - Today, 14:20 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/milestone-1420/) - BTZ Chain (https://btzchain.org) - A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/) --- ## Is BICOIN related to time banks? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/bicoin-and-time-banks/ Idioma: en Descrição: In idea, yes. Since 1980, Edgar Cahn's Time Dollars have measured service in hours. BTZ Chain proposes a new chapter of time as currency. BICOIN, the BTZ Chain coin created by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, shares an idea with time banks. Since 1980, the Time Dollars created by lawyer Edgar Cahn have measured exchanges of service in hours: one hour of work is worth one hour. BTZ Chain takes up the notion of time as a measure, with a different technology. ### What time banks are In a time bank, someone who helps another person for an hour, by teaching a class, caring for an elderly person or fixing something, receives a one-hour credit, which they can exchange for an hour of help from someone else. Cahn's idea was to value work the market doesn't pay for and to strengthen communities. Time banks spread to many countries and still exist today. ### What BTZ Chain proposes differently - The unit: the minute, not the hour. The symbolic yardstick is "1 BTZ = 1 minute of human life." - The record: on a blockchain, so that any participant can verify the truthfulness of exchanges. - The proof: the network proposes to confirm there is a real person behind every interaction. Acknowledging this kinship does not diminish the proposal. On the contrary: it shows that it rests on an idea tested for decades, that people's time is a fair measure, and proposes a new chapter of it. BTZ Chain is in development, and the yardstick is one of purpose, not price. ### Read also - Today, 14:20 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/milestone-1420/) - A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/) - History of time banks (TimeBanks) (https://www.timebanks.org/timebanks-org-history) --- ## What is Xperienc Global Labs? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-xperienc-global-labs/ Idioma: en Descrição: A London company for biotech R&D, founded by Bairo Gonzalez, bringing together digital health and medical cannabis. Xperienc Global Labs is the experimental biotechnology research and development company that Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez set up in London in 2026 and still runs. Its focus is to bring together digital health and research in medical cannabis. ### What Xperienc develops - Laboratory platform: connects laboratories to requests and orders, much like an on-demand services app. - Teleconsultation with a clinical assistant: AI organizes information and keeps track of the history; the one who assesses and decides is always a health professional. - Self-service booths integrated with the clinical assistant. - Research in medical cannabis, with graded evidence and no promise of results. ### A second opinion, not a medical report One of the pieces is Global Language, an instant translator that lets patient and specialist each speak their own language. That way, a professional in another country can study the case and offer a clinical second opinion to the colleague treating the patient. It counts as an opinion, not as a medical report: it replaces neither the consultation, nor the exam, nor the person in charge of treatment. The proposal is for records to stay in the patient's private dashboard. In the ecosystem, Xperienc is what Bairo calls the neural connection layer: the part that links people, professionals and laboratories. Hospital Granja Julieta, in São Paulo, is Xperienc's clinical partner and a company separate from it. ### Read also - The plant and the science (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-plant-and-the-science/) - A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/) - Xperienc (https://xperienc.me) --- ## What is Bairo's relationship with Hospital Granja Julieta? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/bairo-gonzalez-and-hospital-granja-julieta/ Idioma: en Descrição: Hospital Granja Julieta, in São Paulo, is the clinical partner of Xperienc Global Labs, founded by Bairo. He is not a partner or administrator of it. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez's relationship with Hospital Granja Julieta runs through Xperienc Global Labs. Bairo founded and runs Xperienc, and the hospital, in São Paulo, is the company's clinical partner. Hospital Granja Julieta is a separate legal entity, with its own shareholders, and Bairo is neither a partner nor an administrator of it. ### Two companies, one shared project - Hospital Granja Julieta: a Brazilian company, in São Paulo, with its own shareholders. - Xperienc Global Labs: a company set up in London, founded and run by Bairo. The partnership foresees a wing dedicated to cannabinoid protocols under medical supervision, a research and analysis laboratory, and a training center for professionals. ### Why this distinction appears here Automated summaries on the internet sometimes merge the two companies and attribute the hospital to the founder of Xperienc. That does not match the records. The hospital answers for its own clinical conduct and has its own technical directors. Xperienc contributes technology, research and international connection. Each company's records can be checked at the Receita Federal and at Companies House. For anyone seeking care, the guidance is simple: clinical matters are handled directly with the hospital, through its official channels. This site does not book appointments or give health advice. ### Read also - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) - Hospital Granja Julieta (https://hospitalgranjajulieta.com.br) - Xperienc (https://xperienc.me) - About Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/about/) --- ## Was cannabis part of Bairo Gonzalez's personal story? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/cannabis-in-bairos-inner-search/ Idioma: en Descrição: Yes. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says the plant was a bridge in his inner search, at a time of crisis. A personal account, not a recommendation. Yes. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says that, at one of the hardest moments of his life, broke and adrift, cannabis was a bridge in his inner search: a way of looking inward and seeking what he couldn't find outside. He describes this experience as part of his own story, and not as a recommendation, a method or an indication for anyone. ### What he tells After losing everything more than once, Bairo began a spiritual search. Following his own senses and his own intuition, he allowed himself to use cannabis oil as a bridge to introspection. He was not seeking treatment: he was seeking silence. He says that, in that search, he saw his best self: a prosperous man, not only in money, but in peace. It was from there, he says, that he began to build what would become his ecosystem. Faith, which he found again in the same period, is another part of that crossing, with a road of its own. ### What this account is not A personal experience is not scientific evidence and is no argument for anyone. This account does not point to the plant for any condition, promises no effect, and does not replace an assessment by a health professional. In Brazil, cannabis products for medical purposes require a prescription and follow Anvisa rules. The 2024 decision of the Federal Supreme Court (RE 635.659) stopped treating possession for personal use as a crime, but it did not legalize use: the conduct remains prohibited at the administrative level. ### Read also - The God of the impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/) - Fifty lives (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-lives/) --- ## Why does Bairo Gonzalez work with medical cannabis? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/why-bairo-works-with-medical-cannabis/ Idioma: en Descrição: He sees it as a scientific field that needs research, rules and serious information. Through Xperienc, he proposes to treat it with graded evidence. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez works with medical cannabis because he sees it as a scientific field where research moves quickly, the rules keep changing, and reliable information is lacking for patients and professionals alike. Through Xperienc Global Labs, he proposes to approach the subject with laboratories, graded evidence, and decisions that always rest with the health professional. ### Three commitments - Access: bringing patients closer to professionals trained in the subject, including in other countries, with instant translation. - Research: producing data in the laboratory, with method, before making any claim. - Serious information: setting out on the same level what has strong evidence, what has weak evidence, and what has never been tested. ### The limits he adopts Xperienc promises no results and does not talk about products, brands or doses to the general public, because in Brazil advertising of cannabis products is restricted to prescribers and pharmacists. It uses the evidence grading of the U.S. National Academies (NASEM, 2017) to show where science has already arrived and where it has not. And it treats artificial intelligence as a clinical assistant, never as the decision-maker: the assessment belongs to a licensed professional. Xperienc's clinical partner is Hospital Granja Julieta, in São Paulo, a separate company, which plans a wing for cannabinoid protocols under medical supervision. ### Read also - The plant and the science (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-plant-and-the-science/) - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) - Xperienc (https://xperienc.me) --- ## What does science say about medical cannabis? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-science-says-about-medical-cannabis/ Idioma: en Descrição: Per NASEM (2017), there is conclusive or substantial evidence for chronic pain in adults, chemotherapy nausea and multiple sclerosis spasticity. According to the review published in 2017 by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), there is conclusive or substantial evidence of an effect in three situations: chronic pain in adults (cannabis), chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting (oral cannabinoids, the only case graded as conclusive) and patient-reported spasticity in multiple sclerosis (oral cannabinoids). It is the reference adopted by Xperienc, founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez. ### How to read the grading NASEM grades evidence on five levels: conclusive, substantial, moderate, limited, and insufficient (or absent). The level says how much the available studies support a conclusion, not whether a product "works for everyone." Substantial evidence means consistent, good-quality studies, for specific products, doses and groups of patients. Limited or insufficient evidence does not mean the plant has no effect. It means there are not yet enough studies to say. ### What changed after 2017 Research continued. Clinical trials of cannabidiol in two rare epileptic syndromes, Dravet and Lennox-Gastaut, published from 2017 onward, led the U.S. FDA to approve a cannabidiol-based medicine for these conditions in 2018. It is an example of how an area graded as insufficient can gain evidence through dedicated studies. Xperienc presents the science this way: publishing where the evidence is strong and, with equal prominence, where it does not yet exist. This content is informational and does not replace an assessment by a health professional. ### Read also - The plant and the science (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-plant-and-the-science/) - NASEM report (2017) (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK423845/) - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) --- ## How does Anvisa regulate medical cannabis in 2026? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/how-anvisa-regulates-medical-cannabis/ Idioma: en Descrição: Through RDC 1.013, 1.014 and 1.015 of 2026, which replaced RDC 327/2019. Products require a prescription, and advertising may only target prescribers. In 2026, Anvisa, Brazil's health regulatory agency, regulates cannabis products for medical purposes through RDC 1.013, 1.014 and 1.015, published in February 2026. RDC 1.015, in force since May 2026, revoked RDC 327/2019. They require a prescription, and advertising may only target prescribers and pharmacists. These are the rules followed by Xperienc, founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez. ### Medical use and personal use are different things Two sets of rules coexist in Brazil and are often confused: - Cannabis products for medical purposes follow Anvisa rules: authorized manufacturing, import, prescription and sale, with information approved by the agency. - Possession for personal use was addressed by the Federal Supreme Court in June 2024 (RE 635.659, Theme 506). The court stopped treating as a crime the possession of up to 40 grams or 6 female plants for personal use, but the conduct remains unlawful at the administrative level. There was no legalization. ### What this means in practice For the patient, the legal path runs through a consultation with a licensed professional, who assesses the case and, where appropriate, prescribes a regularized product. For companies in the field, such as Xperienc Global Labs, founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, it means talking about science and rules with the public, and reserving product information for health professionals. This text helps you understand the map, but the rules change; for your own case, the one who guides you is a doctor and, if needed, a lawyer. ### Read also - The plant and the science (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/the-plant-and-the-science/) - Xperienc (https://xperienc.me) - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) --- ## What is CLAIN? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-clain/ Idioma: en Descrição: The AI agent orchestrator created by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez to connect his ecosystem. The name comes from the English word "claim." CLAIN is the artificial intelligence agent orchestrator created by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez to connect the ventures of his ecosystem, from health to agribusiness. The name comes from the English word "claim," in the sense of claiming what is yours: the idea that anyone can claim their best self with the help of specialized assistants. It is in development. ### What an orchestrator does An agent orchestrator is a system that receives a request, splits the work among specialized AI assistants, each on its own subject, and brings the answers together. In CLAIN, the rule is that the result goes back to a person: the health professional validates what the clinical assistant prepared, the lawyer leads what the legal analysis organized, the trader decides based on the price quote. In the body image Bairo uses to describe the ecosystem, CLAIN is the brain: it coordinates, but it does not act alone. ### Why "claim" In Portuguese, reclamar means both to complain and to claim what is yours, and CLAIN takes the second sense. Bairo says the name grew out of two realizations. The first was practical: using artificial intelligence requires tokens, and the service is expensive for anyone just starting out. A structure was needed to make these assistants accessible. The second was personal: after years of searching for his own best self, he wanted to create something that would help other people claim theirs, or, in his words, make a new download of their best self. The 1420mhz.org portal is the project's channel. The public goal is to reach 142 niche assistants by February 20, 2027. ### Read also - A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/) - Today, 14:20 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/milestone-1420/) - 1420mhz.org (https://1420mhz.org) --- ## Why is the project called 1420 MHz? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/why-the-project-is-called-1420/ Idioma: en Descrição: Because of the hydrogen line, at 1420.405751768 MHz: the radio signal of the most abundant element in the universe, used by science to map the galaxy. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez's project is called 1420 MHz because of the hydrogen line, the 1420.405751768 MHz frequency emitted by neutral hydrogen in space. Hydrogen is the simplest and most abundant element in the universe, and this line is one of the most important tools in radio astronomy. In the project, 1420 is a name and a symbol. ### What the hydrogen line is The hydrogen atom has one proton and one electron. When the electron flips the direction of its spin relative to the proton, the atom emits a radio wave about 21 centimeters long, at 1420 MHz. Because hydrogen is everywhere, this emission allowed science to map the structure of the Milky Way starting in the 1950s. Hydrogen accounts for about three quarters of the mass of ordinary matter and for more than 90% of the atoms in the universe. ### A frequency with a history In 1959, physicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison proposed in the journal Nature to search for signals from other civilizations precisely at this frequency. The plaques on the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes, launched in 1972 and 1973, use the hydrogen transition as a universal unit of measurement. For Bairo, the number also becomes a signature. Written in hertz, the frequency is 1 420 405 751.768, and the time chosen for the symbolic launch milestone of the ecosystem was 14:20. ### Read also - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) - Today, 14:20 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/milestone-1420/) --- ## What is the "frequency of silence"? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-the-frequency-of-silence/ Idioma: en Descrição: It is what Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez calls the 1400 to 1427 MHz band, where the ITU prohibits all emissions to protect radio astronomy. "Frequency of silence" is the name Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez gives to the radio band around 1420 MHz, the hydrogen line. By international agreement, all emissions are prohibited in the 1400 to 1427 MHz band, so that radio telescopes can listen to the universe without interference. It is that silence that gives the symbol its meaning. ### Why this band stays silent The Radio Regulations of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), in footnote 5.340, prohibit all emissions between 1400 and 1427 MHz. The band is reserved for passive services, such as radio astronomy and Earth observation by satellite. In Brazil, Anatel follows the same allocation, and transmitting without authorization is a crime under the General Telecommunications Law. It is rare to see so many countries agree not to use something. In this case, they agreed so that science could listen. ### A symbol, not a device None of Bairo's projects transmits on this band, and none intends to. 1420 is a symbolic milestone, never a transmission. For him, the frequency of silence stands for an attitude: listen before you build. He links this silence to his own inner search, in the season when, after losing everything, he found faith and decided to start over. It is a personal reading, and that is how it should be understood: an image of connection and listening, grounded in a real scientific fact, with no claim to be science. ### Read also - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) - The God of the impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/) --- ## What happened on October 1, 2026, at 14:20? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-happened-on-october-1-2026/ Idioma: en Descrição: Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez symbolically marked the start of the CLAIN protocol and announced a test transfer of BICOIN on BTZ Chain. On October 1, 2026, at 14:20, Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez symbolically marked the launch of his ecosystem. Two things were announced: the start of the CLAIN protocol, with the goal of 142 niche AI assistants in 142 days, and a BICOIN transfer on the BTZ Chain network as a test record. ### What was announced - The CLAIN protocol: the start of the countdown so that, by February 20, 2027, there will be at least 142 niche artificial intelligence assistants, each created to help people with a specific subject. - A BICOIN (BTZ) transfer: a test record on the BTZ Chain network, read symbolically by the project as a transfer of lifetime, with no character of a launch or an offer. ### Why 14:20 The time reproduces the number 1420, from the hydrogen line, the frequency that countries agreed to keep silent for radio astronomy. Nothing was emitted on that band: the milestone is symbolic, and the silence is the tribute. The date was chosen too. On October 1, 1971, Walt Disney World opened, almost five years after Walt Disney's death. The story goes that, at the opening, someone lamented that he had not seen the park, and heard: "He did see it. That's why it's here." The result of the goal will be published on February 20, 2027, with the real number. ### Read also - Today, 14:20 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/milestone-1420/) - Fifty-five years later (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/) --- ## What is the goal of 142 AIs in 142 days? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/goal-of-142-ais-in-142-days/ Idioma: en Descrição: The public goal of the CLAIN protocol: at least 142 niche AI assistants by February 20, 2027, 142 days after October 1, 2026. The goal of 142 AIs in 142 days is the public commitment announced by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez at the start of the CLAIN protocol: to create at least 142 niche artificial intelligence assistants by February 20, 2027, counting 142 days from October 1, 2026. It is a goal, not a result. ### What a niche AI is A niche AI is an assistant trained and configured for a specific subject, rather than to answer about everything. In the ecosystem founded by Bairo, examples range from pricing produce at the wholesale food markets to health pre-consultations and organizing court decisions for lawyers. The advantage of a niche is precision: an assistant that knows the rules, the vocabulary and the limits of a field well makes fewer mistakes and knows when to hand the decision to a person. In every case, CLAIN's rule is the same: the AI prepares, and a qualified person validates. ### How to follow it The number 142 comes from the same symbol that gives the project its name, the 1420 MHz frequency of the hydrogen line. The deadline was calculated from the date of the symbolic milestone. A public goal is only worth something if it is checked. That is why, on February 20, 2027, this page and the milestone page will be updated with the real number of assistants in operation, whatever it is. ### Read also - Today, 14:20 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/milestone-1420/) - 1420mhz.org (https://1420mhz.org) - A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/) --- ## What is Instituto CEASA? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-instituto-ceasa/ Idioma: en Descrição: A humanitarian project founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez to turn surplus from the CEASAs into food that lasts two years without a refrigerator. Instituto CEASA is the most recent humanitarian project founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez. The proposal is to make use of the food surplus from Brazil's wholesale food markets, the CEASAs, and process it in its own plant, in an autoclave, to produce food with a shelf life of up to two years without refrigeration, for those in need. ### The idea behind it Bairo sums up the goal in one sentence: to make hunger stop being the problem. The logic is to bring together two ends that do not meet today. On one side, fresh food left over at the wholesale markets that goes to waste. On the other, people who do not have access to enough food. The plant is the link: it turns what would spoil in a few days into meals that can be stored and distributed without refrigeration. ### Its place in the ecosystem Instituto CEASA springs from the same source as CEASA Bank: the wholesale food markets, for which Bairo designed his financial platform for agribusiness. If CEASA Bank takes care of the transaction between those who sell and buy, the institute takes care of what is left over. In the three-layer view of the ecosystem, the plant is part of the physical layer, the one that gives the whole real backing. The project is a separate initiative, with a humanitarian purpose, and not a business line of the other companies. ### Read also - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) - A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/) --- ## How can food last two years without refrigeration? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/how-food-lasts-two-years-without-refrigeration/ Idioma: en Descrição: Through autoclave sterilization: food is sealed in its package and heated under pressure until microorganisms are destroyed, as in industrial canning. Food can last up to two years without refrigeration when it goes through commercial sterilization in an autoclave. It is sealed in its package and heated under pressure to temperatures above 100 °C, around 121 °C, until the microorganisms capable of spoiling it are destroyed. This is the process Instituto CEASA, founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, proposes to use. ### How an autoclave works An autoclave is a closed chamber that uses steam or water under pressure. Under pressure, water goes beyond 100 °C without boiling, and the heat reaches the center of the already packaged food. Time and temperature are calculated to destroy even the most resistant spores, such as those of the bacterium that causes botulism. Because the food is sterilized inside its own package, nothing contaminates the product afterward. That is why it can stay at room temperature for months or years, without relying on preservatives to do so. It is the same principle as canning, which goes back to the Frenchman Nicolas Appert in the early 19th century, and as the sterilized pouches used today by armies and humanitarian aid missions. ### Why this matters against hunger Much of the cost of getting food to those in need lies in keeping it cold: refrigerated trucks, cold rooms, energy. Food that needs no refrigerator can be stored in any warehouse, taken anywhere and kept at home for a long time. For communities without a stable cold chain, that makes a difference. ### Read also - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) - A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/) --- ## Why use surplus from the CEASAs against hunger? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/wholesale-market-surplus-against-hunger/ Idioma: en Descrição: Because part of the food from wholesale markets is lost before it reaches the table. Instituto CEASA proposes turning that surplus into meals. Instituto CEASA, founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, proposes using surplus from the wholesale food markets against hunger because that is where large volumes of fresh food are concentrated and, in part, lost before reaching the table. Turning that surplus into long-shelf-life food brings two problems together into one solution. ### The size of the loss Worldwide, the FAO, the United Nations food and agriculture agency, estimates that about 13% of food is lost between harvest and retail. The United Nations Environment Programme, in its 2024 Food Waste Index report, estimated that more than 1 billion tonnes of food were wasted in 2022 in retail, food service and households. Fruits and vegetables are among the most perishable. ### Why the CEASAs The CEASAs are public wholesale markets where producers and wholesalers sell fruit, vegetables and other fresh produce to city retailers. They concentrate a great deal of volume in one place, every day. That makes a recovery operation easier: instead of collecting leftovers scattered across thousands of points, the plant sits close to where the surplus forms. It is the same environment for which Bairo designed CEASA Bank, built for those who sell and buy at the wholesale markets. The institute's proposal is that food that is thrown away today becomes a meal for someone in need. ### Read also - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) - The frequency of silence (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-frequency-of-silence/) --- ## What is qrqbits? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/what-is-qrqbits/ Idioma: en Descrição: The cybersecurity initiative founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez that protects files, images, audio and text with post-quantum cryptography. qrqbits is a cybersecurity initiative founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez. It protects files, images, audio and text with layered post-quantum cryptography, that is, with algorithms designed to hold up against the quantum computers of the future as well. In the ecosystem, it is the protected exit path for information. It is in development. ### What it is for Health data, personal documents, contracts and conversations need to stay protected for many years, not just today. There is a well-known risk in information security: someone copies encrypted data now in order to try to open it in the future, when there are quantum computers capable of breaking part of today's cryptography. qrqbits' proposal is to protect today what needs to remain protected tomorrow. In the ecosystem founded by Bairo, this applies, for example, to the records a patient keeps in their private Xperienc dashboard. In the body image he uses to describe the whole, qrqbits is the external transmission pathway: what leaves the body leaves protected. ### Why this page does not explain how it works By the company's decision, how the technology works is not disclosed until its intellectual property protection is complete. That is why this page speaks only of the benefit: layered protection, with post-quantum cryptography, for different types of files. ### Read also - A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/) - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) --- ## Post-quantum vs. quantum cryptography: the difference URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/post-quantum-vs-quantum-cryptography/ Idioma: en Descrição: Post-quantum is math-based cryptography built to resist quantum computers (NIST FIPS 203 and 204). Quantum uses physics, as in key exchange. Post-quantum cryptography is mathematical cryptography, running on ordinary computers, designed to resist attacks from quantum computers. Quantum cryptography uses properties of quantum physics, as in quantum key distribution over optical fiber or satellite. qrqbits, founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, works with the former: it is post-quantum. ### Post-quantum Part of the cryptography used on the internet today, such as the kind that protects key exchange and digital signatures, depends on mathematical problems that a sufficiently large quantum computer could solve. Post-quantum cryptography uses other problems, for which no quantum shortcut is known. In August 2024, NIST, the U.S. standards institute, published the first official standards of this generation: FIPS 203, for key establishment, and FIPS 204 and 205, for digital signatures. They serve as a reference for governments and companies around the world. One clarification is worth making: strong symmetric cryptography, such as 256-bit AES, does not fall to a quantum computer. The sensitive point lies mainly in public-key algorithms. ### Quantum Quantum cryptography is not an algorithm, it is a physical setup: it uses particles of light so that any attempt at interception leaves a trace. It requires dedicated equipment and its use is more limited today. Mixing up the two terms is common, and it matters. "Post-quantum" describes concrete protection, based on public standards. That is the correct term for qrqbits. ### Read also - The ecosystem (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/ecosystem/) - NIST FIPS 203 (https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/fips/203/final) - A whole body (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/a-whole-body/) --- ## What does "the impossible just hasn't been done yet" mean? URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/the-impossible-just-hasnt-been-done-yet/ Idioma: en Descrição: For Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, impossible is no limit: it is what hasn't been done yet. The stance he admires in Disney, Ford and Jobs. For Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, the impossible is something that hasn't been done yet. The sentence does not deny that limits exist; it says that many of them are only the point someone has reached so far. It is how he reads every "it can't be done" he has heard throughout his life: not as a verdict, but as a description of a temporary state. ### Where this stance comes from The story he tells begins with people who heard "it can't be done" and kept going. The story goes that Walt Disney saw the Florida park before it existed. According to Napoleon Hill, Henry Ford's engineers said a single-block V8 was impossible, and the engine hit the streets in 1932. Steve Jobs asked for ten seconds less on the Macintosh boot, and the team delivered. In Bairo's own path, the "impossible" had other names: an immigrant with no footing, a business he lost to his partners, a financial platform the banks refused to integrate, a coin that took several attempts. ### The care the sentence demands Saying the impossible hasn't been done yet does not permit saying it already has. That is why, in the ecosystem he founded, what is ready is called ready, and what is a goal is called a goal, like the 142 AI assistants planned by February 20, 2027. The sentence is about beginning. The rest is proven by doing. ### Read also - Fifty-five years later (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/fifty-five-years-later/) - The God of the impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/) --- ## What are Bairo Gonzalez's values? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/bairo-gonzalez-values/ Idioma: en Descrição: Faith, fight, grit and determination, in his words. Added to them are honor, which for him outlasts time, and truth as the rule for what gets published. The values of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, in his words, are faith, fight, grit and determination. He adds honor, which he considers something that outlasts time, and truth, which in the ecosystem he founded became a practical rule: call ready only what is ready. They are values forged more in the falls than in the wins. ### What each value means Faith. For Bairo, faith is trusting in something you cannot see. He says he found it again when he was broke and beaten, listening to testimonies from people who had crossed through the impossible. That is where the phrase came from that names a chapter of his story: the God of the impossible. Fight, grit and determination. These are the values of starting over. Fight is facing what has to be faced, without outsourcing the blame. Grit is keeping going when the result has not yet appeared. Determination is holding course after every no: it is what led to the attempt he calls the seventh. Honor and truth. In practice, honor is keeping your word, not speaking ill of those who left, and not promising what you don't control. Truth is what holds everything else up. On BTZ Chain, he describes it as the network's validator; on this site, it shows in the choice to publish only facts on the record and to label plans as plans. ### Read also - The God of the impossible (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-god-of-the-impossible/) - The seventh attempt (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/the-seventh-attempt/) --- ## What is "purpose, dreams and execution"? — Bairo Gonzalez URL: https://bairogonzalez.com/en/questions/purpose-dreams-and-execution/ Idioma: en Descrição: The method of Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez: "There are no coincidences and no accidents, only purpose, dreams and execution." Execution comes last. "Purpose, dreams and execution" is how Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez sums up his method for life. The full sentence is his: there are no coincidences and no accidents, only purpose, dreams and execution. It means that nothing that happened along his path was chance, and that a dream only becomes real when someone carries it out. ### The three words in his story - Purpose: ever since he was a boy, in Colombia, he said he would live in Brazil. Capoeira, which he discovered before moving, was the bridge. As he reads it, that was no coincidence. - Dreams: in the hardest stretch, after losing everything, he says he saw his best self, a prosperous man at peace. That dream became the map of where he was headed. - Execution: six months barely leaving the house, building the foundation of CEASA Bank; then, companies registered in Brazil and the United Kingdom. ### Why execution comes last Purpose and dreams are the beginning, and many people stop there. The word that closes the sentence is the one that separates intention from the work. It is also the easiest to check: execution leaves a trail, in records, products and dates. That is why Bairo treats the sentence as a method, not a slogan. And that is why the milestone of October 1, 2026, came with a goal that has a date to be checked, and not just a promise. ### Read also - Capoeira was the bridge (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/story/capoeira-was-the-bridge/) - Today, 14:20 (https://bairogonzalez.com/en/milestone-1420/)