Eight months since I left Ultimate Beauty, and Matteo still runs it. He's moved to Bilbao, expecting a third kid, and just survived the hardest year of the business... slashing the team by 70%. But something shifted. He's not burned out. Instead, he's discovered AI as a genuine life improvement tool, not a hype cycle. He's using it to solve real problems in his daily life... diet, health, product research. The practical applications fascinate him more than the philosophical ones.
The curiosity that builds systems
As a kid, Matteo built a lifting bridge in his room from rope, burned the carpet playing with fire, created systems and ruled. He's neurodivergent... hyperfocus type. His brain needs complex problems to engage. Simple math breaks him. He can multiply impossible numbers in his head but struggles to add basic ones. For years, he thought it was childhood trauma. Then he learned it was his dopamine profile. High-difficulty tasks light him up. Low-difficulty tasks bore him to the point of paralysis. This entirely explains his business. He's built a company that solves complex supply-chain puzzles. He's not doing it for money. He's doing it because the puzzle itself gives him life. And he's noticed this pattern throughout his entire life... from figuring out how to hack supermarket promotions as a kid, to breaking rules and understanding systems, to now building a business that hacks global supply chains. Every chapter of his life circles back to the same core: curiosity. How do things work. What can be better. What's possible if I tweak this lever.
What excitement actually means
When he talks about his purpose, he doesn't talk about impact. He talks about following highest excitement. Consciousness experiencing itself. Not success, not legacy. Just... what are you genuinely excited about? If you're creating from fear, your shoulders tense, you exhaust yourself. If you're creating from passion, even if nothing happens for two years, the journey itself is the reward. He learned this slowly, over decades. He didn't set a target of three thousand euros a month and quit. He lowered his life cost so low that what he was building didn't have to succeed fast. That patience, paired with genuine curiosity, is what opened everything. When you're not chasing the hit of a monthly salary, when your needs are truly minimal, you can follow what actually excites you. You can build what matters to you. And paradoxically, that's often when things start to work.
The reframe that stuck with him
Near the end, he shared something from a book called Conversations with God. Stop looking for who you are. That's not a journey of discovery. It's a journey of creation. Seek not to find out who you are, but who you want to be. The moment he said it, I realized I'd written the opening lines of a song during my travels. First line: who am I. Who do I want to be. He laughed. Maybe the universe was listening.
