Pedro Silva's Blog

“I wasn’t the fastest guy in the world. I wouldn’t have done well in an Olympiad or a math contest. But I like to ponder. And pondering things, just sort of thinking about it and thinking about it, turns out to be a pretty good approach.” — Jim Simons, Mathematician and Quantitative Investor

Barcelona just finished the tallest tower of the Sagrada Familia and marked a hundred years since Gaudí died. His basilica still has something to say about how to lead.

Barcelona has just lived through something rare. The central tower of the Sagrada Familia, the tallest of them all, was finally blessed and inaugurated, a hundred years to the day after Antoni Gaudí died. The skyline of the city changed in a way that will not happen again in our lifetime. Walking through the streets these days, it is hard not to be stopped in your tracks by the basilica, Gaudí’s great unfinished masterpiece, now a little less unfinished than it was. The building is a testament to his genius, but looking closer, it is also a reflection of how he led. The more I read about his approach, the more it seems just as relevant today as it was in his own time.

Most people just react to life. Writing forces you to stop, look at your thoughts, and actually figure out what you mean.

I think writing will change your life more than motivation ever will. I do not mean this in some motivational sense. I mean it in a highly practical way. Most of us never stop long enough to understand what is happening inside our own heads. We simply react. Writing forces a pause. It makes you look at your thoughts instead of running away from them. You usually do not even realize what you truly think until you start writing it down.

I spent late April in Barcelona at Reuters Pharma Europe, and one sentence from a roundtable on AI and the agency model has stayed with me since. Someone said that AI is compressing content production from weeks to hours, and that the bottleneck has moved. It is no longer making content. It is making it matter.

I take a lot of notes at these events, pages of them, some of which I never reopen. This sentence is the one I kept turning over on the flight home, and I think it is because it reframes almost everything else I heard that week, including a thread I have been pulling on for a while now about what AI does to how we reach doctors.

Top Talent’s Manifest - Redefine Leadership.pdf

This manifesto is seven years old, and a lot of it has aged well. The question is not whether anyone calls themselves “top talent”, but whether organisations are actually willing to build the leadership and culture such people expect: purpose, autonomy, growth, and leaders worth following.

1. I do not choose to be a common employee. It is my nature to be uncommon.

2. I seek challenges - not security and I expect to grow every day.

Every blog seems to need a first post. So here is mine, and it isn’t going to promise much.

There is no content calendar behind this, no niche I am trying to own. I mostly want a place to write down for future reference things I notice, ideas I am still working through, even a sentence from a book that seems worth exploring.

Some of it will come from work. Others from technology, investing, travel, or just ordinary moments that make me stop and think.