An Inspired Chat with Ricardo Bello of City center

We recently had the chance to connect with Ricardo Bello and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Ricardo, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to share your story, experiences and insights with our readers. Let’s jump right in with an interesting one: Who are you learning from right now?
I am learning from life, the lessons that our day-to-day experiences teach us. In current times, I see that it is necessary to have a lot of faith, calmness, patience, and perseverance. The days are not easy. Every day we face battles in our lives. Some face fewer challenges, others more, but we all have obstacles to remove from our path and move forward. As a song by Brazilian singer Milton Nascimento says: one must have strength, one must have determination, one must have desire, always. Strength to fight, to live, to dream, to make things happen, and to always seek to be a better person, having God as a guide for our lives.

Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I am a journalist and I do comedy shows that mix stand-up comedy and characters. I enjoy entertaining people when I’m on stage, telling funny stories and some situations that have happened to me in real life. As a journalist, I have a website that has been running since 2009, called ‘Revista de Cultura’. There, I conduct interviews, promote shows, talk about cinema and theater; it’s really cool. It’s a rewarding job, and I also share the daily gospel. I started doing this during the pandemic, as people couldn’t leave their homes in some parts of the world. It was a way I found to bring a word of comfort to them during such a tumultuous time.

I also have an Instagram profile where I talk about culture, music, cinema, and post videos. The audience has really enjoyed it; some videos have a large viewership. I am very happy to do this work.

Okay, so here’s a deep one: Who taught you the most about work?
My father taught me the most about work. He was a journalist known for his good work and also did some work in cinema. I also became a professional in various roles, journalist, comedian. I started my public life by drawing celebrities, artists I admired in some way. I would make caricatures, drawings and personally deliver them to them. I reached the number of 280 people drawn and photographed. This fact led me to be recognized by Rankbrasil, the book of Brazilian records. In some bookstores around the world, this book exists and I am there in the section dedicated to cultural records.

Is there something you miss that no one else knows about?
Sometimes I miss it; in fact, I get emotional watching old movies, TV shows on YouTube or Instagram, that remind me of times when problems were smaller than they are today, so to speak. It brings that nostalgia like in the Queen song “These are the days of our lives.” It brings that longing, but there’s this inner strength, the thought reminding me that life is today and that we need to do our best today. We must have faith, make things happen with dialogue, attitude, and the will to succeed. We need to pave the way to move forward, always. Every day! We must keep going. Obstacles exist, but life goes on, and we need to continue along with it.

Sure, so let’s go deeper into your values and how you think. Is the public version of you the real you?
Absolutely. I strive to always be sincere in my work and in life. It’s important to be true in what we do. I often say that I don’t know how to lie. If I don’t like something, the person with me certainly knows by my demeanor. In the same way, that person can also tell when I liked something. It’s important to be ourselves, always. Otherwise, the audience ends up liking a character and not who we truly are. Being sincere is the best option. I believe that when we genuinely do what we love and believe in, things happen naturally. So it’s important to be sincere and have our identity in relationships, in work, in life in general. We should always be ourselves, with respect, with charisma, conveying the good we have in everything we do. And always be truthful.

Before we go, we’d love to hear your thoughts on some longer-run, legacy type questions. What light inside you have you been dimming?
I believe it’s impatience. Nowadays, everything is very urgent. The other day I saw a video of a priest commenting in a church that a few years ago, people didn’t have WhatsApp, social networks. There were those people who waited an entire day to hear the messages left on the answering machine of the phone. These days, we send a message on WhatsApp and want a response in 10 seconds. The world is fast-paced, but God’s timing remains the same. Seeds take the right time to sprout, bear fruit, and grow. In this way, I have learned to be a little more patient. Of course, sometimes urgent situations arise, but it is necessary to have patience to solve what we cannot resolve with just one phrase. As it happened in the cartoon, just saying: Shazam! And everything would be resolved. In real life, you need to be calm. Thus, this is the light that dims internally, that of lack of patience. It is necessary to be calm, to think, to act calmly, always.

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Image Credits
Picture (with Characters): Ricardo Ferreira

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