About me Vsevolod Vasev

I am Vsevolod Vasev, a former founder of two companies. Curious and creative. I have critical thinking, self-sufficiency.

I am working with a friend on the idea of creating a full-fledged AI and intelligent translator based on it. And also, we want to create a device that will help people learn a foreign language, wherever they are.

Our goal is to create a product that brings together people who speak different languages.

There are three things that most people are afraid of: trust, tell the truth, and be yourself.

About me

I am a simple person who has experienced ups and downs, the joy of victory, and the bitterness of defeat. I rose high and fell to the very bottom of the social ladder. I went through burnout and depression.

I did not break down, did not give up, did not blame everyone around for his failures, but remained himself, preserved himself as a person.

I left his past behind, analyzing his mistakes and accepting them as part of his life.

I found my goal and am moving towards it with my steps.

I share my thoughts with other people by answering their questions and listening to their opinions. Even if their opinion does not coincide with mine, I have no right to forbid them to say and write what they think.

In dispute and reflection, truth is born.

My studies. How I studied and what I learned, what knowledge I gained.

For as long as I can remember, I was always learning something. Whether it was school, work, college, institute, university. Or I was just educating myself. It's fascinating, despite the challenges I've always had. The more you gain knowledge, the greater your horizons. When you study at any educational institution, you get knowledge first and foremost, not objective or subjective grades for that knowledge.

The School.

Due to frequent moves from place to place and my illness, I had to attend five schools as a child. And each time I had to, as they say now, integrate into school society. Finding common ground with the kids in my class. I studied pretty well until the 7th grade, but after moving to another city, my academic performance decreased. Moving to another city became stressful for me and I hardly integrated into school society. Gradually I got used to it and got involved in studying. My favorite subjects at school were mathematics, physics, astronomy, social studies and history. I did not feel such piety for the rest of the subjects and simply passed them, receiving, as they said then, a satisfactory state assessment.

In Soviet schools, there were oral and written exams in the main subjects. Now Russia has introduced the Unified State Exam, or simply put, tests. The test does not say or show your knowledge in any subject. It just states the fact, that you passed or failed this subject. Students in the last year of school are trained to take tests. They are coached to pass these tests, killing the individuality of the student. In Soviet school it was the opposite, first I took the written exam, and only then passed the oral exam in front of the examination committee. They didn't teach us rhetoric, we taught ourselves how to speak orally. On the exam, you could be asked any question from the entire course of the school program. I learned how to properly express my thoughts using oral speech. Subsequently, this skill has come in handy for me. I think this is the best way to pass exams in school.

The Retreat.

I was fascinated by studying at school and studying at DOSAAF (voluntary society for the promotion of the army, aviation and Navy). I took a course in parachuting in DOSAAF, as I had a dream to enter a military school. But my dreams were not destined to come true, as my health failed me. After graduating from school, I tried to enroll in the Gubkin Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas, but did not pass the competition, there were not enough points. I got a job at a factory, as an apprentice turner. I was 16 years old at the time. Before the army, I worked at a factory. For 1.5 years, my self-study, I became a turner of the 3rd category.

Service in the Soviet Army.

I did not like serving in the Soviet Army. It was not about discipline, but about such a vicious phenomenon as "dedovshchina". Mockery and mockery, extortion of money, suppression of personality, up to and including beatings and murders, that is what the Soviet army was like. I rebelled against injustice and the growing lawlessness, applied to the military prosecutor's office and immediately became an outcast among my conscription, but was respected by the young conscripts. No one else touched the young men, and all military service was conducted strictly according to the regulations. It was hard, but I didn't break down.

The Institute.

After serving in the army, I went back to the factory. After working there for a year, he enrolled in preparatory courses at the Gubkin Institute in Moscow. Gubkin Institute in Moscow. The graduation exams at the courses are the entrance exams to the institute. But only for those who had served in the army. And we went out of the general competition. That's the kind of benefit that existed in the Soviet Union back then. I got into the Department of Oil and Gas Construction Design. I only studied for one year. I failed two exams: technical mechanics and programming. It was the first time I saw a computer, it was 1990. I did well in studying subjects in which, at school, I received unsatisfactorily and satisfactorily. It was higher mathematics and physics. In these subjects I was excellent. I was even kicked out of the exam, as I did help others to solve tasks. I was just interested in solving tasks not only in my variant, but also in other variants.

Yes, I had the opportunity to stay at the institute and continue my studies further. This opportunity sat in the Ministry of Natural Resources of the USSR and was the first deputy minister. But, I flatly refused to accept this help. And I still do not regret making that decision. I believe that it was my decision and my responsibility, and that it was my own fault for not passing the exams. I should have studied, not gone out.

The College.

I entered college in 1993 at the correspondence department. The correspondence department is a form of education in which students enrolled in college study independently at home, and come to the college for the session to listen to lectures and pass tests and exams. Each student is given a homework assignment, which they are required to pass in a certain period. In simple terms, after completing the homework, the student sends it by mail to the college for verification. If the task is completed incorrectly, it comes back with comments that need to be corrected. At the correspondence department, students who worked and could pay their tuition were trained. I was working then and saving money for tuition fees. It was possible to pay not for one year of study, but every six months, which was very convenient.

I was trained as an electrical technician, at the faculty: "Electrical equipment and power supply of industrial and civil buildings". The training lasted two years. We were taught by professors of technical sciences. We were the last group to be taught by professors. At the end of our training in college, most of the professors left for St. Petersburg University for permanent residence and work.

I did my diploma work on my own. Since we did not have computers at the time, I took all the information from books in the library. My thesis was built on the comparison of two systems of electrical equipment and power supply of elevators (firm KONE and the Soviet system). There was also an economical constituent of the project. I made all drawings by me according to the then standards, with the help of my drawing tools. I defended my diploma with excellent marks.

The University.

I entered the technical university in 1998. Specialty: ship electromechanic. Then my situation at work stabilized. Wages were paid on time, not once in six months. I was accepted to the free of charge department of evening faculty. I had already written about the evening faculty. That's when you work the whole day, and then after a short break you go to university. I used to come home at about 11 p.m. And so every day except Saturday and Sunday. At university, it was the same as at the institute, higher mathematics is excellent, but physics is good. In my first year at university, I had such subjects as philosophy and sociology. It seemed strange to me, why we need these subjects, especially in a technical university. But it was explained to us popularly, that we need them, and that on these subjects, we will have tests and examinations. And if we do not pass these subjects, I emphasize, I have a technical specialty, then they can be expelled from the university for failure.

In philosophy, I wrote an essay on the topic: what Plato wrote about in his work "The State". I wrote the essay by myself and by hand. You know that in Russian, written speech is written in italics, not in block letters, as in English. I took the test right in the hallway of the university. I was sick at the time and missed the official test. The professor did not want to make an extra day for me and accepted the test, as I wrote above. I read Plato's work "The State" in its entirety and I liked it, although I had never been into philosophy before.

I managed to have an argument with my sociology teacher. The reason was that I expressed my opinion that, in a technical university in a technical specialty, making sociology a compulsory subject was nonsense. And that we students should study technical subjects, and not waste our time on humanities subjects. The teacher took offense at my words and said that I would personally take written and oral tests on all the topics that we covered during the semester. So as not to embarrass myself, I learned the lectures by heart in two days and could recite any lecture from memory. In the notebook was written out 96 sheets of solid text. Even after many years, I can safely operate with the concepts that exist in sociology. I have written the abstract, where I considered what social groups exist and how people belonging to these social groups interact within the group and with the outside world. To write this essay, I used the works of the German philosopher and sociologist Max Weber.

Here are some of his famous quotes that are relevant today in my opinion:

"Intellectuals have always been the bearers of rationality, and entrepreneurs could become them."

"The state is the organization that provides the most expensive services of the lowest quality."

"It is better to have officials we can spit on than officials who don't care about us."

"An idea is no substitute for a job."

"In a democracy, people choose a leader they trust. Then the elected leader says, 'Now shut up and obey me.' After that, the people and the party can no longer interfere in his affairs." Source : https://ru.citaty.net/avtory/maks-veber/

In the second semester of Sociology, we learned how to properly design a sociological survey of the population on any topic. Analyze and operate with the data obtained. I didn't start studying special subjects until my fourth year at university. I went to university for 5 years and left it because I could not afford to pay for my education. But, since I studied mostly on my own, the knowledge I received came in handy in the future, and it is still relevant today, despite the fact that a lot of time has passed since then.

After my appointment as a middle manager in the company, studying became more difficult for me than it had been before. I tried not to skip classes, no matter how hard it was for me. I left the university and I still do not regret it. Many teachers, because of the lack of money, left the university and went abroad, some to universities in the capital. And the best of the best left, leaving mediocrities. I talked to some of these mediocrities and saw the difference in teaching one subject or another. I went to university to gain knowledge that I couldn't get on my own, because I didn't yet understand what I wanted. I got versatile knowledge in many disciplines. I will not list the disciplines that I studied, because it would take a lot of time.

I consider staff training to be an important stage in my training and knowledge acquisition. When you teach someone, you train yourself. And in the end you become a professional in your business. For me, a professional is a person who can explain complicated things in simple words. If you are not able to do that, then you are not a professional, no matter how much you claim otherwise.

The staff you are training may ask you any questions that you may not know the answer to right away. Then you should not refuse to answer the listener's question, but find the material, study it and give the listener a detailed and comprehensive answer. Your listener gets a detailed answer to his question, and you get knowledge that may be useful to you in the future. Learning never ends. It goes on and on as long as you live. Gaining new knowledge trains your brain, and you won't have diseases like dementia when you're old. Not only do you train your brain, you learn how to solve complex problems, find inconsistencies in reasoning, and more.

You get your own perspective and critical thinking. Eventually, you will look at many things through the prism of your skills, abilities and knowledge. You will no longer blindly believe everything you are shown or told about. It will be difficult to lead you astray from the true path of knowledge, because you will not succumb to manipulation and psychological pressure from the outside.

You don't have to be educated in an educational institution if you have the self-discipline and the ability to see things through to their logical conclusion. The desire alone in this case is not enough, because it can disappear in the process of learning. And finding ways to feed your motivation on your own is very difficult and sometimes not an easy task for a person. Therefore, if you do not have the necessary skills, it is still better to get your initial education in an educational institution.

I mean, get a classical academic education, which gives you a system of gaining knowledge. It is only after you get the knowledge that you begin to acquire the skills. Sometimes, in most cases, it's the other way around. First you get skills, and only then you get knowledge. This way of obtaining knowledge suits you only if you want to become a professional in his business, not mediocrity, which are now scattered quite a lot.

You know, not all people can adequately perceive your analytical conclusions on certain events that take place in your life, in your environment, or in the world. You may be ostracized, insulted, but no one will remain indifferent. I have received and am I receiving both. It's hard to find your way in the gray mass of indifferent and downright aggressive people. The most important thing is not to give up and go to your goal, in spite of all the circumstances and difficulties that arise along the way. And pay less attention to the approval or condemnation of the people around you, you do not need their approval or condemnation by and large. The main thing is your faith in yourself and in your work, to which you have dedicated your life. Good luck to you

Me and my work.

When I write that I've been working on the team for 33 years, I've been counting down since I was 13.

I first started working at the age of 13. And my mother persuaded my math teacher to take me to work in a Komsomol-youth camp to pick fruit. I was the youngest among the boys. The guys in the camp ranged in age from 14 to 17. Pretty soon I became a brigadier, and I had guys older than me working under me. Our brigade became the best among all of them. And, accordingly, our wages were higher. My salary for two months was more than my mother got for a month. And I was proud of that. That was my first money I earned. The next year I went to harvest vegetables. In the years that followed, I didn't go to camp again until I graduated from high school.

After serving in the army, I went back to the plant. I worked at the factory for one year. Then I went to Moscow to study. But I will write about my studies in another article.

When I returned to Murmansk, after my studies, I had three job options that were offered to me. The first option was a factory. And the factory offered me the position of shop manager. But I refused, because I was still young, and I had no relevant experience and no desire to become a chief.

The second variant - the railroad. But I was not inspired to work on the railroad.

The third option is to work in the elevator industry. I chose this option.

In the elevator maintenance company, I worked my way up, for 23 years, from a simple electromechanics, to the managing director of the company. I made a career...gained invaluable experience in managing people. Not everything was smooth in my job, but I still believe I did it. I learned, I made mistakes, I stumbled, I got up, and I moved on.

During my 9 years with the company, I went from being an electromechanics apprentice to a fourth-class electromechanics. I studied and learned the nuances of the profession on my own. Here I need to explain a little to my readers that when you enter the workplace, you take courses to get a permit to work in electrical installations up to 1000V. The courses lasted a total of 1+4 months. The first course gives you a permit, the second course gives you the opportunity to obtain a license and a specialty in the profession of an electromechanics. Further graduation depends entirely on yourself and your desire to grow in your chosen profession. To get a 4-bit, I visited the library after work and studied the material. The notes are kept in his notebook, accessible and understandable language. After I received my category, I gave my notebook to a colleague to study. He, too, wanted to get a degree in his profession. And he saw his notebook only six years later, and then accidentally. It turns out that my notes were a success and passed from hand to hand.

In 2000, I was appointed a middle the head. The structure of the company was as follows: the head office and several of the plots scattered around the city. Yesterday I was a simple worker, today I am the head. And no one trained me as the head. My former supervisor brought a pile of papers and said, now you are the boss here, work. To get into things, I had to start work at 8 a.m. and finish at 6 p.m. At 7 p.m., I started my studies at the technical university, where I was studying at the evening faculty, specializing in ship electromechanics. It was very hard in the beginning. I was 32 years old at the time, and I was the youngest leader.

There was a lot of paperwork. While the head office already had computers, the main tool for middle management was a ballpoint pen, and from electronics, a simple calculator. Having written a lot of papers, I decided that I needed to make changes in my work. To begin with, I started typing basic documents on an old typewriter. The case, it went faster. But I couldn't make charts and tables on this typewriter. And then I asked the company management to give me a computer. They didn't meet my expectations right away. Since the heads themselves worked in the old way, i.e., writing using only pen and paper, and did not understand why you need a computer for this. But, as you know, water grinds stone. And I managed to get a computer assigned to me. But it was old and decommissioned. It had old software on it. But for me, it was a celebration. Progress was moving, from the dead point.

If you want to change something in production, you need to take the initiative, rather than sit back and think that someone will come to you and do something for you.

I didn't know how to use a computer, but that didn't stop me. On the contrary, I tried, I made mistakes, but I managed to understand how to use it. From my salary I bought a printer, the simplest one. I converted my documents into electronic form. I learned how to make graphs and tables, work with Excel and Word. I was the first, among middle the heads, to innovate in my work. I began to be assigned more difficult tasks, which I successfully accomplished.

Yes, my achievements were quietly used, sometimes attributing them to myself. But this did not upset me. What was important to me was that by making changes, I was benefiting the company.

In 2008, I was offered the job of training the workforce. I agreed, even though I had never trained staff on a course before. The training that took place every year, before the staff certification, does not count, because there were my employees, whom I knew well and worked with them for a long time. And I was offered to train people who were unfamiliar to me. I remember that before the first class, I was nervous. I wasn't comfortable. How would I be greeted? Will they listen to me? These and other questions I ask myself. I chose a person who listened to me carefully and when I addressed him, I communicated with the whole class. Then I got involved and no longer felt such strong excitements as I had at the very beginning. The course lasted three months. And for three months I worked, first at of the plot, and then I went to the course to teach. My workday lasted not 8 hours, but 10-11 hours. At the end of the course, all of my trainees passed the exam. And I was proud of that, because before 60% of the trainees passed the exams, not 100%. Now I was the of the main teacher on the course. I lectured on mechanics, electrical engineering, and safety. The electronics were taught by another of the main teacher, because I didn't know them very well. Later on I got to know it quite well, because I began to educate myself.

My reputation grew, and I began to be assigned work that was not part of my duties. I began to grow professionally. It came in handy for me in the future. During my work in the elevator company, I trained three people for the position of middle and upper management.

My achievements were noticed, and I was awarded a letter of appreciation from the mayor's office of the city of Murmansk, with a cash bonus.

In 2010, together with three other people, I created my first company to service electrical installations and carry out work of any kind of complexity. That is, I created my first business. The other founders left the company within 3 years because they thought that by starting the company they would make crazy money. I thought the same thing, but then I changed's point of view. But I will talk about that in another article.

In 2012, I wrote a letter of resignation. It seemed that nothing foretold trouble. But, I got in the way of one supervisor, and he gave me a mobbing. Up to this point, I had also experienced it, but had taken a position of the don 't care. It was my way of saving my psyche from destruction. I closed myself off, put on my armor. And, in this state, I was working in a hostile environment. I needed knowledge, and I got it. It was difficult to get a job at that time, so leaving a job meant losing a steady source of income and having to make do with odd jobs. My company was still growing and did not have a steady income that would provide me with a quiet life.

And that's where I got lucky. The executives of the new elevator company came to me. The company's head office was in Moscow. They came to me through the recommendation of my main customer. That's why I keep telling young people: first you work for your reputation, and then your reputation works for you. If you have a reputation, you will have work and money. If you lose your reputation, you won't have any of the above in the long run. It's only a matter of time before you lose your reputation.

I was offered the position of technical director, and I accepted.

The company only provided me with resources, everything else I had to build on my own based on my experience. Find personnel, organize work, create an emergency service and a fleet. To develop and implement instructions on labor protection as well as technical aspects. Train personnel and prepare them for certification.

In one year I managed to do it. During this time, our competitors stepped up and started a real war, using heavy artillery in the form of their media and television channel. They were trying to smear the company, to make it look bad. They acted in the same way as the giants like Google, Facebook, Twitter, to destroy their competitors, so I look at them as children playing in a sandbox called the global marketplace. They've lost. We gained a foothold and went on to conquer the market. All in all there were 15 people working with me in our team in Murmansk. And we coped with all the work. I believe that this is the optimal size of the company. I learned much later, when I read the book "Parkinson's Laws", that the optimal company size is 15 people. This assertion was confirmed by my real experience much earlier. And by the way, as ridiculous as it is to me, our competitors took our example and started to transform their company. What is not being done, is being done better.

In 2014, I was appointed Managing Director. For me, this position played no role at all, as I had long outgrown it.

I made the decision to leave. Everything I wanted, I achieved, I got the knowledge I needed. What came next was my business...

Yes, of course, I had friends and colleagues who helped me on this path to self-improvement. Some of them are no longer alive. I was not alone and probably would never have been able to reach the heights I reached in my career. I didn't try to build my own career, and I was never a careerist who paced myself by destroying challengers. It just worked out that way for me. I was called the wrong director by my employees. In their opinion, a director should sit in a big, deep chair, drink coffee, smoke a cigar, and give instructions while signing papers.

This is just a little squeeze of what I know and remember. Some events I have omitted, as I do not consider them important to me. I have left only those events, or, as it is fashionable to say nowadays, milestones, which influenced me as a person.

I and the punitive system in the Russian Federation

In Russia, human life is worthless. There is no need to apply Western values to Russia. It is impossible to come to an agreement with the society that exists in Russia now. Negative selection has given its shoots. For more than 1000 years, universal values have been washed out of Russian society, and the sprouts of good have been suppressed and destroyed. The slogan was put at the forefront: man, man - wolf. Such qualities as meanness, hypocrisy, indifference, denunciation, fear developed. These qualities now prevail in Russia.

In Russia, you can be put in jail under any pretext. You can easily turn from a victim into an accused. Because the police have a stick system for solving crimes. The greater the crime detection rate, the more bonuses and promotions in rank and position. So, the police are trying to bring innocent people to criminal or administrative responsibility for crimes that they have never committed. And in order for a person to be more compliant, they create such conditions for him under which he will agree to sign any confessions, if only this hell would end. Yes, I write about torture. In Russia, torture is the norm. And people in Russia are not shocked by torture in places of detention, as well as in the police station. People can express their opinions on social networks, but they are afraid to speak out openly. The system of law enforcement agencies in Russia has long turned into a punitive one. And this transformation did not happen in the 21st century, and not in the 20th century, but much earlier. It's easier to work this way, you don't need to collect evidence, conduct examinations. It is enough to torture the person under investigation, and he will confess everything. A favorite topic for the police is pedophilia and drugs. Women, in order to somehow take revenge on men, file statements to the police that allegedly someone abused their daughter or son. If you need to remove a political opponent, but a person is clean before the law, then he can also be accused of pedophilia. If, for example, you went to the toilet in the wrong place, near a school or kindergarten, then you may be charged with molesting minors. If you were once suspected of molestation, but the victim did not identify you, you will still be on the pencil of the police, even if you are not convicted under this article. And when you contact the police, you may be refused to initiate a criminal case, on the grounds that you allegedly molested your abuser with obscene proposals. The police do not want to deal with cases that cannot bring quick benefits. If they have a lot of unsolved crimes at the end of a quarter or a year, then this spoils the statistics and, accordingly, they may lose bonuses and titles, sometimes positions. Therefore, the police may refuse to accept your statement about the commission of a crime against you; they may bring an innocent person to justice by planting narcotic substances on him, for example.

The police have long turned into a criminal business community, where bribery, torture and slander flourish. Ordinary citizens who meet police officers on the street try not to look them in the eye and avoid them. People are afraid of the police and try to solve their problems on their own. And if you can't solve the problems, then contact the police. And only a few of those who have applied reach the end, i.e. to the court.

I know this firsthand, because at one time a robbery and theft of my property was committed against me. And I had to involve all my acquaintances and friends to force the police to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice. I know what a court is in the Russian Federation. When the judge directly tells you that you have suffered slight damage to your health. Whereas my ears were cut in half and my whole head was covered in scars. Yes, I was beaten on the head and ears with a metal pipe. I was killed in the literal sense of the word. But, I survived and found my abusers. And I was able to prove in court that they were guilty of committing a crime against me.

In the future, when I was already doing my business, I had to constantly face the punitive system of the Russian state. Not always, I came out victorious in these battles with the system. But such fights have tempered my spirit. My conscience was clear, I never tried to hide from responsibility for someone's broad shoulders. I considered such behavior unworthy. But, the fracture still happened, I burned out. Being in constant stress for many years has not been in vain for me. But I will tell you about this and many other things next time.

Books and me.

Part 1.

I read my first book when I was 6 years old. Since then, I have read constantly. Reading books is more than just a pastime for me. The book distracts me, inspires, stimulates me. I'm starting to think better. In my imagination, I mentally built dialogues with my favorite characters and empathized with them. As a teenager, I read books that were not in the school curriculum. I enjoyed reading Belinsky, Griboyedov, Pushkin, Sholokhov, A. Tolstoy, Simonov, Sviridov, Mark Twain, Maine Reed, Conan Doyle, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Gogol, A.P. Chekhov. I enjoyed a book about Robert Wood, an American physicist. As a child, I had many hobbies associated with books, and everywhere I found something of my own, special, which helped me in the future. I did not dwell on one genre of literature, it would be boring. At the age of 11, I read Tristan and Isolde. I liked it so much that it has remained in my memory to this day. Frankly speaking, I took a dislike to the literature that was imposed at school. Well, I didn't want to read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy L.N. Our literature teacher, in order to somehow interest us, asked us to read only a few chapters from Dostoevsky's “Crime and Punishment”, namely the murder scene. And L.N. Tolstoy's “War and Peace” chapters dedicated to the battle in 1812. So that we pupils have at least some vague idea about this and other books. I barely mastered these chapters, everything else was a real nightmare for me. I still cannot read these classics of Russian literature. Since I lived during the Soviet Union, at school, we were taught the appropriate literature, according to communist ideology. I studied the works of Lenin V.I., Brezhnev, took notes of their statements, prepared reports, and quoted them at various meetings. I began reading specialized literature at the age of 16, when I became a turner's apprentice. There were few books at the plant in my specialty, so I had to go to the library after work and enjoy reading technical literature there in the quiet reading room. Yes, you can read technical literature with as much pleasure as you can read fiction. If the technical book is written in the lively language, with good and detailed examples, you will find the action fascinating. And, if you have an active imagination, you can find examples from everyday life in order to better comprehend and understand what you have read. Of course, there were books that you read with difficulty and do not quite understand the meaning of what you read. What I did back then was simple, I broke up the topic, into several smaller topics, and studied them individually. And I studied these small topics using several books. I took several books, found material of interest to me, and read it. In order not to forget what I read, I took notes of the main points. As I say now, made notes in the margins. Moreover, I did not just stupidly rewrite the material, but comprehend it and wrote what I understood in my own words. There were no computers back then, so I made all my notes by hand. Even now, I can read my notes from 15-20 years ago and remember what it's about. I developed the habit of reading any literature and making little notes for myself. I learned to read between the lines, to find double and triple bottoms. It was curious and interesting. For me, it is ordinary, not something special.

Part 2.

I don't see the point of reading business books where a businessman describes how and, what he did. Often these books were written after the businessman had come out of the depression and taken up his mind and possibly become a rich man. His suffering, mistakes, doubts, reasoning, and decisions are usually omitted. Reading a book where he describes events in a condensed version is a waste of time. When a businessman describes how he went on to success, what difficulties he overcame, what mistakes he made, it is much more interesting to read than a mediocrity written book. To my deep regret, most business books are inherently mediocre. Even if you read a few dozen business books and consider the experience of making other people's mistakes, you will still make your own mistakes. That's the way a person is, he takes into account other people's mistakes, but makes his own.

I don't understand businessmen who impose books on other people by business. Read what you like or what you need at the moment and for the next few years, as knowledge. After all, even in fiction lies deep meaning, if you liked the book and left its aftertaste, as from a sip of good wine. A good book, be it fiction or special, leaves an aftertaste and you, over time, want to read it again and see what you may not have seen when you read it the first time. Good books are written by professionals who know how to explain complex things in clear and lively language. Amateurs write nonsense that is impossible to read, even if you drink a bottle of Russian vodka. For example, the book "Think and Get Rich," which I was advised to read by an American businessman. When I wrote him in correspondence that the book is the ravings of a madman, he took offense at me, but did not engage in a debate with me and prove to me that I am wrong. Yeah, I didn't even need proof, I just needed to hear his interpretation of why he thinks this book is a must-read. Very few businessmen entered into a dialogue with me, and we were both interested in having an intellectual conversation. Such a thing can be compared to a breath of fresh air in a closed room that smells very badly of the miasma of homegrown businessmen who think they have achieved everything and retire at 35-40. These amateurs love to teach others how to achieve wealth, not realizing that they achieved it because of it, not in spite of it. Well, God is with them.

Reading books is not just a hobby, it is your constant development and self-improvement. You develop the habit of looking critically at ordinary things and thinking about how you can fix or improve something. Your creativity is awakening in you....

And then it depends on you, if you want to change your gray and uninteresting life into something brighter, adrenaline, stunning, turning your worldview and the worldview of those around you.

I love my country Russia, but I hate the state that Putin and his gang built. To the gnashing of teeth and, almost physical pain that is felt mentally. It's hard to put into words, but it's not phantom pain, it's very real. What he and his henchmen did, Russia will be cleaning up for decades. The Russian people will have to repent and ask for sincere forgiveness. It's just beginning... And I pray to God that Russia and the Russian people passed this test with honor and did not break. It is a necessary sacrifice and must be accepted not only with the mind but also with the heart.