Be self-taught; do not wait for life to teach you.

Stanisław Jerzy Lec

The beginning of this story sounds like one of those rather unfunny jokes from the late Soviet era: father an engineer, mother a teacher. Actually, that is less a laughing matter than a national disgrace, but that is not what this is about. I was born into a family of modest means, and I know very well the particular flavour potatoes acquire when they are served for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

An educated family without much money, the kind people described as “not knowing how to live”, because for families like ours there was no alternative to basic decency—and consequently almost no chance of “living the good life” in the senile phase of late socialism. My parents are wonderful people, and my respect for them is genuine, heartfelt and grateful. They taught me NOT to choose between decency and something else. Or rather, they did not exactly set out to “teach” me: I simply never saw any other options.

But if there was one thing my parents knew how to do, it was love their children. And only they—an engineer and a teacher—know what it cost them to bring me up and, after school, send me to Kyiv, the capital, to “Kharchovyi”: the National University of Food Technologies.

I lived in a student dormitory.

That does a splendid job of making you grow up and stripping away any lingering childish illusions, if you had any. I will come to the benefits of studying itself, and reading in particular, a little later. It is obvious enough that there are serious problems with both these days, that for a great many young people reading is tedious hard labour—before exams, for instance. But even when I was young, I was more puzzled by another sort of person: someone who had read thousands of books without even trying to connect any of it to real life.

As for me, I certainly did not live by the books. Still, some things stuck in my memory once and for all; more than that, they later turned out to be true. “Knowledge is worth nothing if you have no goals you want to achieve with it”—I cannot vouch for the exact wording, but that was the gist. I read it in my second year, in a book by Napoleon Hill.

Let me say straight away that I have no intention of advertising anyone’s theories here, or drawing on any experience other than my own. The book only came my way by chance in the first place. I am almost certain I would eventually have arrived at the same idea myself. But the phrase stayed with me: knowledge implies a goal, and a goal calls for knowledge…

My studies at “Kharchovyi” did not, to put it mildly, fit very neatly into this tidy scheme. Yes, some subjects were interesting—or, more accurately, were taught in an interesting way—but I was far more preoccupied with the fact that I, a tremendously healthy and extraordinarily grown-up former schoolboy, was having to rely on 500–1,000 hryvnias a month from my parents. It was deeply uncomfortable. My understanding of goals was in even worse shape: all I knew was that, at any cost, I had to hang on to my place in the dormitory, at university, and in Kyiv itself. The idea was that I had to stay and establish myself in the capital. Otherwise it would all have been for nothing, and back in my hometown I would have faced an uncomplicated “alternative history” consisting of mayonnaise on white bread, an uncombed wife, vodka, swearing, mud squelching underfoot and other readily available ingredients requiring, as they say, neither brains nor imagination—let alone goals or knowledge. Do not get me wrong: I love my hometown and respect its people, but it really does offer few prospects for a young, ambitious man to develop. I understood very clearly that my future would be considerably better if I could hold my ground in the capital.

By then I had also discovered that a job in my field promised the glittering prospect of 500 conventional units a month. More than 500 parental hryvnias, of course, but between me and that income lay about ten years of running errands.

There was something to think about. In theory, another life existed… well, it simply had to exist: comfortable, happy despite the chronic absurdity all around, successful, full of interesting things to do… In short, as the familiar saying goes, “A normal person only needs money so they do not have to think about it.” I understood that I still had a great deal of thinking to do, for a long time to come, and nobody would do it for me. I understood that I had to believe a dream-life like that was possible, because without belief—and, if you like, stubbornness—you cannot build yourself a decent future. But I also understood that belief alone would not be enough.

I read all sorts of things, listened to just as many audiobooks, and soaked up even more training courses and seminars.

I could have ended the story there, adding “…and that is why I became successful”, or “…I won two million in the lottery and achieved my goal solely thanks to my knowledge.” People would probably have found that easier to believe, too. For some reason, the more ridiculous the miracle, the more readily people believe in it. But the real story is a little longer.

Neither books, nor knowledge, nor goals stopped me taking the most ordinary step in the world: getting a job. This is probably where the story of an ordinary provincial student in the capital stops being quite so ordinary. Even I find it rather strange now to read the list of jobs and occupations I had as a student. Sales manager; sales representative; organiser of rallies for thousands of people on behalf of honest and wise politicians; promoter; merchandiser; leaflet distributor; entertainer;

and I did other jobs, and then some more, while also working in network marketing. Even as a student, I was earning between 700 and 1,000 dollars a month.

Remember that I was still based in the dormitory, and by the standards of the time—and today’s, of course—that was no longer a typical student side job. Still less typical were problems such as “saving” or “investing”, but apparently it was time to get used even to that terminology. By then I seem to have learnt how to find people who understood the fields that interested me better than the books did—and to trust expert opinion. Let us put it this way: sometimes it pays to take your headphones out and listen to what people are telling you. Meanwhile, the university finally equipped me with a diploma and wished me a productive career for the good of the country. I wished it exactly the same, from the bottom of my heart. To this day I am not sure which of us had more reason to. :)

Some friends and I rented a flat near the Ukraina Palace. I already knew it was time to start my own business, so, after subjecting the situation to “scientific analysis”, we opened an estate agency. Someone will smirk and assume we went bust the very next day. They would be wrong: before going bust, our agency lasted a whole three months. No experience, no serious connections, no substantial start-up capital, and right in the middle of the 2008 crisis… Well, perhaps someone else would have lasted longer.

Next came the market economy, popularly known as “buy and sell”. Contrary to the widespread post-Soviet view of rich profiteers, it did not make me much money, nor did it much resemble steady, systematic success.

There was a whole series of entirely predictable questions that this young connoisseur of Hill and Kiyosaki ought to have asked himself. By then I had a fairly good grasp of financial instruments and patterns—not nearly as obvious or simple as many people imagine over a drink or on a bench outside their apartment building. I was gradually accumulating something, but real financial security was still as far away as the sky… on foot.

You should fish for big fish where they actually live, should you not? The logical place to make money is where there is plenty of it. In short, rather than waste time on small stuff, I went straight to the American stock market. Only about five years earlier, abbreviations such as NYSE, NASDAQ and AMEX had been pure television abstractions to me, like a private jet—to nip out for potatoes more quickly—or a dinner invitation from the Queen of England. But it turned out that even green young lads could be useful “somewhere out there”, and for some reason people taught them the basic principles and subtleties of stock trading, market psychology and, indeed, that entire multidimensional coordinate system in which the trajectories of money are plotted. I lived and thought in those coordinates for roughly six months, gradually absorbing financial gravity and developing the necessary instincts.

I earned enough knowledge for twenty books; enough money for food and rent, although I was actually managing hundreds of thousands of other people’s invisible dollars. Something was not right. It was at that point that Branson’s famous book—another book!—fell into my hands. Its most powerful part was its title: “Screw It, Let’s Do It!”

Among other things, it promoted a fairly simple idea: if you have disliked what you do for a long time, you will never truly succeed at it anyway, so quit and find something that will get you out of bed before the alarm clock. Confucius said much the same thing, only rather more briefly: find something you love doing, and you will never have to work.

So, screw it: time to get on and do it. Without wishing to boast, I carried out the first part of that business plan quickly and in full. On the way to the second, the effectiveness of business connections became apparent. In the drearily Soviet mindset—and, through inertia, the post-Soviet one too—the word “connections” carries a complicated and somewhat negative meaning. Everything gets done through favours, they say, through a phone call to “the right person”. In the rest of the world, business connections are as useful, valuable and even marketable a product as oil, reputation or know-how.

Well, young as I was, nobody could any longer call me a complete novice in that world. People knew that; they understood it. So there was nothing accidental about a conversation with an acquaintance who told me, more or less: a new, large-scale financial company is opening, and I need an assistant—with your experience.

I gave it a little thought and agreed. After only about a year of almost round-the-clock work—15–17 hours a day—I felt considerably more confident. What I had earned, and earned entirely by the rules of fair play, using that same knowledge and experience, was no longer a little stash under the mattress “for a rainy day”. It was my first capital.

And, just to raise a smile, let me add that at the end of the year I won… no, still not a million in the lottery, but a Lanos in a competition.

This is where I need to pause and clarify a few important things about fair play. I had not just fallen off the Moon, of course. I understood perfectly well that in so-called “wild capitalism”, the “bazaar economy” and the “period of primitive accumulation”, doing business honestly—or simply behaving decently—was not just unusual: it drew looks of sympathy, surprise and even suspicion. Put simply, people looked at you as if you were a holy fool: what, do you need to be better than everyone else? Everyone else follows the unwritten rules, and here comes this one, all honest and noble… At first I even found it amusing; then I grew bored of it. Perhaps the point is that the world does not end at the borders of one post-Soviet country. And in that larger world, built on logic and living by it, doing business any other way—in grey areas, in the shadows, by double-dealing or scamming—is simply economically impossible. It does not pay. Of course, as a phenomenon, all of that exists in abundance “over there” too. Naturally! But “over there” you can do it once; well, twice, three times… after which you have to disappear somewhere on a Pacific island, assuming you have stolen or schemed your way into enough money. It is not just a pretty phrase: business connections and business reputation are commodities too—or, rather, financial instruments that help you sell, expensive and highly effective ones. Not because everyone “over there” is honest, but because that is the logic of money.

Or perhaps it is much simpler. Perhaps I just cannot do it any other way, which leaves me with nothing to do but preach fair play. Perhaps nobody taught me the “proper, hard-nosed, just-like-everyone-else” sort of business, or perhaps I find it too unpleasant… Believe me, nothing is glowing above my head, I have no wings on my back, and I am no penniless holy fool. But suppose I hire two guys and the three of us earn, say, a bagel. We earn it using my money, knowledge, experience and intuition—let us grant all that—but their labour went into it too! How do we divide this bagel? Give one of them the hole, the other the cellophane wrapper, and keep the rest… That approach has always made me feel slightly sick. You know how some people can eat with gusto, even smack their lips with pleasure, while someone beside them watches with hungry eyes? And how others physically cannot chew in that situation? That sort of bagel does not taste good to me. I do not much like myself either—and I like liking myself—and something starts to nag like a splinter. People sometimes call it a conscience, say I was born with it and that it is not so easy to get rid of—though plenty of people manage, of course. But I feel more comfortable, calmer and happier when everyone is satisfied and smiling, and when I like myself too, so feel free to call that pure selfishness. There is a school of thought that altruism does not really exist, that people only behave decently for their own pleasure. Well then, so be it.

And so, out of pure selfishness, I have helped a great many people over the past few years. Some with money, some by helping them earn it, some by stopping them losing it… This is such an obvious fact, and those people are so real and so numerous, that I am not even embarrassed to say so. At one point I tried to work out how much of the money I earned I spent on myself. The percentage was small but quite sufficient, with peace of mind thrown in. In other words, my efficiency—in terms of usefulness to others—turned out to be no worse than that of an electrical transformer.

But I have wandered off, explaining things that seem perfectly natural to me but that, as I have seen, many people do not understand. Back to the story. It gets more interesting from here.

I worked at the company for a couple of years. Experience, no wings on my back, knowledge and all that. Yet, ridiculous as it may sound, it took me a while to realise that the company employing such a clever fellow was nothing more than a modified version of a pyramid scheme. It was a strange discovery and a strange feeling. All I could do was shrug and politely say goodbye: thank you, gentlemen, but this is not for me. The company, as you can probably guess, fell apart.

Or take the story of how I walked away from an enormous amount of money at one company. People who have known me well for long enough still tease me: someone else would have put on a whole show called “How to Walk Away from a Million”, they say, and you did not even slam the door properly. Even new acquaintances sometimes react in surprise: that was you?! You just up and walked away from that much money?!?! And they look at me as if I am mad. Well, it was not quite “just up and walked away”. I regretted the work, the time and the guys on my team… but yes, it was me, and that much-discussed million was mine—the only one I had at the time, too. We had worked flat out, but no outside investor should have suffered because we had happened to work, as they say, at the wrong time and for the wrong company. So the decision felt rather… automatic, I suppose. Ordinary, without much emotion. I walked away, that was that. What is there to talk about?

Would you not have walked away?

So, once again: “Screw it—let’s do it.” There was a team, and a perfectly capable one at that, so we got on and opened a flower shop. It was my first properly organised, carefully thought-out and thoroughly analysed investment of my own, unlike the ill-fated estate agency. Meanwhile, something was already telling me that this celebrated “knowledge and experience” could actually be acquired in other ways—not just by collecting lumps on your forehead, at any rate—and that there were many things you had to study for a long time, carefully and seriously. Not for a diploma, as they say, but to actually know them. From that point on, I made it a rule to invest part of my profits in my own education. I have never regretted it. It pays off.

I enrolled at the Ukrainian Higher School of Business.

Marketing, finance, advertising, team-building, planning, management, building a systematic business, strategy, tactics… What interested me most at the time was investing, and that became the subject of my graduation project at the Ukrainian Higher School of Business. Together with partners, I created a group of companies that I thought of as an investment fund: financial assets, high-risk assets, retail businesses, patents… that sort of fund. Bear in mind that I was not yet 23. Some things made money, others did not; that is why they call them high-risk assets. Nevertheless, roughly once a year—and there were four such years—capitalisation increased more than tenfold. The principles were simple and clear, almost like commandments: the assets’ activities must not violate the laws of the territory where they operate; they must not violate society’s moral laws; and they must not go against the rules of the particular system in which each asset operates. All I can say is that these rules can be followed. Over time, the fund came to include a chain of grocery shops, a chain of hostels, tile manufacturing, sales of coffee and coffee machines to restaurants and supermarkets, a mobile-phone service centre, the intellectual board game Vikenomy, a Forex proprietary trading centre, a law firm and more. I developed a portfolio-investment mindset.

I admit there were temptations to take the usual “fast business” route, and invitations too: join one of my business partners in an ingenious scheme, for instance, make 100–200 thousand dollars in six months, and then… But I did not do it then, and I have no intention of doing it in future. I think I have had enough of that sort of experience. As one of our teachers at the business school used to say, “The main problem with Ukrainian business is that businesspeople love money more than they love their businesses.”

A sharp observation, and a bitter one. It is probably true, and it will take time—a great deal of time—for that way of thinking to change even a little. But I want to do things. I genuinely enjoy learning and developing, and I genuinely prefer to be of real use to people… Is that funny, perhaps? Somewhere I heard: “These days it has become embarrassing to feel embarrassed, or to talk seriously about serious things.” I am not embarrassed. In my view, what you should be ashamed of is being alive and bored. There are plenty of people like that: bored with life, bored with starting something new, bored with reading, bored with having a conscience and thinking about others, bored with thinking at all… That, to my mind, is shameful.

But in their own way, the people who told me, “Dreamers like you simply do not survive here”, were right too. As if to illustrate the point, at the end of 2012 life presented me with a run of serious troubles, quite typical of our prolonged “transition period”. I was no longer quite so self-assured or naive, but—as often happens to “highly experienced” people who supposedly no longer trust so easily—it was my trust that let me down. My “fund” had apparently been put together well enough to look like a tempting prize to many people. I entered into a very skilfully and competently drafted contract for the supply of iPhone 5 mobile phones from Hong Kong, as a result of which I lost the lion’s share of my capital here as well. In return, I acquired a “headache” thanks to a beautifully staged performance by professional fraudsters, whose aim was to take as many assets and as much money as possible out of my pocket and put them into theirs.

Events like that really can knock you off your feet. Looking back at myself in those days, yes, it seems to have been genuine clinical depression. A year later, a psychologist described my condition as comparable to a broken spine. You grow your business, put all your brains, knowledge, heart and soul into it, and then lose practically everything through gross injustice, deception and betrayal by people “close” to you. But back then I did not know any psychologists, so, to stay on my feet—I had no intention of going down for the count—I chose a “quintessentially English” way to recover: travel. And travel with my belo… Actually, never mind. A private life is private for a reason.

I enjoyed travelling enormously, and God willing I will be able to keep doing it. More than that, it really helped. I became the first among all my friends and acquaintances to travel around the world. The world was still vast and interesting, there were still whole galaxies of absorbing work ahead, and my head now held not only “screw it all” but also a few ideas about how to finish that sentence…

In short, I came back the same dreamer. When people call me that, I do not particularly argue. I simply add: “What makes me different from other dreamers is that I manage to make things happen…”

Looking around the ashes, so to speak, I discovered the following. I do not like the things that brought in money, or continue to bring it in; if I am completely honest with myself, I never particularly liked them. As for work that I might enjoy and find genuinely absorbing, I can picture it and know what it is—but only from other people’s examples. I am not very good at it myself yet.

And wailing along the lines of “I should have done it sooner…” or “Why did I not just…”—I do not understand that at all. Everything has its time; you have to grow into things.

At last, I will do what I have been meaning to do for a long time.

Actually, why “will”? I am already doing it. Three internet projects. Three at once, all either launching or already running. It is brilliant, it is wonderful, and it is the future, because it is effective, very convenient and genuinely useful to users. That last point still matters to me, idealist and dreamer that I am. But all the best things on the internet were made by enthusiastic boys with dreams, were they not?

To earn—not win, not steal, not wheedle your way into… In short, to earn a dream-life, you need a dream-team. I need the best, I need professionals—and almost everyone I need is already beside me. I can practically hear their fingers drumming silently and a little impatiently on the table. People like that do not know how to be bored either. They too are made to work.

There is a goal; knowledge is needed. And at that point I was rather short on specialist knowledge. Well, learning was nothing new, and if you are going to learn, learn from the very best. In this field, the best are the Americans… for now. “Well then, let them teach me,” I thought, turned around and flew to San Diego for an internet-marketing seminar and conference.

I took a course at the University of Pennsylvania, at Wharton… yes, that very Wharton School, the one that comes just behind Harvard and Stanford in the rankings.

Since investing still interested me greatly, I decided to take a finance course at the University of Michigan. Not only did I finish it with distinction, I became a good deal more knowledgeable about finance and investment.

It was worth it. It is ALREADY paying off. I am now finishing a Stanford University course on creating start-ups from a project manager’s perspective.

What is especially good about internet business is that, wherever you are, you are both at home and at work. That is one of the main reasons I chose this particular line of work and way of life: it lets me travel, be a “citizen of the world” and earn a decent living.

I like it very much. I know what I want and what my venture investment fund will look like in the internet space on planet Earth. I will make it happen!

There is a very fine expression in English, a phrase that has quite literally taken flight: self-made man—a man who has made himself.

Get on with it—and do it!