In a recent weeks I have changed my life the most I have in the past ten years. I have moved outside the country I have been living in my whole life and started to work on a craft I have long time dreamed of about perfecting. I would almost say I have been getting ready for this moment my whole life. Right when the moment came, the COVID19 hit the world. Not only that, my health is still not ideal, still having this chronic abdominal pain and I am separated from my family and loved ones. They say what does not kill you, makes you stronger. And if nothing, this experience will make just that. In middle of all of this, my journey for the craft perfection just began. I feel overwhelmed by the amount of new things I am learning. Everyday I wake up eager to learn and excited to get out and perfect it, but as the day progresses I feel how little I know. By the end of the day I am totally exhausted, feeling like my head will explode but happy that I had a chance to perfect new things. To feel passion again. To fight another day. As days go by, I feel like I am actually not moving forward but actually slowing down. I feel like, that I have to lose what I have learned to found it again. At times, this part is the hardest part so far of my journey. This idea of not knowing if I can truly make it, if I can truly perfect it. That doubt that I have everyday in my mind. These doubts come and go and I try to stay as optimistic as I can. These doubts that point out towards the strong neural pathways and scream: “no longer true, lose it”. Will I ever find what works and what does not in this craft. Will I ever perfect it? Will I succeed. I am overwhelmed. But there is one thing, that keeps me going and that is love for this craft. Because everyday, we are born again and everyday we have an opportunity to learn and change. Everyday I can truly learn to lose old ways of doing things, to found and learn the new ways. It is only our old habits, ego, routines, assumptions that are nothing else than strengthen neural pathways of the past. And I feel, in order to succeed in anything, one must begin everyday with a beginners mind, one must first lose the old in order to found the new and become great at the craft one is perceiving. Day by day. A principle worth having in our journey of life. 

As humans beings we have dominated every other specie thanks to our ability to be creative and co-operative. Thanks to our ability to adapt. Now, more then ever, change is the only constant. Now more then ever people will be asking what is the future gonna be like. And unless you have grandma or grandpa with great memory of 1929-1933 period, it is most likely that you won’t know anyone who can really tell you. The last template for what is gonna happen is in those years. But regardless any template or historical similarity, one thing will not change and that is the thing why humans dominate this world. The way how you gonna get out of this crisis is by your own creativity and systematic work. In simple terms, but sitting, thinking, writing and starring into your own thoughts. Thats it. By sitting and staring at the piece of paper writing your ideas down (creative part) and by staring at it, synthetising it  (just a fancy word for narrowing it down), more starring, more sitting and more writing. By taking some time of so your brain can subconsciously defragment what you have consciously created. By coming back and staring at it again. By filtering those parts that do not make any sense. By stripping the meaningless away. And after your initial state is done. You will get out and act on what you have concluded. That creative and systematic engine, is your framework. Your edge how to adjust and come out of this crisis as a winner. Good luck.

When I was a teenager, I was desperate to go out into the world and earn my first big buck. Coming from the ex soviet block, at that time that wasn’t a lot to me. I come from a middle class family where both parents work hard to feed us and provide us with decent education. I have never had pocket money, nor a rich uncle or grandma. Don’t get me wrong, there was always food on a table and house almost always warm during winter cold days. As my 18th birthday were approaching, I knew that in order to earn, I must get out. Go abroad and earn. Experience adventure. There were only handful of skills I could do and no resume I can build my offering. Basically I could coach tennis and teach basic computer programming. Things I have both loved. 

In every crisis there is an opportunity. With COVID19, the crisis is now. And if you think it will go away anytime soon, I believe you are mistaken. The clock is ticking and there is not much time left until the whole world, will be in the biggest debt crisis humanity ever faced. I see it from the first hand, I am a trader and the measures governments and central banks around the world are doing are devestating not just for us but for generations to come. The herd mentality and strength of the state is brutally scary. The way people are assembled in lines, waiting like a piece of code ready to be deployed, obeying orders from the top is just astounding. I am not saying let’s not do that, it is just super scary how manipulated human race and masses became so quickly. There is a beautiful chinese prover: Three Men Make a Tiger. People will believe anything if enough people tell them it’s true. If one person tells you there’s a tiger roaming around your neighborhood, you can assume they’re lying. If two people tell you, you begin to wonder. If three say it’s true, you’re convinced there’s a tiger in your neighborhood and you panic. The world has paniced. But let’s no get away into doomsday scenario building and lets look at opportunities. We have rougly 6-12 months until it starts to get really bad. So unless we found cure (both medical and political), we have to adapt and prepare to what is going to come. I believe there are areas of opportunities:

A quick look into the pursuit of excellence can reveal truth we do not want to hear. That truth is hard, unpredictable, assymetrical work. The truth is that it is not about symmetrical input/output. I put x amount of hours , I will get y result. Sometimes our course has to change. Take all the people that have plans, goals in their head about their future before COVID19 came. Understanding that Systems are more importans then Goals is one of the crucial principles. Taking aside the brutal aspect of what will happen in the futuer with current virus development, I want to talk about deep learning. Moment, when magic happens. When those assymetrical hours of work start to compound. Many times, we start with something. An idea. But we are so fucked up by the reactionary world we have been living in that we want quick answers. In this environemnt, with this approach, nothing like deep work cannot happen. You are not payed by the minute, by the input. You are paid by staring into the idea that might lead to nowhere. By sitting, thinking and observing you might start develop the idea bit further. It is that moment when your brain datacenter start to connect contexts that were not obvious at first sight. The more time we spend with the idea, we play with it. We break it down, build it up, leave it and break it up again. That is the moment of magic. An unmeasurable assymetric moment when we finally throw all the garbage out and start seeing emerging opportunity. By taking that opportunity and testing hypothesis around it we can take the idea from the total garbage idea to something viable. By testing it we can build conviction around that idea. Bit by bit, we build that conviction so one day, we are ready. And it all started with one thing, an idea a shitload of time doing the deep work so we are ready, to go big.

When we are hurt, when something physically or psychologically hurts, when we are hit by the train of our emotions and self-talk our first reaction is to fight it back. To get angry about our condition. It is rooted deep down in our intuition. Fight or flight. Right? Over the years I have slowly been discovering that one must act quite counter-intuitively. Instead of fighting whatever we feel and don’t want to feel (physically or mentally), we simply let it in. We start the kind dialogue with whatever condition we dislike. We smile at the feeling and let all emotions settle in. We remind ourself and these emotions, that even if we would have to live with them for the rest of our life, we are fine and we love them for what they are. For being just the condition. We simply, surrender and radically accept them.  With love and compassion. Only then I have found out we can start the healing process. Over the last year I have been fighting for my health to get it back where it once was. I have been disappointed over and over every time something I hoped for did not work. New treatment, new approach, new supplement, new doctor. The more I hoped, the more I was disappointed. These disappointments brought over time more and more anxiety and fear that my health will never be like it used to be. I had to change that mindset. I had to surrender in order to start healing the mind first, before I could start healing my body. It is the first step. Because as the saying goes: what you resist, persist. So surrender next time you are hit and maybe this time you can change the course of your life.

The more time I spend time with things and people who matter, the more I realize how we all live in this illusion of what a good life is. In this race for life. Of course if anyone told my 20 years old self, that a goal of life is to live in peaceful truth and kindness, I would consider him a loser who never achieved anything. But what a tremendous peace brings living in truth, truth to yourself, your limits, your own speed without constantly measuring dicks with others and caring for approval of total strangers. Learning about richness of live, being curious, sharing with others, caring for others while accepting fully who we really are without constantly judging if we are too slow or to fast, if we have more or less and if we will achieve this or that. 

When other people are hurt, fear has captured their mind. That fear can produce anger, self-pitty, depression, judgmental behavior and other states of mind. Depending on the severity, people who are hurt take actions they usually later regret. Their judgment is clouded with these emotions and they stop being rational. In severe cases, they attack you. Usually verbal attack is the simplest form of an attack. Especially in written form when they feel safe and not threatend (think about all the internet trolls for example). They are hurt and the way they feel better about themself is to get the fear out in form of an attack so they can feel better for themself. Little they know, that anger produces even more anger and they are by this behaviour creating new version of themself that is even more sad, more insecure and looks even more stupid in front of their internal judge and others. Sometimes we can get absorbed into their world thinking that it is about us! This is so typical for our mind. That the attack, reaction, nasty behaviour is about us. About person who is being attacked, yet it is totally the opposite. Their behavior is completely outside of our control and therefore we should not spend a single minute in their circle of fear and most importantly, we should not take it at all personally. 

Sometimes we don’t tell the full truth or bend the truth. Sometimes we hide things for the sake of not being judged. We either do that to look good (to get approval of others) or to avoid fears of not being hurt by their reaction (judgement of others). Every time we do that, we are getting further from who we are not accepting us in its full spectrum. Maybe you know that moment, when you are reading book with a catchy title and you kind of feel that others will judge you for that. Somehow you care about what total strangers will think about you. Weird, I know. Some put covers on the book so others dont see what you are reading, some are hiding the book cover putting it quickly to their bags once they are finished so others dont see. The same goes for not telling the full story. Fear of being judged is just stronger then our own authenticity. This behavior is a great mirror of our authenticity and self-love and self-confidence. And this is totally normal. This is how we were wired to survive yet it is kind of not useful these days anymore. So what can we do about it? Every day accept yourself and praise yourself for the journey of your life. Either by writing or thoughts. For the decisions you have taken, books you read, people you hang out with, virtues you follow. If you radically accept who you are, with compassion, with all your limits you will slowly lose this anxiety of feeling the judgment of others, seek approval of others and start being proud of your own authenticity, your own weirdness, your own way. 

We spend lot of time in our lifes being disappointed by the actions of others. We are being repeatedly hurt by their "selfish" actions without realizing why are we sad in the first place and maybe that it is us who is a) selfish and b) poor communicator. We all create models of expectations around what others should or shouldn’t do, based on our own "selfish" beliefs, our own little world. Then we go on in our life’s and we are surprised that the expectations we have set for us and others are not being met and that leaves us sad and disappointed. One principle I have created for me is: "never expect for something to automatically happen". Also recently, I have added new principle that says: