A life update: why I took an 8-month break, how I dived into AI, which four life areas are in focus, and what's next.
Here’s what’s going on in my life.
Since November last year I’ve stopped writing text posts. My year-long challenge — writing every single day — came to an end. I bravely held out for all 365 days without missing one. It was a fascinating experience that showed me: once you make a decision, you can calmly do even very hard things.
Also in November we ran our Black Friday sale at the school, and after that I stopped launching new live online cohorts of my courses.
I wanted to take a break from the never-ending marathon of teaching. I started it back in 2019 with a small online club and spent most Monday evenings on Zoom with students. From 2022 we moved to themed short courses, but for me it stayed essentially the same: 2–3 hours of teaching every Monday night.
I’m a teacher and a speaker to the bone and I love this work — but even from your calling you sometimes need to step back and recharge.
How targeted ads changed the model
Last year we ran targeted ads on my products for the first time, and it turned out people happily buy our courses in recorded form. Encouraged by that, I decided to pause the live Zoom cohorts and see how long the ads would stay profitable before I needed to go back to actively recruiting students.
Eight months in, that moment still hasn’t come. When Meta ads are set up right, they just deliver you the right number of clients on their own.
How I dived into AI
My creative sabbatical was suddenly interrupted in February this year. A friend from church showed me how he uses AI to build websites, apps and solve all sorts of business tasks.
A whole new world opened up, and I dove in headfirst. It turned out the best teacher of AI is AI itself. You just ask it questions, send it screenshots, and it shows and explains everything. I work with Claude.
I won’t bore you with the technical details of my journey into AI — I’ll just say that right now I consider it the biggest opportunity of the last few decades for every one of us.
You spend the first 15–20 hours figuring out how it works, and you end up with a fantastic tool that can help with any task doable on a computer. Since February I’ve been using AI almost every day, for both business and everyday life.
I’ll show you the projects I’m actively working on with AI a bit later.
The four life areas I’m living in right now
Zooming out to the strategic frame, four areas are the focus of my life right now:
- Spiritual development
- Relationships
- Work and finance
- Health
The first three, from my own sense of it, are doing quite well. Health, though, has some nuances.
About health
I still carry extra weight I can’t seem to shed. My behaviour around food isn’t always wise. I think people call this disordered eating.
My vision has also started to decline lately. I went to a clinic for a check-up — both my eyes see at about 50% of the norm.
I have atrial fibrillation, which doesn’t bother me much (I take a beta-blocker), but it reminds me of itself during physical exertion.
There are other things I’d like to improve too. As I get older I’ve started reading the phrase quite differently: “A healthy person can have many wishes; a sick one has only one main wish.”
I don’t yet consider myself a sick person, but I’ve started feeling on my own body what happens when you don’t give your health enough attention. I want to fix this soon and get serious about this area — understand it as well as I’ve understood the first three.
What’s next in the work
On the work side I’m preparing a series of strategic changes. My attention is on offline events, and I want us to start organising live events in Kyiv before long.
I’m also looking for new authors to bring under the wing of our school and help them build an audience and shape their educational products. Over 1000 new students come to us each year. Our videos are watched by 15+ million people every month. Right now the system runs 90% without me.
I want to hand this whole technology over to other specialists, so together we bring value to many more people and earn well doing it.
Those are the plans for now.
I’m not promising to write regularly, but after a long rest and pause my hands are itching to write again — and that’s a good sign. I’ll keep you posted.