My road
so far
Or: how did I end up living like this?
Born and raised in Nova Kakhovka, a small town in southern Ukraine (Kherson region).
My mother taught Russian language and literature. My father was an engineer, programmer and electrician. An ordinary family of modest means.
My father came up with a simple system: pocket money for pages of books read and for army-style push-ups. It got me hooked first on fiction, then on business writing. Robert Kiyosaki, Randy Gage and Bodo Schäfer shaped how I see the world. If my father had not handed me «Rich Dad Poor Dad» when he did, my life could have turned out completely differently.
How books and sport changed my life
The first books outside the school curriculum: Makarenko's «The Road to Life» and Raffaello Giovagnoli's «Spartacus». After the opening scene with Spartacus I fell in love with literature. My favourite writers: Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Erich Maria Remarque.
In 2006, walking home from a school disco and feeling awful, I decided never to drink or smoke again. I consider it one of the best decisions of my life.
In eighth and ninth grade I got into basketball. By the end of school I was captain of the city team. That was also when I first started training in the gym. Sport gradually became inseparable from my life.
If my parents had been rich, I would never have learned to earn.
I earned my first money in sixth grade: a classmate and I burned games onto discs and sold them for 2 hryvnia each. In ninth grade I brokered the deal between my class and the photographer for the graduation albums — my first 300 hryvnia earned with my head.
Every summer from sixth grade until I left school, I worked:
I went to every interview I was offered. And I was always puzzled — how can grown adults not find work?
My first money mentor.
In the photo — Oleh Molosh. The first entrepreneur who saw potential in me and invested his own time in teaching me. I was around 16 or 17.
His main lesson: listen only to people who have earned the moral right to advise you. I wanted to become a businessman — so advice from people who were not businessmen lost its weight.
Oleh helped systems thinking take root in my head. For the first time I understood that organising other people's work for a percentage beats doing all of it yourself.
Working for an insurance broker, I ran training sessions for my own team for the first time. I loved it. Teaching turned out to be my element — and it remains my main mission to this day.
The case where income raced far ahead of personal growth.
At the end of 2011, aged 20, I came across a fuel combustion catalyst — a product that let any car save 15–20% on petrol. I started selling it and building a partner network. I made $1,100 in the first month.
The logic of network business: you find people, train them, motivate them; they work for themselves and you take a percentage of the team's turnover. It was my first taste of passive income.
But the product worked only half the time and supply kept failing. The company shut down. By then my network was over 660 people. After that I swore off network business for good.
My first encounter with the online education business.
When the network company fell apart, my friend Serhii found a freelance request — a woman needed help with her YouTube channel. We sold her a consultation for $150. Through her we reached other clients in the field.
The work took a couple of hours a week and paid $1,000 between the two of us. We learned as we went — sometimes watching a YouTube video on a subject half an hour before selling it on a Skype call. That recklessness worked: we learned fast and earned while doing it.
Over the next few years we covered the full range of online services: websites, social media advertising, video production. Internet promotion stayed my main source of income for years.
An attempt to build a strong circle around me.
On 9 June 2014 I gathered the first group of people who wanted to grow, through social media. The sessions were free at first; later I began charging a token 30–40 hryvnia to cover the room.
I understood very quickly that this was my life's work. Teaching people is the thing I do better than anything else.
When you run a session three times a week for the same people, you cannot repeat yourself. You have to grow faster than the whole group. That became the strongest catalyst for my own development and killed any fear of public speaking. I have spent far too many hours on stage for it to survive.
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