Since the school here combines yoga, magic, and psychology, naturally moving toward a harmonious synthesis (just like The Glass Bead Game in Castalia), I’d also like to share an interesting article. There are only 100 pieces of advice, but they really resonated with me, and I reread them from time to time.
Alexander Zhurba, managing director and co-founder of Genezis Capital, formulated 100 facts about life and business that he had learned by the age of 27. We recommend reading it—it’s worth it.
1. Life and business consist of a great many boring, tedious, and banal things. Once you have done them, you unexpectedly get something worth talking about in an interview.
2. People are different, but basically they all want the same thing. Old Maslow was right.
3. Creating real value is much harder than creating the appearance of it. For the latter, all you need is a good PR person and plenty of imagination. The former is usually more complicated—there are numbers involved.
4. People are lazy. They do not want to think, check, or prepare. Leaving things unfinished, losing a lot because of it, and then doing things properly is more familiar than doing them properly from the start.
5. Ninety-nine percent of people are capable of nothing. Of the remaining one percent, 99% are doing something that is not interesting to you. With the rest, if many random factors happen to align, you can accomplish something great.
6. The best way to take control of your life is to keep asking yourself, “Why do I need this?” At first it is very painful and frightening, but then order and clarity arrive.
7. Happiness is not joy. Happiness is the absence of unhappiness.
8. Nobody cares. No one is interested in what you look like, what you do, or your life in general. The best way to make sure of this is to go outside wearing socks and sandals. The world will continue living as before, and you will be forgotten instantly.
9. Once you accept and come to terms with death, all other problems seem completely insignificant. Knowing and understanding society’s darkest sides makes it much easier to appreciate what you have. Old Jobs was right.
10. It is possible to live while controlling your emotions and trying to make decisions rationally. There is nothing inhuman about that.
11. All specialists are highly educated experts on “Ohm’s law for a section of a circuit at half past eight in the evening in the Ivanovs’ house.” In the Petrovs’ house, and in the morning, everything is different. No one sees the entire circuit at all.
12. The risks of entrepreneurship are overrated. The greatest risk is realizing at 60 that you will have to spend the rest of your life living on a pension. Which does not exist.
13. Everything changes. Everything always changes. The greatest foolishness is trying to stop change instead of adapting to it. The greatest value in any person is the ability to change.
14. The best way to learn is to be a professional’s assistant. Slightly worse is trying on your own without the supervision of someone knowledgeable. Theory is useful only as a hypothesis that needs to be tested in practice.
15. Knowing a few principles eliminates the need to know many facts.
16. There is no truth. Everything depends on whether you are buying or selling.
17. Power is not given; it is taken.
18. Experience is more important than connections. Connections are more important than money.
19. All of people’s problems and opportunities exist only in their minds.
20. People change only when external conditions demand it. The more they need to change, the stronger and more insurmountable the conditions must be. The best way to change is to put yourself in circumstances where not changing is impossible.
21. The best way to spend your life is to set yourself a great, almost unattainable goal and pursue it all your life. Everything else will follow on its own.
22. Sex, profanity, shorts, or not having a degree do not prevent anyone from accomplishing something great.
23. In life, there is a difficult path and a wrong path.
24. Long-term success is never quick. It is either one or the other, but not both. Business is a marathon.
25. Instincts cannot be ignored; you need to draw strength from them.
26. It is better to do something and regret it than not to do it and regret it.
27. You need as much money as it takes not to think about money.
28. A phone, clothes, and a car say nothing about a person’s wealth—only a bank statement and a balance sheet can really show it. Having zero in the bank is better than being in debt.
29. It is impossible to predict how a person will behave in an extreme situation. The distance from the apparent prosperity of everyday life to extremity is very small. The only thing that concerns people in extreme situations is their own survival and well-being.
30. A negative image is better than obscurity.
31. The only difference between meaningless stubbornness and prophetic persistence is whether the latter produces results. But people usually simply give up without even starting.
32. Behind every fantastic success of 25-year-olds like Zuckerberg stand five or six 50-year-old men in suits and glasses.
33. Words mean almost nothing. Only actions matter.
34. The best way to save money when buying goods is not to buy the goods at all. People’s real need for things and services is greatly overestimated.
35. Experience is measured not in years but in events.
36. The best way to build many good connections is to be useful.
37. If you need a vacation from your work, then it is not the work you truly want to do.
38. If you are the smartest person in the room, you are not in the room where you should be.
39. In the long term, being honest pays off. You should safeguard your honor from a young age.
40. As the complexity of tasks increases, the amount of rest should increase as well. The number of tasks during the day should tend toward one.
41. Frigid women do not exist—there are only men who do not try hard enough. Most women are chronically undersexed and burdened with complexes.
42. Loneliness is terrible only for those who have not come to know themselves.
43. People do not repay debts. You must not lend more than you are prepared to give that person as a gift.
44. People who constantly develop and grow do not experience a midlife crisis. They have only a constant daily life crisis.
45. If you want to hit a puppy with a stick, remember that it may: a) remember it; b) grow into a big, strong dog with sharp teeth and good reflexes.
46. If you trade freedom and prospects for sausage, one day you will have neither freedom, nor prospects, nor sausage.
47. There is no point in forgiving anyone. It is much easier not to take offense at all. No one is obliged to live up to anyone else’s expectations.
48. Success is not an alternative to failure. Success is what comes after a series of failures.
49. Miracles happen, but only to other people. You have to prepare your own miracles carefully and in advance.
50. My rights end where another person’s rights begin. It is better to have one equal partner than many slaves or masters.
51. At any moment, you can look back ten years and say, “There were so many opportunities then, unlike now.” Every country has millionaires and billionaires. Opportunities exist always and everywhere.
52. If God exists, then all our attempts to understand and describe him are equivalent to fish trying to understand who changes the water in the aquarium, how, and why. All religions are psychotherapeutic practices that exist to enrich their leaders and provide their adherents with daily peace of mind.
53. Control over anything is an illusion in most cases. Before learning to manage others, you must learn to manage yourself.
54. There is no point in conforming to other people’s expectations in order to receive their help in a difficult situation in life: most people—including relatives, as a rule—have neither the resources, experience, nor desire to help you. The best way to make sure of this is to try raising money for a supposedly life-saving operation. You can rely only on yourself.
55. Entrepreneurs are not born; they are made.
56. The best gift parents can give their children is to provide for their own old age independently and not prevent their children from providing for theirs.
57. There is more money than there are people capable of managing it effectively.
58. If a person fails to answer work-time calls three times within a week for any reason, or takes more than 24 hours to reply to simple emails, you should not do business with them.
59. If a project at an early stage hires a consultant in order to attract investment, the project will not attract investment.
60. To obtain something great, you must know how to share.
61. People think that a good formal education is the key to success. In reality, the key is understanding facts like this one.
62. The usefulness of a service or product depends on the amount of money spent only up to a certain point.
63. You cannot teach someone; they can only learn. You cannot motivate someone; they can only motivate themselves.
64. Princes usually marry princesses. You cannot sell yourself to someone much better than you; you can only make them want to buy you.
65. Any habit takes 90 days to develop. Any skill can be properly mastered in 10,000 hours.
66. The world is fair. Every effect has its cause. Everyone gets exactly what they have created the conditions to obtain.
67. The difference between people who are serious about business and those who are not is that when things go to hell, the latter become human-rights advocates, journalists, or politicians. The former continue doing what they set out to do.
68. Achieving enlightenment and inner peace as a monk in the Himalayas is easy. Doing the same while building a business in a metropolis is quite a challenge.
69. Making something complicated and expensive is easy. Making it simple and sensible is much harder.
70. There will be no pensions. Guarantees do not exist.
71. Change takes time. Major change takes a lot of time.
72. The amount of knowledge needed to achieve a particular goal is quite specific and limited. Knowledge of cooking is extremely unlikely to help someone who wants to fly to Mars, while experience in wine tasting will not help create a cure for cancer. Much of what people consider an essential body of knowledge for a modern person is either showing off or an attempt to entertain themselves, because doing real things is difficult and unpleasant.
73. The best way to make a woman pay attention to you is to pay attention to her.
74. Those who are most incapable of doing things well shout the loudest that everything is bad. They cannot even imagine how difficult it is to do that very thing well.
75. A society’s level of development is determined by the level at which a bribe can be given in that country. In backward countries, this can be done everywhere. In advanced countries, only at the highest level of government. There, it is called lobbying.
76. If investors do not provide money or customers do not buy, there can be only three reasons:
1. You are terrible at selling;
2. You are selling crap;
3. You are selling to the wrong people.
77. Perfect things and systems do not exist. The grass is always greener on the other side. Any thing, event, company, or person looks wonderful until you start examining the details.
78. The ability to break rules comes immediately after the willingness to accept all the consequences of breaking them.
79. A prepared situation is characterized by the desired result being achieved effortlessly. The effort is applied only during preparation; the result itself happens “by itself.”
80. Do not search where what you want to find does not exist.
81. People want to believe that someone knows exactly how to live, achieve goals, and avoid mistakes. No such people exist. There are only those who pretend to be like that and know how to work creatively with facts. No one makes more mistakes or doubts more than people who go beyond the limits of their knowledge to achieve their goals.
82. Behind every great achievement lies self-denial.
83. The world is ruled by introverts who know how to pretend to be extroverts.
84. Ninety-nine percent of what we use was created by other people.
85. Demands to establish democracy, capitalism, or any other system in a country are usually a desire for a quiet and comfortable life, not for that particular system itself. People have two reasons for any action: the attractive one and the real one.
86. Ideally, save not for a rainy day but for a rainy year or decade.
87. It makes sense to enter into any relationship if you are better off with it than without it.
88. Authorities exist for those who are incapable of thinking for themselves.
89. You should not drift with the current, nor swim against it. You should swim where you need to go.
90. It makes sense to care about the interests of three groups of people: yourself, your immediate circle, and humanity as a whole. All intermediate groups are simply meaningless. This is called enlightened self-interest.
91. You need to exercise, eat properly, and generally keep your body in shape. You will not get another one. It is better to find time for this than for treatment.
92. Properly configured infrastructure saves a great deal of money and time. Everything that can be outsourced, automated, or eliminated should be outsourced, automated, or eliminated.
93. The best way to believe in yourself is to achieve success through hard work after a fall. You never forget something like that. And it works almost every time.
94. Saying that the goal of business is money is like saying that the goal of human life is breathing. It is not a goal; it is a characteristic necessary for survival.
95. Modern people are too soft on important issues and too harsh on unimportant ones.
96. Humanity does not change. Classic books on philosophy, psychology, and sociology are still relevant.
97. Choosing a wife should be taken seriously. It is better to overdo it than underdo it. Frugality is the best protection against unsuitable women.
98. Truly unique situations are almost nonexistent. Every day, millions of people have the same experiences as millions of people before them. If a situation seems unique, it simply means you have not looked hard enough for analogies.
99. Being poor is impractical, unsafe, and shameful.
100. If you consume fewer calories than you burn for a sufficiently long time, you inevitably lose weight. And do not talk about metabolism, hormones, or heavy bones—in concentration camps, there were no fat people.
Alexander Zhurba, managing director and co-founder of Genezis Capital, formulated 100 facts about life and business that he had learned by the age of 27. We recommend reading it—it’s worth it.
1. Life and business consist of a great many boring, tedious, and banal things. Once you have done them, you unexpectedly get something worth talking about in an interview.
2. People are different, but basically they all want the same thing. Old Maslow was right.
3. Creating real value is much harder than creating the appearance of it. For the latter, all you need is a good PR person and plenty of imagination. The former is usually more complicated—there are numbers involved.
4. People are lazy. They do not want to think, check, or prepare. Leaving things unfinished, losing a lot because of it, and then doing things properly is more familiar than doing them properly from the start.
5. Ninety-nine percent of people are capable of nothing. Of the remaining one percent, 99% are doing something that is not interesting to you. With the rest, if many random factors happen to align, you can accomplish something great.
6. The best way to take control of your life is to keep asking yourself, “Why do I need this?” At first it is very painful and frightening, but then order and clarity arrive.
7. Happiness is not joy. Happiness is the absence of unhappiness.
8. Nobody cares. No one is interested in what you look like, what you do, or your life in general. The best way to make sure of this is to go outside wearing socks and sandals. The world will continue living as before, and you will be forgotten instantly.
9. Once you accept and come to terms with death, all other problems seem completely insignificant. Knowing and understanding society’s darkest sides makes it much easier to appreciate what you have. Old Jobs was right.
10. It is possible to live while controlling your emotions and trying to make decisions rationally. There is nothing inhuman about that.
11. All specialists are highly educated experts on “Ohm’s law for a section of a circuit at half past eight in the evening in the Ivanovs’ house.” In the Petrovs’ house, and in the morning, everything is different. No one sees the entire circuit at all.
12. The risks of entrepreneurship are overrated. The greatest risk is realizing at 60 that you will have to spend the rest of your life living on a pension. Which does not exist.
13. Everything changes. Everything always changes. The greatest foolishness is trying to stop change instead of adapting to it. The greatest value in any person is the ability to change.
14. The best way to learn is to be a professional’s assistant. Slightly worse is trying on your own without the supervision of someone knowledgeable. Theory is useful only as a hypothesis that needs to be tested in practice.
15. Knowing a few principles eliminates the need to know many facts.
16. There is no truth. Everything depends on whether you are buying or selling.
17. Power is not given; it is taken.
18. Experience is more important than connections. Connections are more important than money.
19. All of people’s problems and opportunities exist only in their minds.
20. People change only when external conditions demand it. The more they need to change, the stronger and more insurmountable the conditions must be. The best way to change is to put yourself in circumstances where not changing is impossible.
21. The best way to spend your life is to set yourself a great, almost unattainable goal and pursue it all your life. Everything else will follow on its own.
22. Sex, profanity, shorts, or not having a degree do not prevent anyone from accomplishing something great.
23. In life, there is a difficult path and a wrong path.
24. Long-term success is never quick. It is either one or the other, but not both. Business is a marathon.
25. Instincts cannot be ignored; you need to draw strength from them.
26. It is better to do something and regret it than not to do it and regret it.
27. You need as much money as it takes not to think about money.
28. A phone, clothes, and a car say nothing about a person’s wealth—only a bank statement and a balance sheet can really show it. Having zero in the bank is better than being in debt.
29. It is impossible to predict how a person will behave in an extreme situation. The distance from the apparent prosperity of everyday life to extremity is very small. The only thing that concerns people in extreme situations is their own survival and well-being.
30. A negative image is better than obscurity.
31. The only difference between meaningless stubbornness and prophetic persistence is whether the latter produces results. But people usually simply give up without even starting.
32. Behind every fantastic success of 25-year-olds like Zuckerberg stand five or six 50-year-old men in suits and glasses.
33. Words mean almost nothing. Only actions matter.
34. The best way to save money when buying goods is not to buy the goods at all. People’s real need for things and services is greatly overestimated.
35. Experience is measured not in years but in events.
36. The best way to build many good connections is to be useful.
37. If you need a vacation from your work, then it is not the work you truly want to do.
38. If you are the smartest person in the room, you are not in the room where you should be.
39. In the long term, being honest pays off. You should safeguard your honor from a young age.
40. As the complexity of tasks increases, the amount of rest should increase as well. The number of tasks during the day should tend toward one.
41. Frigid women do not exist—there are only men who do not try hard enough. Most women are chronically undersexed and burdened with complexes.
42. Loneliness is terrible only for those who have not come to know themselves.
43. People do not repay debts. You must not lend more than you are prepared to give that person as a gift.
44. People who constantly develop and grow do not experience a midlife crisis. They have only a constant daily life crisis.
45. If you want to hit a puppy with a stick, remember that it may: a) remember it; b) grow into a big, strong dog with sharp teeth and good reflexes.
46. If you trade freedom and prospects for sausage, one day you will have neither freedom, nor prospects, nor sausage.
47. There is no point in forgiving anyone. It is much easier not to take offense at all. No one is obliged to live up to anyone else’s expectations.
48. Success is not an alternative to failure. Success is what comes after a series of failures.
49. Miracles happen, but only to other people. You have to prepare your own miracles carefully and in advance.
50. My rights end where another person’s rights begin. It is better to have one equal partner than many slaves or masters.
51. At any moment, you can look back ten years and say, “There were so many opportunities then, unlike now.” Every country has millionaires and billionaires. Opportunities exist always and everywhere.
52. If God exists, then all our attempts to understand and describe him are equivalent to fish trying to understand who changes the water in the aquarium, how, and why. All religions are psychotherapeutic practices that exist to enrich their leaders and provide their adherents with daily peace of mind.
53. Control over anything is an illusion in most cases. Before learning to manage others, you must learn to manage yourself.
54. There is no point in conforming to other people’s expectations in order to receive their help in a difficult situation in life: most people—including relatives, as a rule—have neither the resources, experience, nor desire to help you. The best way to make sure of this is to try raising money for a supposedly life-saving operation. You can rely only on yourself.
55. Entrepreneurs are not born; they are made.
56. The best gift parents can give their children is to provide for their own old age independently and not prevent their children from providing for theirs.
57. There is more money than there are people capable of managing it effectively.
58. If a person fails to answer work-time calls three times within a week for any reason, or takes more than 24 hours to reply to simple emails, you should not do business with them.
59. If a project at an early stage hires a consultant in order to attract investment, the project will not attract investment.
60. To obtain something great, you must know how to share.
61. People think that a good formal education is the key to success. In reality, the key is understanding facts like this one.
62. The usefulness of a service or product depends on the amount of money spent only up to a certain point.
63. You cannot teach someone; they can only learn. You cannot motivate someone; they can only motivate themselves.
64. Princes usually marry princesses. You cannot sell yourself to someone much better than you; you can only make them want to buy you.
65. Any habit takes 90 days to develop. Any skill can be properly mastered in 10,000 hours.
66. The world is fair. Every effect has its cause. Everyone gets exactly what they have created the conditions to obtain.
67. The difference between people who are serious about business and those who are not is that when things go to hell, the latter become human-rights advocates, journalists, or politicians. The former continue doing what they set out to do.
68. Achieving enlightenment and inner peace as a monk in the Himalayas is easy. Doing the same while building a business in a metropolis is quite a challenge.
69. Making something complicated and expensive is easy. Making it simple and sensible is much harder.
70. There will be no pensions. Guarantees do not exist.
71. Change takes time. Major change takes a lot of time.
72. The amount of knowledge needed to achieve a particular goal is quite specific and limited. Knowledge of cooking is extremely unlikely to help someone who wants to fly to Mars, while experience in wine tasting will not help create a cure for cancer. Much of what people consider an essential body of knowledge for a modern person is either showing off or an attempt to entertain themselves, because doing real things is difficult and unpleasant.
73. The best way to make a woman pay attention to you is to pay attention to her.
74. Those who are most incapable of doing things well shout the loudest that everything is bad. They cannot even imagine how difficult it is to do that very thing well.
75. A society’s level of development is determined by the level at which a bribe can be given in that country. In backward countries, this can be done everywhere. In advanced countries, only at the highest level of government. There, it is called lobbying.
76. If investors do not provide money or customers do not buy, there can be only three reasons:
1. You are terrible at selling;
2. You are selling crap;
3. You are selling to the wrong people.
77. Perfect things and systems do not exist. The grass is always greener on the other side. Any thing, event, company, or person looks wonderful until you start examining the details.
78. The ability to break rules comes immediately after the willingness to accept all the consequences of breaking them.
79. A prepared situation is characterized by the desired result being achieved effortlessly. The effort is applied only during preparation; the result itself happens “by itself.”
80. Do not search where what you want to find does not exist.
81. People want to believe that someone knows exactly how to live, achieve goals, and avoid mistakes. No such people exist. There are only those who pretend to be like that and know how to work creatively with facts. No one makes more mistakes or doubts more than people who go beyond the limits of their knowledge to achieve their goals.
82. Behind every great achievement lies self-denial.
83. The world is ruled by introverts who know how to pretend to be extroverts.
84. Ninety-nine percent of what we use was created by other people.
85. Demands to establish democracy, capitalism, or any other system in a country are usually a desire for a quiet and comfortable life, not for that particular system itself. People have two reasons for any action: the attractive one and the real one.
86. Ideally, save not for a rainy day but for a rainy year or decade.
87. It makes sense to enter into any relationship if you are better off with it than without it.
88. Authorities exist for those who are incapable of thinking for themselves.
89. You should not drift with the current, nor swim against it. You should swim where you need to go.
90. It makes sense to care about the interests of three groups of people: yourself, your immediate circle, and humanity as a whole. All intermediate groups are simply meaningless. This is called enlightened self-interest.
91. You need to exercise, eat properly, and generally keep your body in shape. You will not get another one. It is better to find time for this than for treatment.
92. Properly configured infrastructure saves a great deal of money and time. Everything that can be outsourced, automated, or eliminated should be outsourced, automated, or eliminated.
93. The best way to believe in yourself is to achieve success through hard work after a fall. You never forget something like that. And it works almost every time.
94. Saying that the goal of business is money is like saying that the goal of human life is breathing. It is not a goal; it is a characteristic necessary for survival.
95. Modern people are too soft on important issues and too harsh on unimportant ones.
96. Humanity does not change. Classic books on philosophy, psychology, and sociology are still relevant.
97. Choosing a wife should be taken seriously. It is better to overdo it than underdo it. Frugality is the best protection against unsuitable women.
98. Truly unique situations are almost nonexistent. Every day, millions of people have the same experiences as millions of people before them. If a situation seems unique, it simply means you have not looked hard enough for analogies.
99. Being poor is impractical, unsafe, and shameful.
100. If you consume fewer calories than you burn for a sufficiently long time, you inevitably lose weight. And do not talk about metabolism, hormones, or heavy bones—in concentration camps, there were no fat people.