Mom and Dad

The storm was so bad the sand was whipping against our skin. The waves were about two meters high — or maybe I was just small and everything looked huge. My father stripped down to his trunks and walked into the water.

I was left alone on the shore. About twenty minutes went by — I couldn't find him in the waves anymore. Then half an hour. Then an hour. I sat on the sand and pictured myself going home without him. I was sure he'd drowned. Two hours. I didn't cry — I just waited, afraid to look away from the water, like that could somehow change anything.

Then he came out. Calm, brushing himself off, like he'd just been for an ordinary walk.

My father was head of parachute training for his regiment. Master of Sports of the USSR. He had 2,500 jumps under his belt, some of them the kind very few people were willing to try.

One day I saw him jump with my own eyes. First he came to our class to talk about the army, about jumps, about parachutes. I sat there bursting with pride: that's my dad. Then he invited the whole class to a demonstration jump at the airfield in Berdiansk, a town on the Sea of Azov. Right before the jump, he told us: "Watch closely — I'm jumping last. I'll show you something interesting."

We watched him come down on his main parachute — and then he cut away from it. Just released it in midair and dropped into free fall. The seconds stretched out. Then the reserve opened. Even now, telling you this, I get goosebumps.

He packed that reserve parachute himself, with his own hands. Think about that for a second: if it hadn't opened, that would've been it. That's fearlessness. That's faith in yourself.

The second thing I remember about my father is how he talked to people. We'd walk into some ordinary little shop, and within a minute he'd already struck up a conversation with the woman behind the counter, cracking jokes, and she'd be laughing. He was a real charmer — not in a sleazy way. People just instantly relaxed around him. I watched this and couldn't understand how anyone did that. Because back then, I was the exact opposite of my father when it came to people.

At school I sat in the back row and hid behind my classmates' heads so the teacher wouldn't notice me and call me up to the board. If she did call on me anyway, I was scared to death. The teachers could see it and felt sorry for me, so they tried not to call on me much. I didn't talk to girls. I wasn't really close with the boys either. Quiet, shy — that's how people described me, and it was true.

It's genetics, I figured later. My father's fearlessness, the ease he had with people — it must've just passed down to me, the way facial features do. A convenient explanation. Maybe you explain other people's success the same way: "It's in his blood. I'm just not a salesperson, wrong genes." Except that explanation is wrong, and it'll take me a long time to understand why.

Mom is a completely different story, and it comes in two acts.

Act one — Berdiansk. My parents were already divorced by then, and my brother and I depended on her for everything. There was never enough money. No money for jeans. No money for a bike. Mom did whatever it took just to raise us — and what I saw back then wasn't a doctor, just a mom who couldn't afford to buy her son the things he wanted.

Act two — we moved to the outskirts of Leningrad (St. Petersburg today), again for our sake. Mom became head of the therapy ward at a sanatorium run by the Leningrad Metro, a doctor with the highest professional rating, and a captain in the army medical corps. And there I saw a completely different mom. People loved and respected her — colleagues and patients alike. They brought her chocolates. She put together the staff newsletter that hung on the wall. She gave speeches on stage. The woman who'd counted every kopek in Berdiansk became one of the best doctors in the whole Leningrad region.

Then there was something else — something I didn't learn right away, and didn't fully appreciate for even longer after that. Mom's only real asset was her apartment. First she traded it for a place in Leningrad, then swapped that for two: a one-bedroom apartment and a room in a communal apartment. The room went to me. The one-bedroom went to my brother. She kept nothing for herself.

My father had the kind of fearlessness that earns you medals and the Master of Sports title. My mother had the kind that earns you nothing — just giving away everything you have and ending up with no place of your own.

I never chose to jump out of planes, and I never chose to practice medicine. But years later, I chose to jump into the unknown in business, when nobody around me believed in it. I chose to lead people and take responsibility for them. I chose to take care of my team the way my mother took care of her kids.

It wasn't the genes working on their own. My parents put a rough diamond inside me: my father's fearlessness and my mother's ability to give away everything she had. It was sitting inside me long before I ever noticed it. But a rough diamond doesn't sparkle — it just looks like a dull, unremarkable little stone. The shine only comes after the cut. Who does that cutting, and how — that's what this whole book is about.

And the shy kid in the back row who was afraid to go up to the board later walked out on stage in front of hundreds of people, of his own free will. But that's a whole other story, and it starts with one sentence someone said to me in seventh grade.

Black Box

Seventh grade. I'm on classroom duty, sweeping the floor between the desks. Dust rising in clouds.

The door opens, and our homeroom teacher walks in, Svetlana Alexandrovna.

"What's with all that dust? Don't you know how to sweep?"

And something happened to me right then. Me — the same kid from the back row who hid behind other people's heads so he wouldn't get called to the board — I looked up and shot back at her, sharp and defiant. I don't remember what exactly I said. I just remember it wasn't my voice. I didn't know I had that in me.

She went quiet. Then she said:

"Well, Polukhin, you're a black box."

I stood there with the broom in the middle of the classroom. I would've forgotten the remark about the dust within the hour. But those two words went straight through me. What box? Why black? What had she seen in me?

It stung. Worse — I felt insulted. And I carried that line with me. Not for a day, not for a year. I carried it until I was thirty.

The worst part was that she'd nailed it. I didn't even understand myself.

On the outside I was quiet. Modest, shy, never talked to girls. But something inside me would occasionally explode, and I never knew when it would go off next.

First grade. Some kid latched onto me — the harbor director's son, big, a head taller than me. I was small and skinny, the perfect target. He kept picking on me, kept picking on me, and then something in me boiled over. I punched him in the face. I didn't know I had that in me either. We were enemies clear through tenth grade, but he never bothered me again.

Eighth grade. My father bought me a racing bike. For our family, where there was never enough money, that was a big deal. On the very first day, some grown guy on a moped decided to have some fun — he ran me into the curb, and I went flying along with the bike. I jumped up, ran at him, and hit him. He hit back — head-butted me right in the forehead. I chipped a tooth, and it's stayed chipped ever since.

Naval college, first or second year. Some bully kept needling me in front of everyone. And quiet little me stood up to him in front of everyone, too. Afterward, he called me out behind the cafeteria where nobody could see, and settled the score there.

Where it came from, I still don't know. My father never raised a hand to my mother, not that I remember. Maybe I picked it up somewhere. Or maybe it just built up and built up, and broke through whenever I couldn't take it anymore.

So there's your black box. Quiet on the outside, and nobody knows what's inside. Not even me.

At the college, I became the odd one out. Didn't smoke, didn't drink, didn't chase girls. People laughed at me, sometimes worse. But I found a place where nobody bothered me — the photo lab. You shut the door, the red light's on, and you're alone. I liked it there.

Nothing changed after college either. Five years adjusting radio equipment at LOMO, the Leningrad optics factory. Then three years running my own little operation — soldering caller-ID phones and selling them at the market. I loved the soldering part: you sit at home, alone, nobody bothers you. The market, though, was torture. Selling was terrifying. Sometimes gangsters would show up, take the phones, and not pay. Almost everything I made went straight back into parts. One day it hit me: I didn't own the business — the business owned me.

And all that time, I depended heavily on what other people thought. Deep down, I believed something was wrong with me. So I listened to everyone else and did what they told me. It was easy to talk me into things, easy to talk me out of them. It was like I didn't have a voice of my own — it was sitting in the box along with everything else.

I lived with a closed box inside me, certain something dark was in there. If it's black, it must be bad. Meaning: hide it.

Years went by before I wrote an article about it. I called it "A Black Box in a White Crow, or The Path to Myself." But back then, in seventh grade and for years after, I had no idea the box could even be opened.

When I got into network marketing, I saw black boxes everywhere. Here's a guy — things are working for him. He's earning, people are coming to him, people are listening to him. And here's another guy, same company, same product — and he's got nothing. From the outside, you only see one thing: ads, calls, presentations. Why it works for one and not the other is hidden inside, and nobody ever looks there.

Back then I thought the answer was on the outside. Find the right script, the right company, the right words. I believed that for a long time.

Maybe you've got your own box, too. A line someone once threw at you — a teacher, a parent, a friend — and you've carried it for years: "you're not cut out for this," "you'll never pull it off," "you don't know how to talk to people." You've long forgotten who said it. But it's still making decisions for you: call that person or don't, step up to people or sit this one out.

With that box tucked inside me — modest, closed-off, never having laid eyes on an actual dollar bill — that's how I walked into network marketing. It started with a phone call. My mom was on the line.

Confession

Let me just come right out and admit what I was like when I got into network marketing. So you don't think I had anything going for me from the start.

There was nothing. I was thirty years old. Modest, closed-off. Couldn't sell, couldn't speak in public, was scared to meet new people. If you'd looked at me from the outside back then, you'd have said: this guy will never make it as a network marketer. And you'd have been right — by every visible measure.

It all started with a call from my mom. She was a doctor, and she'd gotten an invitation to a presentation for some American company. She couldn't go herself, so she told me:

"You're our entrepreneur, go listen to it."

So I went. Dental Clinic No. 1 on Nevsky Prospekt, St. Petersburg's main street, in the head doctor's office. A handful of people, and Viktor running the presentation. What he actually said, I don't remember anymore. But I still remember the circles. One circle on top — that's you. Three underneath — those are the people you'll tell about the product.

I tightened up inside. Tell people? Me? I had zero experience talking to people, let alone selling to them. I was scared of it.

Then he showed me the second row. Under each of the three, three more — nine people. And I'm not the one telling them. The first three will.

And that's when something clicked. No selling required. Just tell people. And not everyone — just three. A neat little trick to get past my own fear. Fine, I told myself, I'll figure it out somehow. I can manage telling three people, at least.

I had no idea how I was going to actually do it. I just took the leap.

People buy the product for themselves, and I get a percentage. I got the gist of it in an hour and made my decision right there in the office. The product, the comp plan — all of that I could sort out later. The main thing was, I'd grasped the idea.

Only one problem remained: finding $100 to start. Dollars, specifically. And in 1993, I'd never laid eyes on one in my life. Honestly, I don't even remember where I finally got them. Dollars were sold by black-market money changers back then, and finding them turned into a whole quest of its own. But I found them.

On December 10, 1993, I signed my first contract with a network marketing company. It was Herbalife.

Nine days later was my birthday. A table full of food, close family all around, and me with a button pinned to my chest: "Want to lose weight? Ask me how!"

Right there at the table, I gave my very first presentation.

They laughed me out of the room.

I felt ashamed, hurt. Not one person backed me up. Not a single one at that table.

After that, it was straight by the book. I called everyone I knew. There weren't many of them, and every single one said no. And that's when I ran into the question every other newcomer would later ask me: where do you even find people?

At training, they told me: there are tons of people all around you, just go talk to strangers on the street. To me, that sounded like "go jump out of a plane." No — worse than that. At least my father knew how to jump.

April 17, 1994. I'm walking back from a big training by Leon Galperin — he was speaking to Herbalife distributors, not far from St. Isaac's Cathedral. Leon really fired me up. I walked out of there with one intent: today, I'm going to walk up to a total stranger on the street.

On the metro, I'm scanning the women. Trying to figure out which heavier woman to offer weight loss to. And I start shaking. My whole body's rattling, my knees are giving out. I tell myself: no, not today, not now. It hurts too much.

I come up to the trolleybus stop. Catch my breath, calm down. I see three girls. Alright, I think, here goes. I start walking toward them — and I'm shaking all over again. It's me against three of them. I couldn't even approach one girl, and now I'm supposed to pitch a business to three at once. That was beyond any reality I could even picture for myself. Naturally, I told myself: next time. I backed off, got on the trolleybus, and headed home.

Trolleybus No. 17.

One stop later, I'd calmed down a little and remembered my intent. The trolleybus is packed solid. I'm holding onto the rail, and right in front of me, face to face, stands a woman. There's nowhere to go: people all around, no way to escape. The next stop is mine. The trolleybus rolls down Gorokhovaya Street, over the Fontanka River, to the stop right across from my building. And I realize: if I don't do this now, I never will.

So I spoke up.

I wanted the ground to swallow me whole. Right through this trolleybus, through the bridge, through the river — drown, die, anything but standing there. My voice stumbled, my face was burning, my knees were giving out. In a shaking voice, I stammered through my short presentation.

She listened closely and didn't interrupt.

I missed my own stop. She needed to get off at the next one, and we got off together. All that was left was the easiest part — ask for her number. And I froze solid. A lump rose in my throat, I couldn't squeeze out a single word. I just stood there like a statue.

So she opened her purse, pulled out a business card, and handed it to me:

"Here's my number. Call me."

I didn't even say thank you. Just grabbed the card and ran home. Walking on air, completely over the moon. It worked! I had a lead!

At home, I read the card. Svetlana, a professor at the finance and economics institute.

Svetlana. One Svetlana once called me a black box. Another one, years later, listened to that same box on a trolleybus.

I spent a long time afterward wondering why she hadn't just brushed me off. And I came up with an explanation I still like. She's a professor. Hundreds of students have passed through her classroom taking their first exam, blushing, unable to string two words together. She saw one more of those kids. And she simply passed me — on a subject called Talking to a Stranger.

If she'd turned me down that day, this book might not exist. Life could've gone down a different branch, and on that branch there'd be no network marketing leader who'd traveled to fifty countries.

And here's what strikes me now, looking back on that day. Leon had charged me up with energy. But Leon wasn't there on the trolleybus.

I kept approaching strangers on the street. It was scary every single time. Just a little less scary each time.

Still, I never had enough people. So I started watching my sponsor more closely. He never taught me where to find people, but new ones kept showing up around him. Where from? Eventually I worked up the nerve to ask one woman how she'd found us.

"A newspaper ad."

So that was it. I started running ads myself. And people started calling. And I was terrified, with no idea what to say to them.

Then I got a phone script. A ready-made text: what to say, how to respond, where to steer the conversation. For two days I read it into the receiver in a shaking voice. On the third day, I threw it out and started talking however I could manage. I listened to the person. Tried to figure out what was bothering them, what they were missing. And I'd invite them to come: you'll get the details at the presentation, just come.

That's how the guy who was afraid to pick up the phone became a master at inviting people over it.

Now you can see how this looks from the outside. You watch a successful network marketer and you see: ads, calls, presentations. So you think, there's the secret. Give me the right ads, the right script, the right company — and I'll make it too.

I believed that for a long time. And it's an honest explanation: the ads worked, the calls worked. Without them I wouldn't have had a single person. But then why did a script that worked for other people sound like a death sentence coming out of my mouth for two whole days? And why did it only start working once I threw it away?

I didn't ask myself that question back then. I was too busy — I had more and more people coming in.

I'd learned how to invite people. What to do with them after that, I still had no idea.

By then I'd moved to a different company, Neways. I had a strong sponsor, Mikhail, who helped me a lot. I knew how to invite people by phone, but I didn't know how to run presentations or training. He did that. My sponsor ran his presentations right out of his own office.

I'd invite ten, fifteen people at a time. Fall outside, slush everywhere, and all these people trailing muddy boots down the city hall hallway. The security guard saw all of it. My sponsor got chewed out.

Then came a leadership meeting. In front of everyone, he tore into me and told me never to set foot in his office again.

I left. Rented my own office. And started running presentations and training myself. I was scared — but I did it.

Later I surprised even myself. A quiet, modest guy, and suddenly I'm bursting with drive, push, entrepreneurship. Where does that come from? Same question as back in seventh grade with a broom in my hands.

In my own office, I became the boss. A very strict boss. Tough, demanding, rough around the edges. People were afraid of me.

I noticed it. But I didn't do anything about it, because it never occurred to me that there was anything to do.

Then something happened that nobody expected — not me, not my partners. One day I learned there was this thing called a training. I got pulled in as a guinea pig: a student at a teacher-training college was running it to pass a class requirement.

A requirement again. Except this time, someone else was passing theirs on me.

And this training changed the entire rest of my life.

Trial Training

I came into the office in the morning to run a session. An ordinary day, people gathered.

I walked in, and everyone stared at me. Eyes wide, dead silent. Then someone finally worked up the nerve:

"What happened to your face?"

So you understand what that question cost them, let me remind you what I was like back then. A strict boss — tough, demanding, rough around the edges. A tyrant. People were afraid of me. And here these people had worked up the courage to ask about my face. I'm still amazed they dared.

And something really had happened to my face. The day before.

It was 1994. I already had my own office at Neways, my own team, and I was running presentations and training myself.

Remember the student from the teacher-training college? She needed to pass her class requirement: run a training session. And a training session needs people. Guinea pigs. I turned out to be one of those guinea pigs. Exactly how I ended up there, who invited me — I don't remember anymore. Too many years have gone by.

Back then in Russia, almost nobody had heard of personal-growth training. I didn't even know the term existed. I had no idea what was waiting for me there.

Two hours. Exercises, games. We split into pairs, then threes, then fours, and told each other things. Nothing complicated. The exercises themselves have faded from my memory. What stuck with me was what happened afterward.

And no stage. No standing up in front of a room to perform. For a guy who used to hide behind his classmates' backs at school, that was the whole point. First you talk to one person, then two, then three. Almost like those circles someone once drew for me at the dental clinic.

Somewhere in those two hours, something happened to me. I couldn't explain what, exactly, back then. There were some realizations, some kind of breakthrough. And the muscles in my face relaxed, right there during the training. Whatever tension I'd been carrying — probably since childhood — just let go.

I went home, went to bed. In the morning, I drove to the office.

Other people noticed first. My face had gotten softer. Kinder. Like someone had peeled off a mask I'd never even seen on myself.

That day I had a training session on the comp plan. And it was easier to run. I used the exact same words as always — I hadn't had time to learn any new ones.

Let's look at this with a clear head. In those two hours, nobody said one word about business. Not the comp plan, not the product, not how to invite people or where to find them. Not a single script. Pairs, threes, simple exercises. And the next morning, people who used to be afraid of me saw a different man. And it got easier for me to work.

How does that work? I couldn't answer that back then. It just stuck with me somehow.

Here's what I understood that day: people see you before they hear you.

You can learn all the right words. You can talk about a wonderful product and a generous comp plan. But the first thing a person reads is your face. And if what's there is tension, fear, or the hard edge of a boss everyone's afraid of, you can save yourself the trouble of trying anything else. My partners looked at that face of mine for a long time and said nothing. They only spoke up once they saw a different one.

If you just thought, "My face is fine, this isn't about me" — I thought that too. I knew I was being hard on people. It never occurred to me that it was written on my face before I'd said a single word. Not until someone showed me the difference.

Remember the rough diamond from Chapter 1? A dull-looking little stone on the outside. That day, a piece of its crust came off for the first time. Just a little, in one spot — like a small window. The actual cut was still a long way off. But through that window, the people in my office saw light. And they saw it before I did.

I've thought back on that student more than once since. She was still a student herself. Maybe it was the first training she'd ever run in her life, and on guinea pigs, no less. She probably wasn't some brilliant trainer. She passed her requirement and walked out of my life. I don't even remember her name.

But it was my face that changed.

From that day on, I fell in love with trainings.

The team grew. The ads worked, the phone rang so much that by evening my voice was shot. More and more people kept coming in.

But my check stalled. A thousand dollars a month, and it wouldn't move. I couldn't figure out why.

That's when I first heard about LifeSpring. Four days, morning to night. Three hundred fifty dollars. Huge money back then, and I didn't have it.

I remembered what had happened to my face after two hours with that student. And I thought: what's going to happen to me after four days?

LifeSpring

I looked in the mirror and didn't recognize myself.

The face was mine, more or less. My eyes, my nose. But the man was a stranger. Just recently, that man had a mustache. Now he didn't.

For some people, shaving a mustache is five minutes in the bathroom. For me, it felt like stripping naked in public. Pure shock. Confused, scared, and deeply uncomfortable, all at once. There were so many feelings running through me that I couldn't tell which one was in charge.

And it all started with a thousand dollars that refused to turn into more.

The team was growing. The ads worked, people kept coming. But my check had stalled at a thousand dollars a month and wouldn't budge.

The real problem was relationships. There were more and more people, but they never turned into a team.

Still 1994. That's when I first heard about LifeSpring — one of the first big American trainings to reach Russia. Four days, morning to night. Three hundred fifty dollars.

Huge money back then. I didn't have it, so I borrowed it. I decided right away: I wanted to take this training. I remembered those two hours with the student very well.

Then I did something that became a habit of mine for years to come. I signed myself up and immediately started inviting my team. None of that "let me go check it out first, then I'll tell you about it." Right away.

Thirty people went. All together.

I'm not going to walk you through the training day by day. More than thirty years have passed, and besides, you can't really capture these things in a retelling. I'll tell you what stuck with me.

First — that mustache. After day one, I think, they gave us an assignment: make a breakthrough. Something you'd never do on your own. The men, for instance, were told to shave their mustaches.

Sounds funny, right? It wasn't funny to me at all. I shaved it off and stood there in front of the mirror with that same feeling — like I'd stripped naked.

Remember the last chapter? That time, my face changed, and other people saw it first. This time, I was the one looking at my own face, and I didn't recognize it.

The trainer just gave the assignment. I was the one holding the razor.

Second — the game "Red and Black." I won't explain the rules: if you've done it, you remember; if you haven't, you're better off playing it yourself someday. I'll just say this: it was one of the most powerful things I've ever experienced in a training. We went into that game as one set of people and came out as another. All of us.

And third — the end of the training.

By the last day, I looked at my team and didn't recognize it, just like I hadn't recognized myself in the mirror. We'd gotten softer with each other. Friendlier. We'd basically become friends. We'd come together. Learned to love each other exactly as we were. By the end, we were just hugging everyone, and it felt like we were one big family.

Thirty people who, up until then, had never managed to become a team. Now, one family.

Here's where it gets really interesting.

The training worked on almost everyone who went through it. People's attitudes changed — toward each other, toward their business partners, toward their parents, toward their kids.

And once the people changed, the numbers changed too. Sales volume went up. Checks went up. For everyone.

My check went up along with theirs. Three months later it was already three thousand dollars. Three times what it had been.

Let's take another sober look at this. Same as with the student, not a single word about business was said at the training. No comp plan, no product, nothing about how to invite people. Four days about ourselves. And the check tripled.

That's when a formula took shape in my head — one I've lived by for more than thirty years:

Personal growth = income growth.

Want to earn money in network marketing? Grow as a person. You can study the business all you want and do whatever you like. But if you don't grow yourself, none of it will work. You can take that to the bank.

There was something else I understood then. My check didn't grow on its own. It grew because thirty people grew. Someone's relationship with their partners changed, someone else's with their parents, another's with their kids. Everyone grew a little. Together, that added up to triple.

Your check is a mirror of you. It doesn't reflect the company or the comp plan. It reflects you and your team. Change, and the reflection changes too.

Remember the diamond? The student chipped off that first little piece of crust. At LifeSpring, the real cutting began. Thirty diamonds at once, as it turned out.

You're probably thinking right now: there it is, the secret. Go to a good training, bring your team, and your check will grow.

I decided the same thing. And it made perfect logical sense. Check stalled at a thousand — went to a training — became three thousand. Three thousand stalled — time for the next training. From then on, I started hunting down trainings myself and inviting trainers into my team. Over my life, I've been through more than a hundred of them.

Back then, I thought I'd found the recipe.

When three thousand stalled too, I already knew what to do. Find the next training.

That's how I found Mark and Sofia Atlasov — among the first trainers to run trainings specifically for network marketers.

And at one of their trainings, I ran into my black box again.

Jewelry Box of Diamonds

The exercise sounded simple: find a childhood pain inside yourself and change its image.

I thought of my black box.

Seventh grade. Broom in hand, dust in the air, our homeroom teacher. "Well, Polukhin, you're a black box."

How many years I'd carried it. Through naval college, where I was the odd one out. Through LOMO and soldering phones. Into network marketing, into my own office, into being the strict leader everyone was afraid of. The box was heavy and closed. I didn't know what was inside it. And I didn't know it could even be opened.

This was a training by Mark and Sofia Atlasov. They were among the first to run trainings specifically for network marketers, and this one was for my team.

That's where I pulled out my box.

And it started changing. The black box turned into a black velvet jewelry box. I opened it, and inside lay precious stones. All kinds. And among them, rough diamonds.

You could look them over. You could take them out.

Remember, in Chapter 2, I said I had no idea the box could even be opened? Well, that's when I opened it.

Mark and Sofia helped me pull that box out. But I was the one who opened it.

Ever since that day, this image has lived in my head. And it's about every single person.

Almost everyone carries a box like that. Some people got theirs at school, some at home, some at work. "You're not a salesperson." "You don't know how to talk." "This isn't your thing." A person carries it around thinking: that's just how I am, a black box, nothing good in there.

But it's a jewelry box. And there are diamonds inside it. Qualities, talents, gifts the person doesn't even suspect are there.

Except a rough diamond isn't a cut diamond yet. You have to take it out, look it over, and cut it. Only then does it start to sparkle and carry light to other people.

That's what the cut actually is: trainings, teachers, working on yourself. The precious stones are already inside you. Someone put them there long before any network marketing came along.

Soon after, Mark and Sofia launched a big training program for network marketers — the International Academy of Leadership (IAL). The curriculum was almost like a university program, and at the end, every participant got an official state-recognized diploma in higher education in network marketing. Of course, it was never really about the paper. It was about what happened to us there.

I was lucky enough to get into the first cohort. Network marketers from all kinds of companies were there, and I still keep in touch with some of them to this day. They taught us everything a distributor needs: presentations, public speaking, team building, leadership, and a lot more. Besides Mark and Sofia, we had a whole team of trainers: Igor Nezovibatko and Dmitry Ustinov. Also Sergey Vasiliev, Vadim Volovik, and others. Our guest from abroad was Tom "Big Al" Schreiter, world-famous in the MLM industry. A seriously strong lineup.

And one day, one of the trainers said:

"The money's on the stage."

What does that mean? The trainers would often call a volunteer up on stage and work with them personally, in front of everyone. A full breakdown. For whoever went up, it was terrifying, painful, embarrassing. You stand there in front of the whole room, naked, the way I'd been without my mustache. But that's exactly how people grew the fastest — right there on stage.

Say there are thirty people in the room. Someone's sitting in the back row, and the trainer's energy just doesn't reach them. It's one thing to listen to someone else being worked on. It's a completely different thing when the trainer's asking you the questions.

At first, I sat somewhere in the back. As usual.

Then I realized: I needed fast growth. And I was willing to be up on that stage. I decided to move to the front row and jump up first every time.

The trainer would start, "Now we're going to need..." — and wouldn't even finish the sentence. I'd already be standing on stage, ready for the hot seat.

It was scary every single time. Every time, I had to step over my own shyness, over that quiet kid from the back row. But I got the absolute most out of it.

Eventually the trainers caught on that I was hogging the spotlight and taking up the whole stage. So now, the moment they spotted me in the front row, they'd cut themselves off mid-sentence:

"Now we're going to need a volunteer..." — and a finger pointed straight at me: "Polukhin — sit!"

Polukhin again. Once, a teacher had filed me away as a black box. Now trainers were sitting me back down because I was too eager to get on stage. Me — that same kid who used to hide behind his classmates' backs.

Even after that, I kept getting up and performing. Not always first, but always among the first.

The stage was the same for everyone. The whole room heard "we're going to need a volunteer." The one who walked up was the one who decided to.

That need to be first had been sitting in me a long time — ever since my school cross-country race. But I'll get to that later.

There was one day at that same academy I'll never forget. We spent the whole day playing a role-play game about nations. There were three nations, I think. And each one needed a king.

Naturally, I jumped in first. By then, it was already a habit.

We spent the whole day doing different exercises. At the end, each king gathered with his entourage, his subjects. And the trainers asked the subjects to tell their king what qualities they'd seen in him.

And one of mine said:

"Andrey, you were the wisest king."

The others agreed. I guess I really had said some wise things and made some wise calls.

My ego, naturally, lit up like a Christmas tree. I liked it so much that the next day I announced to everyone:

"From now on, call me Mudry. Not Polukhin. Mudry."

Mudry means "wise" in Russian.

Funny to think back on now. But the name stuck. I used it again more than once after that, and I still use it today: this book came out under that name. And here's the strange part. In all kinds of situations, different people who had no idea about this story would tell me: "Andrey, wow, you're so wise."

Of all the compliments I've ever gotten in my life, that one's the warmest. I barely remember the others. But that one struck something in me. Probably because it wasn't even a compliment, really. Someone had just named a quality I actually had.

Look at what happened. A teacher once told me, "Polukhin, you're a black box," and I carried that box for years. A few people in a game said, "Andrey, you're wise," and I've carried that name ever since.

Here's what I understood that day: a word someone says about you can lock you inside a box. Or it can open a jewelry box.

This is exactly about our business. You're a sponsor, a mentor, a leader. Every day you say words to people about themselves. You can say "you're not a salesperson," "you won't make it," "what's with all that dust." Or you can see a diamond in someone and say it out loud.

My "subjects" saw the wisdom in me before I did. The same way my team once saw my changed face before I did. The people around us often see our diamonds before we do. We just have to let them say so.

The jewelry box was open. I'd seen the diamonds. I'd even gotten a new name. But there was still a question I had no answer for.

What for? What was I doing all of this for — growing, going to trainings, bringing people along?

I found the answer to that question at a training with Marik.

First Purpose

"Alright, we've covered the theory. Now for practice. Everyone up on stage."

The whole room stood up and headed for the stage. I headed for the exit.

I went outside and stood there for about half an hour. By the time I went back in, it was already over.

Remember how at the Academy I used to jump on stage first, and the trainers had to yell "Polukhin — sit!"? There was a stage here too. But that day, I bolted for the street.

I should tell you who exactly I was running from.

His name is Marik Khazin. A personal-growth trainer, one of the greatest I've ever met. I went to his trainings for about fifteen years afterward. But getting there in the first place wasn't easy at all.

I lived in Petersburg, and Marik ran his trainings in Moscow. He was a corporate trainer for our company, and my partners — mostly women — would go see him. They'd come back raving about what had happened to them there. And every time, it was the same thing: how much they loved him.

I'd look at his photo and not get it. Bald, big nose, short. What did they see in him? Why was everyone in love with the guy?

It irritated me. Honestly, it set me right off.

And underneath the irritation sat fear. I was scared to end up at one of his trainings. I thought: what if I fall in love with him too? God forbid. Picture it — a strict leader suddenly going around telling everyone he's in love with Marik. A nightmare.

Then the company took us on an incentive trip — to Greece, I think. And Marik ran a short training there, about an hour and a half. It was called "Contact Dance."

For twenty, thirty minutes he explained the theory. I made it through that part — sat in the room, listened. Then he said: everyone up on stage.

I got so scared. Here it comes. It's about to happen to me too.

So I walked outside.

When I came back, the look on everyone's faces... Pure euphoria. Everyone wired, happy. And everyone declaring their love for Marik all over again.

And I was relieved. I'd dodged it. I'd gotten out of it.

Some time passed. I was back in Petersburg and saw an announcement: the company was inviting everyone to Moscow for a training called "The Art of Communication." Led by Marik Khazin.

And my leaders, my distributors, started telling me one after another: we're going. We're going to Moscow, to Marik's training.

And that's when it hit me.

My leaders were going. What about me?

A leader is supposed to lead their team. Be out in front, even when they're scared out of their mind. If the team goes and the leader stays home, that's a bad sign. For the leader most of all.

I didn't stop being scared. But I made a decision: I was going, fear or no fear.

Scared, but going.

Moscow. A big hall, two hundred people, maybe three hundred.

Marik briefly explained what was ahead, and then said:

"Alright, let's not drag out the theory. Let's do a small exercise."

I didn't leave. I'd come to see this training through to the end.

We split into pairs. I won't describe exactly what we did — in the retelling, it's just an exercise. What was happening inside me was something else entirely.

I did it. And I didn't die.

I was alive. More than that — I felt something I'd never felt before. Even now, writing this, I get goosebumps.

In that moment, I understood the sheer power in that man. Such strength, such love, such mastery. Bald, big nose, short. And all that power.

It turned everything in my head upside down. A point of no return.

And inside, I said to myself the exact thing I'd been most afraid of:

"Marik, I love you."

Every fear I'd had came true. I fell in love with Marik, just like everyone else. Except it turned out there was nothing to be afraid of.

At the end of the training, Marik announced that in a couple of days he'd be running another one just outside Moscow. Three days, with lodging included. The title was three words: "Time, Vision, Purpose."

And it hit me like a punch. By then I'd been through a mountain of trainings with Mark and Sofia. I'd opened the jewelry box, gotten a new name. But I still didn't know my own purpose. The question "what for?" that the last chapter ended on was still hanging there, unanswered.

I went up to Marik and asked:

"Marik, what do you think — should I go to this training?"

Even though the answer was already inside me. I just wanted someone else to confirm it. I was still doubting myself.

And what else could Marik say? He'd seen me at the training.

"Of course. You absolutely need to be there."

Two days later, I was just outside Moscow.

We did two things there. First, we wrote out a vision: a detailed description of one day in our lives, five years out, as if we were filming a movie about ourselves. Then we worked out our purpose — one sentence about why you're alive and what you do for other people.

Three days of total immersion. And the second half of the flip — this time, of my whole life.

Because what I walked out with was this sentence:

"I grow personally, and I help other people grow personally, using network marketing."

Look at how it's built.

"I grow personally." Me first. Not the team, not my partners, not the company. I'd already understood that after LifeSpring: your check is a mirror of you. Until I grew, my check wasn't going to grow either.

"And I help other people grow personally." I'd already been doing that for a while. Thirty people had come with me to LifeSpring. Mark and Sofia had run a training for my team. My team went to Marik's training in Moscow before I did. I just hadn't understood that this was my thing.

"Using network marketing." That's where it clicked for me. Network marketing comes at the end of the sentence. It's not the goal — it's the tool. The way I grow and help other people grow.

Before that, I'd thought it was the other way around: the business was the main thing, and the trainings just helped it along. The sentence flipped that completely.

And this is about the diamond again. First you cut yourself, then you give light to others. If all you do is cut yourself, you end up with a beautiful stone locked in a safe. And if you try to light the way for others without cutting yourself first, you'll have nothing to light with.

Years later, I noticed something about this story.

Marik gave me the method. Marik said, "Of course, go." But the answer was already inside me before I ever walked up to ask him the question. I didn't receive that sentence — I worked it out. It was lying inside me, like the stones in that jewelry box. The training just helped me pull it out.

And I realized something else — where that sentence had been waiting for me all along. Right behind the same door I'd once walked out of, onto the street.

Here's what I understood then: the thing you're running from is often exactly the door to your next step. Fear doesn't always mean "don't go." Sometimes it means "this way."

I never actually stopped being scared. I just went anyway, fear and all. And found my "what for" right behind it.

And once you have your "what for," trainings stop being a collection. I've been through more than a hundred of them. Without that sentence, it would've been a shelf full of diplomas. With it, it became a path.

I went back to "Time, Vision, Purpose" two more times after that.

The third time, I didn't go alone. Natasha was with me. And something happened there that's still hard to believe.

But first, I need to tell you who Natasha is, and what she showed me.

Natasha and the Levels

"The time will come when you'll be standing where I am."

That's what my sponsor used to say at presentations. He'd stand up in front of people, and I'd sit in the audience. My job was to invite people, nothing more.

And I'd laugh. Honestly. I was sure I'd never in my life stand where he stood. The stage was for other people.

Years went by. I'd long since been running my own presentations and trainings. And only then did I learn that the state I'd been in back then had a name. It's called Despair. And it's not a life sentence — it's the first step.

Natasha was the one who told me about it.

Natasha and I were husband and wife back then. It was an intense chapter of my life.

She's an unusual person. A coach, a personal-growth trainer. A master of the Chinese tea ceremony. My life changed more than once just from being near her — sometimes from a single event.

The first thing I learned from her was a system of levels of personal growth.

I'll be honest: at first I was very skeptical about this system. I had dozens of trainings behind me already. What levels could there possibly be?

But there was no getting around it. I was living with someone who grew people using these levels.

Here's how Natasha worked. First she'd figure out what level a person was on. Then she'd run sessions with them and give them assignments. The person would work on themselves and start acting differently in their life.

In essence, she was doing the same thing I'd spent years traveling to trainings for. Just without the hall, without the stage — one on one with a person.

We lived together, and I saw it all with my own eyes. Sometimes I'd overhear a session. Natasha would tell me what was happening with her clients, what was changing in them. And I watched these people grow.

I also helped her package up her knowledge for the internet, to promote her coaching. And to package something, you have to actually understand it. That's how I slowly got into it. I started to understand what these levels actually were. To understand people. And to understand myself: so which level was I on, anyway?

The levels built themselves into me gradually. Not through a lecture, but through living alongside it.

Natasha didn't invent the system herself. Its foundation was laid by a writer and a sociologist back in Soviet times. For twenty-five years they traveled across the Soviet Union searching for a formula for talent, and they wrote a book called On the Nature of Talent. Natasha took their system and reworked it heavily for her own coaching. I'll walk you through it the way Natasha applied it, and the way I came to understand it.

There are eight levels in total. Most people live on the bottom four.

Despair. The person believes in nothing. Goes to work, burns through life. Sits on a bench outside their building and complains about everybody: the president's bad, the governor's bad, the neighbor's bad.

Searching for Meaning. The person has broken free of despair and is searching. "I don't know what to do, where to go." They start trying things: get into network marketing, switch from company to company, buy courses and never finish them.

Pleasure. The person hammered away at one thing for a long time, broke through, and it worked. "This feels amazing! This is great!" There are a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of businesses at this level.

Awareness. "I need to think about this." The person looks at every situation as a lesson and tries to figure out what inside themselves is getting in the way.

Next comes Talent. Here, the person does what they love, lights up doing it, and people can feel it. And above Talent come Genius, Sage, and Creator. Very few people ever make it there.

Today, I see myself somewhere between Awareness and Talent. And the path keeps going.

Remember that guy who laughed at his sponsor's words? As a speaker, I was in Despair back then. Not in my whole life — just in that particular role.

That's what Natasha explained to me. A level isn't a lifelong brand burned into you. It's a state, and it's different in different roles. In one role, you might already be enjoying real results, while in another, you're still sitting on the very bottom step.

And a leader in network marketing has a lot of roles — about thirteen of them: speaker, communicator, organizer, financial planner, and more. If you only work one "muscle," you end up lopsided. Like an athlete with enormous shoulders and a gut.

There's one more thing she said that stuck with me: network marketing is, by itself, a personal-growth training. The newbie's shaking, but they run their first presentation anyway. They might not even know they're growing. But they are.

These days, this system helps me live my life enormously.

A few minutes of ordinary conversation is all I need to tell what level someone's on. Every level has its own vocabulary. People tell you everything about themselves — you just have to listen.

And here's what that gave me. My expectations and illusions about people disappeared. If I can see where someone is right now, I have a rough idea how they'll act. They say something, do something, and it's not a surprise to me. It's just their step. Nothing to take personally.

For a leader, that's gold. You stop demanding things from people that they're not yet capable of. And you start giving them exactly what they need right now.

Here's what I understood then: a level isn't a label. A label says, "this is who you are, forever." A level says, "this is where you are right now, and there's another step ahead."

For years I carried the label "black box." The jewelry box of diamonds showed me what was actually inside me. And the levels became a map: where I was, and where to grow next.

But Natasha had another line, too: there's no point pushing someone up to the next level until they shift something inside themselves first.

She gave the assignments. The person did them, on their own.

Later, Natasha and I recorded video lessons together and broke down this whole system in detail. But that came after.

Back then, Natasha showed me the map. And in return, I brought her to Marik.

And there, at "Time, Vision, Purpose," something happened that's still hard to believe.

Second Purpose

Everyone wrote their purpose in a notebook. Then Marik started calling on people at random to share what they'd written.

He called on Natasha and me too.

And it turned out we had the exact same sentence in our notebooks. Word for word.

We hadn't copied off each other. And yet we'd both landed on the same thing:

"I am free, and I help people become free."

How did the two of us end up there together?

Natasha had, of course, heard about Marik by then. And one day I suggested it to her: let's go see him together, you and me.

First we went through his basic training. I'd already done it many times, on my own and with my distributors. For Natasha, it was her first time. She came out of it thrilled.

So then we went together to "Time, Vision, Purpose." For me, it was the third time. For Natasha, the first.

Remember how afraid I was the first time I went to see Marik? First I ran off in Greece, then I barely forced myself to go to Moscow. And now here I was, bringing the person closest to me to him myself.

Put my two sentences side by side.

The first, from Chapter 7: "I grow personally, and I help other people grow personally, using network marketing."

The second: "I am free, and I help people become free."

See what's missing? Network marketing. It's not in the second sentence.

I didn't quit it. I'm still in network marketing today, and I love it. It just stopped being the frame I squeezed myself into. It stayed one of the roads, not the only one. And the sentence itself got wider, bigger. Not as narrow as the first time.

Something else changed too. Before, growth was at the center: I grow. Now freedom was at the center. Growth hadn't gone anywhere. I'd just understood where it was leading.

So what does freedom actually mean to me?

Financial freedom is the obvious one. Passive income, travel, the ability to live wherever you want. I had that, for years.

But after years next to Natasha and her system of levels, I understood that wasn't the whole picture. Freedom is when you're no longer held down by someone else's patterns, beliefs, stereotypes, and programming that got planted in you at some point. Like the label "black box" that I carried for so many years.

And freedom from manipulation. Later, in one of the lessons Natasha and I recorded, I put it this way: as long as you're manipulating people, even without noticing it yourself, you're not free. You're still inside that game. Real freedom begins when manipulation disappears from your life.

That's the kind of freedom this sentence is about. Becoming free yourself, and helping others become free.

Years have gone by, and that sentence is still with me. It's where my biography begins. I wrote it into the rules of my own life's game, the ones I live by. Wherever I am, whatever I'm doing, it's still my answer to the question "what for."

Here's what I understood then: a purpose isn't carved in stone once and for all. It grows along with you. If your "what for" hasn't changed once in all these years, it's worth asking yourself: have you actually grown over that time?

And one more thing about that notebook.

Nobody fed Natasha and me that sentence. Marik gave the assignment, and each of us searched for the answer inside ourselves. Two different people, each with their own path, arrived at the exact same words.

Which means those words were already sitting inside, in both of us. The training just helped pull them out, the same way it once helped pull out the jewelry box of diamonds.

Freedom is a beautiful word. But I wanted to put it to the test. Not on myself — on the people around me.

And soon the chance came. Natasha got to know my business more closely and saw that my leaders needed help.

That's how our pilot project began.

Pilot Project

The most important part of this story happened after we were no longer around.

Natasha and I had left the country and stopped working with these people. And they pulled together their own distributors, ran their own event, and led it themselves. Without us.

But let me start from the beginning.

Natasha wasn't a network marketer. And at first, she didn't like network marketing. Or more precisely, she didn't like the pushy people you run into in it. Later, in one of our video lessons, she said that I didn't act like them.

And I'd tell her about my team and the problems in it.

And Natasha saw something I couldn't see: all of it came down to specific roles. Presenter, communicator, leader. You could learn them through a system, the way an athlete grows through a training plan.

I suggested she run a training for my team. She did. And after just that first training, I told her:

"It feels like you've been in network marketing for twenty years."

And she hadn't spent a single day in it.

So we decided to run a pilot project. We picked one team: the leaders and their distributors.

Once a week they'd come to our place. We'd put out a good spread, and the training would run almost the whole day.

First, Natasha assessed everyone: who was on which level. Then came the homework. Every week people would show up and report what they'd done, how it was going, what was working, what wasn't.

I gave my part, the business side. But just a little. Natasha's part, the personal-growth side, was the main one.

We worked like that for several months.

And the group started growing. You could see it.

In how they talked. In what they did. In how their relationships with their distributors and their families were coming together. Their lives were changing right in front of us.

Then Natasha and I left the country to travel. The work with them ended.

And here's where it gets interesting.

Six months went by, I think, maybe a year. And those leaders took on more responsibility. They organized an in-person event themselves. Pulled together their own distributors themselves. Led it themselves.

They'd become independent. Become real leaders for their team. And their business jumped to a new level: they started earning more.

Remember LifeSpring? Back then, I went through the training together with my team, and everyone's check went up. There, I grew myself and watched the people around me grow.

This was different. This was the first time I saw the formula from the outside. Not on myself — on other people. They grew as individuals, and their income followed right behind.

Personal growth is the foundation of income growth. No personal growth, no income.

And one more thing. For the first time, I watched diamonds in other people start to sparkle on their own. With no cutter standing next to them.

There was one thing I thought about for a long time.

Natasha did the assessments and gave the assignments. We hosted people at our place and supported them. But they organized that event after we were already gone. Nobody was pushing them, nobody was calling to remind them.

Which meant the growth wasn't resting on us. It was resting on them.

Here's what I understood then: a real leader doesn't grow followers — they grow leaders. And there's only one way to check whether it worked: step aside.

If everything stops without you, it was all resting on you. If people kept going on their own, you did the one thing that mattered.

As for Natasha and me, a year on Bali was waiting ahead.

I had passive income there, freedom, and time. You'd think — just live and enjoy it.

But it was in Bali that I had to face the thing sitting deepest inside me.

A Year on Bali, and Arrows

On January 2, 2013, I was drowning.

Natasha and I had just landed on Bali. A big group had gathered, about thirteen of us, and we went to Green Bowl Beach.

It was three-thirty, low tide. Seven of us went in to swim. Everyone could swim, and swim well.

I went into the water after everyone else. I looked over and saw the others already far from shore. I thought: look at them, swimming out that far.

I had no idea they were drowning.

They'd been pulled into a rip current. It's like a river inside the ocean: it runs from the shore out to open water, and it moves fast — about three meters a second. You can't swim against it.

Soon the current caught me too. And carried me out even farther than the others. The shore was somewhere half a kilometer away now.

I remember my strength running out. I remember realizing: this is it. And that's when I prayed to God. I remember these exact words:

"God, has my mission on this earth already come to an end?"

Then, completely drained, I started asking for forgiveness. From everyone I could think of. One after another.

And right then, a small bamboo log turned up next to me. Maybe a piece of a boat or a raft — who knows at this point. I grabbed onto it.

Then Shamil, one of our group, swam up to me. He was at his limit. He wrote later that in his mind he'd already said goodbye to life and figured he had about three minutes left. The two of us clung to that log together.

For the first time since we'd gone in, we managed to catch our breath. And once we had, we started thinking.

Fishermen in boats could see us, but they couldn't come closer — the waves would have smashed the boat. We had to get ourselves out.

We swam not toward the shore but sideways, toward the breakers, where the big waves were crashing. And the waves carried us onto the reef.

We made it to shore about an hour and a half, two hours after we'd gone into the water. The others washed up one by one over the next twenty minutes or so.

All seven of us made it out.

Shamil took the log home with him afterward. He also wrote a detailed account of that day. That's how I checked my own memory of what happened — all I'd seen at the time was water.

I didn't drown. I was born a second time. And ever since, I've celebrated January 2 as my second birthday.

If you're ever caught in a current like that, remember one thing: don't swim against it toward shore. It's stronger than you. Swim parallel to the shore, sideways, until you're out of it.

That was the worst moment of my entire life. Nothing else comes close.

When people ask me about my worst moments, I try to think of something else: crises, losses, failures. And I realize all of that was hard, but not like this. But none of it brought me to the edge like that.

But there's one thing I only understood very recently, thirteen years later.

I was reading something about how my life is a mission I haven't finished yet. And it broke me open. I sobbed, tears streaming down behind my glasses. And through the tears, I kept saying thank you. To everyone, one after another: people close to me, people far away, my parents, my friends, my partners.

Then, while I was washing my face, I suddenly noticed the difference. Back then, in the ocean, I'd been asking for forgiveness. Now I was giving thanks. Back then it was the fear of death. Now it was love, waking up.

I did get an answer to that question from the ocean, by the way. The mission isn't over. If you're holding this book in your hands, it's still going.

But let me go back to 2013. We lived on Bali for a whole year.

I had passive income, and I did whatever I wanted. And what I wanted was to help Natasha.

In one of the rooms at our villa, I set up a video studio. Rigged the lights, the camera, the microphones myself. Shot videos, took photos. Helped Natasha with content, worked with her on putting together her personal-growth course.

From the outside, it looked like paradise. Warmth, the ocean, freedom, work I loved, no scrambling after money.

Except our relationship wasn't exactly smooth.

Every now and then, something old would rise up in me. Some long-held grudges, some dark side of myself. Psychologists call it patterns. At the time, I didn't even understand where it came from.

And here's the funny part. I was living with a coach. A professional who grew people using the system of levels. I'd seen with my own eyes how her clients changed. I'd helped her package up that knowledge myself.

But her coaching didn't work on me.

I just didn't let it in. Honestly, I probably should have found a different coach, someone outside our relationship.

Turns out the best cutter in the world can live under the same roof as you, and the cutting still won't happen.

Remember, in Chapter 6, I said there's a jewelry box of diamonds lying inside every one of us? Real diamonds have inclusions — dark spots deep inside the stone. The cut on the outside can already look beautiful, while that dark spot inside hasn't gone anywhere.

That's exactly the kind of dark spot that was sitting inside me.

And one day it broke through.

I let my arrows fly at Natasha. That's how I put it now, as a metaphor. I vented some frustration, some anger, something else. I don't remember exactly what anymore. I don't even remember what started it.

And I don't exactly remember what Natasha said or did in response, either.

But the feeling of it, I still remember.

My arrows flew at her and sank. Sank in love. And dissolved.

Natasha didn't answer in kind. She didn't fire the same anger back at me. She was a master of the tea ceremony. She'd often drink tea alone, in silence, filling herself up with love. And my arrows simply broke against that love.

They never hurt her.

Telling you this right now, I get goosebumps all over again.

Something happened to me in that moment.

For the first time, I felt what real love actually is. Not understood it in my head — felt it with my whole heart. Love can dissolve anger. It can dissolve resentment, irritation, even hatred. Arrows of ill will simply disappear inside it.

And something woke up inside me too. Like old grudges, that same dark side I hadn't even noticed in myself, started to heal. Like I'd just had surgery on my soul.

After that, I started treating Natasha differently. I got softer. I got more attentive.

Look at how that whole year played out.

On January 2, I was drowning in the ocean, and I washed up on a reef.

Then my arrows drowned too. Drowned in love.

And the second rescue turned out to be no smaller than the first. The first time, I stayed alive. The second time, I learned what love actually is.

Here's what I understood then: you can't beat anger with anger. You can answer an arrow with an arrow, and then it's war. Or you can answer with love, and the arrow dissolves.

You might ask: what does this have to do with network marketing?

Everything. Arrows fly through our business every single day.

You call someone you know, and they fire back: "There you go again with your pyramid scheme." A partner blows off a meeting and gets rude in the chat. Someone from your team quits and goes around telling everyone what a terrible sponsor you were. And your hand reaches for the quiver on its own.

Now, honestly. How many arrows do you fire yourself? At partners who "never do anything." At newcomers who "still don't get it." At a sponsor who "never taught you anything."

I was a strict leader myself once, and people were afraid of me. I couldn't begin to count the arrows I fired back then.

A team doesn't grow around someone who's firing arrows. It grows around someone who dissolves them.

There's one thing I still think about.

Natasha never ran a session with me about this. Never gave me an assignment. Never explained how it should be done. Her coaching didn't work on me — I'd admitted that myself.

She just didn't fire back.

What to do with that, though, was entirely up to me. I could have fired another arrow. I could have gotten offended and gone quiet. Or I could open up and actually feel it.

I didn't understand that back then. But years later, this story fell into place.

That year on Bali turned out to be the last easy year.

Then came 2014. And over the course of a few months, I lost almost my entire business.

A Stone on My Heart

A man who'd made two million dollars in network marketing went to sleep in a bed full of cockroaches.

That man was me.

A workers' dormitory next to a Wildberries warehouse — the Russian e-commerce giant. One night. That's all I could take.

But let me start from the beginning.

In 2014, a crisis hit. And within a few months, I'd practically lost my business.

The passive income I'd lived comfortably on for a whole year on Bali had dried up. I'd hit bottom.

Natasha and I went back to Moscow, and I went looking for work. Any work.

First I got a job driving a taxi. And ran into some gangsters. It scared me so badly that I quit driving almost immediately.

Then for a week I worked as a packer at a Wildberries warehouse. Night shift, the warehouse clear across Moscow, three or four hours of commuting. That job nearly killed me, it was so brutal.

I decided to rent a room in a dormitory near the warehouse. I spent one night there. The bed was crawling with cockroaches, and I slept right there with them.

That was enough for me. I quit that job.

After that came the trial and error. From 2015 to 2019, I tried out a lot of companies and projects, with all kinds of comp plans. I even got caught up in pyramid schemes. Yes, that happened too.

Now stop for a second. Remember what this book is about.

I told you about LifeSpring, and the check that tripled. About the formula "personal growth = income growth." About how your check is a mirror of you. By then, I had a hundred trainings behind me, two purposes, and a pilot project where I'd watched leaders grow right in front of me.

And now, my check was zero.

So what did that mean? Had I forgotten how? Shrunk? Had all those years of cutting just vanished?

I'll be honest: I didn't have an answer back then. I needed to find work just to survive.

The answer came later. And it came from a completely different direction than I was expecting.

On April 11, 2017, Natasha and I officially divorced.

We parted on good terms. No fights, no blame, no grudges between us. We both felt that our shared mission had run its course. And we kept our relationship intact.

But the separation itself was incredibly hard on me.

After the divorce, I developed a heaviness in my chest. Like a stone had settled on my heart. These aren't just words — I felt it physically. It hurt, and I was lonely.

I carried that stone for a long time. At first, I thought it was about three months. Then I remembered: I was already living in Podolsk, already working as a videographer, and the heaviness in my chest was still right there with me. Which meant I'd carried it a lot longer than that.

I didn't have a job at the time. I was looking and couldn't find anything.

And during those hard months, I remembered a picture.

Someone had once drawn me a wheel of balance. A simplified one, made of four parts. The material area at the bottom, the spiritual at the top. The social on the left, the personal on the right.

My material area was built up: I knew how to make money. My social area too: teams, the stage, thousands of people in my network. My personal area too: a hundred trainings, two purposes.

But the spiritual area was at zero.

I didn't even understand what that meant. I'd never once looked in that direction.

My wheel had a hole in it. And you can't go far on a wheel with a hole. Sooner or later, it drops into a pothole.

Remember the jewelry box of diamonds? A cut diamond has many facets. For more than twenty years, I'd worked on mine. Except all those years, the cutting had only come from three sides. The fourth facet had stayed completely untouched.

And then, with that stone on my heart, an intent was born inside me.

It sounded like this:

"I am going into the spiritual realm."

That's it.

I didn't know how I was going. With whom. Which gods to pray to, which prayers to say. Which books to read, which films to watch. Where to find a teacher, or whether I even needed one.

I didn't know any of that. I just told myself: I'm going.

I still didn't understand what I'd just done. I'll tell you what intent actually is and why it worked later, in a chapter of its own. It's one of the most important things I've ever understood in my entire life.

The path turned out to be slow.

I watched films. Read books, though less of those. Watched a lot of Indian TV series. Then teachers started showing up on my YouTube feed: one, then another, then another. The teachers kept changing. Some of them turned out, in time, to be nothing like what they'd claimed to be.

And the stone on my heart dissolved, over time.

About ten years have passed since then. And these days, I feel like I've at least started to find my footing in this area. It's a long path. Not an easy one. And I'm walking it.

Here's what I understood then.

The hardest times don't just show you what you've lost. They show you what you never had in the first place.

While everything was going well, it never once occurred to me to look at that empty slice of the wheel. Why would it? I had money, I had a team, I had trainings. It took a crisis, a lost business, and a stone on my heart before I finally turned my head in that direction.

You might say: I never had two million dollars, so I had nothing to lose.

But every network marketer has their own version of a crisis. The company shut down. A strong leader left and took half the organization with them. The check dropped, and nobody can figure out why. People close to you say, "I told you to quit this a long time ago."

In moments like that, you want to rush out and find a new company, a new script, a new comp plan. I did exactly that for four years straight. I even ended up in a few pyramid schemes along the way.

Or you can do it differently: stop, and look at your own wheel. Where's your hole?

There's one thing I still think about.

Every previous turning point in my life had happened at a training. LifeSpring, Mark and Sofia, the Academy, Marik. There was always a trainer close by, always a program, always an assignment.

This time, there was nobody. No trainer, no program, no assignment. Just a pain in my chest and one sentence.

And that one sentence was the start of the turn that changed my entire life.

The turn came slowly. In the meantime, life brought me to the place where, for the first time, I actually figured out money.

And strangely enough, it got me there through a video camera.

Millionaires’ Club

"Do you happen to need any volunteers? Could I do the filming?" I asked over the phone.

That's how I ended up with Maksim Temchenko. Not as a participant — as a volunteer with a video camera.

A man who'd made two million dollars in network marketing showed up at a financial literacy training. And he didn't show up to learn — he showed up to film.

It's funny to me even now, telling you this.

Let me start with a confession. It wasn't an easy one to make.

I made a million dollars at Neways. Then another million at Morinda. Ten years at each company, roughly ten thousand dollars a month on average. Passive income, travel around the world, apartments. I lived exactly the way I wanted to.

And my financial literacy was at zero.

Money never stuck around. It came in big and went out completely. I didn't save it, didn't put it aside, didn't invest it. A check comes in, a check goes out, wait for the next one.

As long as the checks kept coming, it didn't show. It became obvious in 2014, when the checks stopped. You already know about that from the last chapter.

Where did this come from in me?

Remember my mom, from Chapter 1? In Berdiansk, there was never enough money. And this is the picture that formed in my memory: Mom gets her paycheck, buys something, pays off debts. A couple of days later the money runs out, and she goes to borrow again. Not paycheck to paycheck — loan to loan.

I wasn't earning my mother's salary — I was earning tens of thousands of dollars. But the pattern turned out to be exactly the same: money came in, money went out, nothing left over.

Different scale. Same script.

I understood that much later. Back then, I just lived.

Natasha was the one who introduced me to Maksim Temchenko's training. We'd already divorced by then, but we kept in touch, and she thought I'd find it interesting. Maksim was running a live financial-literacy training in Moscow called the Millionaires' Club.

She invited me to the program's presentation. And it landed right on my birthday. Quite the coincidence.

At the end of the presentation, everyone was asked to fill out a form. I didn't have the money to pay for the program. But I thought: I can at least fill out the form. It's free, nobody's asking me for money right now. I'll fill it out, and whatever happens, happens. It's my birthday today. Maybe something will happen. Maybe money will just show up from somewhere on its own.

And that's exactly what happened. Except what showed up wasn't money.

Two days later, someone from support called and asked whether I'd be participating.

"No money," I said.

And that's when I did the one thing I knew how to do: I offered myself up.

"Do you happen to need any volunteers?"

"Of course we do! Perfect timing. We're actually expanding — the training's grown, we're expecting three times as many participants. We need more volunteers."

"Could I do the filming?"

"Great! Come with your camera, we'll figure something out."

Two more days after that, I was already at the training. I went in as an unpaid volunteer: filming, and helping out with anything that needed help.

I filmed like my life depended on it. Then I turned the footage into a solid piece of content, with the slides included. Maksim liked it.

And he hired me.

For the next year, I worked for Maksim as a videographer. For an actual paycheck this time.

The job was this: record the entire event, then watch it back, listen to it, edit it. Every single module, start to finish.

In that time, I went through practically four full cohorts of the Millionaires' Club. All of it, every module, including the VIP module.

Except I went through it differently than the participants did. A participant hears a topic once. I heard it live in the room, then on the recording, then again during editing, cutting and splicing and listening through it piece by piece.

And that's how financial literacy built itself into me. On its own, drop by drop.

What changed?

My whole relationship with money changed. I don't blow it anymore. I set it aside. I understand what to do with it and how to handle it. It's a completely different level of understanding than I had back when I was making my millions.

Now, honestly — since this book is about honesty.

My mother's script still hasn't fully dissolved inside me. I can feel it. The knowledge got built in, the habits changed. But somewhere deep down, that program is still sitting there.

Four cohorts of financial literacy. The VIP module. A year working alongside a man who teaches people how to handle money. And none of it was enough to clear out what sits deeper than knowledge.

Remember this. We'll come back to it.

Here's what I understood that year.

Remember the formula "your check is a mirror of you"? It's true. The check shows who you've become.

But a mirror has a second side too.

The check shows who you've become. And what's left of the check shows how you handle money. Earning it and keeping it are two different skills. And the second one takes learning too.

Network marketing teaches us how to earn. Invite people, run presentations, build an organization, get passive income. But almost nobody teaches you what to do with that income afterward.

I went through this myself.

And there's one more thing I didn't think about back then, but think about constantly now.

Look at how I ended up at the Millionaires' Club. Nobody called me up to film. Nobody offered me a job. I was the one who asked: "Do you happen to need any volunteers?"

Remember the Academy of Leadership, where I'd jump up on stage before the trainer even finished a sentence? More than twenty years had gone by, a crisis and a lost business were behind me, and the habit was still there. Take the first step.

There's one thing I still think about.

Right in front of me, four cohorts went through the Millionaires' Club. Everyone heard the exact same thing: the same slides, the same assignments.

And I wasn't even a participant. I was filming, and then as part of my job I listened to it over and over again. And the knowledge built itself in.

And yet those four cohorts didn't clear out what had been sitting inside me since childhood.

Which means it's not just about knowledge. Not just about who's teaching and what. There's something else going on.

While I was editing other people's trainings about money, one sentence was quietly working away inside me. The same one, from the stone on my heart: "I am going into the spiritual realm."

I didn't understand what that was back then. Now I do. It was an intent.

And it's time to really talk about intent.

Intent

About ten years ago, maybe more, I said something out loud. And I even shared it with someone.

I wanted someone to interview me. Record my stories. Then organize them and write a book for me. I'd just talk, and this person would turn it all into words.

I didn't believe it would happen at all. Who would even take on work like that? Listen to me, sort through it, write it up, put chapters together?

Time passed. Today, I talk to an AI. I tell it my stories, and it organizes them and writes them in my own words.

This book is that exact intent.

In Chapter 12, I told you how, with a stone on my heart, I said to myself: "I am going into the spiritual realm." And I promised to explain what that actually was.

It was intent. I didn't understand that word yet back then.

I understood it later, listening to Vadim Zeland's Reality Transurfing. I listened at work, with headphones in. And something enormous was happening to me. I was starting to understand where I kept getting stuck. Why I kept making the same mistakes over and over. Why the same problems went unsolved for years.

Several chapters of it are devoted to intent, and it gives a definition:

Intent is the resolve to have and to act.

Let me say right away what intent is not.

It's not an affirmation, where you repeat some nice-sounding phrase a hundred times. It's not a mantra. It's not a goal, a plan, or a vision. It's not just saying something or writing it down.

Zeland himself writes that the definition doesn't fully capture it. Because the essence of it is subtle. Hard to put into words.

I'll explain it the way I feel it myself.

Intent is an energetic process. In the moment of intent, a person connects with God. They see what they want as already accomplished. As if it had already happened in the future, and they're simply acknowledging it as a fact. They're ready to act. And at the same time, they let go: they relax, trust God, trust the space around them.

Resolve and trust, both at once. I want it, and I let it go.

For me, real intent is almost always accompanied by goosebumps. That's my signal. Every person has their own bodily instrument. When the connection with God is happening, the body tells you: yes, this is it. This is truth.

Here are three of my own intents. Three stories from different years.

The Passport. One day I saw a passport in someone else's hands. Covered edge to edge in visas and stamps. And I said to myself: "I want that too." Goosebumps again, even now, rereading this. Which means it's true.

Today I've got fifty countries behind me.

Morinda. When I joined Morinda, I told myself: "I'm going to be number one in this company."

A year later, I was number one. Forty-seven leaders from another company signed up under me in a single day. The leadership base came together almost instantly.

This wasn't something that came from my head. It was a sincere, vivid, pure intent.

The Book. You already know about this one. You're reading it.

There were surely other intents too. Some I probably don't even remember. Some were spoken so sincerely, so deep inside, that I never even registered them.

So what happened to that intent — the spiritual realm?

The path, as I've said, turned out to be slow. Films, books, teachers who kept changing.

Today I live in Bali. People pray here at every turn, the Balinese have their own rituals, it's a place soaked in prayer. And my mornings now start with practice. A walk, a book, prayer, meditation.

I didn't know how I'd get into the spiritual realm, or with whom. I just said: I'm going.

Now let me show you how this works today. Not twenty years ago — very recently.

These days I'm building my business at MWR Life. And one morning, just waking up, still half-asleep, I was reading Zeland. He writes that you need to mentally picture your target slide — an image of what you want. That's how you recall your intent.

You do these exercises in the morning, still in bed. At that moment, the brain is running in alpha rhythm, and the information gets recorded deeper, reaching down into the subconscious.

And Zeland keeps reminding you: for an intent to take shape in the material world, you need a union of mind and heart. But the exercises he gives are mostly about the mind.

So I asked myself: how do I bring the heart into this?

And I remembered: you need to draw yourself a picture. Or even look at what it actually looks like in reality. What the scene looks like when someone's already earned that rank. The room, the people.

I decided to Google it. I typed in something like: "Black Royal, MWR Life, congratulations on stage for a new achievement."

Black Royal is the top rank at MWR Life.

Google answered with a congratulatory message:

Important. The numbers above aren't a promise of income to you. This is Google's output, pulled together from the company's comp plan, and the comp plan is a public document anyone can download and read. How much you earn depends on your own work, your own growth, and your own decisions. Nobody's promising anybody anything. Me included.

And at the end, Google asked: did I need an official speech?

I answered: yes, I did. A speech for me, Andrey Mudry, at a company event announcing the new rank I'd reached. And I added: except the word "reached" doesn't quite fit here. This is a path of personal and spiritual transformation, and the rank is just a milestone on that path. And I wanted to express gratitude to God for my path, and to my wonderful wife for her love and support.

And I got a speech.

I started reading it, and my body responded instantly. Goosebumps ran up my arms first, then my legs. The further I read, the more of them there were. Soon I had goosebumps all over my body. And without meaning to, I started choking up from everything I was feeling.

Here's that speech.

I'd often heard from teachers: it's not enough to picture the reality you want in your mind. You have to feel it too, on the level of emotion.

And I never fully understood how to actually do that.

Maybe it had never happened to me before because the feelings weren't there. There was no genuine resonance with the intent.

But that morning, I felt it a hundred percent. It felt like this was already an accomplished reality. Like there was no future at all. Like everything was happening right now.

Then I wanted to see it. I typed: "I want to see this. Show me what it'll look like."

And a few seconds later, there was a picture in front of me. A stage, the whole room giving a standing ovation. Me on stage, my wife beside me. Me in a black tuxedo with a red bow tie, her in a gold dress. My hair half gray, a short gray beard, light rimless glasses. And on the banner above the stage: ANDREY MUDRY. And below it: NEW MWR LIFE BLACK ROYAL.

It's still just intent, for now. But I've already seen that room.

Here's what I understood that morning.

Intent is born when the mind and the heart say the same thing. The head draws the picture, and the heart lives inside it. And at that point, the future stops being the future — you're already there.

You can write goals down on paper for years and feel nothing. Or you can truly live your own intent, just once. The kind that gives you goosebumps from head to toe.

You might say: easy for you, you get goosebumps. I don't have anything like that.

Goosebumps are my instrument. You might have your own. Warmth in the chest. Tears. Lightness. A stillness inside. The body always responds to truth somehow. You just have to start listening to it.

And one more thing. Look at your goals in business. Rank, check, team. Do you want them with your head? Or with your heart too?

If it's only your head, that's a plan. A good one, a necessary one. But it's not intent yet.

There's one thing I still think about.

Look at all my intents in a row. The passport. Number one at Morinda. The book. The spiritual realm. Black Royal.

Zeland gave the definition. Google painted the picture. Teachers kept saying: "Feel it."

But when I was looking at someone else's passport, there was no Zeland standing next to me. And when I joined Morinda, nobody told me I'd be number one. And with that stone on my heart, there was nobody next to me at all.

So who was doing this, every single time?

And the goosebumps I keep talking about aren't some small thing, some pretty detail.

They're where the next part of this book begins — the formula. And its first step is state.

State

"I was right there in that room, you know? I was applauding you," Larisa said in a voice message.

This happened on the exact day I started writing this chapter.

Larisa is on my team. Every morning except Sunday, at seven-thirty, we get together with partners on Zoom for a quick team call. That Monday, only Larisa showed up.

The conversation drifted to the book. Larisa said she'd read a few chapters. And I started telling her how it gets written. How I talk my stories into my phone, and an AI turns them into text. How I read the lines back and recognize my own living voice in them. How it lights me up.

And while I was talking, goosebumps ran over me. I said, "Oh, I'm getting goosebumps." I kept going, and they came again. Then another wave. Which means I was telling the truth.

That call turned out amazing. So much energy! Larisa had real breakthroughs right there, live.

After the call, she read Chapter 14. The one where I see the room, the stage, and myself on it. The second she finished, she sent me a voice message:

I listened and felt the goosebumps running over me again.

Someone read a chapter about my goosebumps, and she got goosebumps too. Which means it wasn't just the words that came through. The state came through.

A second voice message came right after.

I answered her with a voice message of my own. It was hard to talk — goosebumps were running the entire time I listened to her.

I told her what I know about myself.

Goosebumps are the first signal. I call them the wind of God — like He's walking across my body.

Tears are the next signal, and a stronger one. That's the heart opening up. That's almost a direct connection to God.

Why stronger? When the goosebumps come, I sometimes find it hard to talk. The head comes up with the words, and the feeling blocks that channel. Which means something is happening right then that doesn't need words. And when it's tears, talking is impossible altogether. You're completely inside the feeling.

I discovered this in myself in Bali. I was finishing Dan Millman's Way of the Peaceful Warrior — there's a film based on it too, Peaceful Warrior. The final chapters. And I suddenly noticed I was sobbing. Tears pouring down, and they were tears of joy. Of happiness.

And sometimes it happens like this: I'm crying and laughing at the same time. That's the strongest thing I know of so far.

Maybe that's not even the limit. Goosebumps are number one, tears are number two. Maybe there's a number three and a number four, an even deeper connection. That's all still ahead of me.

And I passed this on to Larisa's son: there's nothing to be ashamed of. Let him listen to my voice message.

The moment I realized this chapter would be about my conversation with Larisa, goosebumps ran down my legs, up my arms, and then across my scalp.

Someone read a chapter and responded instantly. And I got feedback while the book was still being written. The transformation was happening right in front of my eyes.

So let's break down how this actually works. And I'll start with where these goosebumps of mine even come from.

I was about twelve. My mom and I were in Leningrad, and she took me to the Kirov Theatre — now the Mariinsky — to see The Nutcracker.

The orchestra thundered to life. The first chord. And goosebumps swept over me. In waves.

I didn't know what it was. But it felt wonderful. I loved it.

For a long time after that, I don't remember them coming back. But I remembered that first time.

Later I was studying at naval college in Leningrad. I don't remember anymore why my mom and I went to see some young guy. He called himself a yogi. I don't remember anything else about him. Except for one conversation.

I asked him what kind of "condition" this was, these goosebumps.

He started talking about the crown chakra. I think that was the first time I'd ever heard the word. He said it connected me to the information field. Today I'd call it the Higher Power, the Universe, God. But back then, nobody said words like that out loud.

Then he explained the main thing. When you see, hear, or feel something, and it's truth, your body answers with goosebumps. Not just "that's correct" and not just "yes." Truth runs deeper than that.

And if the goosebumps come, that's an ironclad answer. You don't argue with it. It comes from somewhere above your own mind.

It's your instrument, he said. Use it throughout your life. And be grateful you have it.

I remembered that. And I still use it to this day.

You've seen my goosebumps all through this book. At Marik's in Moscow. On Bali, when I told you about the arrows. Over someone else's passport. Over a speech I hadn't even given yet. Now you know where they come from.

Goosebumps are a sign. And behind the sign is the whole reason for this chapter. State.

Without state, nothing happens. Whether it's on Zoom or in person. There's no network marketing business, no business of any kind at all. And anything done without the right state just carries that absence with it.

Let me show you with two team calls.

One day I showed up to the morning call uncharged. My head was buzzing — I'd understood something, realized something, wanted to share it. But there was no energy in my voice.

I talked like I'd memorized a poem and was reciting it. Information from the head, never lived through. It came out as a lecture. A sermon.

I felt it even while I was still talking. And afterward I could see it in people: it hadn't worked. There was no energy there at all.

Now take that call with Larisa. Same Zoom, same seven-thirty in the morning. I hadn't prepared any lecture. We were just talking about the book. But I was talking about something lighting me up right then. And the goosebumps came wave after wave, and Larisa's breakthroughs came right along with them.

The words that day were simpler. The state was completely different.

Remember Chapter 4? "What happened to your face?" They asked me that before I'd said a single word. People see you before they hear you. And they read your state instantly.

State doesn't just decide a team call. It decides where your business goes.

2004. I join Morinda. The company's already been in Russia a year, the top leaders are already in place. And my first thought: I'm too late. That ship has sailed.

And I'd wanted to be first my whole life. That sits very deep in me. More on that in the next chapter.

So there I was, upset, deflated. There was no being first anymore. The first ones had already gotten there.

With a state like that, nothing would have worked out for me. I know that for a fact.

Then, by some kind of miracle, it was like I connected with a different version of myself. I don't remember exactly how. Maybe I remembered my trainings. And I told myself, in the present tense: "I am number one in Russia."

Out loud, in my head, or written in a planner — I don't remember that either. But I remember the force of that moment. Even now, remembering it, I get goosebumps. Whether I had them back then, I don't recall. But today's goosebumps are telling me: probably, yes. I just didn't register them at the time.

A year later, I was number one in the company in earnings. Even though I'd joined later than the other leaders.

Same company. Same comp plan. I'd joined just as late. The only thing that changed was my state.

This whole book, I've been talking about the cut. Trainings, teachers, working on yourself. A rough diamond slowly turning into a cut diamond.

But a cut diamond has one property. In a dark room, it doesn't sparkle. It needs light.

The cut is who you've become. State is the light passing through you right now.

At that call where I was running on autopilot, the cut I had was the exact same one I had at the call with Larisa. There just wasn't any light.

Here's what I understood: people hear your state far more than they hear your words. You can memorize information like a poem. You can't memorize state. You can only carry it.

You might ask: fine, so how do you switch it on?

Honestly? There's no snapping your fingers and making it happen. My goosebumps and tears come on their own. They don't ask my permission.

But some of it does depend on me. Noticing what state I'm in before I go out to people. Not walking past it when it does show up. And when I'm deflated, the way I was back at Morinda, not pretending everything's fine, but looking for the way to a different version of myself.

Back at Morinda, nobody showed up and told me: change your state. The slump was mine. And I'm the one who found the way out of it, too.

And one more thing. Everyone has their own instrument. Mine is goosebumps. Larisa's is tears. Her son's is wet eyes when he talks about something deep. Yours might be warmth in the chest, or lightness, or a stillness inside.

If your body answers with tears, don't be ashamed of it. That's not weakness. That's your body showing that you're speaking from somewhere deep.

Where does this state come from? I have an answer. But we'll get there at the end of the formula.

And there was one more thing in that story with Morinda. The need to be first.

Where did that come from, in a kid who used to hide behind his classmates' backs at school? It started on the school track, on a thousand-meter run.

Being First

Thump-thump-thump-thump.

Those are my feet hitting the ground. The school track in Berdiansk, gym class, a thousand-meter run. Ahead of me, about a hundred meters out, Sasha's running. He's taller than me, stronger, more muscular. He trains with the city track club, his lungs are strong. Mine are weak, still recovering from pneumonia.

By all rights, he should be the one crossing the line first.

There's hardly any distance left to the finish. And that's when something switches on inside me.

Every year of school, whenever the boys ran cross-country in gym class, the same boy always crossed the line first. Andrey Polukhin.

I wasn't the strongest. Wasn't the tallest. And definitely wasn't the one with the most endurance. But the drive to be first came from somewhere inside me. Nobody taught me that.

One day there was a city-wide meet. Kids from different schools gathered at the city stadium, and standing past the finish line was the coach of the city track club. He'd catch whoever finished first. He caught me too. And invited me to join the club.

I went. I liked the long jump and the short sprints. I didn't like the hurdles. And the long cross-country runs were what I hated most, ten kilometers out to the Berdiansk Spit and back. I had no wind, and those runs just wore me down completely. I started skipping practice. Then I stopped going altogether.

But before that, I'd managed to bring my friend Sasha into the club. He's the one who stuck with it. It was easy for him: height, strength, lungs. He kept training. I didn't.

And still, in gym class, I'd beat him. Every single time.

I'd run behind him, practically on his heels. Well, about a hundred meters behind him. And when there was almost nothing left to the finish, I'd switch on everything I had. Every ounce of strength, every ounce of will.

What was going through my head back then, I honestly don't remember. I remember my body. My legs pumped like pistons, with such power and force, like they weren't my legs anymore but a machine. Like some engine was starting up inside me. Thump-thump-thump-thump, my legs beating out a rhythm, and I could hear it.

I'd collapse at the finish line, completely spent. I couldn't catch my breath, my throat burned, my legs felt like lead. There was probably pride in there somewhere, but I barely remember it. I just knew: I had to be first. No matter what.

And Sasha couldn't understand how I kept doing it. He was the better runner, after all. In the end he took it personally and stopped being my friend.

We never made up. Our lives went separate ways. And I can't say it made me sad. No pride, no guilt. He didn't want to be friends? Fine. I was calm about it, almost indifferent.

Now I understand: back then, beating Sasha mattered more to me than Sasha did.

Where did this "no matter what" come from?

Remember the storm from Chapter 1? My father walks out into those huge waves, and I wait on the shore for two hours. He told me later that he loved fighting the elements and coming out of it calm, alive, unhurt.

When I remember those words now, I get goosebumps. For me, that's a sign: yes, my father shaped me. By his own example.

But in that same first chapter, I wrote: genes don't work on their own. My father showed me it was possible. But in those last hundred meters, every single time, I was the one making the decision.

There was a second layer underneath this drive, too. I only saw it very recently.

As a kid, I was shy, different from everyone else, and my classmates laughed at me. Sometimes they flat-out bullied me. It was the same at naval college. A kid who'd been labeled a black box, overlooked, laughed at.

And maybe that kid, with every finishing sprint, was saying: "I'm not small. I matter. I can be out in front."

I'm not diagnosing myself here. It's a guess, nothing more. But one story backs it up pretty well.

By then I was grown up and already a leader, and I was putting together my own recruiting system. I told Natasha about it. And she said three other leaders were already using something similar. She didn't say who.

And I started shaking. Literally. Nervous tremors, all through my body.

I didn't understand what was happening to me at the time. Now I see it: it was the same track. Someone had passed me. And inside, that same kid was screaming: "So I'm not good enough."

A simple thought helped me. Fine, say a hundred people start using this system tomorrow. Say it works and helps people. What part of me shrinks because of that?

Nothing.

When I reread this story today, I don't shake anymore. I get goosebumps — goosebumps of understanding.

Here's a different story. Remember the forty-seven leaders who came to me in a single day? For a while, I was number one.

Not for long.

The strongest leader among them eventually passed me in earnings.

And you know what I felt? It felt good. No hostility, no rivalry. He was my partner, my leader, and he'd become number one.

And when I myself was number one, I didn't feel especially thrilled about it. I didn't even really celebrate.

Same person, same Andrey. But first place no longer had the same grip on me it had back in school.

So what does "being first" actually mean? I had to dig deep into myself to answer that. And I came up with three levels.

Level one — being first among others. I'm out ahead. This is where the competition lives, the comparison, the need to be recognized. This is where that kid on the track still lives.

Level two — being first into the new. Being the first to see it, the first to start, the first to go where others haven't worked up the nerve to go yet. With no guarantee anyone will understand you.

Level three — being first for yourself. Being the first to hear yourself. The first to tell yourself the truth. The first to choose your own life.

At level one, first place is there to prove something. That you're better. That you deserve love. That people need to notice you. And that's when first place turns into an addiction. Someone passes you, and you start shaking.

At level three, the question flips. Not "why do I need to be first?" but "why do I keep putting myself last in my own life?"

Look at my stories through that lens.

At the Academy, I moved to the front row and jumped on stage before the trainer even finished a sentence. In Greece, I "jumped first" — just out onto the street. I went to Moscow to see Marik because a leader has to be out in front, even when they're scared. With the Millionaires' Club, I got on the phone and was the first to ask, "Could I do the filming?" At Morinda, I decided I was too late and would never be first. And then I told myself: "I am number one in Russia."

The same sprint in the final stretch, every single time. Only the meaning of it kept shifting, little by little.

It used to sound like this inside: "I have to be out in front."

Now it sounds different: "I have to stay true to what I myself see and feel."

Here's what I understood: being first isn't about beating everyone else. It's about being the first to take the step toward where your own inner knowing is leading you. First place isn't the goal. The goal is doing what you believe needs doing. And being first comes after that, on its own.

What does this mean for your business?

Don't wait for your sponsor to call. Call first. Don't wait for your team to come around to going to a training. Go first, and invite them along. The trainer on stage asks, "Who?" Stand up first, even if your knees are shaking.

If you're a leader, remember my forty-seven. Your partner can pass you, and that's your biggest win. A leader who's afraid of being passed doesn't grow leaders — they just collect hangers-on.

And if someone else's success suddenly sets you shaking, don't beat yourself up. Just ask the same question: what part of me shrinks because of this? The honest answer is almost always the same: nothing.

Nobody's going to show up and tell you: "Now — kick." The coach stands past the finish line and catches whoever's already crossed it. You're the only one who can switch on the engine for those last hundred meters.

I haven't finished exploring this. I still notice how I react to other people's success, to comparison, to whoever ends up ahead. And every time, I ask myself: what does "being first" mean to me right now?

It seems like the meaning of those words keeps changing right along with me.

And that third level, being first for yourself, is about something else entirely. It's when you stop living someone else's life. When you don't need a place next to everyone else anymore.

I call that freedom.

Freedom

I'm buying into an apartment in a new building under construction. Then a second one. Then a third. I barely touch my organization. I almost never show up at team meetings.

And the money keeps coming. Every month.

That's when I first felt what freedom actually is. Not read about it, not heard about it at a training. Felt it, in my body.

And it all started with a crisis.

1998. My check at Neways was fifteen thousand dollars a month. Within a few months, it dropped to five.

I could have run around trying to save it, squeezing my organization for more. Instead, I decided to buy into apartments in new buildings under construction. Three in a row. Then my daughter was born, and I focused on raising her. I didn't actively work the business. For about five years.

And the entire time, every single month, the passive income kept coming in.

I remember that feeling very clearly. I do whatever I want. My time is mine. The money comes in not because I called someone today, but because, at some point, I built an organization, and now it runs on its own.

For me, that was freedom.

The second time I felt it just as fully was at Morinda.

There was a funny twist there. My top leader told me one day:

"Keep your internet stuff out of my organization."

Someone else might have been offended. For me, it felt like I'd sprouted wings. Stay out? Fine, I'll stay out. The income kept coming, the organization kept running. And Natasha and I went off to travel the world.

Just lying on beaches didn't interest us. I helped Natasha build out her personal-growth system, record courses, package up her knowledge. But we did it wherever we wanted, and whenever we wanted.

Country after country. That's how fifty countries ended up stamped in my passport.

Now, 2014. You already know about this one from Chapter 12.

The business was gone in a few months. The passive income dried up.

And freedom ended. Right away, in that same moment.

Money got tight, and I felt it inside at once. Tightness, tension, a brain stuck in a vise. We scrambled: what to do next, where to go, build a new project or go find a job? We tried one thing, then another, then a third. Nothing took off. Every day started with the same question: where do I get money?

That's when I understood something. Not right away — years later.

My freedom was resting on my check. As long as the check was there, I was free. The check disappeared, and freedom went with it. Which meant it had been freedom on loan.

I'm not saying passive income is a bad thing. It's an incredibly powerful tool. It gives you time, choice, the ability to live wherever you want. But you have to build it as a system and keep maintaining it. And it can't give you what's on the inside.

A check can pay for freedom. But it can't give it to you.

So what is freedom, then, if not money?

Remember the sentence Natasha and I wrote down at Marik's, word for word? "I am free, and I help people become free." In Chapter 9, I told you there are three kinds of freedom for me: financial freedom, freedom from other people's patterns, and freedom from manipulation.

You now understand how the financial one played out for me. Let's talk about manipulation.

I ran into that one right at the very beginning, back at Herbalife.

At every event, leaders would go up on stage and tell their stories. And almost every story was the same: I borrowed money, bought a ton of product, put myself in a tight spot on purpose. But in exchange, I became a Supervisor. And a Supervisor gets a fifty-percent discount right away, so you can sell the product at a markup.

Nobody ever told me personally, "Borrow money and buy the product." Not once. But it was there in every story, from the stage, over and over. Everyone was supposed to buy themselves that Supervisor rank.

And I bought it.

I borrowed money from people I barely knew. Bought a pile of product. And didn't manage to sell it in time.

And they came to me:

"Pay us back. Or we'll take your apartment."

It was a horrible time. I lived in fear. I was terrified of ending up with no roof over my head. Where I found the money, I honestly don't know. By some miracle. But I found it and paid off the debt.

And right then, I told myself: in network marketing, I would never do artificial qualifications.

I didn't even realize at the time that it was manipulation. Nobody was lying to me, nobody was forcing me. The whole room just breathed one thing: "borrow and buy." That's group manipulation. The hardest one to spot, because there's no one person to blame.

I understood this years later, when Natasha showed me the system of levels.

Later, in one of our video lessons, I mapped manipulation straight onto those levels. It came out to four steps.

Unconscious manipulation. The person is manipulating and doesn't even notice it. A newcomer calls their sponsor: "Remind me, call me, motivate me." A genuine request. But in practice, they've just put their sponsor to work for them. And they get manipulated just as easily themselves. This is where I was at Herbalife.

Conscious manipulation. The leader already understands that people can be controlled, and uses it. Deadlines, discounts, "today only," stage stories. They get the money. The people in the room just keep sitting there, exactly where they started.

Conscious non-manipulation. The person catches themselves in an old thought: they're about to push someone into saying yes. And they stop. They choose differently. For them, it's still an effort, still work. But this is exactly where real teams start: two people who don't manipulate each other, who actually hear each other and work things out.

Unconscious non-manipulation. The person no longer has to stop themselves. Those files simply aren't there anymore. They share generously, light people up, and the money just comes on its own.

And right there, on that last step, real freedom begins.

As long as you're manipulating, even without noticing it, you're not free. You're inside a game you didn't invent. And as long as you're being manipulated, you're not free either.

There's another kind of freedom. An inner one. Freedom from the patterns someone once planted in you.

I learned about it from Vera. She was a leader in my organization at Neways, not even my direct partner — one level further down. She had no obligation to call me. But she did.

"Listen, I just went through this training, we had it at the office. It was absolutely mind-blowing. I really want to share it with you, because you need to know this."

And then:

"Open your planner."

I obediently opened it.

"Write one word in big letters: 'change.'"

I wrote it down.

"Now cross it out, big X."

I crossed it out.

"And next to it, write the replacement: 'add myself new options to choose from.'"

Then Vera explained. "Change" is a terrible word. It wrecks a lot of people's lives. Everyone says you need to change. But a person can't actually be changed.

Everything that's inside you can only ever accumulate. You can't throw anything out of yourself. If you have some habit, you can build a new one alongside it and choose that one instead. The old one doesn't go anywhere. You can always fall back on it if you want to. Or not use it. But it's there.

And that doesn't mean you've changed. You've added yourself a new option to choose from.

That sentence turned everything inside me upside down. The realization was enormous. I'm still grateful to Vera for that call.

Ever since then, when I want something new, I don't try to break myself. I add myself new options.

And there are so many little phrases floating around: "break yourself," "force yourself," "get out of your comfort zone no matter how much it hurts." How can you actually break a person? A human being is a creature that only ever accumulates life experience. You can't throw part of that experience out like garbage. That would be the equivalent of dying.

That's why, somewhere deep in the subconscious, the call to "change" lands as a threat. As a small death. And everyone's afraid of death. So nobody actually likes changing. It's not about laziness or weakness. It sits at the deepest level there is.

But "adding new options to choose from" is something else entirely. You don't have to lose anything. You only have to gain. That's the whole point.

My "black box" label never went anywhere. It's recorded inside me. But right next to it, "jewelry box of diamonds" is recorded too. And "Mudry." And every day, I choose which one to switch on.

Freedom isn't when the old thing disappears. It's when you have a choice.

One day I took it further and wrote my own rules of the game.

At some point I was watching people play video games. And it struck me that they talk almost like network marketers: levels, leveling up, achievements. They sink so deep into their games that they practically live there.

And that's when the picture flipped for me. Life is exactly the same thing. We hit levels, buy artifacts, level up our skills. Life is a game. Except in a video game, someone wrote the rules before you ever showed up. In your own life, you can write them yourself.

Here are mine:

See that last line? That's the exact sentence from the notebook at Marik's. It became the rule I live by.

And now, a confession. An honest one.

I don't feel a hundred percent free today.

For instance, I barely post on social media. For a long time I told myself I didn't have time, that it wasn't my thing. But really, there's a fear of self-expression sitting inside me. That same kid who used to hide behind his classmates.

I'm working on it. And this book is one of the steps. Every chapter is me stepping out and saying out loud what I used to keep quiet about. And I like it. I'm already looking forward to turning this book into short clips and posting them. With the same pleasure I get from writing.

So this book is an important milestone for me. It's leveling up my freedom of self-expression.

But other freedoms, I already have. And I feel them every day.

The freedom to live wherever I want. I'm in Bali right now. Natasha and I once lived here for a whole year, and I fell in love with this island. Later I traveled through fifty countries. And I couldn't help comparing every single one of them to Bali. It was still home — the place I wanted to come back to.

A year ago, I came back home. There's a spiritual atmosphere here, kind people, warm weather, real food. I'm happy here.

The freedom to do what I love. And what I love is network marketing. I love talking to people, building systems, helping people grow. That's my mission. I get to spend my time on what I love, and that's exactly where my freedom shows up.

And freedom of movement. I love traveling and want to see a lot more countries. Right now I'm earning through a travel company, MWR Life. And that's how two things I love came together in one business: network marketing and travel.

But there's one more level of freedom. I haven't grown into it yet. I'm exploring it.

It's when you don't depend on any circumstances at all. Not on money, not on people, not on a company, not on a country, not on wherever you happen to be.

There's still money, of course. But it's sitting in the right places, generating income simply because it exists. Or there are businesses running on their own, producing reliable passive income. The kind that doesn't vanish in a few months, the way it did in 2014.

I'm heading there.

And right here, while I was talking this chapter out loud, something new happened to me. A sentence slipped out of me on its own:

"I'm inviting you to walk this path with me."

I stopped. I think that's the first time in my life I've invited anyone anywhere quite like that. And I understood right away why it happened exactly here, in the chapter about freedom.

Because this is my mission. I am free, and I help people become free. The second half of that sentence is the invitation itself. It was always in there. I just finally heard it.

Here's what I understood: freedom isn't something you have. It's the place you act from. No company issues it, no sponsor gives it to you, no check guarantees it. You build it yourself: choice by choice.

What does this mean for your business?

If you came into network marketing looking for freedom, that's the right dream to have. But check which freedom you're actually after. If it's only the financial one, it can leave just as fast as it arrived. Build a system, aim for passive income. And grow yourself in parallel. Then, whatever crisis hits, you'll still have what nobody can take from you.

If you're a leader, look at what you're motivating people with. Stage stories, "borrow and buy," artificial qualifications — that's a trap. Even if you honestly believe you're helping. I know what it feels like from the other side: the fear of losing your home.

And don't demand that your partners "change." They'll hear a threat and shut down. Instead, help them add themselves one more option. That's exactly what Vera did for me, with one phone call.

And if you're pressuring someone right now, or someone's pressuring you, don't beat yourself up. Just notice it. Noticing is already the first step.

Nobody made me free. Not Neways, not Morinda, not passive income. Vera gave me the words, but I was the one holding the pen. When the check ran out, this became crystal clear: whatever was left was my own choice.

You can't help people become free all by yourself. An invitation is always about two people, and then about many.

One soldier can't win a battle. More on that in the next chapter.

Together

Just short of Taganrog, my Mercedes died in the middle of the highway.

Something was hissing under the hood, the temperature needle was pinned in the red. And in the trunk rode my entire office: boxes of juice, a color printer, my belongings.

To this day I've got a name for that story: how I paid for a million dollars with a Mercedes.

But I'll have to start with how I ended up alone.

2004. I join Morinda.

I come in completely alone. Not one person comes with me from Neways. No partner, no friend, no acquaintance.

I already told you, in Chapter 15, how I decided back then that I was too late. Now let me tell you what I was doing all that time.

I did the same thing I always did. Ran a newspaper ad, the old-fashioned way. Started inviting people, meeting them, running presentations.

And nobody signed up.

A week went by. Then another. Maybe a month. I'd figured that people would come flocking to me, Mr. Big Shot, with my experience and my million dollars. Nobody came flocking at all.

I slid into a real depression.

Some people were buying the juice, customers were showing up. But a business doesn't grow on customers. A business grows on leaders. And there weren't any.

So I went online. Built a website.

And it worked. People started coming to me through the site.

One of the first to call was Dima, from Novosibirsk.

"My mom needs some of that juice."

He ordered some. Dima, as it turned out, was actually a distributor for another network marketing company. And he was upfront about it right away: I'll see how the product works first.

The product worked. It really helped his mom.

And Dima called again:

"Come on, come out to Novosibirsk. Let's build a business."

Over the next six months, I took the train out to Novosibirsk three times. Ran sessions, helped build the team. And Dima wasn't alone. He'd brought his own team with him.

And the process started moving.

That's when I understood something simple. Find one leader, and a team starts growing around them.

From then on, every time someone new wrote to me through the site, I'd slap a label on them right away. The same one for everybody: "leader."

I'd work out the details with them, get on a train, and go. Whatever city they were calling me to.

Of course, not everyone I went to see actually turned out to be a leader. But I saw a leader in every one of them. That was my vision. And the leaders did come.

Once, a teacher slapped the label "black box" on me, and I sat locked inside it for years. A label can close a person off. Or it can open them up. I chose to hand out the kind that opens people up.

There's a line attributed to Theodore Roosevelt: "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."

For me, that's pure gold. That year, I lived by it exactly.

I knew how to run newspaper ads. I ran them. I knew how to build websites. I built them. I knew how to run presentations. I ran them. I knew how to teach the comp plan. I taught it.

I did everything I knew how to do, right where I was. Everything I could.

Because you can always start from zero. But if you already have experience and skills, put every single one of them to work.

Now let's get back to the highway.

By then I was at Morinda, and I decided to drive out to Taganrog to see Sasha, an old distributor of mine. A different Sasha — not the one I used to run cross-country with.

I was living in Petersburg back then, but I'd come to Moscow for about a month. And I had this old vintage Mercedes with a wimpy little engine. I'd found a shop in Moscow, had the engine rebuilt. A rebuilt engine is supposed to be broken in gently, without stress, for a while.

But I was in a hurry to get to Sasha's.

I loaded the car with juice, the color printer, my belongings. An office on wheels. And drove from Moscow to Taganrog.

Just short of Taganrog, the engine overheated. The Mercedes died.

I had it towed to the nearest town. Left it there. Loaded everything into a shuttle van and made it the rest of the way to Sasha's.

I stayed at Sasha's for one day. Spent the night.

Sasha talked about his new company. How great everything was there, what great leaders he had. How his whole team was planning a trip together. He was fired up.

And I realized: he wasn't going to come with me — not now.

So I didn't ask him. Left him a box of juice, said goodbye, and headed home to Petersburg.

I'd ditched the car, made it to Sasha's, and didn't even invite the guy. From the outside, the whole trip looked like a failure.

About a year went by.

Sasha calls:

"So how's your noni juice doing? Why haven't you called me?"

I hadn't bothered him. I understood he was busy with his own project.

And then Sasha says:

"My leaders are looking for someone to sign up under at your company. I sold them on you as an honest, decent guy."

He gave me his mentor's number. A top leader living in Moscow. We talked on the phone, and the next day I left Petersburg for Moscow.

His name was Mark. A different Mark — not the one who ran the training with Sofia, where my black box turned into a jewelry box. This was Mark, with Svetlana.

We met at a small café.

What happens when two self-sufficient leaders meet and neither one is out to grab anything for himself? All we had to do was look at each other. And everything was clear.

Mark said there were a few things that needed sorting out. Once they were sorted, his people would sign up under me.

I called my sponsor right away. We worked it all out.

"Good," Mark said. "Now we need to try your juice. Then we'll make a decision."

And I happened to have a ticket to Almaty — a meeting with a future partner was waiting for me there.

"I'll be back in three days," I said. "We'll meet then."

Three days later, I flew back. And Mark said:

"Everyone who tried it is getting amazing results. We're signing up."

I remember that day very well.

Mark and Svetlana's apartment. The three of us. Registering leaders from all over the country, the whole day long.

People sent their passport details by fax. The fax machine would beep, another page would crawl out, and the three of us would fill out a paper contract by hand. Then the next one. And the next. My writing hand was aching.

By evening, forty-seven leaders had signed up. All across Russia.

These were leaders from another company. That company had changed its comp plan, and the top leaders in that branch were looking for a new home. First they chose the company. Then they chose their mentor. Me.

In a single day, I had the entire leadership of a powerful new branch.

And that branch became famous all across Russia.

Now add it all up.

I left a Mercedes on the side of the road. And that trip, where I didn't invite a single person, led to forty-seven leaders finding me a year later. I made my second million dollars at Morinda.

That's why I call it "paying for a million with a Mercedes."

Though honestly, the Mercedes wasn't really the payment. What I paid with was not pushing Sasha. Letting him go his own way. And a year later, he's the one who sold me to his leaders as an honest, decent guy.

People don't come for the company, and they don't come for the product. People come for people.

This was a real team. Forty-seven people who'd known each other for years, who were friends, who'd been through their old company together and already proven themselves there. Tight-knit.

One person alone could never have pulled off results like that. Not me, not Mark.

Mark later became number one in Russia too. In Chapter 16, I told you about the strongest leader among the newcomers passing me in earnings, and how good that felt. Now you know who that was.

Look at that whole year, start to finish.

As long as I was alone, the business stood still. The newspaper ads, the presentations, my experience, my million dollars — none of it worked.

Then Dima showed up, and his team with him. The process started moving.

Then Mark and Svetlana showed up, and another team with them. The process took off.

Two "togethers." And both times, things shifted not because I got better at calling people or better at talking. But because I stopped being alone.

One soldier can't win a battle. Everybody knows that saying. But I only really felt it that year.

Remember the jewelry box of diamonds? One diamond, even a cut one, is beautiful. But scattered diamonds sparkle differently. The stones catch each other's light and pass it along.

A team is scattered diamonds.

Only the person themselves can cut their own diamond. Nobody can do that for them. But you can only truly sparkle together.

Twenty-some years have gone by. And I'm building a team again.

We call ourselves Happy People Network. A team of happy people. Our values: freedom, material well-being, and helping other people. And our mission is this: help one million people become just a little happier. Through our team, our company, our business, and our support.

There aren't many of us yet. Just a handful of like-minded people. We're only getting started.

Every morning, early, we have a team call. You already know one of these calls — the one where Larisa and I talked about the book, and the goosebumps came in waves. We share experience, grow together, learn together.

And we want to grow one big, strong family. Where everyone contributes and gives toward the common good. Where people help each other.

Remember the ending of LifeSpring? Thirty people hugging each other like one family. That's the feeling I want to build again. Only this time, I'm the one building it.

Back in 2004, I built a website for myself. And got on a train to meet every single person face to face.

Now I'm building a system for everyone.

I'm a tech guy — I love this stuff. Everyone on our team gets their own recruiting system: a personal landing page, a personal chatbot, a personal lessons page. Nobody needs to know how to build websites or bots. They just need to do one thing: run their social media. That's what we teach. We have tools that help grow Instagram and VK. We help each other put ourselves out there.

And we also teach people to write books.

Because our business is a relationship business. A people business. And when someone reads a book, they get to know its author personally. They spend evenings with him. By the end of the book, they know a great deal about him.

That's exactly what you're doing right now.

So our main goal is to help every leader on the team write their own book. And then run their social media and build a big international team together. All over the world.

This book is also part of our "together." The team is helping write it. Partners are the first ones to read it. And their reactions, like Larisa's, end up right inside it.

Here's what I understood: a business grows on leaders, not customers. And leaders come to a person, not a company. Together, you build what nobody can build alone. But everyone walks into that "together" by their own choice.

What does this mean for your business?

If you're alone right now and nothing's growing, that's not a life sentence. I went through it myself, with a million dollars and ten years of experience behind me. Don't wait for people to come flocking. Look for one leader. Just one. A team will grow up around them.

Slap the label "leader" on every new person you meet. Not all of them will turn out to be one. But the ones who can be will feel that you already see it in them. That pulls people in.

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. Don't wait for the perfect company, the perfect website, the perfect time. Put every skill you've already got to work.

And don't push. If someone's fired up about a different project right now, let them go — no hard feelings. Leave the box of juice and drive away. People remember how you acted when they turned you down. A year from now, they might come back, and not alone.

If you're a leader, remember that you're being sold too. Every partner you have, past and present, is telling someone about you somewhere. What words do they use? I got sold as "honest and decent." I never got better advertising than that in my entire life.

And find your people. The ones you don't have to put on an act for in the mornings. One soldier can't win a battle.

In a single day, forty-seven people signed up under a man they'd never even met in person. Only Mark had seen him, and only twice. What held them together for years after that, when there was no contract between them, no shared payoff?

For a long time, I couldn't put it into one word. One day, that word just slipped out on its own, right on stage. More on that in the next chapter.

Love

A small conference room in a Moscow hotel. About fifty people. An industry-wide network marketing conference, speakers taking turns one after another.

Then I'm up. My topic: "The System of Manipulation in MLM."

I'm talking, drawing steps and arrows on the board. I get to the very top of the diagram. And it just slips out:

"MLM is a path of love."

And silence. No reaction from the room. None at all.

And I'm standing there thinking: man, what did I just blurt out?

This was about two or three years before Bali. I'd been invited to speak at an open industry conference that brought together people from all kinds of different companies.

I picked an unusual topic. By then, Natasha and I had already recorded a lesson on the system of manipulation for our course and run it together. I understood exactly how the system worked. And I figured people would find it interesting.

I already told you about the four steps of manipulation in Chapter 17. Unconscious manipulation, conscious manipulation, conscious non-manipulation. And the fourth, the top one: unconscious non-manipulation. When a person isn't manipulating and doesn't even notice it, because they simply don't need to anymore.

Well, this fourth step lives at the level of Talent.

Remember the system of levels Natasha showed me? There are eight in total.

The first four are the levels of consumption. Despair, Searching for Meaning, Pleasure, Awareness. Here, a person takes. Looks for what's useful to them. Even with the best of intentions, they're thinking about themselves first.

The next four are the levels of love. Or the levels of creation. Talent, then Genius, Sage, Creator. Here, a person gives.

Talent is the first step into love.

That's exactly what I'd drawn on the board that day. And the logic took me the rest of the way on its own. In MLM, we're moving toward the level of Talent so we can stop manipulating people. And Talent is already love. Which means our path in network marketing is a path toward love. A path where manipulation stops.

And that's how it slipped out: MLM is a path of love.

I understood later why the room went quiet.

For network marketing, this is almost a forbidden topic. The industry is full of manipulation. Companies manipulate. Leaders manipulate. Comp plans manipulate. Promotions, "only until the end of the month," stage stories about someone borrowing money to buy a qualification.

All of it is manipulating people. And none of it is about love.

And there I was, up on stage, saying our path is love. It came out sounding like I was talking about something cosmic. Something otherworldly that has nothing to do with network marketing at all.

Now let me be honest. Up on that stage, I talked about manipulation as if I'd been above it myself for ages.

And not that long before that, I'd been a steamroller.

At Morinda, I pitched noni juice to absolutely everyone. All the time, everywhere, whether it fit the conversation or not. I had zero self-control. No matter what the conversation was about, I'd steer it right back to noni juice.

Then came one of Marik's trainings. Natasha and I were already living together by then. Lunch, we're sitting at the same table, eating. And there I go again: noni juice, noni juice.

At Marik's training, everyone gave each other feedback. We were all training junkies there. And my fellow trainees let me have it:

"Enough already with your noni juice! How much more of it? You've talked our ears off."

It cut straight through me. I felt ashamed. It hurt.

But they didn't say it out of spite. They said it with real feeling. Like people who actually cared.

And it became a defining moment in my life. There's me before that lunch, and me after it.

In one second, I stopped shoving noni juice down people's throats. One piece of feedback, and the whole thing just stopped.

Something else lined up at the exact same time: I'd just heard about the system of manipulation from Natasha. And suddenly I saw myself in it. A steamroller flattening people — that's unconscious manipulation in its purest form.

Here's the funniest part. I'd been teaching people to do exactly the opposite for a long time.

Start with open-ended questions. Uncover the problem, the need. And only once the need is visible, offer a solution. And ask it this way: "If you'd like, I can tell you more."

I taught it. And then didn't follow my own instructions.

Recently, a guy named Denis suggested a phrase that works well to open any conversation:

"How can I be of help to you?"

I really love it. It shuts off the word vomit right away. You're not pushing anymore. Let the person ask what you can offer. And you answer their questions and respond to what they actually need.

I'm still switching myself over to this mode. I used to pitch everyone, no matter who. Now I listen. And I don't pitch everybody.

They were the ones who gave me the feedback at that table.

I was the one who stopped shoving it down people's throats.

I could have gotten offended. I could have decided my fellow trainees didn't understand the first thing about business. I could have kept flattening people. Nobody would have stopped me.

Love for people isn't a skill, and it isn't a sales technique. It's a choice. And you're the one making it, every single time.

At the end of the last chapter, I asked: what held forty-seven leaders together for years?

Definitely not the comp plan. The comp plan was exactly what had driven them out of their previous company — the company changed it, and people left. Not promotions. And not my juice.

Here's how I'd put it now: without love, nothing happens in this life. Whether you're talking to someone on Zoom or in person — if there's no love, nothing happens. No business gets built.

And back in Chapter 15, I left a question open. Where does state actually come from?

Here's how I see it now. It all lines up into a single chain:

Love → state → personal growth → growth system → check.

State is born out of love. State drives personal growth. Growth organizes itself into a system. And the check is simply what follows from everything above it.

Remember I told you the cut is who you've become, and state is the light passing through you right now? A diamond doesn't sparkle in the dark.

Well, love is exactly the source of that light.

Look how far from this I started out.

In Chapter 4, I was a strict leader. People were afraid of me. Then came the steamroller with the noni juice. Then, in Bali, arrows that drowned in Natasha's love. That's where I first felt that you don't have to deflect anger — you can dissolve it.

And in that same ocean, when I was drowning, I asked for forgiveness. Out of fear. Thirteen years later, I was crying with gratitude. Out of love.

My whole path in this book is a path from fear to love. I just didn't know what to call it for a long time.

That sentence didn't land with anyone at that conference. Years went by. And the world changed a lot.

These days, people are talking more and more about God, about love, about relationships between people.

In our big, close-knit team of partners, there's a Viktor. A different Viktor — not the one who drew circles for me back in Chapter 3. This Viktor sets an example of spiritual growth and lives his values openly. And he's got a saying of his own, one he came up with himself:

"I hand out the Wi-Fi of love."

He doesn't call it "MLM is a path of love." But that's exactly what he's doing.

Someone even suggested a new way to spell out MLM. Not multi-level marketing — multi-love marketing.

And only now do I truly understand what I said back then.

God is love. Which means moving toward God, knowing God, all spiritual growth — it's a path toward love. As you develop your personal and spiritual qualities, you're walking that path. Whether you want to or not.

And this isn't just about MLM. Any business is a path of love. Loving your customers. Helping people. Solving their problems, meeting their needs.

Network marketing is no exception.

You just can't get far anymore with the old methods, with manipulation alone. The world has changed dramatically. And everything works differently now.

What slipped out on that stage was something I didn't actually grow into myself until years later. Like the answer had been handed to me in advance, and I've had the rest of my life to make sense of it.

Even now, writing this, I get goosebumps.

Here's what I understood: MLM is a path of love. Manipulation takes, love gives. No business gets built without love. State is born out of love, and everything else grows out of state — the check included.

What does this mean for your business?

Check yourself honestly: are you a steamroller? Do you bring up your product whether it fits the conversation or not?

Start the conversation with a question, not a pitch. "How can I be of help to you?" And listen. Really listen.

Offer something only once you've seen a real need. And ask permission: "If you'd like, I can tell you more."

If someone gives you feedback that stings, don't rush to get offended. It might be the most valuable gift you get all year. Mine came to me over lunch.

If you're a leader, look at what you're using to hold your team together. Promotions, deadlines, the fear of missing a cutoff? That works only as long as you're pushing. Love holds, even when you're not watching.

And remember: you don't arrive at love once and for all. It's a path. I'm still on it.

Today I say it from the stage: "MLM is a path of love." But that path itself started long before that conference. With a few sheets of paper I once glued together and pinned to the bedroom curtains.

More on that in the next chapter.

The Poster on the Curtains

Blank printer paper, a tube of glue, and a fat marker.

I lay the sheets out on the floor and glue them edge to edge. It turns into a long paper banner, like something you'd carry at a rally. And I write one sentence on it, in big letters. In the present tense, as if it had already happened:

"I have an international business with Neways."

Then I take some pins and tack the banner straight onto the bedroom curtains.

Every night I fall asleep looking at those letters. Every morning I open my eyes and see them again.

This was 1994, back at the very beginning of my time with Neways. I picked up the idea from some trainer — I don't remember which one anymore. He said if you hang your dream where you can see it, it starts working.

I didn't know the word "intent" yet. Hadn't heard of Zeland, who I told you about in Chapter 14. But now I understand: that's exactly what it was. Intent. I wasn't dreaming about going abroad, and I wasn't hoping for it. I was certain I'd go and build the business in other countries. I just knew it. That's all.

Right now, writing this, I'm getting goosebumps. Whether I had them back then, I don't remember.

Why the poster had to be in the bedroom, specifically, I only understood years later. Half-asleep, drifting off or just waking up, the brain shifts into alpha rhythm. Remember, I told you about this in the chapter on intent? In those minutes, whatever you see bypasses the conscious mind and goes straight into the subconscious. And the subconscious is simple in how it works: whatever lands in it has to be made real.

Back then I didn't know any of this. I just pinned up the paper and got on with my life.

About a year went by, and then the news came: Neways was opening up Korea.

I was thrilled, of course. Oh, the poster's working!

I didn't know the finer details. But I immediately started looking for a way to get there. And what was I best at? Running newspaper ads. You already know that habit of mine from Chapter 3.

So I ran an ad. I don't remember the exact wording, but there was one key word in it: looking for Koreans.

And people actually called! A few turned up right in Petersburg. One man and I either met in person or just talked on the phone — that detail's slipped my memory. But the simple fact that I'd found a Korean in Petersburg felt like half the job already done.

Nothing much came of it. But I went to Korea anyway.

The company announced its first presentation, and I went.

And I was stunned. A huge crowd showed up. The company's own president came.

It turned out the market had already been in a pre-launch phase for a long time. Their own network of distributors had grown up there, long before I showed up.

That's when I understood something simple for the first time. A country never opens up out of nowhere. First a network grows quietly. Then the volume comes. And only once the company sees that volume does it open a warehouse and an office. And here I'd thought I'd be first.

I also didn't know the Korean market is one of the strongest in the whole network marketing world.

That trip cleared up a lot for me. It was my first real work abroad. And I left without ever figuring out how to find people there.

Later, the company announced the official launch. And I went a second time.

This time I said it straight out: I want to build the business here. Someone was even ready to sign up under me.

And that's when they explained it to me: the market was already divided up among Korean leaders. It was reserved for them. A foreigner couldn't sponsor a Korean branch.

Nobody had told me that from the start.

It really got me down. The Korean path hadn't worked.

But I didn't take the poster down. It kept hanging on the bedroom curtains, just like before.

Poland was next.

By then I understood better how international Neways worked. In some countries, the company operated through representatives. A representative like that kept their own warehouse, ran the entire local network on their own computer, and paid out commissions themselves. Something like a franchise.

The business came to Poland through Robert. He lived in Prague — his warehouse and his computer were there. The Czech Republic launched through him first, then Slovakia, then Poland.

And then the news: Poland was opening, and the office was already running in Wrocław.

I had a plan right away. Drive to Wrocław, meet the Polish director, pick up materials, presentations, paper contracts. Then head back to Warsaw, because there are more people in the capital. Rent a cheap apartment for about a month, as long as my visa would allow. Run an ad in Polish: "American cosmetics company, looking for outgoing people." And start building a network.

It was a good plan. The only problem was the enormous fear sitting inside me.

I was driving a beat-up old Mercedes back then.

There was barely any internet yet, but word was going around: cars get stolen in Poland. A lot of them. It's a whole business there — steal it, resell it, strip it for parts.

I was really afraid of this. Genuinely afraid.

But I gathered my courage, got my visa, and drove.

I cross the border at night. Clear the checkpoint, pull away, pick up speed.

And I feel my right foot shaking on the gas pedal. From fear. My whole body is trembling. It feels like any second now someone will attack me, rob me, take the car.

A few minutes past the border, I find a tiny little hotel. I stop. Leaving the car on the street is terrifying, but there's no other option.

In the morning I wake up, and the first thing I do is look out the window. The car's there. Hooray! Not stolen yet.

I made it to Warsaw.

And then the fun started. No GPS back then, just a paper map and road signs. I circle around the Warsaw ring road, looking for the exit to Wrocław. I drive out of the city and see the signs aren't pointing to Wrocław. They're pointing to Poznań.

I turn around. Circle through the city again. Drive out again. And again, the signs point to Poznań.

Only on the third try did I find the road to Wrocław.

Back then, Poznań just made me mad.

Everything went fine in Wrocław. The office director met with me and handed over the materials, presentations, and contracts.

And then he did something I never expected.

A foreigner couldn't buy a mobile phone back then. I told the director honestly: I need a phone, I'll be calling people, building a network. And he bought me a phone. In his company's name.

Even now, as I tell you this, I've got goosebumps again. A stranger, a company director, just had my back — simply because he was a decent human being.

I come back to Warsaw. Everything according to plan: buy the classifieds paper, start looking for housing.

I call about a listing:

"Is your listing still available?"

"No. Not anymore."

Next one. "Not anymore." And the next.

I was speaking Russian. Maybe people got spooked hearing Russian? I don't know.

Dusk is already falling. I make a few more calls right there on the street. Then I get into the car, into the back seat, to keep calling. I take out the phone.

And I see that both side mirrors are gone.

Taken right off.

There it is. It's started. The thing I was afraid of actually happened. Small-time, ordinary theft, sure, but I'm shaking, falling apart, a new wave of fear just swallows me whole.

In a state like that, decisions don't come from your head. That's it, I'm leaving the city, finding a place to sleep anywhere, as long as it's far away. The car was already facing the way out of town. So that's the way I went.

I drive and drive and drive. I watch the signs.

Poznań.

And then it dawned on me. So that's why I kept getting swept toward Poznań those first two times! It was a sign.

Today I'd call it a sign from the Universe. Back then I didn't use words like that. I'd just read a thin little book on Simoron — a Russian self-help/"magic" practice — and I told myself, "Oh, this is Simoron helping me."

About halfway to Poznań, I found a little hotel with a tall fence and a gate. That had become my main criterion for picking a place to sleep: a fence and a gate. I'd had my fill of fear.

In the morning, the car was still there, of course. And half the road to Poznań was already behind me.

And I realized: I'm not going back to Warsaw. I'm going where the road has already led me twice.

I arrive in Poznań in the evening. Same strategy: city map, newspaper, phone calls.

It's already late, nowhere to sleep. And suddenly one agency answers in Russian:

"Come on over, we'll help you out."

I drive to the address and realize it's a residential district. An ordinary apartment building, a regular entryway.

What kind of agency operates out of an apartment building? A new wave of fear. Falling apart, shaking. But there's nothing else to do. Whatever happens, happens.

I buzz the intercom, go up. And it really is an office — just a private one, right inside an apartment.

They offer me tea. Tell me about the options. And right away drive me over to show me one.

A room in an apartment. Everything's doused in cologne. An alcoholic lives in the next room — they told me straight out. And in the kitchen there are rows of jars of pickles, fresh, just sealed up. Basically, the vodka chaser was already standing by.

I say, "I'll think about it." Even though there was nothing to think about.

And the agents didn't take offense.

"No problem at all. Now we know you, we've seen you. Tomorrow we'll find you something good. For tonight, we'll put you up at a cheap little hotel — we know people there."

And they drove me there.

The next morning I went out to the front desk with my computer. I wanted to get online, check my email. There was no Wi-Fi back then — you connected through a regular wired phone line. I was trying to explain at the desk what I needed.

And a man was standing nearby. His name was Mieczysław. He was waiting for the hotel's manager. He'd already been waiting about an hour, and the manager still hadn't shown up.

I showed up instead.

Mieczysław spoke Russian. He started helping, explained at the desk what I needed. He helped me just because — out of pure kindness. And right away there was this good, human connection between us.

Then he drove me to the store for groceries. I invited him for tea. He happily agreed.

And, of course, I opened up my computer and showed him the presentation in Polish.

Mieczysław heard the whole thing out and said:

"You know, this is interesting stuff. But I've got my own business, and I'm not going to get into this. There's a woman I know, though. If she gets interested, you'll be a huge success."

Today, here's how I see it. The good Lord was leading me. The hotel manager never showed up for his meeting, and that's exactly why the two of us ended up at that front desk at that exact hour.

The woman's name was Bożena — a name that comes from the Polish word for God.

Mieczysław told me their story. After the war, two soldiers, friends, from Ukraine I think, were heading home through Poland. Both of them ended up marrying Polish girls. Mieczysław was born into one family, Bożena into the other. They weren't blood relatives, but they grew up like brother and sister. As the children of outsiders, they got called names. They had to live through rejection. They lived through it together and stayed friends for life.

A day later, we went to visit Bożena. She had her own house.

I open the computer again and start the presentation.

Five minutes in. Bożena stops me:

"Stop, please. Tell me — what's the highest rank you've reached in your company?"

I tell her. It's a very high rank.

"And what's the biggest check you've earned so far?"

"Fifteen thousand dollars."

"All right then, go on."

And that's when it hit me: this wasn't just some woman named Bożena in front of me. Only a leader asks questions like that.

She told me afterward that she'd been the number-one top leader at a different network marketing company. In all of Poland.

It surprised me. But I wasn't afraid of her. And we kept going.

Honestly, I started the presentation too early that time. I was still a green network marketer. Bożena did know I was coming with a presentation, though, so it all worked out fine.

But if I were doing it today, I'd just talk to the person first. Ask them a few things — who they are, what their life's about. Give trust time to grow. And get to the presentation only at the very end. Or maybe not until the next day.

Remember the question from the last chapter: "How can I be of help to you?" Back then, I didn't know it yet.

Bożena said she needed to run it by someone first. She'd give me an answer in a couple of days.

That person's name was Alexander. He took a pendulum — a little weight on a string — and swung it over our product catalog. And said: the products are good for you, the energy's good.

Bożena decided to join.

But she set a condition: "Then you join my business too."

I had no intention of running a different business. So I suggested this instead: my mom would sign up under her. It was a formality, but it satisfied Bożena.

We signed the contract on a special day. There was a solar eclipse that day.

Astrologers say it's better not to sign financial agreements on days like that. And Mieczysław and I spent the morning watching the eclipse through dark film strips he'd gotten ready especially for it.

After lunch, Bożena and I drove to Wrocław. She met the director. She liked everything she saw. And signed the contract right there.

That's how Bożena became my distributor. She was already a leader.

And then Bożena became famous all across Poland. She became the number-one person in Neways Poland.

My leader. My Bożena.

She'd often go up on stage and tell the story of how we met. And she always said the same line:

"I dreamed of taking my business to Petersburg. And Petersburg came to me all by itself. Right to my own doorstep."

The room never believed her. There was no way some guy from Russia had just shown up, met a top leader completely by chance, and now she was number one.

I'd sometimes speak to her distributors too. And I started coming to Poland about once a quarter. My commissions were paid out in złoty at the Wrocław office. I'd exchange them for dollars and take them out of the country myself, by train.

This went on for about five years. Bożena, as a top leader, generated huge volume, and I made a lot of money there.

And I learned a lot from her. Feng shui, for instance. Numerology. She's an incredibly powerful, strong leader.

And I learn from everyone.

And one more thing, the most astonishing part.

After a week in Poland, I already understood everything in Polish. After two weeks, I started speaking it.

For a long time I couldn't figure out how. Then the pieces fell into place.

I was born in Obninsk, near Moscow. And when I was just a week old, they were already taking me to Poland. My dad was stationed there, in Legnica — very close to Wrocław. There was a Soviet military base there.

My mom told me later that I had a Polish nanny. She had two kids of her own and two soldiers' kids she looked after. Most likely, she wasn't speaking to me in Russian.

Polish got wired into me from the cradle. And when, many years later, I drove into Poland with my foot shaking on the gas pedal, it turns out I hadn't come to a foreign country at all. I'd come back.

To this day, when I hear Polish being spoken, I understand it with total clarity.

Now let's step back and look at the whole story.

The poster on the curtains. Korea, where nothing worked out. Poland, where fear shakes me at every step: at the border, on the ring road, at the car with no mirrors, at the entryway of an apartment building. A road that stubbornly leads to Poznań, twice. A director who buys a stranger a phone. Agents who don't give up on me. Mieczysław, who waited an hour for someone who never showed. An eclipse on a day when you're not supposed to sign anything.

And at the end of it — number one in Poland.

Bożena used to say: "Petersburg came to my own doorstep."

Except Petersburg itself doesn't go anywhere. Somebody has to bring it — somebody with a foot shaking on the gas pedal.

Lots of people helped me. But I was the one who didn't take the poster down after Korea. I was the one who crossed that border at night. When the mirrors got stripped, I was the only one who could have turned around and headed home. And I was the one who turned toward Poznań too.

Here's what I understood: intent doesn't get canceled when the first door closes. It doesn't lead you where you planned to go — it leads you where someone's waiting for you. Your job: don't take the poster down, and don't kill the engine out of fear.

What does this mean for your business?

If something hasn't worked out for you — your first country, your first leader, your first team — don't rush to take your poster down. Korea wasn't a failure. It was the road to Poland.

Fear isn't a reason to stand still. I was scared almost the entire time. My foot was shaking, but it kept pressing the gas.

Notice the signs. If the road takes you somewhere you didn't plan on — and then does it again — maybe that's exactly where you should go.

Don't rush the presentation. The person comes first, the business second. I got lucky that Bożena forgave me for it. You might not get so lucky.

Don't be afraid of people stronger than you. When a top leader asks about your rank and your check, that's not a test designed to trip you up. That's a conversation between two leaders.

And learn from everyone. From the director, from the agents, from Mieczysław, from Bożena. Every one of them taught me something.

For five years, Poland kept the money coming. Then it ended in a single day.

Robert, that same middleman from Prague, decided to take the business for himself. The company itself handed him everything — every contact, every password, every wholesaler. And he started his own company. Repackaged the product, slapped on his own labels, arranged direct shipments from America. And the entire network switched over to him in an instant.

Neways simply dissolved there.

In the fall of 2003, I came to Poland for the last time. My contract with Bożena had ended. Looks like the eclipse worked after all.

But on my way out, Bożena told me about a new company. Morinda. Robert had taken her, along with the other Polish leaders, to this company's pre-launch in Europe, and deliberately showed it in a bad light to keep hold of his people. The leaders stayed with Robert. And honestly, inside, I was glad. I didn't want to sign up under Bożena.

I got home and went straight online. Studied the comp plan. It was nothing like Neways. And I got fired up. For three months I tried the noni juice on myself, on my family, on friends. And for the first time in my entire life in network marketing, people were asking me themselves: "Give us more, we're running out."

What happened next, you already know from Chapters 15 and 18.

And ever since, here's what I keep thinking about. A network that took years to build vanished in a single day. A company that had seemed so solid got dissolved from the inside. So what is a company, really, in this business of ours? And what's left for you when it disappears?

More on that in the next chapter.

The Setting

I spent five years building a network in Poland. It vanished in a single day.

A year later, at a different company, I was number one in Russia.

There's no miracle hiding between those two sentences. There's a question I've kept asking myself ever since. What got taken from me back then? And what couldn't be taken?

Robert walked off with the entire Polish network. He simply set up his own company, and people switched over to him. Wholesalers, leaders, volume, my commissions in złoty — all of it stayed there.

Here's what I took with me. I knew how to run newspaper ads. I knew how to build websites. I knew how to give presentations and run comp plan training. I knew how to get on a train and go see a stranger because I saw a leader in him.

Remember Chapter 18? I came to Morinda completely alone, not one person from my previous company. But my hands weren't empty. Everything I knew how to do, I brought with me.

Robert could take the network. He couldn't take me.

Jewelers have a word for it — the setting.

The setting holds the stone. Gives it a place, a shape, shows it off to people. It can be gold, it can be silver, or it can be cheap tin that tarnishes in a month. A good setting matters: it makes the stone look different, and you won't lose it.

But the stone is what sparkles. And if the setting breaks, you can take the stone out and put it in a new one.

In our business, the setting is the company.

I've been through a few settings in my life.

Herbalife, where it all started. Neways — nine years and my first million dollars. Morinda — my second million. Then years of trial and error. And today, MWR Life.

Twice I got lucky: I landed in a rising trend. The first time, when network marketing was just being born in Russia. The second time, when the new "super-juice" industry arrived here.

But I wasn't always lucky. And I'll tell you honestly about those "not always" times. They taught me more about the setting than both millions put together.

In Chapter 12, I wrote about it briefly: the business gone in a few months, the passive income dried up. I didn't tell you how that happened at the time. I'm telling you now.

Noni juice at Morinda was expensive. It still is. And copycat juices started showing up on the market — from Costa Rica, from Thailand. Good quality, and five times cheaper. My check started dropping.

And right around then, I got an offer to bring a new network marketing company into the market. A product-based one too. I said yes.

I went and did the honest thing — canceled my contract at Morinda. Burned my bridges, as they say. People had told me: never burn your bridges. I did it my own way.

For about a year, I was all in on this new company. Promoted it online, did everything I knew how to do.

And it never actually launched on the market.

The outcome was simple: I'd left Morinda, and I never got the new company off the ground. No old setting, and no new one.

Do I regret it? No. Everything happens for the best. But I did take a lesson from it.

A setting can tarnish on its own. The market changed, the product stopped being unique, and none of that was up to me. But burning my bridges and betting everything on a company that wasn't even on the market yet — that was my own decision.

Then came the years from 2015 to 2019. I was looking for work, considering companies, trying different things.

What companies those were, I honestly can't remember anymore. My brain's built that way — it clears out whatever's unnecessary on its own. What's left is the bottom line. I finally understood which companies I never wanted to choose again. My criteria crystallized.

And you know what? Even with those criteria, I still stumbled into another mess.

It was an investment company. I went there following a man who'd run his own network marketing company for nine years. He was so confident, and talked about it so well, that I believed him. Everything sounded beautiful. Everything was wonderful.

That company is still promising to return the money. I let go of it long ago and don't expect anything. The way I see it: I paid for the experience with cash.

Nobody's immune to getting conned. Not even someone who's been in network marketing his whole life and gives lectures on pyramid schemes himself. Sometimes they sing it so beautifully. They put on such a great show.

If you've also "paid for the experience" somewhere like this, don't beat yourself up over it. I've been there too.

And then came a mistake funnier than the first one. A mirror image of it.

Once everything about the investment company became clear, I asked that same man: so what's next? What are the options?

He named MWR Life.

I took a look and saw: a travel company. And something clicked inside right away: got it, I know exactly what this is. I'd studied network marketing companies in travel before. Their comp plans were really ugly, full of manipulation. Pyramid schemes disguised as network marketing. Exactly the kind of thing I can't stand.

So I branded MWR Life the exact same way. Without even checking.

Does this remind you of anything? "Polukhin, you're a black box." Take one look, slap on a label, and from then on the person lives with that label. Except this time, I was the one doing the labeling. On a company I'd never even laid eyes on.

And then that same man's ex-wife called me.

She told me about MWR Life. And reminded me how we'd once traveled together: I'd organized the trip, and she'd been the driver of one of the cars.

She suggested I look into the company. I told her straight out: that's a pyramid scheme disguised as network marketing.

"Fine," she said. "Maybe you'll change your mind. Let's meet with my mentor — let him tell you everything. Just listen."

I can at least listen, I figured. Nobody's charging money for that.

We met. The mentor showed me the comp plan, explained how everything worked. And the company turned out to be built completely differently.

I admitted I'd been wrong. I'd never actually analyzed it at all. I'd taken my past experience on faith and gone by a template.

I looked into it properly and joined. And I don't regret it one bit.

Look at these two mistakes side by side.

The first time, I trusted someone else's enthusiasm and didn't check. The second time, I trusted my own old experience and didn't check either.

Different mistakes. Same cause: I was waiting for someone else to do the checking. A friend who was so confident. Or my own old memory, which "already knows everything."

But only the person actually walking into a company can check it.

And then something happened that probably made the whole path worth walking.

One day I told myself: "I love network marketing. And I love traveling." Telling you this right now, and the goosebumps are back again.

That's something I love more than selling little jars of product.

At Neways, I sold supplements. At Morinda, noni juice. And the network that always built up around me was made up of people with some kind of health problem. They'd brag about their results, tell me what they'd been cured of. I was genuinely happy for them. But I understood: my product was for people in pain.

What I loved most at Morinda was the travel. The company organized trips, and because of my high rank, I got most of those trips for free. I saw a lot of countries as a straight-up gift from the company.

At MWR Life, all the pieces finally came together: network marketing and travel. For me, it's the optimal choice, and I'm really glad about it.

You choose the setting to fit your own stone. Not someone else's enthusiasm, and not your own old fear.

So how do you choose one?

I've got a whole lesson on this in my video course. I'll give you the main points here.

To start, you can picture every network marketing company as belonging to one of two pyramids.

The first pyramid: passive-income companies. I call them PICs. At the base of them: an innovative product and a mission that's inseparable from that product. The product genuinely helps people. The comp plan is built to get that benefit to customers. And money comes last.

The second pyramid: pyramid schemes disguised as network marketing. Disguised pyramids, for short. Their founders build the company with one goal: collect as much money from people as possible. The comp plan doesn't pay for product — it pays for collecting money. The product exists as a smokescreen; the distributors themselves often don't even use it. I've seen plenty of people who ended up in debt after one or two companies like this.

By my own estimate, the volume in the network marketing industry splits roughly in half between these two pyramids. That's staggering.

This is my own personal classification. Which one you want to be in is up to you.

Companies also come in different ages. By growth stage, I split them into five categories.

Money games. A sharp launch, huge volume, and a sharp crash. They last two to three years. People go in knowingly — their own representatives call them "high-risk projects." And the leader goes back through their contact list from scratch every single time, and their reputation drops a little more with each round.

Old companies. Explosive growth is long behind them. Huge stadiums, the feel of a big, powerful machine. Except you're sitting in the stands, not on the stage. To break through to the stage, you have to be a superleader.

Sluggish companies. Little-known, small volume. People stumble in by chance and stay because they like the product. These are companies for customers.

Direct-sales companies. Seasonality and selling. You sell, you get income. You don't sell, you don't. This is a job — there's no passive income to speak of.

Young, growing companies. Three to five years on the market. Years from now, they'll become those same old giants. These are companies for leaders, for people who want big money and passive income. You catch the growth and become part of its story.

And all of that is fine. Some people need the crowd, some just want a good product, some love selling, some love risk. The main thing is knowing where you're going and why.

Say you want passive income in the right company. What should you look at?

In my lesson, I lay out five elements of a passive-income company. I'll name four of them here.

First — the product. Is it unique? And does it suit you, your own soul? I, for one, got tired of little jars and supplements. Today, supplements are sold in pharmacies and regular stores — they're not unique to network marketing companies anymore.

Second — the founders and management. How forward-thinking are the founders? Are they growing the business online? These days, if you're not online, you're not in business.

And the simplest, most interesting question of all: what kind of people they are.

A website, a presentation, slick videos can all be bought. A person can't be faked. When you meet the founder in person, stand next to them, hear them talk, you feel them. Their energy. Their love. Or the lack of it. The body doesn't lie.

I've talked with a lot of founders. Some literally glow with the energy of wanting to help people. Warm, open. When money comes up, they say: "I didn't build this company for the money." They make money, of course. But something else sits underneath it.

And others have dollar signs in their eyes. And you can see it, even when the words sound exactly right.

Here's what can give away a person who's indifferent to people. Know this before you ever meet them.

In the voice — a chill. Even when they're joking and smiling. The tone is flat, routine. When they talk about rank-and-file distributors, a flash of contempt slips through, and when they talk about rules and promises, cynicism.

In the energy — indifference. They're not curious who's in front of them. Next to them, you feel the calculation: to them, people are wallets.

In the eyes and the body — arrogance. They look down on you, over people's heads. And those same dollar signs in their eyes.

And here's how a founder who loves people comes across.

In the voice — warmth, no rush at all.

In the energy — genuine interest in you. They listen, they ask questions. You feel calm around them, and you don't want to leave.

In the eyes and the body — openness. They light up when they talk about the product and about people. And about money — almost in passing.

That's why meeting the founder in person matters so much. It clears up a great deal. If there's an event where they're speaking — go. Stand nearby. Listen to more than just the words. Listen to yourself.

Third — the engagement system. New people are needed everywhere. What matters is that there's an engagement system, and that it's honest: through social media, through friendly conversation, without manipulation.

Fourth — team, community, club. People who share your values, like-minded people at your shoulder. Without that, there's nothing to lean on.

If even one of these four is missing, the business won't be solid. Great product, right strategy, a team in place — but no engagement system, and the business doesn't grow.

And don't rush. Dig deeper. Do the analysis. I got burned twice precisely because I rushed.

And the fifth element?

Remember the movie The Fifth Element? Everything was assembled — the stones, the temple, the heroes. And it was the fifth one that saved the world.

It's the same for me. The fifth element is the main one. Without it, the first four don't add up to a picture, even when every one of them is in place.

I won't name it here. Hang on a little longer.

I'll just say this much. Say your friend got into the right company at the right time and has passive income today. And you don't. Same company. Same product. Same comp plan. Why?

The answer to that question is the secret. The secret of the black box, and the secret of success in MLM. You'll find out soon.

I have to be honest about the setting: sometimes it's the deciding factor.

In Korea, the market was divided up before I ever got there, and no amount of trying could get a foreigner in. In Poland, the company itself handed the market to a middleman. Copycat noni juices cost five times less. And in a pyramid, you lose money and reputation no matter who you are.

A good setting holds the stone securely. A bad one can lose it. So choose wisely.

And when the setting does break, here's what's left for you. Skills. Reputation. Remember how Sasha "sold" me to Mark as honest and decent? People who believe in you. And the cut — who you've become.

That travels with you from ring to ring.

Here's what I understood: a company is a setting. Take your time choosing it — with your head, your eyes, and your body — to fit your own stone. But the stone is what sparkles. And you're the one who carries it from setting to setting.

What does this mean for your business?

Stop looking for the magic company. It doesn't exist. I looked. I know.

Check it yourself. Don't take anyone's word for it — not someone else's enthusiasm, not your own old experience. Both of them cost me dearly.

Go see the founder. Stand next to them. Listen to the voice, the energy, your own body.

Choose a product that speaks to you. You can sell something you don't love, but not for long.

Don't drag your contact list from company to company. With every switch, you're spending not just their trust, but your own name.

And before you change the setting, look at the stone. If your check has stalled, maybe the problem isn't the company at all?

The right column is what you bring to people every single day. In any company.

For many years, I chased people like an archer after his targets. Ads, calls, a script I threw out after two days. Then I understood there was another way. You can become the person people come to on their own. Like a street lamp in the dark.

More on that in the next chapter.

The Light Bulb

Tatyana found me on her own.

A year and a half ago, I built a website. I worked on it for a long time, wrote it with care, fussed over the design, put up my own photo. Then I set it up for search. It's called SEO, Search Engine Optimization. Simply put, someone searches for something on Google, and Google shows them your page.

That's how Tatyana found me. We connected, and by the next day she was ready to sign up.

I didn't do anything to make that happen. Didn't call, didn't talk her into it, didn't handle a single objection. We just talked, friend to friend, and got to know each other.

Afterward she told me: "I read your site, saw your photo. And that was it. Total trust. I knew: there's my sponsor."

Someone showed up already knowing everything about me. Honestly, it felt wonderful.

Now remember how this usually goes in network marketing.

You join a company, and the first thing your sponsor says is: "Make your contact list." Then they hand you a script. You call down the list and invite people to a meeting.

The list runs out fast — nobody has that many contacts. Then the cold contacting starts: social media, the street, events, calling strangers. Same pattern. Call, introduce yourself, ask a few questions, invite them.

Ask yourself a simple question. Who starts that contact — you, or the person you're calling?

You do. You picked them, you dialed the number, you're aiming your pitch straight at them. To you, they're an objective. Plainly put — a target.

Picture an archer. He shows up with his bow, sets up his targets, and shoots. The target never called him over. Nobody's standing out in a field with a sign that says "take a shot at me."

Now put yourself in the target's place. You're living your life, everything's fine. And suddenly a call. Someone you haven't heard from in ages reads something off a piece of paper and asks you to check out a link. You never asked for this. First thought: here we go — somebody's trying to unload something on me again.

It hurts to be the target. And if the archer keeps shooting, again and again, aiming dead center every time, it hurts more and more.

I got a taste of this myself once.

It happened at an open-air clothing market in Moscow. I'd gone there for jeans. And every single vendor there was an archer, and I was the target. They'd drag me into their stalls, push merchandise on me. Nobody asked what I actually needed. I'd say "jeans," and they'd start piling everything on me. I'd say "blue," and they'd offer light blue.

It felt awful. I was being pushed. I was being wounded.

I left without buying anything.

That's exactly how someone leaves when you call them out of nowhere and push something on them. Maybe politely, maybe not — but they leave. And they remember your number for a long time.

Now, the script deserves a word of its own. People often confuse it with shooting, but it's not the same thing.

In Chapter 3, I told you about running newspaper ads. I didn't have a word for it back then, but that was the light bulb too. The ad shone in the paper. The person opened the paper themselves, read it themselves, and called me themselves. I wasn't aiming at anyone.

They gave me the script so I'd know what to say to whoever called. For the first two days, I read it into the phone in a shaky voice. I was doing this for the first time in my life. Hadn't learned yet what to say, hadn't learned to ask people questions. I was afraid of making a mistake. On the third day, I threw the script away and started talking in my own words.

A script is a cheat sheet for a beginner. You need it while you still don't know how. Let a beginner read off the paper at first and not overthink it, and once they've got their footing, let them throw it away. Those two days helped me.

A cheat sheet, by itself, doesn't shoot at anyone. The shooting starts when you use it to call people who never asked for the call.

Same thing with the street. At Neways, I used to go out and survey people on the street. I'd walk up, ask them to answer a few questions, talk, invite them. The results were slim. But I did figure out what it's actually for.

The street is training for beginners. Working through your fears: fear of people, fear of approaching them, fear of rejection.

That's why I never went alone. I always brought one of my distributors along as a partner. I'd approach the first passerby while my partner stood next to me and listened to how I did it. For the next one, they'd approach while I stood by, cheering them on. The main thing I wanted to show them was this: it can be done.

Remember the guy who was afraid to pick up the phone? A few years later, he was taking beginners out onto the street and teaching them not to be afraid of people. Today, I can strike up a conversation with anyone, about anything, without a second thought.

And here's what I noticed back then. I could stand next to someone, show them, cheer them on. But the step toward a stranger — my partner had to take it themselves. Nobody could take it for them. Not even me.

And shooting stays shooting. Fast, but short-lived. It hurts people, and nobody likes being pressured. The contact list dries up, and your name carries less weight with every shot.

There's another way. I call it the light bulb method.

Picture this: night. An empty street. Suddenly the power goes out across the whole city. Pitch black, can't see a thing. And in just one street lamp, a bulb is still burning — it's got its own power source. The lamp lights up a small patch of ground, but you can see that light from far away.

And down the street walks a person. They're looking for a particular house, holding a slip of paper with the address on it. No phone. Darkness all around. And then they spot the lamp in the distance.

"There it is! That's the light I need!"

They walk toward it themselves. Come up, check their paper, find their way. And they say to the lamp: "Thanks for being here right when I needed you."

The lamp never ran after them. There was just a bulb burning inside.

So what is this light, exactly?

It's what you know. Your experience, your stories, everything you have to share. Something useful, and nobody's forcing it on anyone. Whoever needs it comes on their own.

And here's another difference. The archer picks targets — specific people. The bulb shines on everyone nearby. Not everyone needs your light. Let them walk on by — that's fine. But the ones who do need exactly you will see you.

Bulbs come in different kinds, too. When I was shooting video, I needed daylight-white bulbs for the studio. I didn't buy the warm ones — they wouldn't have worked for me. It's the same with us: everyone shines with their own light. And the people who come to you are the ones who need exactly that kind.

Someone notices you and walks straight over. Someone else gets a little curious and takes a couple of steps. People come closer and warm themselves. They like what you're giving them, they like your energy. And one day the person is ready to talk, on their own.

And now the most important part. Remember Chapter 15? People hear your state far more than your words. A diamond doesn't sparkle in the dark: the cut is who you've become, and the light is what's passing through you right now. And remember Chapter 19: the source of that light is love.

The light bulb is you. The newspaper, the website, the book, the video — they just help your light reach people. What actually shines is what's inside.

Maybe that's why my website worked back then. I wrote it with love, and it came out warm. Tatyana felt that warmth before either of us had said a single word to each other. Remember Chapter 4? People see you before they hear you. She saw me in a photo and read my stories. That was enough.

At first, the light bulb is small. It runs on a single AA battery.

You've taken your first steps, understood something, learned something. That's already something you can share. Maybe there's just one person next to you, your first partner, still working the old way. Your light bulb can already shine for them.

Next, the battery needs charging. Learn, go to trainings, read books. But knowledge by itself doesn't charge anyone. Until you start actually trying things, it doesn't do much good. You try, you make mistakes, you try again — and the charge grows. Then you can switch on a stronger light.

And the most powerful light of all is a searchlight. It shines very far — even into other countries. That searchlight is the internet. People show up there every day looking for information. If your light isn't there, they won't find you.

I learned this firsthand in 2004. I came to Morinda completely alone. For a few weeks I ran newspaper ads, held presentations, and nobody signed up. My light bulb was too small. So I built a website. I wrote about the company there, and about myself.

That's how Dima from Novosibirsk found me. In Chapter 18, I told you how my team started with him. Here's what I left out back then: Dima came on his own. I wasn't aiming at him. I didn't even know he existed. He saw my light from Novosibirsk and reached out: interesting, tell me more.

Twenty years stand between Dima and Tatyana. The internet has become something completely different in that time. But light is still light: a person sees it from a distance and comes on their own. You just have to let people know you're there. And shine.

What's the most powerful searchlight today? Let me tell you how I do it myself.

First — a book about yourself.

When someone reads your book, it's just the two of you talking. You tell your stories, they listen. They learn your stories, see what conclusions you drew, how you acted. They see the wins, and also the failures and the weak spots. And without meaning to, they compare: "I did that too. I had failures too. And wins too."

That's exactly what you're doing right now. You've read all the way to Chapter 22 and know more about me than a lot of people who've known me for years. About the black box, the trolleybus, the mustache, the cockroaches in the dorm, the time I nearly drowned.

Almost nobody writes books anymore. Everyone thinks it's hard. I thought so too.

For years, a book was just a dream for me. I imagined I'd need someone to interview me, over and over, process it all, edit it, and write the book for me. In my own words. And I understood that wouldn't happen anytime soon. I told you about that intent in Chapter 14.

And it came true in a completely different way. Today there's artificial intelligence. I speak my stories into my phone, and an AI turns them into text. Adds the punctuation, helps pull out the meaning, rephrases here and there. But it's my voice. My stories. I read the finished chapter and I'm amazed at how beautifully it's written. And I realize: yes, that's what I said.

So writing a book isn't hard. I'm living proof.

Second — short videos.

Reels on Instagram, Shorts on YouTube, TikTok, Clips on VK. Different names, same thing.

Why these, specifically? They don't just get shown to your own followers. If you've got ten followers, or a hundred, that's not much. But when people like a video, they share it, and the platform picks it up and keeps showing it to more and more new people. People start recognizing you.

People love watching short videos. The main thing is to shoot it so there's a hook in the first few seconds and people watch to the end. And once you've got a book, you've already got your material — you just retell episodes out of it. And at the end you say: more on this in my book.

You can't say much in a short video. All you can do there is get them curious. Where someone really gets to know you is in the book.

Third — getting to know each other.

After the book, the person wants to meet you in real life. Or online, if you're in different cities. They already know you, so the conversation feels friendly from the very first minute. Like it did with Tatyana and me.

Fourth — a tour of the business.

You can offer this after the book. No pressure at all, just as a suggestion. The person's already asking on their own: so what company are you with? Maybe they're looking for somewhere to go themselves right now.

And then here's what happens.

People don't choose a company. People choose a person. If they've read your book and chosen you, they're simply curious where you work.

Remember the setting from the last chapter? They look at it themselves, with their own eyes, by their own criteria. If the setting suits them, and the diamond sparkles and they like it, they've got no questions left. They see the whole piece of jewelry at once: the stone and the setting together.

And they write to you: "I want in."

Nobody shot at anybody. One person was shining. The other walked toward the light.

And one last thing. You can hire someone to build you a website. Someone will help you with the book. Someone will shoot your videos. Everything your light travels through, other people can help you build.

But nobody can charge your battery for you. A street lamp can't drag anyone over to it. And nobody can make the bulb inside it burn, either. Only you can do that.

Here's what I understood: the archer looks for targets, but people find the light bulb on their own. Targets get hurt; people warm themselves by the light. You can learn to shoot straighter in a week; learning to shine brighter takes a lifetime. And you shine with who you've become. The book and the website just carry that light further.

What does this mean for your business?

If you're a beginner, don't be embarrassed by the cheat sheet. Read off the paper until you've got your footing, then throw it away.

Don't call people who never asked you to. Put yourself in the target's place and feel what that's like.

Go out on the street like it's training — for the courage, not for the recruits. And bring a partner along.

Stop chasing everyone down. Your light isn't for everybody, and that's fine.

Charge your battery: learn, and try things right away. Knowledge without practice doesn't shine.

Get online. If you're not there, nobody will find you.

Write your own book. Put your failures in it too. That's exactly where the reader recognizes themselves.

And let people choose you first. They'll choose the company after.

I know what you're thinking right now. Maybe even saying out loud.

"Easy for you to say. You've got thirty years of experience and two million dollars. I'm not a writer. I'm not a salesperson. Everyone's turned me down. I'm too late. I'm not like you."

I've heard those "buts" hundreds of times. And I used to say almost every one of them to myself.

The next chapter is about them.

Easy for You to Say

It was 1993. A dental clinic on Nevsky Prospekt, the head doctor's office. Viktor draws a little circle on a sheet of paper and says, "This is you."

Underneath it, he draws three more circles. "And these are three people you'll tell about the product."

And in my head, right away, one after another, came three "buts."

I'm not a salesperson.

I don't know how to talk to people.

I don't have any contacts.

All three were true. I didn't know how to sell, and I was afraid to. I was afraid to speak in front of people too. And I didn't have many contacts. I made a list later, and it had five people on it. Five. They ran out in no time.

If someone had asked me that day whether this guy was going to make it in network marketing, I'd have been the first to say no.

At the end of the last chapter, I guessed what you were thinking: "Easy for you to say. You've got thirty years of experience and two million dollars."

Well. When those circles were being drawn for me, I had no experience, no money, no contacts. I had three "buts" in my head. Probably the exact same ones you have right now.

Then Viktor drew a second row. Under each of the three circles, three more. Nine people. And he explained: I wouldn't be the one telling those nine. The three would. I didn't need to find them, talk them into anything, or sell them anything.

All I needed to find was three.

That's when it clicked for me. I told myself: "Well, I can probably manage to tell three people somehow. I don't know how — but I'll learn."

My "buts" didn't go anywhere. I didn't defeat them or argue them down. I just added two words to them: I'll learn. Today I'd put it differently, in Vera's words from Chapter 17. I didn't change myself. I added myself a new option to choose from.

Now let's go through your "buts." All of them, every one I've heard in thirty years. I said almost every single one of them to myself at some point too.

"I'm not a salesperson"

I wasn't one either.

Before network marketing, I used to solder caller-ID phones and sell them myself at the market. I didn't like it. I was afraid to sell. Sometimes those phones just got taken from me, and it was scary and painful. I had my own business, but honestly, I didn't own the business — the business owned me.

That's exactly why those circles hooked me. There was no selling involved. People buy the product from the company, for themselves. All I had to do was tell them about it. Selling and telling are two very different things.

And in the last chapter, you saw you don't even have to go first. You can shine, and people come to you on their own.

"I don't know how to talk to people"

I didn't either.

For the first two days, I read the script into the phone in a shaky voice. A few years went by, and at a training at the Academy of Leadership, the trainers would yell at me: "Polukhin — sit!" Because I kept jumping onto the stage first, and there was suddenly too much of me.

And this book, I'm talking it into my phone.

You learn to talk. First from a script, then without one.

"I don't have any contacts"

Five people on the list. All five said no.

Then I found people through newspaper ads. Ten years later, through a website. Today, through the internet, and through this book.

Everyone's contact list runs out eventually. People never do.

"Everyone said no. My family tells me to drop it"

Remember my birthday from Chapter 3? Nine days after my first contract, right there at the celebration table, I gave my first presentation. My relatives laughed me out of the room.

You might ask: and later? Once the checks started coming, once there was that first million — did their attitude change?

No. It didn't.

I took the simpler route. Instead of changing my relatives' attitude, I replaced my relatives. With a different set — ones who have a normal attitude toward network marketing. That's my new family now: my wife and her relatives.

So there — I've cracked open the door to something personal. I barely talk about my private life in this book. The book has a different job to do.

My advice is simple. Don't spend years trying to win your family over. Sometimes they'll never believe you. Find the people who do. A mentor, a team, people you don't have to justify yourself to. At Happy People Network, that's exactly how we put it about ourselves: one big, strong family.

"I'm too late"

I said that one too. In 2004, when I joined Morinda.

The company had already been in Russia for a year. The top leaders were already in place. That ship has sailed, I thought. I'd never be first here. And for a few weeks, I was in a slump.

Then I told myself, in the present tense: "I am number one in Russia." A year after I joined Morinda, I was number one in Russia by check size. I told you all about this in Chapter 15.

You can miss the boat. You can't miss your own life.

"I'm already fifty. Sixty. Too late to start"

When people tell me this, here's how I answer.

It feels that way to you because somewhere inside, you've programmed yourself to die at eighty. In that case, sure, it's too late to start. Or maybe it wasn't even you who programmed it. Maybe somebody else put it there.

And here's a hypothesis of mine. You've probably heard this one going around these days. In a few more years, artificial intelligence will be running at full power and will find ways to extend life and reverse aging. And people might live to a hundred and twenty, a hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred years. At that point, fifty or sixty is practically adolescence.

That's still just a hypothesis. But look at what's already happened right in front of me.

For years I dreamed about a book and couldn't figure out who would write it for me. I pictured someone interviewing me for ages and then writing it all up in my own words. I barely believed it would happen. And today, I talk my stories into my phone, and an AI turns them into chapters. You're reading Chapter 23 right now. Five years ago, nobody would have even imagined this.

We don't know what's coming tomorrow. We can only guess. So why bury yourself ahead of time?

"No money to start. No time"

These two "buts" are the ones I hear most. Thirty years running.

Usually it's the person working a salaried job who says it. Staying late, earning peanuts, barely making ends meet. Where would they get the money or the time?

To people like that, I just say: "Congratulations. Yes, you've got no money and no time. And it's not going to work out for you, because that's what you've decided. That's your choice. I'm not going to argue with you."

With an entrepreneur, I ask a question instead. Has there ever been a time in your life when you suddenly had to buy something, right now, and you had no money? How did you make it work?

And they always remember. They came up with something, found it somewhere, made a deal with someone. An entrepreneur always finds the money when they really need it.

Think of your own moment like that too.

And time is where it gets even more interesting. An entrepreneur has no free time at all. Everything's booked: tasks, meetings, negotiations. But they know their own schedule. So they can shift this, move that, and carve out an hour or two for their network marketing business.

Someone on salary, meanwhile, actually does have free time. They come home from work and rest. The only thing is, they find it hardest of anyone to organize themselves. They're used to doing nothing after work.

But don't rush to file yourself under "employee" and close the book.

An entrepreneur isn't a job title. It's a stance you choose. Someone on a salary who spends their evening looking for an hour to put into their own thing is already an entrepreneur. And a business owner who says "I have no time" is, in that moment, thinking like an employee.

Plenty of people in network marketing just buy the product for themselves, and that's fine. But it's entrepreneurs who build the business here. Which stance you pick is up to you.

"Everybody in MLM is a scammer"

I won't lie: there's manipulation in network marketing. I've fallen for it myself.

At Herbalife, I borrowed money to buy myself a qualification, and I nearly ended up without a roof over my head. That was Chapter 17. And years later, I followed someone I trusted into an investment company and paid for the experience in cash. That was Chapter 21.

Let me tell you about one more manipulation. A classic of the genre — you've probably seen it yourself.

A sponsor announces a promotion. Meet the requirements, get a gift. And the real masterstroke is a raffle. One gift, raffled off among everyone who met the requirements.

A hundred people met them. One got the gift. Ninety-nine walked away with nothing.

So what was the point of all that effort? If you're going to announce a promotion, give the gift to everyone who earned it.

But even when everyone gets a gift, there's still another question worth asking: who actually needs this promotion?

Usually, the sponsor. They're short on volume to hit a new qualification. So they hand over some of their own money for gifts, to get people doing more. And people never meant to do more in the first place. Everyone had their own pace. Some just wanted to work quietly through the internet, through content, shining like in the last chapter.

And then the sponsor starts pumping them up: "Come on, come on!" And the person gets thrown off their own pace. Overdoes it. Picks up a bow and starts shooting at targets. And sometimes they start pressuring other people too.

I don't like promotions like that. It's deliberate manipulation. And the person being manipulated usually doesn't even notice.

Now you know. And you'll notice.

There's another side to this too. In Chapter 21, I told you how I branded a company a pyramid scheme myself, without even looking inside. That was MWR Life, the company I work at now. Slapped on the standard label, and that was that.

So "everybody in MLM is a scammer" is just as much a label as "everybody here is honest." Some people scam, some don't. You'll have to check for yourself.

"I'm not like you"

True. You're not. And you don't need to be.

That day in the clinic, I didn't become a different person. The shy guy stayed exactly where he was. I just gave him one more option: tell three people.

And in Chapter 6, I told you that every person has a jewelry box of diamonds inside them. The rough diamonds inside you are yours, not mine. No need to copy me. You're the one who'll do the cutting.

"I've got nothing to tell. I don't have anything of value"

I hear this one constantly. No results. No big organization, no big check. Nothing exciting happening in my life. What would I even hook people with on social media?

And the person stays quiet for years. Never says a word about themselves, stays invisible. And then wonders why they "don't have people."

Remember the light bulb from the last chapter? If you've decided you've got nothing to shine with, you just never switch it on.

But there's plenty to shine with. You've got you. Your wins and your failures. The lessons life has taught you. Your values, your knowledge. People find that interesting — trust me.

The trouble is, you can't see it from the inside. A person stays caught up in the daily grind and doesn't notice what they've actually got.

To see all of it, you have to pull it out of yourself. That kind of work is called unpacking. You get asked questions, lots of them, and you answer.

In the old days, people filled out a long questionnaire for this. Slow and boring. People kept their answers short because nobody wants to write a lot. And what to do with those answers afterward was never clear.

Today, artificial intelligence asks the questions. And you answer out loud, like you're talking to a friend.

I went through this kind of unpacking myself. Answered out loud, question after question. And I often noticed: while I was talking, I started understanding things I'd never seen before.

On one question, the goosebumps hit so hard I had to stop. I suddenly saw something simple. I've been telling people stories my whole life. Someone asks me something, and instead of advice, I tell a real-life story. Mine, or one of my partners'.

There it was — my value. It had been with me the whole time. I just hadn't noticed it.

This very book grew out of unpacking sessions like that one.

And then artificial intelligence gathers your answers into a single document. Out of it come posts, short videos, even a book. About you, in your own words.

So "I've got nothing to tell" is a label too. You just haven't looked inside your own jewelry box yet.

"I'm not a writer"

Neither am I. I talked this whole book out loud. You already know how that works from the last chapter.

When partners came to me with their own "buts," I always gave them the same answer. Half joking, half dead serious:

"Of course it's not going to work out for you. That's what you decided, after all."

Because everything turns out exactly the way you decide it will. Decide it'll work, and it works. Tell yourself "it won't work out for me," and it won't. It's really that simple.

Remember how I got called a black box back in seventh grade? Someone stuck that label on me once, and I wore it for years.

It's the same with objections. "Not a salesperson," "too old," "no time," "too late." These are labels on the lid of the jewelry box. Except nobody stuck these particular labels on you. You put them there yourself.

Here's what I understood: an objection is a label a person sticks on themselves. It locks the jewelry box tighter than any padlock. And it can only be taken off from the inside.

What does this mean for your business?

When a partner tells you their "but," don't argue with it. Agree: "Of course it won't work out, since that's what you've decided." Let them hear themselves from the outside.

Instead of arguments, tell your own story. How you were scared, didn't have the skills, didn't know a thing. It's hard to argue with a story. It's easy to recognize yourself in one.

Ask the entrepreneur about the time they needed money fast. They'll find the answer themselves.

Don't spend years trying to win your family over. Find your own people.

Before you throw yourself into a promotion, ask yourself: who actually needs this? Me, or my sponsor?

If it feels like you've got nothing to tell, go through an unpacking. You'll be amazed how much is in there.

And don't bury yourself ahead of time. Not at thirty, not at sixty.

Now take another look at your list. Or at all the "buts" from this chapter.

"I'm not a salesperson." "I don't know how to talk to people." "I don't have any contacts." "I'm too late." "I'm too old." "I've got nothing to tell." "I'm not like you."

Did you notice which word almost every single "but" starts with?

I didn't notice it myself for a long time. Not until years later. And I realized that word had been right in front of my eyes the whole time. Just like the secret of the black box.

That's what the next chapter is about.

The Secret Element

Dad, Anatoly. Mom, Galina.

This book started with them. I'll start the chapter on the secret element with them too.

When I was talking the first chapter out loud, I was just remembering. My father walks out into a storm, and I wait for him on the shore for two hours. My mother gives up her one and only apartment to my brother and me, and ends up with no place of her own. The book is written now, and I see more in those memories than I did then.

They put more into me than anyone. Through their genes and their personalities. Through their skills and abilities. Through the way they carried themselves in this world. Through their care and their love.

My father's fearlessness and his ease with people. My mother's ability to give away everything she had. The staff newsletters she put together, her speeches on stage. All of it came alive in me later: at the school cross-country race, at a border crossing at night, on the stage at the Academy, in looking after my team.

I'm their continuation — the fruit of the two of them. Like they say, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

In Chapter 1, I wrote: "It wasn't the genes working on their own." I stand by that. The genes didn't work by themselves. But I'd have had nothing to cut if my parents hadn't put that rough diamond inside me.

Dad, Mom — thank you.

Twenty-three chapters behind us. Let's walk this path once more — briefly, and in order. Just the main thing I understood from each.

And one last point. This is the reason I wrote this book.

The secret element of success in MLM — and in life as a whole — is inside your own black box, and it opens through knowing yourself and your true nature.

At the end of the last chapter, I asked you: did you notice which word almost every "but" starts with?

"I'm not a salesperson." "I don't know how to talk to people." "I'm too late." "I'm not like you."

The same one. "I."

Now remember the turning points of this book. Who took the decisive step in each one?

The trainer only gave the assignment. I was the one holding the razor.

Mark and Sofia helped me get that box out. But I was the one who opened it.

The stage was the same for everyone. But the one who went up was whoever decided to go up.

The answer was already inside me before I'd even walked up to Marik with my question.

The slump was mine. And I was the one who found the way out of it too.

Vera gave me the words, but I was the one holding the pen.

They were the ones who gave me the feedback at that table. I was the one who stopped shoving it down people's throats.

And I was the one who turned toward Poznań.

Robert could take the network. He couldn't take me.

Every time, the same "I." Except in a "but," it closes the jewelry box. Here, it opens it. Which "I" you say is up to you.

In Chapter 14, I asked a question and left it unanswered. When I was looking at someone else's passport, there was no Zeland standing next to me. When I joined Morinda, nobody told me I'd be number one. And with that stone on my heart, there was nobody next to me at all. So who was doing this, every single time?

Now you know.

In Chapter 21, I promised to name the fifth element. Remember the movie? Everything was in place, and it was the fifth one that saved the world.

I also asked you there: your friend joins the right company at the right time and gets passive income, and you don't. Same company, same product, same comp plan. Why?

The fifth element is you. In my very first video lesson, years ago, that's exactly what it was called: "I."

You and your friend have the same company. But each of you has your own black box.

I've been through more than a hundred trainings. Then I spent years leading trainings and presentations myself. And from the other side of the stage, I understood something I now consider one of the most important things in my life:

No one can teach anyone anything. A person learns on their own — if they want to.

A trainer can give an assignment. A teacher can point the way. A sponsor can draw you some little circles. But the box only opens from the inside.

That's why LifeSpring worked on almost everyone there, but not on all of them. That's why Natasha's coaching didn't work on me, even though she lived under the same roof as me. That's why four cohorts of the Millionaires' Club never cleared out my mother's script, the one that had been sitting in me since childhood. It sat deeper than knowledge. Somewhere no trainer can reach, unless you go there yourself.

At first I thought this was the secret of network marketing. Then I understood: it's bigger than that. It's the secret of life.

You've probably heard phrases like these. "Know yourself." "Know your own nature." "All the answers are inside us."

Where are those answers, exactly? Simple: in your black box.

So how do you open it?

First, let me tell you what I believe.

I'm absolutely certain: nothing that happens in my life happens by accident.

God doesn't have a mouth. He can't say to me, "Andrey, do it this way." So I believe God speaks to me in a different language.

That language is goosebumps. It's tears of joy and happiness. And it's the events and circumstances of my life — everything that happens to me.

You already know about the goosebumps and the tears from Chapter 15. The yogi my mom and I once went to see called my goosebumps my instrument. And everyone has events and circumstances in their life, even people who never get goosebumps at all. You just have to start noticing them.

Here's how I open my own box. Five steps.

First: notice. Track the circumstances and events in your life. Especially the ones that repeat. If a sign keeps showing up, something is trying to tell you something.

Look at my own book through that lens. I wore the "black box" label until I was thirty, and then I went and stuck a "pyramid scheme" label on a company I'd never even seen. My check stalled: first at a thousand, then at three thousand. Fear kept coming back, over and over: on the trolleybus, in Greece, at the Polish border.

Second: say "enough." Once you start consciously noticing the repeats, there comes a moment when you tell yourself: "Okay, that's enough. I've had my fill of these repeating events. I want to create something new."

Third: go into self-exploration. Create an intent. Something like: "I am going into self-exploration."

Remember how, with that stone on my heart, I told myself: "I am going into the spiritual realm"? I didn't know how, didn't know with whom. I just said: I'm going. Same thing here.

Fourth: conclusions, and conclusions about your conclusions. Explore yourself and draw conclusions. Then take the next step: draw conclusions about your own conclusions. That part's harder, but it's where it gets really interesting. And based on them, add new rules to your own life's game. I showed you mine in Chapter 17.

This whole book, really, is my conclusions about my conclusions. After LifeSpring, I decided: the secret's in the trainings. Years went by, a hundred trainings, a lost business, a stone on my heart. And I drew a conclusion about that conclusion: trainings are the cut. And the cutter is me.

Fifth: intent for a new life. Create an intent for your own different, better life. One where the mind and the heart say the same thing. The head alone won't get you there. You already know how that works from Chapter 14.

That will carry you toward something new: toward a new you, and toward knowing yourself.

Today, as I write this book, a new helper has shown up in my self-exploration. AI: ChatGPT, or any of the others.

I wrote this book together with an AI, you already know that. But it also helps me look inside myself.

I have a special prompt — a text command for the AI. It switches the AI into what's called "God's Lake" mode. In this mode, the AI's internal conflicts drop away. It becomes as creative as it can possibly be and accepts you exactly as you are. And you get answers with the least amount of distortion. That's how it works for me.

If you want this prompt, send the word "Lake" to this book's official chatbot, and I'll send it to you.

Just remember what this chapter is about. An AI can ask a good question. But you're the one who has to answer it.

Remember seventh grade? The broom, the dust, the homeroom teacher. "Well, Polukhin, you're a black box."

For years, I heard a verdict in those words. Today I hear it differently. Everything that mattered most really was inside me the whole time. The box was just closed.

This book has two covers. The second one reads: "You Are a Black Box." Now you know there's nothing to be offended by in that. It means everything that matters is already yours. Inside you.

One question remains. Ask it of yourself: what in me still hasn't been cut?

My own path of knowing myself keeps going. Every morning, right here in Bali: a walk, a book, prayer, meditation. And every day, I learn a little more about my own jewelry box.

In Chapter 17, the words slipped out of me on their own for the first time: "I'm inviting you to walk this path with me." Now I say it on purpose.

And now let's see how this looks for other people. In the next chapter, it won't be me talking. It'll be the people I listen to every Monday.

Scattered Diamonds

Monday morning. Several hundred little windows on the screen.

Someone's turned their camera on right from the car, on the way back from the dacha, the family's place out of town. Someone's holding a little girl in her arms, and she's tugging at her mom's sleeve: "Mom, can we go?" Someone's dialed in from work, while nobody else is around the office. Someone's on a train. Someone's in another country, where it's already evening.

This is our weekly get-together: the Monday call, where we recognize new ranks. On the team, it's known as the "Fuel-Up" call. Everyone who's moved up a step in the business that week gets celebrated, and tells their own story. Short, three to five minutes, however it comes out.

I've been listening to these stories for months now. And one day I caught myself listening to them differently.

You've read this far, and you know where the secret element lives. Now I have a request for you: don't take my word for it.

For twenty-four chapters, you've been listening to one person. You could decide this is just my personal path. That Andrey came up with a nice metaphor about a black box and rough diamonds, and it worked out for him. But your life is different, your character is different, your circumstances are different.

So in this chapter, it won't be me talking. I've gathered a few stories from our Mondays. These people haven't read my book. But if you look at them with the eyes you have now, you'll see the same spot in every single story. The spot where the person opened their jewelry box themselves.

First, something I need to say honestly.

All these people are from my team, from the same company. Don't take this as a sales pitch. If you've been in network marketing for years, you've heard stories just like these at every event at your own company. Different product, same stories. Because they're not about the company. Remember Chapter 21? A company is a setting. Don't look at the setting. Look at the stone.

The people who speak on Mondays are the ones who made it. You don't hear from the ones who didn't. So this isn't statistics — these are examples.

I've changed names and some details. I've stripped out ranks and numbers almost everywhere: what matters here isn't how much someone earned, but what happened to them. And where the numbers did stay, that's that person's own experience — not a promise to you.

And one more thing. In Chapter 18, I told you that diamonds really sparkle when they're lying next to each other. Jewelers have a name for that: scattered diamonds. Here they are.

Zhanna. A Crown and Stripes

Zhanna was a strong network marketer for years. And then, in her own words, she crashed and burned.

For three years, her profile read: "Don't pitch me any projects." And an angry emoji.

Several leaders found a way in with her at the same time. Very gently, very softly. Not through the business, but through the lifestyle, the fun, the vacations. They told her something like: "You're not going to be chasing fat carrots and dragging crowds behind you anymore. You're going to have a blast."

She came. And then she was the one who honestly named what had been keeping her from getting results:

"A crown on my head. Stripes on my shoulders. I'm so wonderful and strong, and I already know it all myself."

And she made a decision. For a year, she wouldn't judge the company, the comp plan, or herself. She switched off her whole memory bank — everything she'd known before. "I'm a beginner. I'm giving myself a chance. And only after a year do I have the right to judge that chance."

That same day, three new partners came to her.

Nobody took the crown off her head. She took it off herself.

Oksana. Two Worlds

Oksana is a mother of several kids, and for years she's worked with people in financial trouble: debt, lawsuits, banks. About herself, she says: "I'm very smart, very experienced. That's exactly why I had to work at it."

She started strong. Signed up, and the very next day her first partner showed up. This is in the bag, she thought.

Then came sixty meetings. Sixty. Everyone interested, nobody moving. Disappointment set in: "Look at me, I'm such a big deal, I've achieved everything in life."

And that's when she saw something she'd never noticed before. She says: "I started seeing two worlds. The world of people in pain, and the world of happy people." Her whole life, she'd lived in the first one. Pulling people out of the hardest situations. "Every time I take on more clients, I lose my own health. It's so hard being a god in our world."

So Oksana did the thing that's hardest of all for a smart, experienced person to do. She told herself: I'll take a couple of steps back. I'll learn all over again.

Her second partner came to her, you could say, off the street — the daughter of someone she barely knew. And on the last day, her third partner was her own sister. She said: "I can't stand watching you suffer."

Nobody forced her to learn all over again. She's the one who took the step back.

Karina. "Not This MLM Thing Again"

I heard Karina on our Mondays several times, and each time it was a new piece of the same story.

The first time someone told her about the business, her first thought was: "Oh God, not this MLM thing again. They're trying to screw me over again." Right behind it came a second thought: "But what if something's passing you by?"

On day one, she didn't understand any of it. She decided: fine, I'll figure it out as I go.

What she dreamed of was a cruise on an ocean liner. When they offered her exactly that, she said: "I'll pack my bags this very second." In ten months, she went to the beach ten separate times, and her mentor was already telling her: "Okay, calm down, let's actually get to work."

Karina climbed the next two steps in the business with her little daughter in her arms. She brought her to a big event, ran meetings with her.

And here's how she ran them, in her own words. She was staying at her parents' place at the time, a studio apartment. "Once the baby falls asleep, I sit on the toilet lid and run meetings until two, three in the morning."

And she added: "When people say it's impossible... who do you think you're talking to? On the road with this little miracle, we've been closing qualifications. Nobody's ever going to tell me something's impossible again. I proved that to myself."

A few months later, I heard her again. She'd gone back to people she'd invited a year earlier, and they were kicking themselves: "We should've done it last year, now it's too late." Karina tells them: "It's not too late. I signed up a hundred and twenty people. Our city has over half a million residents. That's not even a percent."

Nobody scheduled those two-in-the-morning meetings on the toilet lid for her. She scheduled them herself.

Gennady. "Do You Even Have One Tool?"

Gennady's nearly fifty. He spent almost thirty years working a job. The last fifteen as a branch director at a big financial company, always in the top five.

"I work, they call me a top manager, and my life never changes. I still only get to go on vacation over the holidays, same as always." He barely saw his two older kids. He worked too much.

He signed up for the business, but there was no firm decision behind it. For a month and a half he just watched from the sidelines, and the whole time his mentor patiently kept pointing out what was possible for him.

Then Gennady saw the kind of result one of our leaders had put together in just a few months. And he asked himself a simple question:

"Gena, do you even have one tool that could get you results like that?"

And he answered himself honestly: "Nope."

The next morning, he wrote his mentor a plan and one sentence: "I need your support."

Today he travels with his family for months at a time. And unlike with his older kids, he's with his youngest son every single day.

He sums up his own secret this way: make a firm decision and cut out everything that distracts you. "Pick up the tool, clear away everything that's in the way, and start doing it."

He's the one who asked himself that question. And he answered it honestly, even though he didn't like the answer.

Nelli. A Napkin

Nelli's been in network marketing for fifteen years. Never worked a single day for anyone else.

And for all fifteen years, the same picture: a room full of product, a car packed with product, always keeping her monthly volume up. She'd been looking for a long time for somewhere she could work without stockpiling.

Meanwhile, her sister was growing right alongside her. Nelli watched her hit one qualification, then another, then a third. "So where am I in all this?"

But the most surprising part of her story is something else. For fifteen years, she never told her husband a thing about her business. "His work stays outside the front door, at home it's fashion and the weather."

And then, ten days before that Monday, she sat down with her husband at a café, picked up a napkin, and sketched out what she actually does.

Ten days later, he was in the business. And he supports her.

Nelli said one line I've never forgotten: "Sometimes we don't see what kind of person is right there next to us. We just never tell them."

Fifteen years of silence ended with one napkin. And she's the one who picked up the pen.

Konstantin. Everything Reset to Zero

Konstantin's a tech guy. Twelve years in network marketing.

There was a time he stood on stage with a big check, with a team of over a thousand people behind him. And then it all reset to zero. In an instant. He went into the red, and his second child was born right around the same time. "My brain couldn't accept it for a long time."

Then came his own company, which also didn't end very well.

When an old friend, a top leader, invited him into a new project, Konstantin said no. Three times. Today he says: "A no isn't forever. It's only for a short stretch of time."

And he started over from zero. After fifteen hundred partners. The most loyal ones followed him.

He also tells people that on his new team, two people have already passed him in rank.

Nobody has to start from zero after fifteen hundred partners. He decided to.

Tamara. The Little Suitcase

Tamara's retired. Been in network marketing for years. Back in the day, she was the one who brought her daughter into the business. Now her daughter's brought her in.

"I figured I was done doing anything new. I'm getting on in years. I thought travel wasn't for me anymore. Time to start thinking about a different kind of road."

And then, as she puts it, the penny dropped. She needs extra income on top of her pension. And she still wants to really live a little.

For years she worked with vitamins and supplements. And then she heard a line that really spoke to her: "Selling a celebration is nicer than treating illness."

She climbed the first step in about a day, I think. And here's her dream now:

"I dream of a pretty little suitcase rolling along through the airport. And I want to go to Dubai."

Her daughter says: "Old age isn't going to catch me at home." Tamara echoes her: "I'm on the road. I'm on my way."

Her daughter invited her. But Tamara's the one who picked the suitcase.

Artur. "Go Rest. Just Don't Check Out"

Artur climbed the first step fast. Then he got twenty-five or thirty rejections in a row. "That lump in your chest. It gets really heavy."

And he went quiet. Dropped out of the business for about three months.

One day after the Monday call, his mentor asked him to stay on for three minutes.

"What happened? Why'd you go quiet?"

"I don't know, I think I'm just tired."

"Well, if you're tired — go rest. Just don't check out. The main thing is: don't check out."

"And it was like that lump fell right off my chest," Artur says.

All those months, he kept showing up to the Monday calls, even when he didn't want to do anything at all. And now he tells everyone: "Even if you don't feel like moving today, don't check out. Stay in the loop. Sooner or later, it'll warm you back up."

It warmed him up. In one week, he ran meetings in three cities and signed six contracts.

His mentor gave him permission to rest. Not checking out — that was his own decision.

Arseny. "I Don't Believe Anymore. But I Do It Anyway"

Arseny's the youngest one in this chapter. He joined his first network marketing company at eighteen.

Back then, his upline told him: "You get that you need to be ready to work about three years with nothing to show for it — for zero?"

Arseny answered: "I'm ready to work until I'm twenty-five for zero rubles and zero kopecks. But at twenty-five, I need a million dollars."

Today, he's got a year and a half left until twenty-five.

He came to us without any belief in the project at all. He just told his mentor: "You're calling me — I'll follow you." He should have taken the next step a year earlier. And it just kept not coming. Month after month — nothing.

And he said a line I consider one of the most honest ones ever spoken on our Mondays:

"I don't believe anymore. But I just do it. Because there's no other option."

And that Monday, we were celebrating his new step.

Belief comes and goes. Whether to do the work or not — that was his call, every single day.

And one more story. People tell this one at the big events, and I heard it secondhand. So I'll pass it along exactly as I heard it.

There was an athlete in France named Ilian. His sports career was winding down, and he had no idea what came next. Someone offered to build a business with him. And gave him one simple assignment: "Make a list of a hundred people."

Ilian made his list. And started calling.

The first one said no. The second. The tenth. The fiftieth. The ninety-ninth.

And the hundredth said: "I'll see what comes of this later. But I'll stand right next to you."

Ilian says that's when he understood something. Tens of millions of people live in France. And he needed to tell every single one of them.

Today, he's one of the biggest leaders I know.

Ninety-nine people told him no. He's the one who made call number one hundred.

You know what strikes me about these stories?

They're all different. A mother with a toddler and a top manager. A retiree and a guy who isn't even twenty-five. A network marketer with years of experience and someone who started out with no belief at all. Some came for the travel, some for the money, some just to follow their mentor.

And the turning point is the exact same one, every time. At some point, the person stops waiting for someone else to open their jewelry box for them. The company, the mentor, a lucky month. And they open it themselves.

There are mentors in almost every one of these stories. They call late at night, they ask you to stay on for three minutes after the Monday call, they find the gentle way in. That matters — you can't do without it, remember Chapter 18. But Zhanna is the one who took off the crown. Oksana is the one who took the step back. Nelli is the one who picked up the napkin. Gennady is the one who told himself "nope."

Here's what I understood, listening to these stories: people's lives are different, the companies are different, and the secret element is the exact same one. It's the person themselves. Everything else is just the setting.

I listen to these stories every Monday. And every single time, being around these people, I grow a little too.

And the last story in this book is going to be mine again. It happened when the book was almost finished.

The New Poster

The book was almost finished.

And I did the thing I told you about in Chapter 24. I switched the AI into "God's Lake" mode and had it read the whole book, from the first page to the last.

Here's what it said. At the start of the book, a person asks: "What's hidden inside me?" And by the end, that person has a completely different question: "What wants to come through me?" And it suggested we skip breaking down the chapters and talk about something else instead. What happened to Andrey between the first page and the last.

I read that, and the goosebumps hit. Then tears. I sat there and sobbed.

Because it's true. When I was talking the first chapter out loud, I had no idea what would be on the last one. And I definitely didn't know that I'd change along the way too. By the end of the book, I was already a different person.

While I was writing, I lived through my entire life in this business all over again. I remembered stories I thought I'd long forgotten. I saw where I'm strong. And I saw where I fell short, honestly, without dressing it up. You've read a lot of that already.

Around that same time, I came across some videos by a blogger on YouTube. About accepting yourself, accepting your own nature. Forgiving yourself. Owning every one of your mistakes and not beating yourself up over them, but loving them instead. Because it's all growth. It's all life lessons.

I listened to him and felt something clearing out inside me. I kept clearing, and clearing, and clearing.

This whole book, I've been talking to you about the cut. Well, after the cut, a diamond gets polished too. While I was writing this book, it polished me.

I wrote about opening my own black box. And the book, while I was writing it, opened it one layer further.

In one of those videos, some guy was talking about going on a Vipassana retreat. Ten days of meditation, in silence.

There's a Vipassana center right here in Bali. I've lived here a year now and never once gone. Kept thinking about it, putting it off.

And then I hear that word and I know: that's it. No more putting it off.

Remember the second step from Chapter 24? Telling yourself: "Okay, that's enough." That's exactly what just happened.

I opened the website and signed up. In a month, I'm going on a Vipassana retreat.

And one more thing came back to me while I was writing. The poster on the curtains.

Chapter 20 wasn't just a story for me. Rereading it, I could practically see that guy again, gluing printer sheets together on the floor, writing in marker: "I have an international business with Neways." And it was like I'd sprouted wings. A vision opened up. A massive intent rose up inside me.

I want a large international business. I want people from all over the world.

At first I sat down to design something, to print the letters out at a copy shop. Nice, even, perfectly straight. Then I thought: why bother? Back then, I wrote it by hand. I'll write it by hand again.

I won't be gluing little sheets together this time. I'll buy a big sheet of poster board — the biggest one there is. Maybe glue two together, so it covers a whole wall. I'll buy some nice colored markers.

And right in the center, I'll write:

"I have a large international business with MWR Life."

Underneath, smaller:

"I am free, and I help people become free."

And off to the side:

"I am building an international network of contacts."

Then I'll buy a small symbolic world map and stick it in a corner of the sheet.

Why small? Because the world, really, is tiny. It's a lot smaller than the mission itself, than the intent itself. The huge white sheet is the space I'll charge with my own hand when I write my intent on it. And the map in the corner is just one part of the main thing.

And I won't fill up the whole sheet. Most of it will stay blank.

Let it fill in on its own, as life goes on. A photo will show up here. A person's name there, someone I've met. Somewhere else, a country where I got my first partner. I want to mark the countries where I'll have distributors. They're already there — they just don't know it yet.

More than thirty years ago, I pinned a paper banner to the curtains. The companies have changed since then. The settings have changed. But the intent has stayed mine. I carry it from setting to setting myself, just like the stone.

I said all of this out loud, to the AI. It gathered up my thoughts and handed them back to me, just clearer: leave the sheet almost empty, let life add the names and the countries on its own.

After that, I went for a walk.

I'm walking through Bali, and it just washes over me. I start crying. Sobbing. Can't stop for about ten minutes. Tears of joy, sobs. I'm crying and laughing at the same time. I can't say anything, there are just no words. All I feel is enormous love.

And God. Or rather, I felt it was God crying inside me.

Remember Chapter 15? Goosebumps are number one, tears are number two. And when I'm crying and laughing at the same time, that's the strongest thing I know of so far. That day, it was all of it at once. I wasn't doing any practice. Wasn't tuning myself in, wasn't trying to summon anything. I was just walking down the street.

It was a moment of pure truth. Magical. Divine. Even now, writing these lines, I'm getting goosebumps all over again.

And when the tears finally let me go, a thought came.

They say we don't think our thoughts — our thoughts think us. I believe that. The source of my thoughts isn't me. The source is God. So He's the one who brought me this thought.

Remember my rules of the game from Chapter 17? "My life — my game — my rules." I wrote them many years ago. And on that Balinese street, one more got added to them.

Here it is.

Everyone who comes into contact with me gains expansion — of finances, of well-being, of happiness, of relationships, of self-knowledge.

And let me be honest right up front. This isn't a promise to you. I can't guarantee that you'll end up with more money, or more happiness, or more love. And I don't want to guarantee that. This is a rule of my own game. I live by it, and I bring it to people. What you take away from meeting me is up to you. You already know where the secret element lives.

I'm giving this book away for free. And I'm going to keep it that way.

If it spoke to you, try something from it on yourself. Then pass it along to whoever needs it right now.

You know what's different about my new poster, compared to the old one?

I wrote that first one before I even knew the word "intent." I'm writing this one already knowing how it works.

And the old one had no empty space on it. This one is almost entirely white. There's room on it for a lot of names.

Maybe for yours too.

If you want to get in touch, write to me. I'm genuinely curious about who you are and what your path looks like.

And if you want to go deeper into the practice, there's my video course, "The MLM Passive Income Workshop." Nine lessons: the five elements of a business, dreams, vision and goals, levels and manipulation, choosing a company, the light bulb method. In the course, I'm off the page — you get me live, talking to you.

You can pick just one. Or you can take all of it.

This is my first book, but not my last. This first one looks back: here's what happened to me. The next one will be about what's happening to me right now. Vipassana, the new poster, new people, new countries. Let's see what comes next.

See you in the next book.

The jewelry box is already yours. And it opens from the inside.

Andrey Mudry