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.