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.