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.