English / 29.01.2020 / 2764

The Final Life Purpose

Nikolay Mokhov, author from the Dark Side of Business

How do you find your purpose? This question torments the poor and the rich alike. And if someone thinks that once they earn millions and billions, they will no longer have to worry about it... I will run as fast as I can, fall, rub my knees (ouch!), and still keep running, just to make sure I'm there on time to disappoint the reader. The question of purpose weighs on anyone-regardless of the bank statement. And if the reader is curious, I'm going to tell a story about a very wealthy man.

He was someone who made a fortune in the IT industry. Millions and millions of dollars couldn't satisfy his soul.

- They pay me for nothing! I sell air. If the wind changes tomorrow, our company will blowdown. I should diversify the risks. One shouldn't keep all the eggs in one basket! We need to diversify the risks! You can't put your eggs in one basket!

The popular proverb about eggs led many businessmen to bankruptcy. The same can happen to our character. Because he started investing in the "real sector" like a madman. By "real sector" he meant big trucks, warehouses... In a word - European logistics. Anyone who has done business in Europe should know that it's a pain in the butt.
One of the reasons some Swiss banks give loans at low rates is that you can hardly earn high ones.

it is better to become a genius fraudster than a mediocre manager

Here the reader will have a logical question:

- Nick, why the hell are you telling me a story of some rich guy and European logistics? I have a family to provide for, the new government is trying to control the income of each citizen. Life is trying to drown us in troubles (or in something else)... And there is also this question, are we doing the right thing in life?

Now let me give a simple explanation. Look at this example of the guy going nuts about the logistics. He earns money in IT and they waists it in the “real sector”. Why does it happen? Because mom, dad, friends and other people around could keep convincing him since childhood:

- You are doing some nonsense...look at your classmate who bought a truck and now he is transporting prawns to other countries. That's a real business!

And who cares if our character has a truck full of money, while his classmate hardly has a thousand of Euros of savings. This is a question of acceptance by the people closest to him. And here this question of purpose pops up. We understand a lot about ourselves since childhood. When I was six, I could not read or write, but when someone asked me “what do you want to be when you grow up” I was very confident:

"A writer!

But I was told:

- Writers earn very little, and only a few make it...

Relatives and friends inclined:

- Maybe, you could become a programmer? Maybe an engineer?

I wasted energy, time and money to check my relatives' theories. And thank God, it didn't take too much time. 'Cause I know a story of a woman who got old and realized, that she had always dreamt of being a ballet dancer. But, as she said it herself:

— But it's hard to be a ballerina when you are sixty."...

From the heading

The thought of eternal life

Neuroscientists say that the bigger the brain, the longer a mammal lives. And there is also a commonplace observation: people who are engaged in research, teaching, and theoretical science live long. You can count straight from Plato, who died at the age of eighty. His colleague Newton at 84, Mendeleev at 72, Einstein at 76, physicist Niels Bohr at 77, and so on. And the other day I was walking around Cyprus with a PhD, so she told me:

Escaping Fate?

My grandfather Semyon escaped dekulakization, a wave of Soviet repressions in the 1930s. He grew up in a big family. His father died fighting in the First World War, and his grandfather (my great-grandfather) had a fairly decent, by rural standards, household. He had a sturdy house, some horses… In the Soviet thirties, this was a death sentence.

Brasileiro. Chapter II

Part I. Vaeroy
Chapter II. The travelers’ club

In the times of Father

My father played a mean joke on me. Our discussions, though rare, always left me in a state of slight to heavy confusion. For example, when I was five years old, he told me: “A man could never imagine two things: infinity and eternity”. My mind, young and inquisitive as it was, decided to test that statement. I sat down in my room and tried to imagine the supposedly unimaginable entities. This led to intense drooling.