My fear sounds like English. My plan looks like a checklist / Personal Transmission, Episode 0

“There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.”
— Morpheus, The Matrix

A persona makes sense in business. Business exists because there are motives that push people to do it. That’s why I decided to start a fairly regular personal column inside the agency. Not a personal blog.

On Monday I officially launched our website in English. Formally, from that moment on, every attempt and every piece of strategy to win clients in English has begun — Europe, the UK, the US, basically anywhere people learn English for business, or have it by default.

That immediately creates dilemmas, problems, and a familiar question: “Why?”

Let me start with the “Why?”

For people who are politically immersed in the Russia–Ukraine context, the answer is obvious — they just read it differently. Some see “traitor.” Others see “self-preservation.” Two ends of the political horseshoe (horseshoe theory; the idea that extremes can resemble each other). There’s no real request from them to revisit or refine their view, so there’s nothing to explain.

But there are people somewhere along that horseshoe who might genuinely wonder: what’s my move here?

I once had a lead tell me, after finding out I’m in Tbilisi and left Russia back in mid-November 2022, that I’d listened to too many alarmists and that it wasn’t actually that bad.

In one interview, Liberov — an inoagent (Russia’s “foreign agent” designation; a legal/political label) — said to another inoagent, Yuri Dud (Russian journalist and YouTube interviewer), a line I still think about: “Some events need focal distance to be seen.” I’m paraphrasing.

So: today is day 1,472 since 24 Feb 2022 (the start of the full-scale war). The situation is still unfolding, yet after four years you can already start seeing outlines of conclusions. That focal distance begins to exist.

With that distance, I understand what I want.

I want to build a family. I want to play the video games I love. I want to take care of pets and stray animals. I want to grow in my profession.

And before we fall into endless lists like “you can do all of that in Russia, you just need to handle this, and that, and another thing…” — I agree with you.

When I read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, he makes it very clear: a human being can adapt to conditions that feel like hell.

It might sound like I’m sliding into a comparison like “Russia equals a concentration camp?” No. That would be theatrical. Beautiful for a moral white coat, and inaccurate.

What I took from Frankl is simpler: our capacity for adaptation is vast. People who stayed in Russia will benefit from that adaptation later, when the next thaw arrives.

And after that little bow, hand on heart, answer this question — not for me, for yourself: outside Russia, is it easier or harder to build a planning horizon for those goals?

Here’s how I see it: it’s easier for me. I need to choose a country, clear all the legalization quests (immigration paperwork as a long game), and once that’s done I’ll have a stable base for long-range planning that actually holds.

So what are the dilemmas and problems then?

The problem is my English isn’t good enough yet to reach clients who use English as a real business tool at an international level. I’ll have to solve that on the move. Yesterday and today I was burning ChatGPT’s brain trying to figure out what to do and how to do it.

Here’s the plan I landed on.

I need to pump Listening by watching interviews and podcasts with subtitles — so I can actually understand what a person is saying on a call, if it gets that far.

I need to pump grammar and sentence patterns, especially the tenses. Here’s the importance ranking, descending, in one line:

Present Simple, Past Simple, Future (will / going to), Present Continuous, Present Perfect, Past Continuous, Future Continuous, Past Perfect, Future Perfect, Present Perfect Continuous, Past Perfect Continuous, Future Perfect Continuous.

And I need verbs and everyday structures, so I don’t freeze mid-sentence while assembling a thought.

I also need to pump Speaking. Right now I can do that by talking into the air, and through apps built for speaking practice.

And I need to learn a vocabulary of terms, so I understand what the conversation is even about.

And now the last part — the dilemma.

What do I do with the RU market? Do I stop running my Telegram channel?

I’ve already decided: no. I’m not shutting it down and slamming the door. I love my people. I want them to keep reaching out. The question is how to handle that properly alongside the workload above.

That’s why I’m keeping Telegram, and why I started a YouTube channel in Russian.

But it feels like I’ll have to start a YouTube channel in English too…

Okay. What’s the summary of this whole message?

It’s a series. You’ll be watching it here as well. How it goes for me. What happens in the international arena of my actions. What keeps happening on the Russian side of my work. How manageable this whole “planning horizon density” project really is.

These notes won’t be frequent. Things usually move slower than I want. Still — this is your chance to re-decide whether you want to keep reading me, or not.

See you in the next episode.