I remember. In the ninth grade, I hated Yefim Rosenblum: I saw that Olga N., my love, met him after school. She stopped my attempts to quarrel with a direct and extremely honest text: “It’s more interesting for me with Yefim. Don’t whine, but make it more interesting for me with you!” — A super challenge, considering that Yefim is a class older than me, shines in the first roles in the school theater, plays the guitar and writes poetry … There was no question whether to accept the challenge: go ahead! At the next big break, I stole her notebook from Olga’s briefcase: in it she wrote down everything that she read and that was interesting to her. I copied all the authors, quietly returned the notebook and did not get out of the library for a month: I got acquainted with prose, Gumilyov, Severyanin, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, Tarkovsky and Akhmadullina became my favorite poets. Well, but in Olga’s notebook there were poems and Efim: I understood, I began to write myself, and Olga controlled the level. For dreary garbage she ridiculed immediately, a decent poem gave me her attention for a whole change, a collection of poems was an occasion to invite her to visit.
Well, every month she was visiting me …
Competition and challenge are harsh conditions, but only in such conditions is character forged.
School ends, ahead — what? I was told that at the Faculty of Psychology of Moscow State University you can become a psychologist, that is, a harmoniously developed personality, but … — but you definitely won’t get there without connections. That’s right. Do not enter? I won’t do it? Call. The task was set: I seriously set myself up for study, signed up for preparatory courses, studied with an expensive tutor.
It will always be remembered that he did not save paper. Sweepingly wrote and drew large pictures on blank sheets, and then on the next … Like a rich bourgeois.
A month before the entrance exams, I lived at home all alone (my parents left for the village) and organized myself like this: I got up at 7.00 on an alarm clock, washed my face — at the table, textbooks. An hour of work — a break of 10 minutes: warm-up and breathing exercises. Again, an hour of work, a break of 10 minutes, and so on until the evening. Short cuts: 15 minutes breakfast, 20 minutes lunch, 15 minutes dinner, 30 minutes walk before bed. And in this mode, thirty days on an alarm clock without exception, after which I entered the Faculty of Psychology.
There is! There is always room for achievement in life.
After the Faculty of Psychology, I miraculously ended up at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the State Committee for Tourism as a teacher. To make it clear: today is July 3rd, I still feel like a student, and on September 3rd (in two months) I will go to the department, give lectures on practical psychology for guide-translators and department heads. Yes. But not only I didn’t have such a course in practical psychology, but, as far as I know, none of the Institutes in the USSR. Got it, it’s a challenge. Two months of crazy work, the course from oblivion became reality, and in September I already read it, later I take exams on it …
There is a challenge — there are miracles.
Etc. At the institute, I set myself the task of becoming the best teacher at the Institute, so that later I could become the best teacher in Moscow. To become the best in Russia after that. A few years later, I was burning with a dream to develop the best psychological programs, to become the best coach, the leader of personal growth groups, to create the best Practical Psychology Club, to write the best books on psychology in Russia …
Later, I realized that the task was initially set incorrectly: these are not those competitions, there cannot be a single Winner, just as there cannot be the Best Man in General and the Most Beautiful Lady for everyone … Everyone can have their own loved one, their own best psychologist and the most suitable program for him. The task was set incorrectly, but it helped to move forward with maximum energy. So it was a great job!