How to Plan and Achieve Goals, Even When the Whole World Is Against You

AVAlexander Volchek

And sustain that growth over a long period. And it has to be worth $400 million. They've come up with the idea itself, but there's no goal in the idea, because they feel caged at home. There's simply a desire to start a business. Every time this person goes to work, they wonder whether they'll earn that $5,000. I manage this project, this business; the business doesn't manage me. What matters, and what should you do: plan forty years ahead or think about today? When you're in business, have a sense of it one, two, or three years ahead and make illusory plans for twenty or thirty years? Plan nothing two or three years ahead but know firmly what you want in forty years? Or plan every single day? My name is Alexander Volchek. You're on my channel. I'm very glad you're here watching this video today. Let's start with something fundamental, central, and extraordinary. Throughout this video, I'll try to bring you as close as possible to understanding how important it is to grasp things and think on a very broad scale, here and now. How important it is to be able to let everything go here and now. How important it is to see what will happen in forty or fifty years, or after your lifetime.

How important it is not to create an illusion around the words “values” and “mission.” What lies beyond money? How important it is to firmly develop yourself as a person, as an individual capable of operating on a larger scale, personally achieving substantial growth, and sustaining that growth for a long time. The first rule, or the first point to focus on—we'll look at business examples and probably some employment examples—is this: whatever you do and wherever you do it in your social environment, it's very important to clearly see your goal. I run a business in financing, mortgages, real estate lending in the United States to make money. That's a goal. Or I'm building a large education company so I can sell it in five years, and it has to be worth $400 million. Or I'm doing business—for example, filming this video—to find an opportunity in the future that I can sense now but can't describe with any certainty. I just know I need to do this right now. Or I run a business because it's very important to my wife, and my wife has an enormous influence and say in how I feel and what results I achieve. Someone takes a job as a programmer because their wife wanted them to.

At that particular company, for that particular salary. Or someone takes a job as an architect because they want to make as much money as possible each month. Someone takes a sales job not to earn money and feed their family right now, not to build financial castles, manipulations, or schemes and receive money every day. They become a salesperson to build a career and understand sales so they can become a manager in three years. They clearly see that path ahead and become a manager. And once they've become a manager, they tell themselves, “When I become a manager, then I'll think about money. Right now, I have a clear goal: I want to become a manager.” For example, a sales team leader, a sales director, or a product director. Someone starts a partnership because they know—they've told themselves clearly—that in a year or two they don't want to handle operations in this business. They don't want to work. They want a partner who handles operations while they themselves don't work. That's their main, overarching, precise goal: to have a business that brings in income without them, and they achieve it through that partnership.

Different businesses and opportunities open up within that partnership. A person can have very different goals in a job, in business, and everywhere else. I moved to the United States a year ago. When I moved, I was just about to turn forty, and we moved with my wife and our four children. I'd spent the previous thirteen years in Moscow. Before that, we were from Minsk, Belarus. Is there a goal in moving to another country? Of course, and goals vary. People often ask me, “Do you definitely plan to stay in the States? Do you definitely plan to live here in Silicon Valley, in California, in this particular place? Will you stay while the children are in school? What do you plan afterward? Did you move to make money here? Do you have a job here?” There is a goal. Someone says, “I was fleeing. I had a goal. It was important for me to get to another country.” Someone else has dreamed of moving to the United States their whole life. I know people who wanted to move to the United States all their lives, and they did. Someone dreams of moving all their life and never does.

Someone never wanted to, doesn't want to when they're moving, moves, and still doesn't want to for the rest of their life. Someone never wants to, moves, circumstances change, and then they feel incredibly happy. When we immerse ourselves in other people's lives and compare them with ours, we first draw conclusions from our own personal feelings, how we feel at that moment. When moving, someone starts worrying: What will the children do there? How well do they speak the language? What will you do yourself? Who will you socialize with? Do you even know the language? Do you have any idea what kind of country it is and how you'll feel there among other people? Do you have acquaintances or friends there? Does the climate suit you? Do the prices suit you? Does the culture of interaction and communication suit you, on the road when you drive or when you go into a store? Do the rules, laws, and economic situation suit you? Some people arrive determined to get a job at a particular place. Some want to work in person; others want to work online. I've always said there are people who absolutely don't want to work from home.

Many people now say, “Remote work is widespread. Everyone wants to work remotely.” That's not true. Some people absolutely don't want to be at home. They want to leave home at least during working hours and feel free at least while they're working, because they feel caged at home. They may feel caged at home because they're lonely, or because of circumstances involving their family or the people they live with. So what's your goal in the actions you're taking right now? In the significant, important things you do every day, do you know precisely what real goal lies behind those actions? If you don't know that goal—as in my example of why I film this video—I don't know the ultimate goal, and probably don't even really know the intermediate goal. If you don't fully understand it, then you have an inner state of faith and an understanding that you're doing this because it will affect your life twenty or thirty years from now.

I have a sense that what I'm doing now, making these videos for this YouTube channel, will affect my life twenty or thirty years from now. But that's my own personal, individual feeling. Anyone who tries to advise me from outside while preparing videos, editing, choosing titles, promoting, or advertising—“Let's sell this,” “Let's do this here,” “This topic is unclear,” or “This topic is clear”—is setting their own local goals without understanding mine. Because if I don't have an easily defined current intermediate or even final goal for one, two, three, four, or five years, other people can't understand me at all. My team can't understand me. It's impossible. I have no illusions about that. I try to explain, to adapt, to interact. I allow different kinds of videos, topics, questions, experiments, formats, and strategies.

But I understand that only I can feel the goal ahead and follow it, move toward it. When my wife and I were moving to America, I remember making the decision. It was March 2022. Things were quite good for us. They're good now, too. And before then, things were probably good as well. We said to each other, “Well, we probably need to decide whether to move at all.” “Yes, let's move.” We'd discussed it and thought about it over the years, and we'd traveled to America a lot. Incidentally, we didn't yet know we were going to America. I remember waking up on a Sunday morning, lying in bed. I said, “Listen, either we decide now or we probably never will, because it'll be a little harder in ten years. We need to either make the decision or not.” At that moment, I'm running a company. I'm the CEO of a large education company. I have thirty directors reporting to me, hundreds of thousands of clients, lots of partnerships, discussions, and details of all kinds. You're living in a particular place, in a particular apartment. A certain distance away, in Minsk, are my mother and my wife's mother.

We're lying there and saying, “Yes, we'll probably move.” I say, “That's it. We're moving. Agreed. Agreed.” Then we tell ourselves, “Listen, since we don't even know exactly which country we'll go to, life is somehow going to draw us onward now. We don't fully understand what will happen in our lives: what I'll do, what you'll do, how we'll feel, what our inner state will be. And that's the most important thing. Let's agree at the outset that, since we have four children, we won't worry or be anxious about their school.” Because absolutely everyone's first question is, “What will you do there for work?” And the second question people always ask when you leave is, “What about the children? What will they do? What about their school?” We said, “We won't worry about school, because we know children's happiness isn't about how many hours they spend at school. At least at our children's ages—three, seven, nine, and thirteen—their happiness depends on how we feel at that time, how stable we are as people, and whether we can create an atmosphere of harmony and freedom for their development, so they can grow within that freedom, with some choice about how to move forward.”

I'm talking about inner freedom now, not external social, political, or economic freedom, a country's freedom, restrictions on real estate, or anything else. I'm talking about a person's inner freedom: how they feel inside. We reached an agreement about schools. Our whole journey led us to the United States. Interestingly, it turned out that in the United States, if you live in a good neighborhood, you automatically have awesome schools. The United States has an extensive public school system. You arrive, rent or buy a property, and your address determines your school. We arrived, and everyone told us, “School is free. You can enroll the children where you live.” Our children start school, and my wife and I still can't quite believe it's free, because our minds couldn't imagine that. I grew up in Belarus. All my life, I was absolutely convinced that to attend good schools—maybe not elementary schools, but middle and high schools—you needed an astronomical amount of money, and getting in was impossible. It turned out all you had to do was rent a house or apartment in the right place.

And in that right place, at the right address, there are both expensive and inexpensive options: take your pick. The school question resolved itself, of course, because when we moved, our goal wasn't based on “I'm moving because I need the right job,” or “We're moving as a family because the most important thing is that our children have a good school.” Something entirely different lay behind our move. Knowing your goal is incredibly important everywhere. Yesterday, I had guests at home, and they said they wanted to start a business manufacturing a particular category of product. Since my videos go on YouTube and I sometimes show my guests, I won't tell you exactly what product today. The first thing I asked was, “What's your goal? Do you want to earn a lot of cash, receive a large, steady flow of money, or create something you can sell for a very high price?” You can immediately see that these people have no focus in their calculations for this business. They've come up with the idea itself, but there's no goal in the idea. There's simply a desire to start a business. Is that desire itself a goal for them? It isn't. You can also immediately see that there are people for whom simply starting any business is what's important.

And that is the goal. That's great. Someone arrives and says, “I want to start absolutely any business, you know. I've been sitting here thinking: I want to start a business. I'd go open a bakery, for example, or a small cafe. I'd open a coffee shop or start providing some kind of service. I'd start a business, any business. I just want one that's enjoyable for me, that speaks to my soul. I just want to start a business.” That can also be a particular goal. You can set certain limits within it, such as saying that this business must, or at least should, bring you $1,000 a month or $1 million a month. Set some sort of limit, right? Or set a limit that says it's important to spend no more than three hours a day on this business. It's common here in Silicon Valley: you walk through a nice downtown in a small town, and all the stores are closed. My wife always asks, “Sasha, why are these stores closed? Do they ever open? How do they make any money?” I say, “Well, their goal isn't to make money.” Most likely, they own the premises. Or someone opened a place for themselves as a hobby.

They've put in some kind of gallery of new clothes, old clothes, clothes they made themselves, antiques, paintings, whatever, or some service. They told themselves, “I'll work three hours a day, twice a week.” That's their right, just as it's my right, when I make videos for YouTube, to make them five minutes, ten minutes, thirty minutes, three hours, or five hours long, once a month or every day. That's my choice, my right. Why? Because I'm the one directing my goal in this project. I manage this project, this business; the business doesn't manage me. When you're trapped in a business, don't understand what's happening, and keep being pulled and pulled and pulled and pulled who knows where, and you can no longer make decisions yourself, your own inner decisions, find your own peace. One fundamental problem with goal setting is when a person's goal intersects with the business's goal or the goal of their professional activity. What does “intersects” mean? Let's explore it a little. Imagine a business with two partners that generates $10,000 net each month. It's incredibly important to one partner that this business generate $5,000 for them—they split it fifty-fifty—because they spend that entire $5,000 on the apartment they rent, their children's school, food for their family, and maintaining their whole life.

That's their minimum necessary standard of living. So every time a month is planned in the business, every time this person goes to work, they wonder whether they'll earn that $5,000. Because that's the very point of the word “business”: it can be profitable or it can lose money. When you're hired for a job, you know you'll receive your salary regardless. I'm not talking about critical circumstances, like an earthquake collapsing your company's building, the financial and banking system collapsing, or something else happening. Basically, in general, when someone goes to work, they know they'll get their salary at the end of the month, or that they'll have a job for a long time if they work under a system and laws where they can't be fired, for instance. Or they work at some fucking amazing corporation that doesn't fire anyone, or their role in the company means they can't be fired. They know they're guaranteed to earn that money. Or they work at this company and make money—for example, as a salesperson earning $3,000 a month—and know they could easily earn that money at any other company.

But if you own a business and earn $5,000 a month from it, and you have to work very hard, you're involved in operations, and without you the business won't earn that $5,000. You also see the risks that arise from time to time: sometimes you might earn $8,000 and sometimes $1,000. You understand that if you earn $1,000 for three consecutive months, not only will the business go bankrupt, but you yourself will go bankrupt, and your children will have nothing to eat at home. At that point, every day you start making

decisions that are wrong for your business, because there's a mismatch between your own goal and the business's goals. My first recommendation is to always try, in these situations—and a huge number of people will face them; that doesn't mean you have to avoid such situations. Life presents different circumstances that each of us also needs. When you're in such a situation, make sure that when you plan the company's goals or plan a discussion with your partner, you take the business's side and make plans and draw conclusions from the business's perspective, not from your own personal goal. Many people plan a business based on how much they themselves will earn in two years. That's not bad; it's necessary. If you earn $5,000 in a business and want to earn $50,000 a month in two years, but know your business will never deliver that because it's one little cafe—it can squeeze out $10,000 at most, even if it's one hundred percent full—that's absolutely fine. Then you say, “Not bad. I know this business can bring me $10,000, so let it.

I'll think of something else.” You go and create a second, third, fourth, or fifth direction in parallel. But in any business, it's important to clearly see the goal you've set and clearly know—or in any job or any action you take—to clearly know exactly what you want to accomplish and what that action is for. Of course, a highly developed person, someone deeply developed in terms of values, individuality, and spiritual state, is someone capable of approaching absolutely every action this way. When taking any action, they understand what will happen next. That doesn't mean they aren't free and live only according to some strange plan. It means their inner system is so strong that they can take different actions every day with an understanding of what's happening, with presence here and now, without fuss, with a calm, balanced inner state and a sense of inner freedom and ease. I follow education, the information product business, EdTech, HRTech, and the technology market. I'm now seeing how many people can't see a range of goals ahead. They may even see some short-term goal. And if they're in business and have set a short-term goal, their own lives are completely out of sync.

Again, being in sync and having that steadiness in life doesn't mean you control your life. I certainly didn't know I'd be here, living and loving life every day in the United States in January 2024. I definitely didn't know that. I first visited Silicon Valley in 2007 or 2006. I first came to the States in 2004. After that, I made a great many trips around the States, but I never knew for certain, and I never had the goal of coming here, staying here, and living here with my family. I never planned my move, my paperwork, schools, business, or work. It wasn't because I didn't know the techniques for doing it. It wasn't because I had other plans or goals. I didn't do it because I know that major life changes like moving don't happen because we've set a goal and report on it daily according to some protocol or rules, or take certain actions every day.

Moving is an incredibly fundamental, important, difficult, liberating, powerful, major, easy event in a person's life. Any move to another country has an enormous impact on your life, your destiny, and everything happening in your life. And not just yours: it affects everyone who moved with you—husbands or wives, children or parents, your friends, acquaintances—absolutely everyone, enormously. And its influence isn't about work or money. Those are affected, too. First and foremost, it affects your inner state, how you feel. In one place, you'll feel calm every day. You wake up in the morning and think, “How do I feel? Good.” In another place, however many times you wake up, you'll feel tense. Every morning, you'll feel something's wrong, something inside you isn't right, and you want to change it. The place you're in will be causing that. You'll attribute it to your diet, your interactions, your business, work, state of mind, practices, trips, retreats, books, films, music—anything at all. But the place itself will also play a major role.

Everything else will, too, of course, because a huge number of things are interconnected. I now live in this place because of how circumstances came together, and every day I see an incredible view from my home. Every day, all the time, I see this view. I look at it, and my mind couldn't even have imagined such a view. It couldn't have drawn that picture, created it with those proportions and details, analyzed it, or even understood whether this was the view I needed or some other one, whether these were the people I needed around me or others. What a combination of particular circumstances would be needed for me to even imagine it, visualize it, and end up in this place. Yesterday, I was driving to San Francisco. Opposite a very beautiful place, a poor person was sitting and gazing into the distance in a meditative state, a detached, meditative state. There are lots of great sayings, proverbs, and jokes about someone dreaming of spending their old age with an ocean view. The question is: what kind of ocean view? Who are you at that moment socially? Who are you at that moment as a parent? Who are you at that moment as a son or daughter?

Who are you at that moment to your friends, loved ones, acquaintances, and partners? Who are you at that moment in terms of your inner state? Identifying and understanding your goal, different goals, different ranges of goals here and now lets you attain incredible inner freedom and peace. It lets you work on many tasks far into the future so easily that you don't have to rush, and you can know, “I wouldn't mind running this YouTube channel for the next thirty, forty, or fifty years, until I grow old and die.” Because I don't fully know what will happen ahead. But I do know that my current action is right, considered, and aligned with my inner core of freedom, which then arranges, generates, and creates an incredible number of goals in my life. Those goals also affect my family and you, the people watching this video. See you next time! We were just discussing how many people want the person they're listening to to be sincere. You said that lets them feel exactly the same as that person. But the sincerity of someone you're listening to or spending time with doesn't mean that person becomes, or is, just like you.

When we want to recognize ourselves in another person's state, or want that person to be just like me, or want to be like that person, then in general we want to change that other person, and someone else has to adapt to it. For example, as the person recording this video, I'd have to adapt to other people so they'd feel similar to me. Or that person wants to be like the other person and adapt. But a real person is unique.

A person is unique. Everyone is totally different. There are far more differences between us than similarities. We already know what's similar: basically, a person has two ears, two eyes, a nose, two hands, and five fingers on each hand. There are some variations, but people are already very similar in those respects, because we're human. As for understanding someone's inner state, how can you understand—how can you truly understand—the state of a person who's telling you something? How can you understand their state outside filming a video, in their real life, interacting with their children, their parents, their wife, when they're alone, alone in this country or another country, when they're working as a director, an owner, or an employee, when they're going to the store? Every time, a person carries their own powerful, substantial uniqueness. So if I start adapting—not even adapting, but just entertaining the thought that it's incredibly important for people to feel similar to me: “Give them that point of connection.” Then they usually say, “Well, you have the same pain, the same fears.”

They aren't the same. Do I have pain? Of course. Do I have fears? Of course I do. Are they the same? That's unknown. You could compare them, but that comparison would take a great deal of time. I have four children with one wife. Those four children are totally different from one another. And not just totally different in appearance, even though you'd think, “They come from the same two parents; they should probably look alike.” What does “alike” mean? You could find many more people in town who resemble one another than you could among my children, in terms of height, coloring, and other outward features of their physical bodies. But they're so incredibly different inside, and they live such different lives at any particular moment.