My Father Beat an Oath Out of Me That I'd Never Do Business. I Broke It Three Days Later

I'm eighteen, on my knees in the narrow hallway of a converted communal apartment, my father holding me by the throat, making me swear on God and on my mother's heart that I will never in my life go into business. I swear. Tears are running down my face, and it hurts, not so much from the belt as from the fact that I'm giving this oath already knowing I'll break it. Three days from now, I'll sneak off to the next training.

To understand why a kid who's just been called a cult member and beaten in front of his own father sneaks back three days later, you have to go back a few hours. To a sheet of paper and a single number.

The number after which the calm was over

That morning I'd been invited to a meeting, told to be somewhere by one o'clock. I thought I was going on a date, and since I had nowhere else to wear my suit anyway, I showed up in it. They walked me into the big auditorium of a community center, sat me in the middle, and said: watch and listen. A man in a white suit came out, stepped up to a flip chart, and started drawing little circles, you bring in six people, each of them brings in six of their own. Network marketing, which back then I knew absolutely nothing about. But the moment he said that you become a successful man when you earn ten thousand dollars a month, something happened to me that never had before. For the first time, I sat down and did the math on my future.

I'm studying to be a programmer, so I run the numbers: how much can a programmer make, well, maybe five thousand dollars a month if I'm really lucky. And could I buy my dreams on five thousand a month? The car I want costs about a hundred and fifty thousand. The house I dream of living in, around three million. A trip with the woman I love, ten thousand a pop, and I want to go at least every four months, that's forty thousand a year, and if I keep that up for even ten years, it adds up to four hundred thousand. I add it together, and I get three million six hundred and fifty thousand dollars just for the most basic dreams. I divide it by five thousand a month. It comes out to sixty years. I'm eighteen, which means I'll reach my dream around seventy-eight, and only if I start saving today and don't spend a single cent of that five thousand, don't eat, don't buy clothes.

And then it hits me, something simple I can no longer hide from: the life my parents and the system had laid out for me simply doesn't lead to my dreams. It's the same ceiling I'd later write about in the piece on the millionaire mindset, except back then, at eighteen, I saw it for the first time and in the form of a bare number.

A dream you've never once divided by a number lives quietly, because no one's ever tested it. That evening I tested mine, and the calm was over for good.

Most people walk out of those meetings as skeptics. I walk out with a single question, okay, what do I do. The people who invited me come over to ask what I think, clearly expecting the usual resistance, and instead they hear my "what do I do" and don't know what to say. They tell me: at least sleep on it a day, make sure this is really what you want. They hand me a Brian Tracy book, and as I leave they ask, just don't tell your parents, we need to tell them the right way, we'll meet with them ourselves later.

The room where my father spoke of a dream for the first time

I come home. A converted communal apartment, a narrow hallway, a gas stove on the left, a cot under the staircase on the right where I sleep, the staircase leading up to the attic, and past all that, my parents' room. My mother's out, my brother's still at school. I walk in, my father is sitting alone in front of the TV, his back to me. And suddenly, without turning around, he says something I've never once heard from him in my whole life: "Igor, I dream that you'll be a success."

Still buzzing from the training, I answer with total confidence: "Dad, I will." He turns around sharply, he didn't expect that answer, then back to the TV: "And I dream you'll buy me a Hummer, a yellow one." My father broke his leg when I was still a kid, hasn't walked since, and put on so much weight, close to four hundred pounds, that he wouldn't have fit into an ordinary car anyway, a Hummer or nothing. "Dad, I'll buy it," I say, with that same confidence, because now I supposedly know how to make money. He turns again: "And that you'll build a big house, so we stop crowding into one room and all live together." "Dad, I'll build it."

And then he turns one more time and says the line I'll remember for the rest of my life: "Where were you?"

The belt

He'd never once believed in the dream he'd just been describing, and my sudden confidence put him on alert: he understood right away that something had happened to this kid. I'd been told to keep quiet, so I say: "Nowhere." But the belt beats the truth out of me faster than I can invent a cover story. My father pins me to the wall, holds me by the throat, and now I'm on my knees, beaten, tears streaming, and the pain, like I said, isn't mostly in the body.

He picks up the book, declares it a cult book, and throws it out the window. He dials the number of the people who invited me and, in the crudest language, with all his military bearing, tells them exactly what he thinks of people who drag someone else's kid into a cult. He hangs up and makes me swear on God and on my mother's heart that there will be no business in my life and that I'll never see these people again. "I swear," I say, and I run off to my corner to cry under a pillow so no one hears.

An oath that's beaten out of you with a belt and a hand on your throat isn't given to the future. It's given to the room, to make the pain stop right now. I swore only so my father would let me go, and there was nothing else in that oath at all.

The book they gave me the next morning

The next morning I sneak back to the same guys and tell them, I can't do business, I've been forbidden. They give me a different book, it's called How to Become a Free Man, and they tell me something I'll repeat from stages hundreds of times: "Read it. And remember: listen to your father, and you'll live like your father. If you like that standard of living, do as he says. If you don't, you'll have to do something else. But the decision has to be yours."

I walk out with that thought and with a heavy clarity an eighteen-year-old usually doesn't have yet: it's either death or freedom.

The sports arena

A few days later comes the next training, no longer a cramped community-center hall but a sports arena, packed, thousands of people at once. Admission is a hundred and twenty dollars, four of my stipends, and I have zero in my pocket, because I never saved money, and I've got exactly four days to come up with it. How I pulled it together back then I honestly can't remember today. All I remember is riding there alone, having told no one, biting my nails the whole way. If my parents call my cell right now and hear the roar of a two-thousand-person hall behind me, I won't have any cover story left. I sit there inventing, on the fly, an excuse that'll hold for exactly one call.

No one calls. But it's in that arena, caught between the fear of being exposed and the first feeling in my life of being surrounded by people who talk about money without shame, that I do what the belt couldn't. I confirm my own decision, with no one holding me by the throat anymore. Right there, and not on my knees in the hallway, is where it truly becomes mine.

Three years of silence

What came next was neither triumph nor quick revenge on my father through money. It was three years in which I didn't earn a single cent in that business. I listen to audiobooks on the minibus on my way to the university, on a tiny push-button phone, deliberately loading Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich onto it in some clumsily compressed format, because I honestly understand that in this field I'm a total zero, which means I need to listen to people who've already walked the road. I don't miss a single training, and every time it's a new cover story for home.

I earned my first thousand dollars only three years later and in an entirely different venture, not the one they'd held me by the throat over. That's when I finally moved out of my parents' place. That evening with the flip chart and the little circles didn't bring me a single cent on its own. It brought me three years of silence that began with one decision.

What I tell people who have no support at home

Over the years, hundreds of people have come to me with the same pain: they have an idea, but their family is against it. I tell them two things.

First. Do the math on your dream, on paper, the way I did back then. Divide the sum of everything you want by the income your familiar path promises, and just look at the number. Until you've seen it, there's nothing to argue about. Once you see it, there'll be nothing left to argue about.

Second. An oath extracted from you under pressure and a decision you made alone with yourself are two different things, even if they sound the same. The first holds only as long as they're pressing on you. The second lives on its own, it needs no witnesses and no permission.

What he never got to see

All those years I lived in secret. Out in the morning, back in the evening, telling no one anything, off to my room. I listened to books on audio, on discs, because a paper book would have been found in our apartment in a minute, but a disc, who's going to check what's on my disc. My father never found out that I'd dropped neither the business nor the girl who would later become my wife. He was gone before I earned any serious money. My mother only learned I'd been living a whole other life when I got expelled from the university, and by then my father was no longer around.

I became exactly the man he dreamed aloud about that one evening, with his back turned to the TV. I could have bought him that yellow Hummer. I would have built that house for the whole family. But to drive over to him and say "Dad, look, I made it, you weren't right about everything," I never got the chance, and that still hurts more than the belt.

Because underneath the whole pretty story about freedom and about the decision I made on my own, there was always something far simpler and far less proud. The kid wanted his father to be proud of him. To earn his love. I broke the oath he beat out of me with a belt, and still, years later, somewhere deep inside, I kept proving something to him specifically.

That book they pushed into my hands the morning after that evening was called How to Become a Free Man. Today I'm writing my own under the same title, and only now, it seems, am I beginning to understand what it's about. Freedom isn't about no longer listening to your father. It's about no longer waiting for the day he finally turns around and says you were right.

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P.S. When my mother found out I'd never quit, she said I'd betrayed her and my father. What I answered her in that moment is a whole other story. If you're curious, I'll tell it in the comments.