Happiness in 90 Minutes

Preface to the Second Edition

Honestly, I never thought I’d be writing a preface to a second edition. Not because I didn’t believe in the book — but because I never expected it to spread so far, so fast.

It’s been six years since Happiness in 90 Minutes first came out. A lot has happened since then. An enormous number of people from all over the world discovered the painhunting method through this book. I received so many thank-you letters from people in all kinds of professions — writing about how their lives had completely changed. What made me happy was that the book resonated with readers who had never touched psychology in their lives, as well as those who had spent decades on self-development and read hundreds of psychology books. Even seasoned practicing psychologists wrote to tell me that using painhunting in their work had meaningfully improved the quality of their sessions — and helped them earn more.

Over six years, the painhunting method hasn’t fundamentally changed — if anything, it’s been confirmed and strengthened by practice and time. Every method and theory described in this book is still just as relevant today, which is why I haven’t changed a single chapter in this edition. The only thing that has evolved is the development of more specialized algorithms for complex problems — but all of them are still built on the core methods described right here.

Our biggest achievement over these six years has been bringing painhunting closer to science. The method generated enough of a stir that the professional and academic community started criticizing us more and more loudly for the lack of clinical trials — calling us pseudoscientific. That’s exactly why in 2026 we conducted a clinical trial that met all international academic standards.

The results are striking: the effectiveness of the method turned out to be so high that it even surpasses cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) — the evidence-based gold standard in psychology. You can explore the research findings here: clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT07490691

The reason for this second edition is simple: the demands and expectations placed on the method have grown significantly. Some in the academic world began criticizing the book for its overly emotional and “unserious” tone — even though that was entirely intentional. I wanted anyone, absolutely anyone, to be able to read it in one sitting and get real value out of it.

So in this edition, I’m only smoothing out the sharp edges — the overly aggressive marketing language and the bold claims that no longer need to shout, because the research results speak for themselves. But at the request of hundreds of my readers, I’m keeping the light, conversational, and occasionally humorous style.

I genuinely hope this book brings you a great deal of pleasure, sparks some real moments of clarity, and helps you work through whatever psychological challenges you’re facing.

Introduction

Dear reader,

the book you’re holding has the power to change you and your life — once and for all. It doesn’t matter where you are right now — in depression or joy, in poverty or wealth, alone or in a relationship — you’ll find answers here to many questions about psychology and personal growth, and that will absolutely make your life brighter and more colorful.

Why is this book called “Happiness in 90 Minutes”?

Because it contains a recipe for finding happiness in an hour and a half! Of course, the level of happiness you reach in that time depends on where you’re starting from. The less happiness you’re carrying inside, the more sessions it will take — that’s true. But most clients who come in with moderate depression typically confirm that they feel happiness already in the first session.

Why 90 minutes specifically?

Before I created this method, I spent years going to psychologists myself — and I kept leaving their 50-minute sessions feeling unsatisfied, always feeling like I needed just another half hour to really get somewhere. Anyone who has ever visited a traditional therapist will know that feeling — you walk out drained, broken, suspended in mid-air, and the idea of coming back to feel that beat-up again is not exactly appealing.

So when I was developing the method, through trial and error I discovered that around 90 minutes is the optimal amount of time to bring a person to a genuinely good place — so they leave having resolved at least one real problem.

In this book, you’ll be introduced to a remarkably simple method for working with the subconscious called painhunting — a method that brings relief, awareness, or a moment of clarity, and a feeling of freedom, no matter what psychological issue you’re working through.

To be more precise:

according to the results of a pilot RCT (NCT07490691, publication pending), painhunting reduces depression levels by an average of 30–35% in just one session.

And even in patients who were experiencing the most severe form of depression, symptoms dropped to near zero in just 3–4 sessions!

If you’re familiar with conventional psychology, you’ll understand what extraordinary numbers these are. People spend years on antidepressants, or going from therapist to therapist — and here, a person can fully recover from even severe depression in 3–4 sessions. This is no longer just a claim — it’s a documented fact, proven through a clinical trial, which you’ll find linked in the preface to this edition.

The painhunting method didn’t appear overnight. It was a long road. It all started with childhood trauma and negative emotions that had been getting in the way of my adult life. Constant inner conflict, a whole range of psychosomatic conditions, recurring depression, and even thoughts of suicide — all of it pushed me to look for a way out.

I searched in many different places: religion, psychology, spiritual practices, esoterica — but my life didn’t change in any meaningful way. If anything, the deeper I dug, the more terrifying my inner “demons” seemed to become — making me angrier and more irritable.

It wasn’t until I was 35, after endless searching and fruitless attempts to get a grip on myself, that I finally understood:

no one else was going to figure out what was happening inside my mind but me.

Most psychology professionals are in a hurry to slap on a diagnosis, plug you up with some piece of advice, and send you home with homework.

So I had to take things seriously into my own hands. I came to the bitter realization that no modern psychological system could actually help a person find genuine happiness, rediscover the lightness of childhood, or recover the energy of youth. And here’s the interesting part — what helped me out of that deep dead end wasn’t psychology at all. It was my education and the skills I had picked up working in financial management.

You see, as a programmer by first degree, an economist by second, and an auditor and financial analyst by professional experience, I was trained to dig down to the root — to find the real cause of any problem. My mind was conditioned to ask thirty “whys” to get to the truth.

When I studied traditional psychology, I kept feeling that most of the methods were too surface-level — they didn’t reach the roots buried in the subconscious. As someone who loved hard sciences, I was particularly bothered by the vagueness and contradictions scattered across so many psychological theories. So I had to go very deep, and systematize something that no one else had thought to systematize — the enormous, chaotic world of thoughts inside a person’s head. And I started with my own.

With the spiritual knowledge I had at the time, I understood that order in life only comes after order in the mind. And in our minds, there are tens of thousands of thoughts — not just thoughts, but often destructive ones.

With my background in financial management at large corporations, I knew that the root cause of any financial problem can be found if you know how to read numbers and reports.Psychology needed exactly that kind of approach.

What’s been missing from psychology, in my view, is precision: thousands of therapists offering different — often contradictory — solutions to the same problem, with no guarantee that you’re following a specific algorithm that will actually lead to happiness and relief.

It was that precision, structure, and clarity that eventually made painhunting a genuine discovery for modern society.

First it saved me. Then my friends. Then my followers on social media. Then my students, my students’ clients, and so on. As of today — May 2026 — I have personally conducted more than 5,000 individual sessions. Over 1,000 students have been trained.

And more than 30,000 people from all over the world have received help through our school.

Honestly, these are quite modest numbers. Well-known coaches, influencers, and therapists do far bigger business. But sales were never my first priority all these years. I was focused on doing careful, quality work with each individual client.

And yet — how did society come to trust a finance guy with no psychology degree?

How did thousands of people entrust their inner lives to me and my students?

That kind of public trust doesn’t emerge out of nowhere — not unless the method actually stands apart from conventional psychology and from the various unscientific and alternative approaches to exploring the mind and subconscious, like theta healing, cosmo-energetics, reiki, yoga, access bars, and others.

It was the depth, the specificity, and the real results that made people look past my credentials. And people who were genuinely searching for answers often valued exactly that — my technical way of thinking, my “non-traditional” educational background, my different approach to psychology, and of course my personal experience.

Painhunting literally means “hunting for pains”.

These two words capture the essence of the method. Painhunting is first and foremost aimed at eliminating deep inner pains — pains a person may not even be aware of. As long as those inner pains remain, a person can’t truly become happy — they’ll keep making the same mistakes, engaging in self-deception, and living in illusions.

Second, the entire method is so focused on pinpointing the source of pain with maximum precision that no word other than “hunting” really fits.

In today’s world — where people are exhausted by pointless reading, drowning in information overload, and desperately searching for something of real value — what’s needed is exactly this: a targeted technique for clearing out negative thoughts and inner pain, without filler and without wasting precious time.

When I say “pain,” I don’t necessarily mean tears or resentment.

Sometimes pain shows up as a general fog — a sense of being stuck, confused, mentally cloudy. When we locate the root of that chaos, a person can shift rapidly into clarity and confidence. Rather than invent a new umbrella term to cover both inner pain and intellectual dead ends, we’ve kept the familiar word “pain” — even if it doesn’t perfectly capture every case.

Over eight years, we’ve met plenty of people who had real problems in life but insisted they had no pain. And when we worked through their lives in a session, it often turned out to be true — no childhood trauma, no serious adult suffering.

So why weren’t they happy? Why did they come to us? We found a surprising answer..

Here’s the thing: if a child is raised strictly — with the proverbial rod — they carry the pain of that harshness into adulthood, and it holds them back.

But if a child is raised without any discipline at all — if every problem is solved for them through hyper-protection — the outcome can actually be worse. And painhunting helps both types of people find happiness and success.

Want to know why?

Because the child raised strictly suffers from pain that was actually experienced — while the child raised in excessive warmth suffers from projected, hypothetical pain in the future. They’re afraid of failure, afraid of disappointing others, afraid of losing their comfort zone, afraid of carrying the “pain” of responsibility. So they do nothing — quietly envying others who are more successful — and ultimately suffer the consequences of too much love.

That’s why, even though the method has evolved over eight years to help even people with no real pain in their history, we’ve kept the name “painhunting” — because in the end, all our suffering comes from either actual pain, or from anticipated, “theoretical” pain.

My confidence in painhunting’s effectiveness didn’t come all at once.

Back in 2018, when the method was just being created, I was searching day and night for a universal key — reading hundreds of books, dissecting other methods, and testing everything on real people. There were stretches when I was running eight individual sessions in a single day with completely different clients, working 15–16 hours straight. What started as simple business consulting gradually shifted into personal coaching.

It wasn’t something I had planned, honestly. People just sensed my softness, my empathy, my warmth — and they poured their hearts out to me. At first I was genuinely at a loss. I could see how many people were walking around in despair, unable to find a single pair of ears willing to listen without judgment. But I didn’t want to just listen. I genuinely wanted people to feel better — not temporarily, but for good.

So I started testing on these people the techniques that had worked for me — and each time I became more convinced that the method was universal enough to tackle problems far more serious than simple emotional exhaustion.

I was amazed to discover that solving these problems was possible in a surprisingly short time, and that they weren’t nearly as complicated as conventional psychology had made them out to be. Thousands of clients came to the same conclusion after successful sessions.

Even practicing psychologists, coaches, and other specialists who work with the human psyche and subconscious — many of whom came to me specifically to put the method to the test — were equally surprised by the simplicity and effectiveness of painhunting.

After reading this book, you’ll be surprised too — at how easily even complex psychological problems can be untangled when you combine an analytical mind, the ability to truly listen, and a genuine desire to help. It might sound absurd, but in our practice, people without a psychology degree have consistently been better at working with the painhunting method — precisely because their picture of a person’s inner world hasn’t been overcomplicated the way it often is for professional psychologists.

That’s why the method described in this book can be used by anyone who wants to understand themselves and help others.

A little kindness, a little persistence, a bit of intelligence and attentiveness — and, of course, a thorough reading of this book — will make you a genuinely valuable and needed person in the world around you.

You’ll begin to transform yourself, your life, your family — and once you’ve handled all that, you may well find yourself wanting to change your environment, approach your work more wisely, connect with children with deeper understanding, and take real control of your life instead of constantly bending to the whims of the world around you.

With painhunting, you feel like a magician. When the outside world seems impossibly complex and its problems unsolvable, a couple of painhunting sessions can shift your life to the point where it feels like you are the author of your own story. And if you’re a religious person — don’t worry. Painhunting is not anti-religious. Quite the opposite: it will bring you closer to God and deepen your understanding of sacred texts, because it removes the negative conditioning that has distanced you from your original, pure spiritual nature.

Although painhunting is a serious method, I had no interest in writing a dry, academic book. I won’t burden readers with proofs and endless citations. Those who want the numbers will find the clinical trial results in the preface.

My main goal is simple: to make sure that as many people as possible finish this book having gained the greatest possible sense of happiness. So if you’re the type who likes to pick apart every word and challenge every sentence — you’re welcome to explore my academic work, which I’ll link at the end of this book.

And once you get real results, you’ll understand that you were actually caught in the trap of older ways of thinking — unable to see the full picture of life.

Alright — let’s get into it.

This book has four parts.

In the first, you’ll learn the core of the painhunting method — how to find subconscious patterns and transform them once and for all.

In the second part, you’ll see how to work with specific negative emotions using the method described in part one.

In the third, you’ll read about the fundamental laws of life — laws that are as essential as air for building yourself as a person and reaching genuine happiness and freedom.

In the fourth part, you’ll find a reference guide covering the most common life problems — you’ll understand where they come from, and get a concrete action plan for resolving each one.

I highly recommend reading through the book in order first, without getting bogged down in details. That will help you properly piece together the full picture of a person’s inner world. After that, you can return to specific chapters for a deeper dive.

If you start jumping around from chapter to chapter, you may misunderstand certain things — including some of the key terms — and end up feeling frustrated or put off by the book. That said, I’ve made it as simple as I possibly can — minimum jargon, maximum real-world examples from my practice — so it’s accessible to readers of any background.

And by the way — this book isn’t just for beginners looking to work through some psychological difficulty. It’s also for specialists: philosophers, medical professionals, esoteric practitioners, and anyone who wants to master the new profession of painhunter.

If you’re ready to travel to the origins of your problems, if you want to know yourself and the human soul more deeply, if you’re hungry for real answers —

let’s go.

PART 1. THE PAINHUNTING METHOD

Chapter 1.1. The Roots of All Suffering

Why do people suffer? Is life itself inherently painful?

Why does one person suffer from poverty, while another — someone very wealthy — is tormented by a lack of purpose?

Why does a person who finally gets what they desperately wanted soon find themselves restless again, searching for something new? Is that normal?

Why do the wise say that the recipe for happiness is simply to be happy?

If it’s that simple, why are there so many unhappy people in the world?

Could it really be that many people somehow prefer being unhappy?

Some practitioners of spiritual disciplines say that happiness can only be found in meditation — that we suffer because of our own thoughts and our own minds, and that in meditation we stop the senseless inner chatter, and that silence brings us to happiness. Is that actually true?

Western civilization sells people a perfect dream: achieve this, and you will definitely be happy. People chase that dream for years, for decades, hoping that reaching it will finally make them happy — they hit short-term material goals to feel the rush of achievement again — and then one day it stops working. The more self-aware a person becomes, the sooner they see the emptiness in material achievements, and that’s when the spiritual crisis begins.

Let’s work this out. In a moment, you’ll understand something interesting — and at the same time surprisingly simple — about the nature of happiness. Something you’ve probably already noticed but never quite put into words.

Think of the happiest people in your life. Chances are you already know who comes to mind — children.

When are children happiest?

You’ve probably seen it yourself: when they’re playing. When they want something wonderful — they run to their parents for a hug, they delight in a scoop of ice cream. When they’re watching something fascinating and new. When they’re making something with their own hands. When they see pride and admiration in their parents’ eyes.

Now let’s look at when children become unhappy.

Each of you can probably recall a moment from your own childhood.

Children become unhappy instantly — when their game is taken away. When they’re dismissed or scolded. When their favorite game gets boring. When they sense danger around them. When they feel pain. When they lose attention, love, admiration. When they feel their parents are being unfair. When they’re pushed into something they don’t want to do.

So what is the actual root of happiness and unhappiness, based on all these examples?

If happiness comes from a parent’s hug, from ice cream, from a toy — then why can’t an adult simply become happy by satisfying those same desires? And if unhappiness comes from being mistreated, dismissed, or treated unfairly — then why do developed countries like Japan and South Korea have higher suicide rates than poorer ones, like many in Latin America, where cultural standards and behavioral norms are noticeably lower?

You’ve surely noticed adults who do something simple — like gardening — with more happiness in their eyes than someone earning millions in an office.

What’s their secret?

Happiness is simply a state in which your mind is full of bright pictures. These pictures include your vision of the future, your desires, your dreams, your memories, your feelings, and so on.

The more bright pictures in your head, the more happiness you feel. And the fewer there are, the darker life seems — and the more unhappy you feel.

That’s exactly why two people can be in the same moment, in the same circumstances, and one sees storm clouds while the other sees beautiful flowers. One sees a dangerous world, the other sees enormous opportunity. One complains about life; the other creates it.

The only difference between these two people is the quantity and quality of the bright pictures in their heads.

Look at how most people’s lives unfold. In childhood there was a lot of happiness, in youth a little less, in adulthood less still, and in old age hardly any at all. Where did the happiness go? Can it really only exist in childhood? No — as you’ve already started to understand, what actually happens is that as a person grows up, they simply lose the bright pictures in their mind, and dark ones take their place. That’s the whole secret.

So to make a person happy, all you have to do is replace the dark pictures in their head with bright ones — right? Yes. Exactly.

That is the entire essence of painhunting. Painhunting doesn’t ask anyone to spend decades meditating in Tibet to quiet the mind and discover the happiness of inner silence.

It’s a rather pointless approach — trying to get rid of your dark pictures by simply avoiding life.

Painhunting doesn’t tell you to ignore the negative pictures and push forward, the way many motivational coaches do. It doesn’t comfort you with the fact that people in Africa are starving and you’re not.

It doesn’t ask you to accept your dark pictures and make peace with them.

And it doesn’t try to teach you to behave better — because an unhappy person cannot genuinely be good until their inner wounds have healed.

Painhunting changes your inner world by changing the pictures — one by one.

And when your dark pictures are replaced with bright ones, you will naturally become good, happy, wise, kind, joyful, responsible, and caring — not because you forced yourself to be, but because that’s what happens.

Only bright pictures give you energy, motivation, desire, and persistence in life. Only they help you be more active, more creative, more inventive, and move forward with confidence. Only bright pictures allow you to see a vivid future even when the world around you is falling apart — to help others, to understand what people need, and to become a more successful person and a leader in your field.

Remove the dark pictures. Restore the bright ones. How easy and simple that sounds!

But why have people struggled to grasp this truth for thousands of years?

And even if they grasped it — maybe they just didn’t know how to actually get rid of the dark pictures?

Yes. As it turns out, getting rid of these pictures is not so easy.

To do it, you need to understand why they stick to us so stubbornly and refuse to leave on their own. This is exactly where thousands of psychologists have racked their brains, developing all sorts of methods to reduce the destructive force of these pictures.

And unfortunately, a rather unexpected finding emerged: many people don’t really want to let go of the pain contained inside those dark pictures. No one had ever been able to remove inner pain completely — and so, over time, society invented a false belief: that pain is useful.

So before we can remove the negative pictures from our minds, we need to understand what they — these dark pictures and pains — are actually doing there in the first place.

Do they even need to be removed?

When many people are offered the idea of letting go of their negative thoughts, they raise a rather strange objection: the negative pictures are helping them survive!

What on earth does that mean?

Let’s look at this more closely.

Chapter 1.2. The Supposed Benefits of Pain and Suffering

It sounds absurd, but you’ll find plenty of people who are genuinely convinced that pain is good for you. There are no shortage of coaches telling us that pain is what drives growth. And because of this, many people believe that pain is something you should never let go of.

Like true masochists, they make life harder for themselves — setting impossibly demanding goals, torturing themselves with exhausting discipline — all for one purpose: to suffer, so that they’ll eventually come out stronger. As they proudly put it: “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

I need to look at this more carefully, because this ridiculous belief is one of the biggest obstacles standing between people and happiness — between people and freedom from their own negative thoughts. It’s the reason people voluntarily give up on happiness. Some believe that pain and suffering make us wiser, more careful, more thoughtful. As a result, they get caught in a contradiction: they want to be happy, but at the same time they’re afraid to lose their pain — their “useful friend.”

So when the pain is gone, they worry they’ll become foolish, convinced that wisdom only comes through suffering. They also firmly believe that suffering leads to maturity, or that happiness is something you earn only after you’ve survived enough hardship. Ultimately, they feel that being happy for no particular reason is simply not allowed. This enormous and widespread delusion keeps countless people on this planet miserable.

But why are people so convinced that pain is the engine of progress?

Let’s start with a simple example.

Imagine a man who spent ten years in a marriage — never giving his wife real attention, never paying much attention to his own happiness either. Work, home, work, home.

Then one day he discovers, to his horror, that his wife is in love with someone else, and she asks for a divorce. The situation cuts him to the core. He falls into a deep depression for a while, then reassesses his life and starts over. He comes to understand that he had spent years ignoring the color and joy of life, pouring everything into work.

He realizes he had never noticed how his wife had gone all those years without real conversation, without his attention as a man. Now he throws himself into self-development — attending seminars, exercising, meeting new people, becoming more alive. And he says: “If the divorce hadn’t happened, I never would have grown. The pain of it was what pushed me forward.”

When someone suggests removing that pain — releasing the resentment toward his ex-wife and the fear of deep relationships — he says his pain is his engine of progress, and he doesn’t want to part with it. He might seem like a masochist, but what’s actually happened is a specific subconscious glitch.

Let’s think about this carefully.

Did he really start working on himself because of the pain of the separation? Actually, no.

What motivated him was his refusal to accept degradation and suffering. That’s all.

What saved him was his desire to live better — without pain.

What saved him were the images of the future he created for himself the moment he decided to stop suffering.

The pain had nothing to do with it.

If pain genuinely drove people to progress, then every divorced man would start growing after a divorce. But the reality is that most divorces and breakups have a negative effect on people — making them depressed, unhappy, and closed off to future relationships. It’s only in rare cases that a divorce becomes a catalyst for growth. And even then, what’s actually helping the person isn’t the pain — it’s their own life energy, their spirit, their will to live. In other words, it’s their bright pictures.

Here’s another example.

An entrepreneur had no idea how to manage finances — so when his business tripled in revenue, he lost control within a few months and went bankrupt. He loses everything, goes through intense pain, and at some point makes a decision to educate himself.

He takes business management courses, learns the basics of finance, sets a new goal — to build a company on a solid system — and succeeds. A couple of years later he sleeps soundly, feeling fully in control, and tells a friend: “If I hadn’t gone bankrupt back then, I never would have invested in my education.”

But is bankruptcy actually the cause of his success? No. The causes of his success are knowledge and his desire to grow. Another entrepreneur in the same situation might have given up on the idea of running his own business entirely and gone to work for someone else. What helped this particular man was his desire to change things. Again, pain had nothing to do with it. If anything, the bankruptcy speaks to his shortsightedness — he could have invested in his education from the start, without waiting until he lost everything.

In both examples, the real cause of these people’s failures was a lack of knowledge, a reluctance to grow, and the illusions they were living in before the pain arrived. If the first man had been more attentive, more communicative, more present in the relationship, he wouldn’t have lost his wife — and he would be living far more happily than he is now. In the second case, if the entrepreneur had known from the beginning how to plan and manage finances properly, he would never have gone bankrupt, and would have spared himself the damage to his nerves and his health.

This is how a huge number of people live — clinging to pain.

They believe that to grow up, you need to collect hard knocks from life.

They wait for the world to deliver a magical kick.

A man thinks he’ll become experienced by going through relationships with as many women as possible. An entrepreneur believes he’ll become a millionaire only after surviving seven to ten business failures. Listen to some entrepreneurs and they’ll tell you straight: you have to fall many, many times before you can succeed. No. That is a genuine trap. It’s dangerous advice — it installs a negative belief system in you and actively draws failure and suffering into your life.

It is entirely possible to live while avoiding pain — absorbing knowledge and wisdom instead. That way you won’t age and destroy your health after every setback. You won’t lose your childlike sincerity, your enthusiasm, your purity of spirit.

The idea that life is designed to hit you one day — and that the blow will make you smarter and help you grow, so you might as well just drift along until it does — is a foolish one. It’s like learning to cook without first learning how to use a knife safely. It’s like performing surgery on another person without any medical training, hoping that the pain and the mistakes will teach you to do it better next time. Yes — in all of these situations, you might eventually succeed. But at what cost?

This is one of the most widespread and deeply held misconceptions around — the way most people live. Simply put: pain is not the engine of progress. Throughout human history, progress has never begun with devastating wars. Progress begins with literacy, with the growth of science, with the development of culture, with the spread of ethical thinking.

A winner is not someone who has endured a great deal of pain — a winner is someone who managed to overcome pain and navigate around failure. Notice the subtle difference. A person who has suffered a great deal of pain cannot, in fact, become a true leader.

They will close themselves off, retreat inward, and begin making serious mistakes.

A good leader avoids pain by making a timely, wise decision — and becomes stronger and more capable as a result. We grow strong not because of pain, but through overcoming it.

Do you see the distinction? Pain is handed to everyone — but only some come out victorious. You gain enormous confidence, rich experience, and powerful faith in the future when you accumulate the experience of winning over pain — not the experience of pain itself. And you can only win through knowledge, awareness, effort, and your own life energy.

Put another way: what makes a great footballer is not the falls and the cuts on his legs — it’s his drive, his hard work, and his dream of becoming great.

Don’t confuse cause and effect here.

What makes a great boxer is not the knockout blows to his jaw — it’s proper technique, the dream of winning, and the burning desire to succeed.

A manager doesn’t become great by living through hundreds of bankruptcies — they become great by successfully guiding hundreds of companies to prosperity.

If you have friends who are convinced that suffering is the key to future happiness, please share this chapter with them. Let them reconsider.

But where did this idea come from — that pain drives progress?

It’s quite simple. When you’re suffering, some of the people close to you don’t know how to help, so they reach into their “bank of wisdom” and pull out phrases like: “Pain is given to us as a test,” or “Pain helps us grow.”

As I said earlier, for thousands of years people had no idea how to heal inner pain — so they did what they could, coming up with consoling phrases like these.

When you hear them, you take them as truth, and you ask yourself: “How can I turn this pain into growth?” You find a way and you rise.

But the phrase was never actually true. It simply switched on a kind of game in your mind: “Find a way out of this trial — because God gave me this trial so I would grow.” You shifted your attention toward the exit from suffering, you actually found the exit — and then later you retold the story to others, spreading the idea, proudly saying: “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.”

If you’ve ever gone through severe depression, you probably remember that this kind of consoling phrase did nothing for you.

If a phrase is close to the truth, it will always lift you out of depression. If it doesn’t work, it means it isn’t true — do you see?

The phrase “pain helps us grow” will only lift you if you’re not in a particularly serious state — if you still have some life energy left, some will to keep going.

If that energy is at zero, the phrase won’t touch you at all.

Another reason people are convinced that pain is useful is that they confuse pain with experience.

They think it’s better to make your own mistakes and learn from them than to read a hundred books and try to avoid every error. And of course, there’s real truth in that. It really is better to visit the Himalayas once with your own eyes than to read a hundred articles and study photographs.

But here’s the thing — nobody is talking about pain. They’re talking about firsthand experience.

When you learn to chop vegetables, you first learn how to hold the knife safely so you don’t cut yourself, right? You don’t deliberately slice your finger to gain experience with the knife.

And you don’t get behind the wheel of a car and drive without any lessons, hoping that a crash will teach you. That would be genuinely foolish — you’d agree.

And yet this is exactly how things work in so many areas of life. People don’t know how to raise a child but rush to have one, hoping they’ll figure out the fine points on the job.

People don’t know how to handle hurt and loss but race into relationships, hoping for the best.

People don’t know how to navigate adult life but can’t wait to finish school so they can start learning from their mistakes.

All of this happens because schools don’t teach people how to live — how to earn money, raise children, be a good partner.

So people have adopted a high-risk belief: “We’ll figure it all out in practice.”

Young people don’t yet understand how painful it is when someone you love deeply hurts you. They don’t understand how painful a breakup can be. They don’t understand what a serious responsibility it is to raise a child, or what kind of damage a parent’s mistake can cause.

They don’t understand what it means to suddenly lose your sense of purpose in life. These pains can be far more agonizing than a cut finger or a sunburn. “Everyone learns from their own experience” — armed with this conviction, a person lives their life, ignores the advice of others, and collects painful experiences — treating all of it as completely normal.

But experience doesn’t have to be painful.

Not everyone stops to think about that.

You can become a deeply experienced partner, a deeply experienced parent, a wise grandparent — without getting stuck in profound inner pain.

By now, I hope you understand where this “virus” comes from — the idea that pain is the catalyst of success.

Six years after the first edition was published, I found another important factor that I hadn’t written about back then.

In practice, we began noticing that people who grew up in excessively comfortable conditions — never experiencing even a drop of pain — often remain immature, naive, and irresponsible. And looking at these people, and comparing them with others who grew up in pain, people think: “Someone needs to give that person a wake-up call so they finally grow up.” I’m sure you can think of an example like that in your own circle.

And we began seeing more and more often another extreme in modern society: people who were never hit, never yelled at — whose parents never offered them a word of criticism. These people live in their own private illusion and barely sense reality at all.

They have such inflated self-esteem and confidence that they look down on everyone around them — and yet they are incapable of doing anything useful, incapable of achieving any real success.

Looking at these spoiled, demanding, and deeply irresponsible people, society has built a firm conviction: “Sometimes people need a firm hand,” “Sometimes a belt does some good,” “Sometimes they need harsh punishment.”

But even working with people like this, we came to understand that pain is not the answer.

Do you think these spoiled, difficult people actually need pain? That maybe it’ll hurt at first, but then the wound will heal and they’ll wise up?

If your answer is yes, you’re mistaken.

What these people actually need is clarity. Knowledge. Honest, objective feedback. Constructive criticism. They need to be taught about life — not hit.

Firm, yes — but without a belt. Demanding, yes — but without shouting.

They need to be told, from childhood, about the dangers of adult life, and taught to navigate those dangers early — not left to reach their forties as eternal children, and then, after the first real blow life delivers, end up lost and broken for the rest of their days.

Even those considered psychopaths often became that way simply because no one ever gave them any real upbringing, no one ever explained the basic rules of living. No one told them that harming others is bad for everyone. No one explained that life has consequences, that there is justice, and that actions come back around.

Knowledge, wisdom, and clarity are what help a person become happy and flourishing — not pain. These are the forces that built civilization — not exhausting wars, disease, and famine.

In reality, pain doesn’t just fail to help us — it actively creates distorted beliefs, foolish convictions, and compulsive desires that will later feel entirely real and natural. That’s what happens on the inside.

And if you look at the outside — the physical — you can see plainly how happiness or pain shows up in a person’s appearance and body. Slouched posture, lost appetite, a darkened face, deep lines, drowsiness, fatigue, irritability, and an accumulation of chronic conditions. And as bleak as it sounds, not knowing how to heal inner pain, people genuinely come to believe that losing their health, their youth, and their vitality will somehow push them forward.

I hope that by now you’re ready to let go of your pain and finally start living.

I have received hundreds of thank-you messages from readers specifically for this core idea — and in their words, it was this realization that became the turning point, the thing that helped them grow and dramatically reduced their suffering.

If this idea has settled in for you — congratulations!

This is just the beginning. It only gets more interesting from here.

Let’s now look at how these dark pictures appear in the first place, and why they become so persistent and cause us so much harm.