YaroslavLashch

“M” and “E” aren’t just for “manager” and “economist”. There’s also “excavator operator” and, in Russian, “house painter”.

That’s roughly the feedback I got at school whenever I didn’t pass an algebra test on the first try.

And it wasn’t just the hard sciences. In literature I caught it for not memorizing all thirty Tyutchev poems and slipping up somewhere; in physics I couldn’t properly derive a new formula from the ones we already had, for which I was promised a job at a cash register. And it seems that the harsh teachers, and my own mother, an algebra and geometry teacher herself, and copying homework out clean at three in the morning, in tears (because two smudges meant a fiasco and you had to rewrite it again and again until there were none) — all of it lit something inside me. A feeling along the lines of “well, we’ll see”, “let me get to some real problems first, and then we’ll talk”. Spite, spilling over into an unhealthy stubbornness that in the end got me somewhere.

And it wasn’t just me; I think it’s the norm for my generation. But here’s what matters: if it worked for someone, that’s far from a guarantee it will work for everyone.

People, in a large enough sample, and especially as children, are easily led. You can instill almost any construct in them: they’ll take it as a given, and their future will, to some extent, be predetermined. (Breaking down attitudes laid down early is harder, and to do that you first need to realize they’re there and that they’re in the way.)

And that’s the whole catch. The same line about the excavator operator or the sewage worker (yes, we were offered a range of interesting careers to choose from) gives one kid a kick and simply breaks another: they nod and mentally close the question of their future, because an adult said so, and adults know. The “well, we’ll see” reaction isn’t universal; it’s temperament (read: an outright lottery). And the teacher or parent tossing that line across the classroom has no idea who it will land on: the one who’ll get angry, or the one who’ll believe it.

That’s why I’m wary of the genre “they rode me hard as a kid, and look, I turned out fine”. We only ever hear from the ones it worked for. The ones the same system quietly convinced they couldn’t cut it don’t get invited on stage. They really did end up behind a cash register, and they believe that was an honest assessment of their ceiling, not a construct that happened to stick to them. Survivorship bias in all its glory: in hindsight, success always looks like a pattern, when it was closer to a coin toss.

It’s a strange feeling: I’m grateful to that spite for where it took me, and at the same time I can’t prescribe it to anyone as a solution. The odds are too high that instead of stubbornness, a person walks away with nothing but a quiet certainty that they’re worth nothing in this life.

Not long ago we sat through a training on sales strategies, and, as with most fundamental things, the hidden ideas built into some fairly simple mechanics came to me out of nowhere — this morning.

We were going over argumentation techniques: numbers, compromises, contribution, power, intimidation, the direct “why?”, the effect of examples, expertise and small steps (I just smiled, realizing I'd remembered every one of them). The curious part is that most of these techniques work quite well outside the usual business context too — in negotiations with yourself. Not all of them, and that's telling: the ones that break are tied to an asymmetry between the parties (power, intimidation) — when both parties are you, the mechanism stops working. The ones that carry over work directly on how a person makes decisions in the first place.

What I'm getting at is that most techniques come from an empirical understanding of a person — their patterns, and what actually works on them. Which means most of them are multipurpose and unfold in other situations and contexts — sometimes to your own surprise.

Remember how, in our grandparents' flats, there used to be a wired radio that almost never got switched off?

As a rule it was a very small radio with a basic little speaker, hanging somewhere above the fridge. The same spot, I'm sure, where Grandpa hid his Belomor cigarettes so the kids (like me) couldn't get at them. I suspect the sweets were kept somewhere up there too (I never did manage to establish that at the time).

What else was nearby? A worn-through oilcloth on the table, a copy of Panorama TV, the listings magazine, with the crosswords already solved, a magnifying glass, a three-litre jar of what decades later would be called kombucha, wooden windows with the gaps taped over with newspaper so the winter wouldn't blow in.

And every hour, Radio Mayak announced the time in St. Petersburg and in some other cities I knew nothing about, except that it was midnight there. And there were the songs: Magomaev, Anna German, Eduard Khil. And by the way, the voices of those legends of the Soviet stage still carry me back to exactly those days, as if someone flipped a switch.

The days when Grandma made Grandpa's sandwiches for work in the morning, two with cheese and two with sausage, and poured chokeberry kompot, our homemade fruit drink, into a bottle for me so I'd always have something to drink at school between lessons.

Back to that kitchen where the whole family somehow squeezed in and made salads for the holidays. Well, "the whole family" is putting it generously: I was sent off to the other rooms to play so I wouldn't get in the way, but something from the cooking always came my way regardless (remember: the caviar has to be tasted by the youngest first, and only then spread on the bread).

And you know, back then it felt absolutely certain that it would always be like this: I'd keep collecting sweets from the guests (later I had to share them with my sister, but at the time I was the sole beneficiary), Grandma and Grandpa would always be young, and the whole family would always be somewhere close by (just knock on the next room).

But life, of course, is arranged differently.

P.S. Prompted entirely by an evening spent listening to Magomaev, and by way of a small tribute to warm childhood memories.