What if everything you knew about decision-making is no longer valid? What if the secret of success lies not in finding the next strategy, but in understanding the very essence of change?
This book invites you on a journey into the unknown territories of your mind, where you will discover the hidden patterns and principles that govern our world.
Join this journey and open the doors to new opportunities and perspectives!
You will learn how to assess risks, identify key success factors, and develop strategies to help you achieve your goals, even in the face of turbulence. The book will become your reliable tool for making decisions and building the desired future.
Introduction
I’m about thirty, and several times in my life I’ve been the person who did everything right and was left with nothing.
It’s a special condition, and I suspect you’re familiar with it, otherwise you wouldn’t be holding this book right now. You’re doing exactly what you’ve been taught. You don’t get lazy, you don’t mess around, you don’t cut corners. You invest, you save, you build. And then at some point you look around and realize that for some reason it doesn’t hold up. That the efforts have gone away, but there is no support under them. And the first thing that comes to mind is that you’ve screwed up somewhere yourself.
I’ve been thinking about it for quite a long time. That I misunderstood something, missed something, missed an important turn that the others saw. Until I started noticing too many people around me in exactly the same condition—smart, capable, hardworking—and each of them was sure that he was the only one. Then it dawned on me that these were not our personal failures, gathered in one place by chance. It’s something in common. Something has happened not to us, but to the world in which we are trying to live according to instructions that no longer apply.
The promise we were given
We were all given roughly the same promise. In different words, in different families, but essentially the same.
Study well. Get a profession. Work diligently. Gain experience, make the right acquaintances, build a reputation, and life will work out. Not immediately, not easily, but it will develop along a clear trajectory: the more you invest, the more stable you will be. This promise sounded so natural that we didn’t even perceive it as a promise. It was just a description of how life works. An axiom that did not imply a question.
And it worked for a while. Our parents lived their lives by it, and in their world it stuck. Because their world was quite still. The profession I chose at twenty fed me until retirement. A skill mastered once didn’t become obsolete for decades. The accumulated wealth was not devalued — it was accumulated and added up into the future, brick by brick. In such a world, the promise was true. Do the right thing and you will be rewarded.
We grew up with this truth inside. We built our plans on it, our expectations, our idea of how a normal life should unfold. And then they discovered that the world for which this truth was true was over. Quietly, without an announcement. No one came out and said: the rules have changed, the old instructions have been withdrawn, and here’s a new one for you. It’s just that at some point it turned out that you were doing everything the same way, but there was no result.
What does it look like from the inside
This is not a high-profile disaster. At least it’s clear how to experience a loud disaster. It’s pulling, background, not letting go. An anxiety that is not tied to anything specific — everything seems to be in order, but inside there is a steady hum of anxiety that does not turn off. It feels like you’re falling behind, even though you seem to be running, and it’s not clear who you’re falling behind from or where everyone is running to.
It’s a constant suspicion that you’re an impostor. That your achievements are an accident, that it’s about to turn out that you’re not in your place, and no matter how much you’ve already done, you have to prove it anew every day, and the evidence doesn’t seem to accumulate. This is a special kind of fatigue — not from work, but from trying to calculate everything. You’re sitting there trying to figure out the right solution, like an equation, sorting through the options, weighing them, and you can’t come up with an answer because there are too many variables and they keep changing. And from this calculation, which never converges, comes more severe exhaustion than from any physical labor.
And something else, very recognizable. Paralysis before choosing. You’re facing a decision and you can’t make it because you’re afraid of making a mistake. Maybe it’s not that. I might regret it later. Maybe there’s a better option that I didn’t see. And in the end, you don’t choose anything, and this is also a choice, only made for you by circumstances. Time passes, the fork passes, and you just stand there, sorting out options that no longer exist.
I don’t know all this from research. I know this because I have lived it myself and I still live it periodically. This book is not written from the perspective of a person who has figured it out and is now teaching you. It is written from the perspective of a person who found himself in the same trap and spent several years trying to understand its structure — not to get out of it completely, no one seems to get out of it completely, but to learn how to move in it.
Where did we end up
To put it briefly, what happened is that the world stopped being linear.
A linear world is a world where the next step builds on the previous one. Where tomorrow stands on the shoulders of today. Where there’s a road where everyone goes roughly the same way, and the only question is how well you’re moving along it. In such a world, it was wise to choose a strategy—to rely on work, talent, connections, and education—and follow it, because the environment remained static long enough for the investment to pay off.
This world is no more. In its place is another one that is constantly changing, in all directions at once, faster than we can adjust. In it, a profession can become worthless in a couple of years. The strategy that brought out your teachers may stop working by the time you master it. And most importantly, the very link between effort and result that held the entire linear world together was broken. Now you can invest entirely and get nothing. Or you can almost accidentally do something small and get a disproportionate amount. The effort is no longer converted into a result at a clear rate.
The name “Shiva world” is closest to me. In the Hindu tradition, Shiva is a deity whose destruction and creation do not follow each other, but happen in one movement, simultaneously. The old does not disintegrate before the new appears, but at exactly the same time. We live inside a continuous re-creation, where the familiar collapses and the unusual arises at the same moment, and there is no pause either to mourn the past or to get used to the new.
There’s no one around who admits that they don’t know what to do either. People are divided into those who panic and those who pretend to keep everything under control. The latter are more frightening than the former, because they send a message: there’s nothing wrong with me, but there’s something wrong with you, since you’re at a loss. And you’re left alone with your confusion, adding to it the shame of being confused.
Why are there no more recipes?
When you realize that the old instructions don’t work, the natural desire is to find a new one. Someone should have already written a new instruction. Where is it, let me live by it.
There is no new instruction, and this is the main difficulty. Not because they are too lazy to write it, but because in a world that is constantly changing, instruction is impossible by nature. The recipe works where situations repeat themselves: do this, you’ll get that, it’s checked. And when the situations stopped repeating themselves, the decisions stopped repeating themselves. What worked for your neighbor last year won’t work for you this year, because the year is different, and you’re different, and the conditions are different.
Therefore, anyone who offers you a ready—made recipe for success today — five steps to it, seven habits of it – either does not understand what kind of world he lives in, or understands, but sells it to you. The answer to the question “how to live now” is not a recipe. It’s a way of thinking. The way to deal with each specific situation, which is unlike anyone else’s, is to figure it out for yourself. Not to get a solution, but to learn how to find it — anew, every time.
Don’t “do that.” And “this is how the world works, this is what works in it, this is how to make decisions in it” — so that you can figure out your own forks, because now no one will do it for you.
What’s next?
I built the book as a path that I think it makes sense to take in order to get used to the new reality.
What ways to get your way helped out before and what’s left of them now. This is a diagnosis, and without it, the rest has no basis.
How to choose a direction when there is no common road and every day you have to decide anew. How to deal with what you’ve already accumulated so that it doesn’t turn from a springboard into a weight that pulls you to the bottom. How to move forward when you can’t see where to put your foot, and it’s scary. How to set goals for yourself in a world where there are no ready-made goals anymore, and the planning horizon has shrunk from decades to a quarter.
How quickly we have to act now and why the old race is outdated, although we have only managed to get used to it. How to make decisions without hanging around waiting for things to clear up, because they won’t. And how to put it all together in a flexible way to plan your life, in which the goal is a direction, not a point, and the path appears under your feet as you walk.
And at the very end, it’s about what lies deeper than all the tools. About the attitude to life, in which a huge part of everything is beyond our control. Because you can master any navigation and still work hard if you don’t find the right way to be with a world that is stronger than us. Not imagining that everything depends on you is a path to burnout and self—blame. And not giving up in impotence, which does not depend on anything, is the way to quiet despair. Somewhere between these two is what everything else is for.
The title of this book is one of the most famous principles of the game of chess, which even those who do not know how the Bishop differs from the Queen have heard about. If you touch the figure, go. That is, if you have taken up a figure, then you must go with it. You can’t put it back, you can’t change your mind. This rule forces you to make a decision before you touch it, and when you touch it, you act instead of hanging on thinking. It seems to me that it is quite accurate about what is required of us today. Not to fuss or rush, but also not to freeze in endless calculation. Take a look at what’s around you, make your move, and be ready for the next one— because while you were doing this, the situation had already changed.
I do not know your specific life. I don’t know which fork you’re at right now, or what exactly has stopped working for you. But I managed to take a closer look at the general situation we all found ourselves in, both on others and on myself, during those periods when I didn’t understand what to do myself.
Chapter 1. The World of Shiva
In short, the rules that most of us learned to live by are written for a world that no longer exists. Not in the sense of “everything is gone,” but in the sense that the map no longer matches the terrain. We keep checking it out of habit, then wonder why we’re not there.
For the past thirty years, the professional community — managers, researchers, military personnel, and psychologists — has been trying to describe the state of the world in three successive abbreviations. VUCA. BANI. Shiva. It sounds like a set of marketing labels from the business press, and it partly is. But there are different diagnoses behind these letters, and the difference between them has a direct bearing on why the usual success strategies stopped working for you specifically. The man who holds this book in his hands.
To understand where we are, we will have to briefly return to where we came from.
The Linear World
For most of the twentieth century, human life in developed societies was considered predictable. It wasn’t perfect—there were enough wars, crises, and catastrophes—but it was linear. If you take step A, you are highly likely to end up in step B. After graduating from high school, you entered the institute. He entered the institute and got a profession. I got a job and got a job. Next is the ladder: position, salary, apartment, car, cottage, pension. Perhaps not at once and not at all, but the design itself was considered working.
In this world, there was a clear list of ways to “get it done.” Learn better than others. Work hard. Have the right acquaintances. Accumulate capital. Upgrade your talent. Get a good education. Each of these strategies was not a guarantee, but a real lever. The teenager was told: choose what you will rely on, and lean on it. Someone relied on work, someone on abilities, someone on the right people, someone on successful admission to university. And these bets worked on average.
This worked especially well in the creative industries. The screenwriter got a job at the editorial office, wrote to the desk for years, then received his first full—length project – and then his career began. The designer joined an agency as an intern, rose to art director in five years, and then, perhaps, opened his own. The musician made his way through the labels. The artist works through galleries. There were stairs everywhere, and at each step the person roughly understood what to expect on the next one.
This reality is commonly called linear. I would add — inheritable. Each subsequent stage of life was based on the previous one, like a brick laying on a brick. The past worked for the future. Accumulated experience, reputation, diplomas, connections, portfolios — all this was further converted, because the environment was stable, and these currencies did not devalue in it.
At some point, it became clear that these mechanics were starting to fail. The generation that came out into adulthood in the late noughties and in the tenth, already discovered on their own skin that the instructions according to which the parents lived did not work. A degree does not guarantee a job. A job does not guarantee a career. A career does not guarantee sustainability. Sustainability does not guarantee anything, because it no longer exists in nature.
VUCA: a world in which it was first recognized that it was complex
The abbreviation VUCA was coined at the US Army War College in the late eighties, after the Cold War ended and it became unclear which war to prepare for now. The previous picture — two blocks, a clear opponent, clear scenarios — has crumbled. And the military needed a word to describe the new situation.
VUCA stands for like this.
V — volatility, variability. Things change often, quickly, and sometimes dramatically. The exchange rate may jump. The technology can become obsolete in two years. The partner can leave for competitors.
U — uncertainty, uncertainty. Even if you see what is happening, you cannot confidently predict what will happen next. The cause-and-effect relationships are blurring.
C — complexity, complexity. The situation has many variables, and they are related non-linearly. They pulled one string, and five others went.
A — ambiguity, ambiguity. The same event can be read in different ways, and there is no clear answer as to which reading is correct.
In the noughties, this framework was adopted by corporate coaches and strategists. The genre of conferences “how to act as a leader in the VUCA world” has appeared. An industry has emerged. And the thought gradually reached ordinary people: life has become more complicated than it was for our parents. No one argued with that anymore.
Importantly, the VUCA world still implied that the world could be analyzed. Changeable means you need to be flexible. Uncertain means that scenario planning is needed. It’s difficult, which means you need good analysts. Ambiguous means you need to learn how to work with interpretations. In the VUCA framework, the world is complex but knowable. It’s just that learning it requires more effort and tools than before.
In this world, the old success strategies still worked, but required an upgrade. Talent alone was no longer sufficient — talent plus self-promotion was needed. Education alone was no longer guaranteed — education plus continuing education was needed. Work, yes, but smart work, not just hours.
In the creative industries, it looked like this. If you’re a screenwriter, it wasn’t enough for you to write well. You also needed to be able to pitch, build relationships with producers, understand how the platforms you sell to work, and understand that Netflix is not doing the same thing as Channel One. If you’re a designer, it wasn’t enough to be a great designer — you also had to have a portfolio on Behance, a profile on social media, understand how tenders work, and which international competitions give you visibility.
It was still a game by the rules, but there were more rules and they became more cunning. You could hire a consultant, read the right books, take the right course, and get instructions on how to proceed. The instructions were long but final.
The VUCA world is a world where you have to work twice as hard to stay put. Lewis Carroll’s famous phrase became the corporate anthem of the two thousandth. You need to run as fast as you can. Run even faster to get somewhere. This is how a whole generation of managers and creative professionals have arranged their lives: a race, but a meaningful race, with a clear finish, even if it is far away.
At some point, it became clear that this treadmill no longer had a finish line. And there is no flat canvas either.
BANI: a world in which it was recognized that it would not be possible to know him
The abbreviation BANI was proposed by American futurist Jamais Cascio in 2020, after the first wave of the pandemic. He wrote a text with a simple thesis: VUCA as a description of reality has stopped working, because VUCA implies that the world, although complex, is rational. You can build a model. You can make a forecast. You can prepare yourself.
The pandemic has shown that this is not the case.
BANI stands for like this.
B — brittle, fragile. Systems look solid until the moment they break down. The aviation industry seemed unsinkable until it almost completely stopped in two weeks. Global supply chains seemed stable until a container ship sat across the Suez Canal and showed that global trade was on the line. Fragility differs from variability in that a volatile system fluctuates but does not collapse. Fragile — it stands like glass, and then it shatters.
A — anxious, anxious. This is no longer a description of the world, but of our state in it. The alarm becomes background noise. Not the fear of anything in particular, but the feeling that anything could happen at any moment. If a person opens the news and closes it with the feeling that it would be better not to open it, this is a BANI symptom.
N — non-linear, non-linear. A small action can cause huge consequences, but a huge one can’t. One post can go viral and bring the author a million subscribers. A hundred posts may not bring anything. The connection between effort and result is broken. The old rule of “if you work hard, you’ll definitely achieve something” no longer works. You can work hard and not achieve much. Or you can accidentally record rils in the kitchen and wake up famous.
I — incomprehensible, incomprehensible. Even when you have all the data, you cannot understand what is happening. You know that inflation is rising, but you don’t understand why it’s happening right now. You know that the neural network has given such an answer, but no one, including its creators, can explain exactly why. The world is no longer transparent to the mind.
BANI is no longer an upgrade of VUCA, it is a paradigm shift. In the VUCA world, you are a pilot who finds it harder to fly, but he is still a pilot, he still has instruments. In the BANI world, devices can lie, the destination may disappear, and the plane may not be an airplane.
This is especially noticeable in creative work. Let’s take a musician. In the two thousandth, the scheme was clear: record an album, find a label, get into rotation, go on tour. In 2015, it has already changed: record tracks, post on streaming, gain an audience on social networks, play concerts. By 2020, the rules were changed every six months. The social network’s algorithm could boost a track to billions of listens in a week and forget about it the next. Concerts could be canceled in a day. Streaming platforms could change the terms of payments, and the usual money disappeared. A musician who tried to build a career according to a plan found that the plan was outdated before he had time to implement it.
Or a screenwriter. Five years ago, the Russian screenwriter understood which platforms were buying what, which genres were in fashion, and who to pitch ideas to. To date, half of these platforms either do not exist, or they operate according to different rules, or they exist, but they pay in a different currency and at a different time. The audience has also shifted — what was in demand three years ago is no longer needed by anyone, but what was in demand three years ago did not exist at all as a genre.
BANI is not comforting. BANI says: Guys, you’re not going crazy, the world has really become like this. It’s not your problem, it’s his property. And the old tools — more work, better analysis, more thorough preparation — no longer regain control. There is no more control to the extent that we are used to.
And it would have been possible to stop there, but the world continued to change.
Shiva: A world in which destruction has become a part of existence
The concept of the Shiva world appeared after BANI, in the works of several researchers and philosophers of technology, as an attempt to describe what is happening now – in the era of the mass spread of neural networks, climate shifts, reformatting geopolitics and the breakdown of familiar industries at the same time.
The name was not chosen by chance. In the Hindu tradition, Shiva is a deity in whom destruction and creation are not opposed to each other, but are part of the same process. Shiva does not destroy the world in order to build a new one. Shiva is in a constant dance in which the old disintegrates and the new arises simultaneously, at the same moment. This is a different logic of the relationship with change.
In Shiva decoding, the letters add up like this.
S — split, split. Reality is bifurcating, disintegrating, and splitting into parallel layers. You live simultaneously in several contexts that do not converge. A professional context is of one type, a personal context is of another, and an informational context is of a third, and each requires its own rules of behavior. What is normal in one bubble is scandalous in another. Previously, you could say, “I live in Moscow in 2020,” and that meant something. Right now, “I’m in Moscow” means ten different lives, depending on where you work, what you read, who you communicate with, and what age you are.
H — terrifying, frightening. Not disturbing, as in BANI, but frightening, because some changes cross the line from “I understand mentally that this is happening” to “I am physically afraid of what I see.” Climate disasters are no longer news from another country. Technologies that were science fiction five years ago are now on the phone. The war is returning to Europe. The exchange is responding to a post on a social network. It’s not anxiety—it’s fear of a new quality of reality.
I — incomprehensible, incomprehensible (the legacy of BANI, but enhanced). If in BANI we could not understand individual phenomena, then in Shiva we cannot understand the rules themselves, according to which understanding is arranged. A neural network that writes code better than most programmers doesn’t explain how it does it. The algorithms that recommend content to us shape our views, but we don’t know who controls these algorithms, and why they show one thing today and another tomorrow (about this and how it affects our lives and our sense of self in the world, how many problems it adds, I have a separate book “Slaves AI. A cage of algorithms”).
V is volatile, changeable (legacy of VUCA, but of a different order). The speed of change has exceeded the speed of our perception. We don’t have time to notice what has changed, as it has already changed again. Professions become obsolete not in ten years, but in two years. Technology — in six months. Social norms — in months.
A — ambiguous, ambiguous. Not in the sense that an event can be read in two ways, as in VUCA, but in the sense that a stable “correct reading” no longer exists in principle. Any event can be read in five ways, and all five will be equally justified. The truth has ceased to be a point and has become a cloud of probabilities.
If we try to explain the difference between the three worlds at the everyday level, it turns out something like this.
In the VUCA world, a person who has lost his job understands that he needs to look for a new one, can make a plan, send out a resume, go through interviews, and get a job after a while. It took a long time, it was nervous, but the process was clear.
In the BANI world, the same person discovers that half of the companies he could have gone to have closed or left. No one reads the resume, because the algorithm handles the selection. The profession he had been learning for ten years was no longer needed in its former form. He doesn’t understand what to do, but he is still trying to act in the logic of “job search”.
In the Shiva world, the same person is no longer sure that he wants a job. He doesn’t know if he needs a job, freelancing, his own business, moving to another country, changing his profession, learning neural networks so that they work for him, or even taking a break for a year. And each of these decisions may turn out to be correct or catastrophic — and he cannot calculate the probabilities because there is no data for the calculation. He makes decisions in the dark, and this darkness is the normal state of the world, not a temporary problem.
Let’s take an example from the creative environment. An illustrator who had been drawing for book publishers and advertising agencies for ten years discovered in 2022 that neural networks could do in a minute what he spends a week doing. This does not mean that the profession is over, but it has definitely ceased to be the same. He would have retrained in VUCA logic: mastered new programs, added new services. In BANI logic, he would have realized that he would have to retrain constantly, because the tools are updated monthly. In Shiva logic, he understands that the issue is not even about the tools. The question is whether there is a profession of illustrator in the old sense, whether it is necessary to be a performer at all, whether it is worth becoming a curator, an art director on neural networks, teaching them to others, doing something completely third. And no one has an answer. Everyone makes their own decision, and it may turn out to be successful or not — for reasons that will only manifest themselves after the fact.
Why do we need this periodization?
Here it is logical to ask the question: why should the world be divided into these abbreviations at all? Doesn’t this look like another fashionable brainwashing?
The question is legitimate. By themselves, VUCA, BANI and Shiva are just stickers that researchers and consultants have attached to different states of the same reality. It doesn’t change what the state is called. You can live your whole life without ever hearing these words and be a normal adult.
This periodization is important not in itself, but because it shows: What we intuitively feel is that the world has become somehow different, that the old tools don’t work, that we seem to be doing everything right, but the result doesn’t come — this is not our personal feeling. This is described, analyzed and fixed as an objective property of the environment. And each next stage is not just “it has become even more difficult”, but a change in the very logic according to which reality is arranged.
And this leads to a rather harsh conclusion. If you grew up in a family and in an educational system that prepared you for the linear world or, at best, for VUCA, you have certain omissions in your head. That you need to make a good choice and follow it. That diligence is rewarded. That you need to build a plan and implement it. That past achievements work for the future. That if a person has achieved something, he is smart, and if he has not achieved it, he has not tried hard enough.
All these omissions in the Shiva world work poorly or don’t work at all. And until you consciously review them, you will act in a logic that does not correspond to the environment. It’s like crawling through a swamp — the technique is correct, but the environment is different, and the technique doesn’t help.
This book is about how to redefine omissions. Which success strategies worked before and why they stopped working. What comes to replace them. How to make decisions when you don’t have reliable data. How to move when there is no road. How to set goals when the landscape is changing faster than you can walk. How to relate to your past so that it helps, not hinders. And how to keep your mind in a reality that wasn’t designed for your mental health.
Let’s start by analyzing the old strategies. The same list — labor, talent, connections, capital, education, audience. When they worked, how exactly, and what’s left of them today.
Chapter 2. Success Strategies
If you ask a random adult what it takes to succeed in life, the answer will be quite predictable. Someone will say to work. Someone needs to have talent. Someone has connections. Someone needs money. Someone needs education. These answers will sound like evidence, like something self-evident.
Meanwhile, each of these answers is a trace of a specific historical success strategy that worked in a certain era for certain reasons. And when we cling to these strategies today, we are not clinging to eternal truths, but to instructions written for other circumstances. Some of them are still working. Some of them are almost gone. Part of it has turned into its opposite.
I’ll try to answer each one: when it worked, how exactly, what’s left of it now, and in what cases it makes sense to rely on it today. I’ll take examples from different professional worlds — from the author of a social media channel to a corporate manager, from a private dentist to a screenwriter — because the mechanics I’m talking about work everywhere. The only difference is which strategy is still breathing in which environment.