The Secret of Movement

About the author.

Lipinskyi Vladimir Alexandrovich was born on June 4, 1988, in Odessa, Ukraine. He was born into a very poor, small family. Mother – Elena Bloschak, Father – Alexander Bloshchak, and older sister – Irina Bloschak. He finished secondary school No. 11, and went to study at school No. 54, with specialization in “chef”. After graduation, a year later, he entered and graduated from Moscow State University, with specialization in “International Economic Relations”. He created his first business in 2011 called PlayStation Club.

Knowing all his relatives and their unsuccessful lives, Vladimir Bloshchak was ashamed that he bore the surname of a family in which no one was distinguished by anything and achieved nothing grandiose. Vladimir lost his father in 2007; he lost his mother in 2012.

In 2012, Vladimir met his future wife Christina Lipinskaya, and after marrying her in 2013, he took her surname. In 2021, he earned his first million dollars for the first time.

The secret of movement

See through their eyes

Sitting in Dubai, in a great apartment overlooking the sea, it’s hard to believe that once upon a time I was running down the street, at a temperature of +30 degrees in wool pants with a sewn-in fly. Because there was no zipper on the pants. Though to tell the truth, that’s complete nonsense, as I always knew that the shit I was living in was definitely not for me.

I always believed that I was destined for something more than cutting through the streets of the sloboda. I didn’t know how, of course, but I knew that I had to do anything to get out of that God forsaken place. So that you understand what I mean by the word shit – this is when you live in a family of four in a house with an area of 55 sq m., of which 20 are in disrepair. In a house where there is no water and legal light. There was so little space that the sofa on which I slept barely fit into the room, and the impression was, looking at it, that it was placed before those clay walls were erected. Yeah, you got that right, the house was made of fucking clay. There were three rooms and a kitchen in that 55-square-foot space. The biggest room was uninhabitable because the ceiling was so sagging that it could fall off at any moment and kill someone. As you understand, a shower or a bathtub was out of the question. We had to take turns washing in a basin in the far room, as all the rooms were walk-through. We often did not wash, as I had to carry the water from the neighbors, who lived not very close. Don’t think that I am trying to complain a little and pull at heartstrings. I want it to be clear what and how things were. I can’t say I had bad parents. I loved them very much, although I cried in childhood like a tearful girl. Every day, for any reason.

I always wanted to grow up as soon as possible so I could go to work, earn money, save it, and start doing something that would bring me a personal income. Even as a child, I did not understand why, in schools providing secondary education, there is not a word about how to become an entrepreneur or a businessman. An incubator that produces service personnel. I’m not saying that you don’t need to send your children to school. Since basic knowledge of the same mathematics, reading, etc. is necessary for any person. I am saying that children should also be told that they should become not a cashier in a store, an operator in a good company, or any other hired personnel, but also an entrepreneur, a businessman, and, in the end, an investor. A person working for himself. The master of his destiny and his income. Actually, a lot depends on your thinking. You should always imagine what you want to see yourself. Naturally, you don’t come to this in your school years.

I only knew then that I would be rich, or at least live in abundance, but how I was supposed to do it, I had no idea. Nor do I now, to tell you the truth. Wealth, it’s a very fuzzy concept. There’s always someone wealthier than you. You have to understand what you’re going for. If you’re ambitious and you want to be rich, this race will be over for you when your light dies out. Just so you understand, my friend Dennis “Spacker” in my childhood, who I hadn’t seen in about 10 years, got a job that paid him $800 a month. It was around 2000-2002. I was only 12 or 14 years old. And I thought he was practically a rich man. I thought that he had caught God by the balls, as they say, or he was just cheating and carrying bricks somewhere on a construction site. Which was more likely. It didn’t occur to me that a guy who was nicknamed “Spacker” could get a high-paying job. I mean, that at that moment, he was practically a rich man to me. When someone else started earning that kind of money and more, that someone else was the rich man. And it happens all the time. The more you earn, the more you need. And there is no definition of a rich person. Unless you’re in the top three, or at least the top ten richest people in the world. I have always been involved in sports, and like all children in the ‘90s watched movies with star athletes like Steven Seagal, Jean Claude Van Damme, Stallone, etc. So, in one of Steven Seagal’s movies, he played a calm, peaceful chef who, if necessary, crushed everyone around him and knocked the shit out of them. That’s how I knew I wanted to be a chef until I came up with something else. Well, and as we’ve all often heard from adults, “A chef will not remain hungry.” I wanted to be like Steven, but I could not even imagine that I would be sitting with him in the same restaurant. So here I am sitting in a restaurant with my beautiful wife and I see Steven sitting at several tables away from us! Of course, not as fit and young, but still the same Steven. When I saw him, we were already about to leave, but I could not leave without approaching my childhood idol. Steven was sitting with his family and having dinner. I had to sit for about an hour and wait for him to finish his dinner. I really did not want to approach him like all his fans and ask him something obtrusively. I thought about accidentally meeting him while leaving the lavatory, for example, and accidentally starting a conversation. Since he did not even think about getting up from the table, I had to approach him and ask to take a photo with him. Naturally, I waited until he stopped eating. I approach the table, politely apologize for distracting him, and ask if I can take a photo with him. His wife turns around and says:

“Can’t you see he’s eating?”

He looked at me as if apologizing for his bitchy, in my eyes, wife. Because he’s definitely finished eating.

Meeting your childhood idols isn’t always how we imagine it would be. So, I was studying to be a chef at a vocational school. After two years of theory, I was sent to practice in an Italian pizzeria. After two weeks of practice, they didn’t want to let me leave that place, and agreed with the class teacher of my group, for some regular commission “retro bonuses”, as we called them, to keep me on a permanent job. I was insanely pleased, because since childhood I, like many children, wanted to have my own money with which to buy some new things. I wanted to be liked by girls and to be able to invite them somewhere. After about a month, I met a girl on the beach who was a top totty! I turned to look in her direction from time to time, and I could see that she wouldn’t take her eyes off me. I had no idea how to hook up with her. I just actually splashed her when she went in the water. She laughed and, as the conversation continued, left me her phone number. I still remember writing it down with a pen on a piece of paper at the time. And to call her, I had to go to a friend and ask him to call me from his home phone. It was much more complicated, but also more interesting than it is now. We went to a fancy disco. I had saved a tidy little sum by my standards. And we decided to have a bite at a restaurant nearby. That decent girl drank so many martinis that I was afraid to go to the disco with her. I often found myself in a situation when I sat at a table with a girl and ate nothing, worrying that I wouldn’t have enough money to pay for the table. Now, I realize that it was not for nothing. I had never lied about my financial situation. I never said, like many at that age, that I was the grandchild, nephew, or even the child of a wealthy family. Naturally, I lost my head and skittled away all my savings in less than a week. And I realized that something had to be done… When the girl realized that I was not joking about the fact that I am far from rich, and even on the contrary, she fell in love with me even more. She began to behave more modestly in restaurants. My appearance always misled people when they first met me, because when I started earning some money, I tried to look impeccably. I always thought that appearance was a business card. That’s the way the world works. You are always judged by your clothes. So, appearance was so important to me that I even boiled over when someone stepped on my foot. Like a lot of kids, I hated to read anything. It didn’t matter books or magazines. So, there was no way for me to know about business or anything close to it. In my black neighborhood, as I called it, it was hard to meet any businessmen to give a couple of lessons and instructions on life. And those who were small businessmen only socialized with their own kind, unfortunately.

I knew that I was going to succeed sooner or later. I had shown entrepreneurial spirit since I was a kid. That my friend Denis Spacker was in all the shit next to me. He was a greedy, lying and cunning bastard, but he was almost always there. He lived just as poorly as I did. He had money more often than I did, but he was so greedy that, buying peanuts in chocolate, he always said:

“I bought that for my mom!”

To eat it stealthily and not share it.

We found a fella who had a father who was a diver and always had money. He was much younger than us, and naturally, he was not allowed to go anywhere far from home. We were always dare-devils. We could go anywhere and anytime. Our parents didn’t worry about us. My parents had different parenting practices.

“Do what you want, but study hard! And then you won’t be like me.”

My father used to tell me. But no one even checked the diary. My father was a junkie, but he was a good man. I used to think he was. So, I had a living example of what not to do to avoid becoming one too… So, we went to the market, bought firecrackers, and fireworks, at wholesale low prices, and brought them to that daddy’s boy ten times more expensive. Tell me that’s not a great business model? We lived on the street next door to the biggest crack house in the city. There, junkies were crawling out like ants from an anthill. And in the same quantity. Several times with my friend Denis, nicknamed “Spacker” (he was nicknamed so by his elders because he was dumb), we went to the market and bought sunflower seeds, chocolates, candies, and various sweets. We took crates for bottles, put a crown on them, put everything we bought into the midst of the freaky bustle, and made them pay through the nose because we knew that all “druggies” had a craving for “sugared” after giving themselves an injection. I’ve always been easy to get along with any adult. Since I had met and already knew one of those drug lords, we were the only ones allowed to sell the stuff we bought there. It didn’t last long, as a few times we were passed by neighborhood girls from wealthier families on pink and red bikes. As I remember now, we had to hide to avoid being seen. We decided not to take the risk of continuing our business. I never lied about being from a rich family, but I was incredibly embarrassed to show where I lived, so I didn’t. I lived in a corner house with a wooden fence. If you can call it that. It was made of sparse, rotten, unpainted boards that folded over one-by-one like in old cartoons where dogs run through.

That fence was barely poised. When the weather was windy, I was always going out to see whether the fence was lying in the middle of the street, and I fixed it as best I could. “Spacker” knew that I liked those girls very much, and they liked me.

He often went for a cycle ride with them, while I picked all the cherries off the tree for the neighbors. In exchange for a couple of buckets of those same cherries. After picking the cherries, I walked home, niggered like “Mowgli” with two buckets of cherries. Each bucket was like half or three-quarters of me. You can imagine the picture. I’ve always been, so to speak, not very tall. I turned the corner and saw “Spacker” sitting against my gate with those girls on bicycles, waiting for me to come. That foul rogue knew that after that, I would feel uncomfortable and stop communicating with them. As soon as we had a squabble, he was always so low, trying to humiliate me in every possible way. I was always afraid of him a little bit because he was older than me and much bigger. So, I just had to tolerate, at most verbally humiliate him. Mowgli with buckets of cherries, walked into the yard calmly, without giving any sign of alarm. But once inside the house, if you can call it that, he started crying like a girl. It was not necessary to come even close to the fence to see that huge mountain of garbage in the yard and how poorly I lived. My mom asked me:

“What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”

I often said that phrase:

“Why did you give birth to me? So, I could be ashamed and suffer?”

I can’t believe I was such a wimp and a crybaby. I’ve felt out of this world for my whole life. Like there was just a mistake at the factory, in the department that assigned the children to families, and I was in the wrong place. I knew for as long as I could remember that I was definitely going to get out of this beggary and that I was definitely not a part of that and those around me. I firmly believed that I would get my chance, at the right time and in the right place. I knew so well that it wasn’t my thing, that when my parents passed away, I immediately decided, “It’s time to sell this house for even 5 bucks, and get as far away as possible, only in no way to never be able to go back there again”. I put the house up for sale for $27,000 with no paperwork except for the household register, which was registered to my uncle. The same uncle who, after my father died, called and told me to give him the keys to the house or he would come and throw us out. The uncle, after his military service, was just registered in our house, which belonged to my father conditionally, in order for my uncle not to be homeless documentarily. And that piece of shit decided to throw us out of the house a week after my father died.

When another client came to see the house, I told him that all the documents were in order and the deal could be concluded at any time. That was the first client who agreed to come inside to see the house. All the previous ones, could at most glance into the yard, apologize, turn around and leave. I decided that there was a client who was ready to give that $5))) But if he would be willing to give more, I needed to feel it. I could see in his eyes that the man was cunning. And I wasn’t wrong. He tried to lower the price in all sorts of ways. We started haggling and dropped the price to $26,000. Then he said:

“I got $5,000, and the car is for sale at the used car dealership. I can give you an earnest payment of $5,000 and, when the car is sold, the rest of the money.”

I realized that “the boar is in the hole.” I asked him what kind of car he was selling. He immediately decided to sell the car to a little punk who clearly didn’t understand anything. He described this Lexus as the most perfect car for me. Just like I described to him the story of buying a house.)) I drove with him to the used car dealership knowing that I would take this car, no matter what condition it was in, because the point was to get the deal done, and not miss that chance. I remembered I was ready to sell it for $5. The main thing was not to give it away for free. And for a pretty car and $5,000, even so much the more.

How do you think I was going to sell the house? Naturally, I didn’t have the money to do the paperwork for it. Since childhood, I have tried to look a few steps ahead. I tried to understand which people could be useful to me in life and which ones could be helpful. And it is useful to me to this day. When I had to do some certificates for school, I would come to the house administration (the name of the place where they issued various certificates of residence, including the household register, which was the basis for applying for legalization of the house). I always smiled at a woman of about 50 years old coming out of one of the offices and told her all kinds of compliments. She adored me and always smiled back. She was sitting in the office, a bigshot), my thinking was like that. She often asked me:

“Why are you sitting in the queue? Come inside, we’ll take care of it.”

As you understand by now, it’s always necessary to be polite and agile. It came in handy for me. When the client asked how we would re-register the house, I said that there was no problem. We write a receipt for the earnest payment, we go to the house administration, we register you, write us out, and then you, based on these documents, do all the other documents. I realized that I could not do that, as I was not even registered in the house, not that I was the owner according to that book. After receiving the earnest payment, I realized that I now had to solve the problem that had arisen. I went to the house administration and sat in the queue for one of those offices. But unfortunately, it was not to the woman with whom I had already established contact.

There were only two or three rooms there, and I always met her when I came to the house administration. And naturally, at that time I met that woman again. She was as usually all in gold and wearing makeup. After my usual compliments, she melted, and as if according to a worked-out and planned scheme, she told me not to wait in the queue. She took me into a room she wasn’t sitting in and told me to do whatever I asked. And walked out of the room smiling at me. That’s when I was flabbergasted to find out she was the head of that local department. She ordered me to do whatever I asked, without realizing what I might ask. I remembered that lesson forever. It goes without saying that her subordinate, thinking that I was her son, grandson or nephew, was ready for any request, even if not quite legal. The name of the woman I was taken to was Viktoria Semionovna. I told her the truth and said I’d just lost my parents. The goal was to become friends. And since Viktoria Semionovna knew who I was from, she pursued that goal herself. Why, you might ask, would I want to be friends with Viktoria Semionovna? So that she wouldn’t be tempted to ask me if she could really do anything I asked. So, I decided to entangle her a little deeper. I told her that I was selling that house, and I was doing all those documents for that purpose. And I wanted to thank her for her help and for the speed I was asking for by giving her 5% of the sale price. Having received such generosity, Viktoria Semionovna wouldn’t even think of asking her director for permission) It was the lesson I remembered for the rest of my life. “Be generous to smile at people around you”, because you don’t know if this or that person will be useful to you in the future. I managed to pull it all off in 2-3 days so that my uncle, a moral freak, did not have time to realize what had happened)) Thus began a new chapter of my life. I got a chance and had no right to shit on myself. I really broke out into the open ocean, where I had to get acquainted with completely different people and new rules.

At that time, I dated a girl who worked in a company selling ready-made businesses. She came across a business plan for a gaming club, which was very prospective on paper. It cost $50,000. At that time, I had only those $5,000 that were needed to pay for a rented apartment, food, and petrol for my new car). The wheels became a pass for me and a business card for meeting people on the next “step”.

A search for the algorithm of success, finding useful acquaintances and finding the right strategy to buy that game club was going on constantly in my head. Being a talkative and agile guy, I worked simultaneously in a Dating Agency, where I helped Ukrainian girls and American guys get acquainted.

I constantly had to surf popular social networks and find girls willing to register in our agency to meet Americans. We were making money on it. I had to find a different approach to each girl to convince her to register with our agency. Of course, I perfected my skills at that time almost to perfection. Needless to say, it wasn’t a business I saw myself doing in the long run. I, spending another night looking for clients for the site, came across a girl with whom one of my acquaintances was dating. Andrei told me what a rich family she was from and how smart she was. “Do anything, and something will work out well.” This has been my motto since early childhood, and up to the present day. You don’t have to sit still and wait for an idea to come along, for a chance to turn up, for luck to knock on the door. You should always drive a car, ride a bike, and walk in new places. It is necessary to get out of your comfort zone and be attentive to the little things and details that surround you. In your head, there is a constant activity, the analysis of what you see and hear, and as a result, you get an idea to create a business. You make new acquaintances and this is your further growth.

At the time, I read a lot of business literature and psychology. I still do it to this day, to be honest. The first book I read was written by a businessman named Donald Trump. It was called “Why We Want You to Be Rich.” This book talked a lot about the shortcomings of schooling, which I agree with. In school, they explain all the time, that you have to study hard and you will be able to get a good stable job. We are trained from an early age to become payroll employees. But not a word is said that we can and should create companies, holdings, corporations. There is no financial education in school, and I think this is a huge mistake. In Donald Trump’s book, there are no complicated formulations, and there are no intricate, abstruse descriptions of anything.

For someone like me, it was the ideal book to start reading business literature. Strange as it may seem, my parents were never able to convey to me a key point of the phrase that I heard many times, including from them: “Who keeps company with the wolf, will learn to howl.” And it was Donald Trump’s book that revealed this phrase at a 100% level. He clearly described what that looked like, and I began to notice that in life, just like in school, people clumped together around common interests. Athletes to athletes, crammers to crammers, slackers to their peers. It’s the same in the adult world. Only the choices are more conscious.

If you keep company with five millionaires, you will be the sixth.

If you keep company with five beggars, you will be the sixth.

So, I started intentionally to be on friendly terms with successful and potentially successful people. I wrote on social media to a former girlfriend of my comrade some made-up nonsense, but which would allow me to get caught up in the conversation. I don’t remember exactly, but if I’m not mistaken, that sentence was like:

“Hey, you know, you appeared in my dreams today.”

She was interested curiously in what had happened in that dream. That was when my imagination did not fail me. I coldly replied that I didn’t want her to worry, she was behaving properly in the dream. She appeared in my dreams that we were buying a PS club together. The content of that dream was most likely the consequence of the fact that I yesterday all day stared at the Business Plan of the club that was in the dream)))).

“I just have a lot of free time now, so tell me, what is the PS club?”

The exact wording was lost, but the gist of it was as follows.

And then, with the boar in the pit, that would be that! I told her everything in colors, how it was described in this BP. Kira Leonidovna was very interested. We started discussing that club in detail, and we went to see it, but still, I had no plan where and how I would be able to find not even the full amount of money to buy that startup, but half of it. As Deepak Chopra said in one of his books, if you can’t solve a problem, no matter how hard you try, step away from it and let the strength of intention solve it for you. I let the PS club seller believe that I could afford to buy the club, let Kira Leonidovna believe that I could buy it, and at some moment I believed it myself. Everything was shaping up quite nicely according to the stories of that seller who was selling us a pig in a poke. He showed us excellent numbers and the growth dynamics of this PS’s profit. And he let slip that he urgently needed to sell it, as he had big plans and needed to move to another city. That was when I saw an opportunity for myself, something to latch onto. I adhere to the slogan: “Everything that happens, happens for the best”. Always try to see the glass as half full, not half empty. He didn’t have time to sell the business for long, which meant I didn’t have much time to find the money to buy my share. Unfortunately, that’s how most people think. At that moment, I realized that the seller needed to sell, and there was not enough time to defend all his wishes for the deal. We talked with Kira Leonidovna for a few minutes and decided that the offer was very worthy, but not verified. Kira said she was willing to pay 60% of the price.