The deadly sting of the Russia-Ukraine war has touched my family. My first cousin, dear brother, with whom we grew up in the same jampacked soviet appartment, survived the terrible 90’s and navigated our adolescence years until I left to work abroad, was sent to his first assignment at the end of 2024. Lost on the battlefield soon after. 1,5 years of silence and waiting followed. Was he in captivity or … we did not know. Finally, this week my family will be given a chance to say goodbye. He fell as a hero. We hold the line.
Because of this war, I came to an understanding of many things about life. We are all on the battlefield. But many of us do not know it.
Following the development of the war, with a larger, better-equipped enemy against a country that did not have an army at the beginning, I have realized that the force that kept Ukraine standing was the quality of its people on the front lines.
The Ukrainian army was filled with volunteers who had never pursued a military career. They came from different professional and educational backgrounds. I remember seeing professors giving lectures from the trenches in body armour. I remember listening to the leadership of the Azov brigade of the Ukrainian army with my mouth open, understanding that I was listening to highly educated people. It broke my belief that the army had been sort of “thoughtless”, as the old soviet anecdotes presented.
This gave me strong evidence that what General Mattis said was true.
For the younger officers who might view this lecture, I can tell them how they can become four-star generals. They can fight enemies who are dumber than a bucket full of rocks. And those are generally enemies who have not had the same rigor in pressing themselves to learn from history and to be curious about the world around them.
General James Mattis (An nterview to UCTV and Harry Kreisler) 2014
I wrote earlier that we are all on the battlefield, but many of us are sleeping on this idea. The reality is, there is a war between the good and the evil, tyranny and democracy, slavery and freedom, righteousness and love of sin. This war has casualties. As Hosea said, people perish for the lack of knowledge. To be more precise, the quotation sounds like this according to KJV:
My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.
Bible – King James Version (The book of Hosea 4:6)
The law Hosea refers to is not only religious texts, but curiosity about the world around and history. If people reject the knowledge, they become the enemy who is dumber than a bucket full of rocks. The person who treats self-education seriously is set to win in the battle. I believe that this is the reason Ukraine stands.
The tragedy of my brother’s loss is that the two months of instruction before the most deadly battle robbed him of a chance to come back, like most of his compatriots in that assignment. This is the most painful fact for me. The trenches take the lives of experienced and prepared soldiers too. But the number of lost lives of newly employed combatants is in much bigger proportion, I assume. History will show.
Technically, he was sent to his death. His brave soul did not have to be lost like that. I wonder what would have happened if he had specialized in any military discipline? I mourn his life, and I am trying to make sense of his sacrifice. At least I want to remember that I am on the battlefield and I need to have rigor in pressing myself to read and learn.
In this interview, General Mattis – a four-star US general – talked about weaponizing reading and education. Making good humor your armour. Strengthening body, soul, and spirit. We are on the battlefield, and we need to hold the line.
Lasting influence depends on communication, but communication depends on something deeper: an organized mind. Before we learn to speak well, we must learn to think well.
The difficulty in expressing one’s thoughts, in finding arguments to defend the position, or even to form it, in listening to other people’s arguments, and in producing counterarguments are signs of an unorganized mind. Education is supposed to sort this issue out, but conventional education is rarely capable of doing it. Traditional education often develops literacy and subject knowledge, but it rarely teaches students how to organize complex thoughts, construct arguments, examine opposing views, and communicate ideas persuasively.
People who received a generic education struggle to communicate. Our timelines are filled with people who are struggling to express their thoughts. It becomes a problem for those who want to become influencers, thought leaders, and authors, because influence requires communication. Communication is not the ability to produce words. It is the ability to transmit organized thought. The quality of communication depends primarily on the quality of thinking behind it.
Communication skills are a byproduct of an organized mind, but not a guarantee of excellence in communication. An organized mind is the foundation of communication skills. Communication itself still requires deliberate practice, but without organized thinking, that practice produces style without substance. An organized mind is one that can distinguish facts from opinions, recognize assumptions, arrange ideas logically, support claims with evidence, anticipate objections, and explain conclusions clearly. Only organized thinking can sustain meaningful communication. However, nowadays we find ourselves in a situation where the emphasis is placed more on communication techniques than on the foundations of communication – the thought process.
Neither organized thinking nor communication skills appear overnight, just like no one becomes literate instantly.
We are not born with a special gift to communicate and the ability to think clearly – it is a result of an education (self-education) process.
History knows people with speech difficulties who were great communicators. Take, for example, Helen Keller, who was blind and deaf. Helen Keller reminds us that communication is not fundamentally about speech. It is about conveying meaning. Despite being unable to see or hear, she became an author, speaker, and activist because her ideas were worth communicating. Her success was impossible without organized thought.
Yes, some people can find it easier to articulate their thoughts; others will find it extremely challenging, but every one of us can decide to build necessary skills and achieve the goal of becoming a charismatic speaker, author, and brilliant communicator.
Where does a person desiring to learn organized thinking and communication start? You start with clarity in the subject you want to communicate. Understanding your topic, passion, and convictions is best to begin with. The next step will be finding arguments that strengthen the position. Then understand counterarguments and how to respond to them in multiple ways. This is called the organization of one’s mind. We start with one topic and gradually expand to other areas of our interests and life.
After organizing thoughts around one specific area, we can start training ourselves to share them. I think the best way to express thoughts at the start is to talk on camera. It allows us to feel more secure than if we spoke in front of a live audience and to take enough time to prepare, analyse outcomes, and improve. Later, we can move to public speaking in friendly and familiar environments. After that, the next step is to try speaking to an unfamiliar but welcoming and understanding audience. This should be followed by communicating with an audience with opposite views.
Communication skills development should be gradual and in this order. Many people possess clearer ideas than they can express because fear interrupts retrieval, organization, and articulation. It comes from sharing raw ideas with an unwelcoming audience and an audience with opposite views too early. The lack of proper conditions was the reason many of us never progressed in forming and expressing our thoughts. Critical parents and siblings, bullying at school, and dominating bosses and coworkers later convinced us that we should not speak out. Thus, there was no need to train articulation.
Now, in the era of influence marketing and personal branding, communication is a must-have for those who want to share ideas, attract customers, and build followership. Many of those appearing in our timelines are unable to express their thoughts, and they have no idea how bad their communication is, and how undeveloped their ideas are. They are often told to just keep producing content. Practice improves fluency. It does not automatically improve thinking. Repeating poorly organized ideas simply makes someone more fluent at expressing confusion. We have to start with the organization of the mind. And that is what many coaches and personal brand advocates are missing.
The influence does not start with posts. The impact does not begin with recording yourself on camera.
Just like one of the greatest mentors of the ancient world, Apostle Paul, spoke of love, saying that a declaration of love without its foundational attributes sounds like the clanging of cymbals – empty – today we can say that without thought organization, all speeches, preaching, keynotes, posts, articles, podcasts, YouTube videos are empty sounds.
If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal
Apostle Paul ( Bible, 1st Corinthians 13:1)
This phrase is followed by the main attributes of love. Paul did not merely define love in one sentence. He unpacked it through a series of carefully distinguished characteristics. Whether one approaches the passage theologically or rhetorically, it illustrates organized thinking applied to a profound idea. Paul seemed to have invested in the idea of love if he came up with sixteen different attributes. It required time and organized thinking to compose what we know of today as the “Hymn of Love”.
We can become very productive today with the use of AI. It can compile more attributes of love, crafted better than Paul’s. But it doesn’t make an “author” of the prompt a better thinker. AI can help organize our thoughts, but in most cases it just overwhelms us or covers up for our inability to think. If I can use all the AI in the world, it does not make me a great thinker and communicator. It does not make me even an average one. But understanding how to organize our own minds takes the work with AI to a totally new level.
We often think that influence starts with publishing and promotion of our content. It doesn’t. The influence begins when we discipline our minds to organize ideas and communicate them clearly. Every article, post, book, YouTube video must start with an organization of our mind.
Obviously there are people who achieve goals not through discipline but other values, like passion, action and persistence. There might be more. But to my opinion, people with those values are like hunters or wild animals attempting to achieve goals. Hunting is not without discipline, of course, but when I speak of hunting I imagine something unorganized and fueled by adrenaline that comes with chasing the prey.
With the large goals, complicated tasks, ambitious achievement everyone will have to be disciplined.
You can win one football game in your neighborhood, but to become the best football team you need to develop many skills which will require discipline. I was never a fan of discipline. I never went into sports. Even the scouts group I joined was more of soviet hippie in disguise. In my teens I could never do a planned task on time. Discipline was what I hated. I did well without discipline because I was like a hunter and a wild animal. But, with adolescence came ambitions. I had to admit that I needed discipline. I took me years to figure out even to accept it. Now I work on my discipline. I am 45.
I picked up Hard Times by Charles Dickens with a simple goal: to improve my vocabulary. I did not expect the book to challenge my behavior, my beliefs, and the way I present myself to the world.
Yet, through its exaggerated and often uncomfortable characters, the novel acted as a mirror—revealing traits I had overlooked and forcing me to rethink the cost of my own attitudes.
When Recognition Turns into Overcompensation
Thanks to Hard Times I have noticed the following pattern in my life. After a long period of dismissal of my achievements and efforts in different projects and spheres by people who mattered for me, I have decided to talk about my work and… “brilliance” on my own. “If other people don’t do it, I will do it myself,” I thought. We often overcorrect past neglect without realizing it. In trying to compensate, we risk becoming what we once disliked.
When Self-Promotion Becomes Self-Caricature
Through the character of Mr. Bounderby, I immediately recognized how foolish constant self-promotion can appear. It was indeed revealing but not painful. By reading the scenes with Bounderby I could smile thinking how ridiculously close these situations were to some of mine. It convinced me to avoid making the same kind of impression going forward. I decided there should be specific occasions for self-promotion, not every opportunity. Self-promotion without awareness quickly turns into self-caricature.
The Illusion of Perfect Systems
Another belief the book challenged was my assumption that systems guarantee results. Gradgrind’s character and story helped me to expand my understanding of why systems fail people. We are constantly told systems are the perfect solution to productivity—yet they often fail us because we misunderstand their nature.
Learning the Power of Quiet Wisdom
In contrast to this I have learned how being humble and considerate of other people is a power. I have fallen in love with the character of Sissy as she possesses what I never had – a quiet wisdom that surfaces when it is needed. I am so much extravert, I would never be able to hide anything in me. I loved her lack of needing acknowledgement to be such a strong character, self-sufficient and rich from within. Indeed, she became an example for me. Being humble doesn’t mean hiding, it means showing your strength where it is needed.
Loyalty, Status, and Hidden Insecurity
On a different note some characters were really entertaining. A lot of laughs about the Mrs. Sparsit’s looks and reactions. It felt as if it had been written from my old co-worker Mrs. O, who still remains around her Patron. Her headshakes over the cup of coffee and the nose that demonstrated her coming from high society and especially eyebrows, are the exact representation of that lady I know. Of course, putting her high society nose where she should not out of the overprotection of her patron and dedication to him is admirable and miserable simultaneously.
I did not see Mrs. Sparsit as an inspiration, but rather as confirmation that my dislike for such behavior is justified. Behind devotion to authority often lies insecurity and immaturity.
How Charles Dickens Made Me Feel What I Didn’t Expect
These are the impressions from the characters. Now I would like to cover my impressions from the writing. At some point, while shedding a tear over the scene of dying Stephen Blackpool I have caught myself on a thought: “How did he (Dickens) did it? I did not even sympathize a lot with Stephen?”
The Discomfort of Unfair Outcomes
Finding the answer to what moved me was a puzzle. Maybe due to the difficult language used in Stephen’s dialogues to picture his heavy accent, my mind was overwhelmed trying to process what exactly was said and what meant within the scope of story. Maybe because of his pessimistic outlook at life I did not quite like him, despite his character being noble and kind. And then these tears over his death.. wow, very impressive effect.
Maybe at the end of his story I have seen how he did his best to do the right thing.. like I do, and I have seen how this attitude to life and things brought to the tragic and unfair end? That realization was uncomfortable because it raised a deeper question: is doing the right thing always enough to lead to a fair outcome? I wonder if other readers liked Stephen from the very beginning.
A Book That Changed More Than My Vocabulary
Dickens’ writing is definitely one that has to be learned from, and I believe I will explore more of his works.
What impressed me the most, as I have read about this writing process after I have completed reading the novel, is that he was writing a chapter a week (or maybe a longer period per chapter – I don’t remember) for a publication in a magazine. This means that the story could not be corrected once published. This writing was a journey for Dickens himself. One wrong turn and the story would have a different impact from what he intended. I still need to read his correspondence related to the Hard Times writing to understand how he worked on this piece and what the challenges were. I am happy with what I have discovered so far and might come back with the analysis of his writing process in more details.
Reading Hard Times enriched me. More importantly, it pushed me to rethink how I present myself, how I rely on systems, and how I relate to others. These are not small shifts—they are changes I will carry into my work and daily life. Sometimes, the books we read for small reasons change us in the biggest ways.
