If someone had told me twenty years ago that, at the age of 51, I would become a philosophy student at the University of

If someone had told me twenty years ago that, at the age of 51, I would become a philosophy student at the University of Oxford, I would have laughed.

It is December 2006.

I am lying on a beach in Egypt after three days of eating, drinking, chain-smoking, and swimming in the Red Sea. I thought I had come to Egypt for a vacation. It turned out to be the beginning of a transformation that changed my life.

I had come because I thought I needed a break after eighteen exhausting months of building my engineering company. Until then, I had graduated with honors, built a successful corporate career with multinational companies, and launched my own engineering business.

My ambition was to build the leading engineering company in the country. Instead, my partners were happy with a handful of profitable government contracts, while I wanted to build something much bigger. I was exhausted.

Back in my hotel room was a book by Jack Canfield. I had bought it almost two years earlier because something inside me kept saying, “You need to read this.” At more than 400 pages, it was the biggest book I had ever tried to read in English.

That morning, I finally picked it up. For the next few days, nothing else existed. Again and again, the book confronted me with the same question:

“Mykola, what do you truly want to do with your life?”

At first, I thought I already knew the answer. Then I realized I didn’t.

I had achieved everything I once believed would make me successful. Yet I no longer wanted to build success for myself. I wanted to dedicate my life to helping other people build theirs.

That week, on a beach in Egypt, I made a decision that sounded almost absurd. I decided to become the first Russian-speaking motivational speaker.

Back then, a Google search for “motivational speaker” in Russian returned zero results. There wasn’t even a name for the profession I had just decided to dedicate my life to.

There was only one problem. I wanted to study with Jack Canfield in Arizona, but I couldn’t afford the training.

So I sold my car.

Looking back, it may still be the best investment I have ever made.

The years that followed were filled with airports, conference halls, and training rooms around the world. I founded the Academy of True Success, spoke in more than forty countries, and spent the next two decades helping people believe in themselves and achieve ambitious goals.

About ten years later, another question quietly entered my life—not how people become successful, but what it truly means to live a fully human life.

That question led me into philosophy, spirituality, and the study of consciousness. Eventually, at the age of 51, it brought me to the University of Oxford, where I became a philosophy student.

Today, my research explores one central question:

What must remain uniquely human in the age of artificial intelligence?

The biggest turning points in my life never began with certainty. They began with a question I simply could not ignore.

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