About
I write because I spent twenty-five years standing behind a counter, watching people try to live, and I noticed the same five mistakes repeating across every age, every income, every nationality. The books are my attempt to put those observations into a form a person can actually use. The app is my attempt to make the form move.
Kishinev, fifth grade
I was born in 1975 in Kishinev, Moldova. Until I was eleven I was a model student and my teachers were gods. Then I caught rheumatism, missed half a year of school, came back stiff at the blackboard, and the teacher made a joke at my expense. The class laughed. She liked it, so she kept doing it. The biology, physics and geography teachers joined in.
At some point I understood it was not pedagogy — she just enjoyed it personally. And I thought: then she is just a person. With a grade book.
There are no gods. There are people with grade books.
That sentence is the seed of every book I have written since.
Twenty-five years in Italy
In December 2000 I crossed the border into Italy with two hundred dollars in my pocket. The relatives who had called me over did not pick me up at the station. For the first six months I paid for everyone. The first job was a construction site without electricity, mixing concrete by hand until my fingers were too swollen to close around a mosquito.
My wife Larisa came with me — and "with me" understates it. She worked as a domestic helper in houses that humiliated her, took the humiliation in silence, and decided one day she would never work for anyone again. We opened our first shop in 2011, lost it to a landlord-fraud scheme by 2013, opened VALMART that same year on Via Venezia in Padova with twenty thousand euros and a debt of twenty thousand more. We are still there. About three hundred square metres, half a million euros a year, three children.
The slow patient build is the only kind I trust now. Anything that came fast in my life either disappeared fast or cost me later.
Why nine books, and not one
Nine because life has more than one operating system inside it, and one book pretending to cover all of them is a course, not a body of thought. I split the work into a trilogy: mind (firmware, manipulation defence, sovereignty), body (procrastination, energy, contact) and architect (fatherhood, integration, biography). Each book has a single home concept. Each one stands alone. Together they make a system you can actually live inside.
I chose long-form because I do not believe in courses. Courses make people dependent on a structure outside themselves. A book you read once and put on the shelf, then return to in five years and find a different sentence underlined — that is what changes a person.
Why the app exists
There is a gap between reading and applying. I have watched it kill more good intentions than any other thing. People finish a strong book, feel awake for three days, and then daily life closes back over them like water.
NeoEvo is the daily companion I needed myself. It tracks the seven skills the books map onto. It catches the small action you would otherwise postpone. It is free where it can be free, paid only where it has to be. It is not a productivity tool — it is a place to keep your own structure when the world keeps trying to dissolve it.
The family
Larisa is co-author of the books on contact and fatherhood, and co-author of everything else by way of being co-author of my life. We have three children — Alexander, Artyom and Valeria. Most of the case material in the books is them, us, our shop, our customers, our mistakes. I do not write about strangers. The shop on Via Venezia has been my laboratory for twenty-five years. The lab is open six days a week.
A note before you read further
I am not here to motivate you. I do not believe motivation works, and I find the people who sell it tiresome. I am here to put down what I have learned in a form you can examine, disagree with, and use the parts of that work for you. If a book or the app helps, that is good. If it does not, put it down. Your life is yours.
— Valentin