Grim business

Grim Prayers. Wiktor Miesok, Felix Charin. 2026. 

A Grim mindset is the foundation of business success: Passion. Thunder. Focus. Sincerity. Endurance. 

1. Test and find out if what you are building is something people actually want. Don’t build something you don’t love. And don't build something people don’t love. Test early. Test sincerely. Talk to your potential customers. See if their eyes light up. If you don’t find real passion inside you, and inside them, try a different product.
2. Thunder is your friend. Grim comes from the Slavic word Grom which means thunder. Thunder does not wait for perfection. Thunder strikes. No matter if thunder hits or misses, it strikes again. Start small. Build a prototype. Ship Fast. See what works. Change what doesn’t. Strike again. Good is better than perfect, remember that. Because good lets you strike.
3. Focus on one core problem. Life is grim. Harsh. Cold. That’s the problem. And the problem is your friend. Good startups do one thing well. They focus on one problem. And solve it. Distraction kills early companies faster than competition. Filter without mercy: If your product does not solve the problem – cut it. No extra features. No side quests. No shiny shit. Fall in love with the problem, not with the solution.
4. Build a culture of radical honesty. Grim means earnest, serious. No games. Inside your team, truth is oxygen. No politics. No egos. No hiding mistakes. Founders who don't like hard conversations destroy their own enterprises. Speak directly. Eye to eye. And always with respect. But speak honestly. Bad news now is always cheaper than bad news later.
5. Take care of your energy. Take care of your people. Startups die when teams die. And teams die when founders burn out. Sleep well. Train the body. Take silent days. Be a brother, not a colleague. And always, always keep walking.

Grim prayers

Grim Prayers. Wiktor Miesok, Felix Charin. 2026.

Adaptability 

I ponder sometimes on how our moods change, and how little it takes to enjoy life if one has the right attitude. Adaptability is the great gift of the human species. We can survive anywhere; we can get used to anything. But this trait can also cost us everything, rob us of our morals, values and what makes us human in the first place.

Kintsugi, the art of repairing broken pottery. When it cracks, they do not hide the damage but seal it with golden glue, and the fracture becomes part of the design.

The vory look at pain differently than the regular men. We embrace it, we make it our ally. That’s why it is so hard to break or corrupt a vor with threats or torture. But we all have breaking points, even the hardest of us.

Nothing to lose 

If you take everything from a man, and he has nothing else to lose, he might snap back at you.

Friendship

Fighting pain and struggling together brings men closer, but having your brother pick ticks from your ass makes you family.

A man has to fight for his family.

Division

It is easier to see such things in hindsight when the fog of war lifts and the perspective widens. But when we are in the midst of turmoil, when we need to survive in the moment, and are blinded by petty grievances, we easily fall prey to the trap of division.

The polarized society can’t stand together against the tyranny of the few.

Divide et impera.

Look at your own adversaries today, droog. Are they opposed to you by their own will? Maybe someone else has pitted them against your cause, to keep you busy from seeing the invisible prison you’re in.

Vengeance

Don’t ever cross a woman, because their vengeance can be the polar opposite of their normally caring nature. Cold, calculating, and absolutely ruthless.

Mortality

Born once by your mother, die once, like no other.

There is no equality in the universe, except for the fact that we are all going to die. But you seem to know that yourself.

Remember that we are all mortal, and everything that we do has meaning because of this. Be on your way, follow your path, and be honorable!

How to deal with enemies

Grim Prayers. Wiktor Miesok, Felix Charin. 2026.

Be thankful for your enemy. He will teach you everything you need to know about your mind, your life, and your death.

1. You are not a rock. You are an ocean. A good enemy will teach you that before strategy, before words comes control over the ocean that is inside of you. Is it storming? Then better not go and sail towards your enemy, bratan. Do not engage with your enemy in anger. An enemy wants a reaction. Rage. Fear. Impulse. You will not give him that. Silence is your shield. Silence is your sword.
2. Reduce yourself. Limit exposure. Limit information. Limit emotional availability. The less access an enemy has to your time, data, and energy, the weaker they become.
3. Build boundaries. State clearly what you will accept and what you will not. Once. Calmly. Respectfully. Without explanation. Then enforce through consistency, not outbursts. Never fight in public. It turns disagreement into big theater. Egos rise. Faces must be saved. Positions harden. Silence again is your master.
4. Stop personalizing, start analyzing. Do not take things personally. You are not the center of the world. You do not really matter. Most enemies are not driven by hatred towards you. They are driven by their own fear, status, resources, insecurity. Ask yourself: What do they gain by opposing me? Then remove or neutralize that gain. You don’t defeat enemies by insults. You defeat them by making opposition unprofitable.
5. Document. Memory can lie. Paper does not. Write down facts. Dates. Words. Actions. Not with emotion. With precision. Documentation is quiet power. It protects you when stories shift and narratives are rewritten. The calm record outlives the loud accusation.
6. Generosity. Follow the rules of Silence, Boundaries, Ani-Personalization, Analyzation, Documentation and then in a sudden moment, your biggest weapon to diffuse the enemy is honor. Be generous to your enemy, use it like a weapon. It has worked many times.
7. Remember Death. Your enemy will teach you an important lesson. When death greets you all you have is who you have become. If you have become full of hate, then you take this into the afterlife. Don’t do it.

Business is business

Grim Prayers. Wiktor Miesok, Felix Charin. 2026.

1. If you have nothing, first get a skill. A high-income skill. In prison these are: medical skills, cutting hair, fixing clothes, or technology. In real life this is a skill that pays 100 Dollars per hour and more. Take six months to learn minimum two hours every fucking day.
2. No matter how much money you make, stay humble, save your money. Save 55% of what you make.
3. Multiply. You will never get rich if you trade time for money. You get rich when you multiply your time WITH money.
4. Invest into compounding assets with leverage. Compounding assets are things that become more valuable over time. Leverage means you use the money you have now to easily get more money in the future. Honor makes you more money in the long run than dishonor. Every century a major monetary system gets reset. That means only those people with hard assets like real estate will have something left. Everyone else’s money, stocks, bonds will be devalued, they will be stolen. Look at history. And look into the future.

Simple rules to keep yourself in loneliness and isolation

Grim Prayers. Wiktor Miesok, Felix Charin. 2026.

1. Move your body. I tell that to all my young associates, and it is the simplest rule to follow. Your body is made for action, so give it some.
2. Use your mind. Now that your body is active, and your mind is calm, focus it, and think. Contemplate on your mission, droog, on what you will do after you get out. Play chess in your head or pretend to write stories and letters.
3. Know yourself. Sometimes to know who you are, you must know who you are not, and by defining your enemies, you come to understand your values.
4. Rein in your emotions. Look at the feelings, observe them, learn from them. When you master your emotions, you won’t be afraid of solitude ever again. Breathwork can be helpful.
5. Keep faith. It is a well-established phenomenon that people with faith often survive, heal faster, and overcome more than those who believe in nothing. Believe in something. Find a meaning and hold on to it.
6. Think about your death. Consider your own mortality, and make it fuel your willpower.

How you grow

Grim Prayers. Wiktor Miesok, Felix Charin. 2026.

1. Breaking is part of becoming. Boys do not become men without something dying. An old identity must crack before a stronger one forms. If you fight the break, you stay small.
2. Pain calls for meaning. I saw this in prison and in freedom. Pain plus meaning equals depth. Pain minus meaning is bitterness. If you ask, “Why did this happen to me?” you shrink. If you ask, “What is this teaching me?” you grow.
3. Accept new identities without losing yourself. Own your transformation. Boys become men through rites of passage. Those who say, “I am who I am, I won’t change,” will not grow. I went from a soldier to a vor, from a vor to an entrepreneur, and from a prisoner to a free man. Identity is not a prison unless you refuse to outgrow it.
4. Pride stunt your growth. Men who were strong, who grew, were not alone. They spoke about pain without drowning in it, and they allowed support. The ones who said, “I need no one,” who saw vulnerability only as weakness, who refused a helping hand—they broke even more, year by year. They either turned inward, becoming subdued and depressed, or lashed out, hurting anyone who crossed their path. Pride lies, telling you that you are stronger than you really are. Growth begins when pride cracks.
5. Do not hide your scars, especially from yourself. Kintsugi does not conceal the fracture. It highlights it. Your scars are not shame. They are proof of survival and a rebirth. Face your shadows. Inside you there is anger, fear, envy, weakness. If you pretend it is not there, it controls you. Look at it. Name it. Discipline it. After all that I lived through, I realized that I did not chose what happened to me. But I choose who I would become.

How to deal with loss

Grim Prayers. Wiktor Miesok, Felix Charin. 2026.

1. Keep tight in public. Easier said than done but keep your grief private. Don't fall apart in public. If you collapse in front of people, you invite predators, and you also weaken the ones who depend on you. Be their pillar to lean on.
2. Accept that the world moves on. The sun will rise tomorrow whether you are ready or not. Life continues, problems multiply, and your enemies move. So, you move too, even if your chest feels like it’s full of stones.
3. Don’t romanticize the dead. They weren’t saints. None of us are. Honor who they really were, the good and the ugly, because truth is the only respect that lasts.
4. Use the past as fuel, but don’t live in the past. Remembrance is useful, it can push you forward. But if you crawl inside it and live there, then instead of honoring the dead you’re hiding from life. Make memories into a tool to inspire you, not into a home to hide in.
5. Carry on. Finish the mission you had together. That is loyalty: family, work, a promise, even a simple way of living. When you complete what the two of you began, grief turns into duty, and you find peace in your soul.
6. Keep moving. If you fell, rise and continue walking. One step at a time. Move forward, every fucking day.

Grim Begins

Grim Begins. Wiktor Miesok, Felix Charin. 2025.

Life is grim. The first lesson I got from the Grim Death: In a blink of an eye, I lost the only person I cared about.

Being where I am now, I have no regrets. I made my choices, and I paid for them. Some of the consequences I still carry, but I do not complain, and I accept the burden.

It was not my accomplishments that satisfy me. In the darkest days I learned the brightest lesson. When Death greets you, all you have is who you have become. It was the man I came to be that made me proud and filled me with the sense of confidence that you end up with after a hard battle.

I began to understand that with money and good connections, anything was possible.

As much as technology makes our lives easier, it also makes us more dependent on it. How many men nowadays could find their way through a maze of country roads without their phone and a map app? Back then, we had to depend on printed paper and road signs to know we were heading in the right direction. Sometimes we would even have to stop and ask one of the locals for guidance, as some routes were closed due to roadworks, diverting us through small villages and towns. And sometimes we used the most powerful tool of any good man, his instinct, which you can’t develop without experience.

It is good, you can stand your ground. In this business you need that to keep yourself from being eaten alive.

Never look down at the lowlifes. We are all lowlifes in some way or the other, but God never looks down on anyone. 

There was no point showing off that I did well among those who were struggling.

It is in times when we succeed, when things seem to be working in our favor, and our egos expand like a pufferfish, that we are most easily blind-sided and in danger of the greatest fall. (Whom the gods would destroy, they first make blind). 

Never lose your calm. Those who are loudest are those who are weakest. Those who are silent are the ones who are dangerous.

Always keep your word. If you break it, it will break you. No matter if you are dealing with solid people or criminals. The dealings are the same.

Be honorable. Your honor, your reputation is everything you have. Criminals are well connected. If you ruin your reputation, you don’t just ruin your business, you ruin your life.

An honor once tarnished is not easily restored, and trust broken might never be mended.

Success is never built overnight, it’s an iceberg. You only see the very tip, but never the fundament.

What is owned by everyone, is owned by no one.

It is in our hands to either allow tyranny, or to stand in its way.

When times are hard, when tyranny is pressing down on us. The choice is always there, it is just a matter of how determined we are, how much we are willing to sacrifice, how much we value ourselves.

Public education often stifles rather than nurtures our true potential, and the labor market, combined with an oppressive taxation system, ensures that even in an age of incredible production efficiency, most people are barely getting by.

There wasn’t much difference between zeki and the guards when it came to violence, criminality and morals. We were all beasts locked in a cage; they just held the weapons and had some power over us.

There were fates worse than death that could be dealt out by these harsh men, as I would learn in time.

—Pecunia non olet, as they said in Ancient Rome, money does not stink. —Zhadnost' vsyakomu goryu nachalo, Greed is the root of all sorrow, as they say in Russia.

Knowledge is good, but it is the experience that really puts us ahead in life.

The importance of communication and how much power a man can wield if he has the ability to convey his thoughts effectively.

Human beings are multidimensional creatures, with sometimes conflicting characteristics.

I am wiser now, unaffected by either success or failure, as both are fleeting and vain.

It can be a cycle for many of us, until we learn how to break it, how to be unaffected by either success or failure, and just keep moving forward, towards our goals.

It was part of my ego that had led me astray a few times in my life. It took quite a bit of suffering before I was able to turn it into dust. But at that time, I was still full of it.

Enemies. 

No point arguing with fanatics, religious or otherwise, won’t listen, and the only thing you can get out of them is their rage.

Information is key, and when you know your opponents’ actions, you can adjust your own strategy accordingly.

Know your enemy in and out, droog.

In prison, you never let your guard down. A bad mistake. (Always alert of your surroundings. The Art of Manliness).

Rules for life from a russian mob chief

Grim Prayers. Wiktor Miesok, Felix Charin. 2025.

1. Keep calm and follow your gut.
2. You never forget: I’m OK, you’re OK.
3. Don’t speak it. Do it. 
4. Have a good team. No assholes. People with soul.
5. Work hard. But one day a week, do not work.
6. Only one thing at a time. Concentrate.
7. Do not make money number one. You will not be a success; you will be a stinking whore.
8. Keep the word you speak. What you say will be done. Every fucking day.

How to survive in jail

Grim Prayers. Wiktor Miesok, Felix Charin. 2025.

1. Be strong but never confrontative. Walk tall and keep your head up. Don’t avoid someone’s eye like a coward. Don’t look away too quickly but also don’t stare like you’re looking for a fight. There is a balance between strength and arrogance. The former is respected, but the latter punished without mercy.
2. Be silent. Talk less, listen more. When you listen, you learn. When you talk, you attract attention."
3. Always treat people with respect, especially yourself. Never give up on yourself. If you are bullied, fight the bully, even if you lose. It is better to have a bloody nose, than to become a downcast. There are fates worse than death,"
4. Be of service. No matter who you are and what you know, you can be useful, even if you think you have nothing to offer. Smuggle love letters, trade cigarettes, adjust broken noses, and listen to those who are sharing their pain. An open heart in a tough man is the strongest weapon you can get in jail.

How to play poker

Grim Begins. Wiktor Miesok, Felix Charin. 2025.

1. If you want to win, never get intoxicated. Clear mind, clear game. 
2. Spend time understanding other players' betting patterns and their body language. Study their micro-expressions, especially around their eyes and mouth. These parts of the body are the true mirror of the soul. 
3. People change under the influence of winning money. Some become cocky, some become nervous, and very few are unaffected by the spell of easy profit. Use that to your advantage, especially against those who are both intoxicated and flying high on a winning streak.
4. Pretend to be strong when you’re weak and show weakness when you have a powerful hand. Adjust and change your patterns to be unpredictable. 
5. Most important: manage your bankroll. For each game set a strict limit for how much you’re willing to bet and play with. Don’t exceed it, no matter the outcome. The pain of not winning big is much smaller than the pain of losing big, trust me.

How to deal with bullies

Grim Begins. Wiktor Miesok, Felix Charin. 2025.

1. Everything starts with your eyes. Never stare, but also never look sheepishly to the ground. Power is balance. Your eyes are not just the gates to your soul, they are also a weapon and they are an indicator of how strong you are.
2. Your body language will determine if you will receive respect. Walk tall, eyes straight, chest to the front, and imagine an invisible thread attached to the crown of your head, always pulling you up, making your chin go down. Only arrogant people have their chin up and will get punched and knocked out the quickest in life.
3. After mastering body language, you master mindset. Always start out with: I’m OK, You’re OK. Start out cooperative with everyone. Set clear boundaries. Bullies like to test limits. If someone treats you like shit, strike back, swiftly - as a warning - and then offer cooperation again. This is the highest level of game theory that will bring you far in life, no matter if you are in kindergarten, in prison, or in a boardroom.
4. Never react emotionally. Bullies thrive on provoking anger or fear. Keep calm, use logic and humor, and don't give the bullies the emotional reaction they seek. Your calm is your shield, and your wit is your sword.
5. Form alliances. Everything starts with paying it forward, a favor will grow you a  connection, a connection will become an alliance, an alliance can even become a friendship. Bullies have a tough time when you are well-connected and useful. Trust me. The best thing to stop a bully is another bully. Always maintain ties with the rivals of those you are dealing with - if one side tries to squeeze you, you are protected by their rivals. Your enemy's enemy can be made your friend.
6. Keep your skills sharp. Whatever is needed in your area, practice everyday. Verbal wit, strategic thinking, or self-defense, everyday sharpen your sword. Bullies avoid people who have competence, but are humble about it.
7. Your sharpest sword is silence, also against bullies. When dealing with a bully, silence combined with strong eye contact will create a powerful shield, if your body language is tall and strong. Silence is your master, your protector and your charisma.
8. Be honorable.