From the Author
Hello.
No one specifically planned this book. There was no goal to “write a bestseller.”
The idea for the book was born… in a group chat, after yet another “developmental” training. You know the ones: “Get up at 5 AM!”, “Become unstoppable!”, “1% every day!”, “You are a project that needs improvement!”
My colleagues and I returned from the conference room to our workstations — tired, slightly irritated, with a feeling that “we’ve been motivated again.”
Someone wrote in the chat: “Why aren’t there any ‘anti-trainings’? Where the main goal is to do nothing.”
Then colleagues started brainstorming the idea. Someone added: “A training on skill degradation. With a ‘Master of Laziness’ certificate.”, “A lecture: ‘How to Lose Concentration with Pleasure’.”
We laughed. Joked. Shared memes. But the more we wrote, the clearer it became: this is not a joke.
Then I thought: what if we base a book on these ideas? What if we make “anti-training” not a meme-joke, but a practice — the very one that brings back peace, ease, and the right to say “not now”?
I connected the collective mind of my colleagues and AI — and this book was the result.
Important: Anti-Training is not about abandoning all your tasks and lying on the couch for months (hello Ilya Ilyich Oblomov). It’s about reclaiming your right to pause, to recover, to choose. It’s a tool for those tired of the race, to find their own rhythm, not to lose it completely.
With warmth and gratitude to the colleagues with whom it all began, Ruslan
St. Petersburg, 2025
