TeleGIF Collection

Baby Steps Algorithm

Some advice on how to accomplish things by doing real baby steps (which can be studied by observing an actual baby as opposed to reading self-help books):

1. Choose a goal and GRAB it like it was made for you

2. DROP whatever you’ve been holding or doing — others will take care of it

3. STORM towards your goal with complete disregard for your surroundings

4. If you can no longer run or walk, CRAWL to it

5. If you can no longer crawl, STRETCH in its general direction

6. If nothing works, HOWL like a demon — maybe someone will help

7. If you still can't get it, go to SLEEP

8. REPEAT

Received from my spirit animal who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Pavel Durov, also known as Paul Du Rove, just turned 40. I already told you the secrets I know about Pavel and what I learned from him over the 20 years he’s been my best friend. So today, I’m going to tell you a story about how Pavel saved my life.

First, you'll need some context. All Telegram developers meet every Tuesday and Friday to share their progress on the new features that Pavel has planned for the app. For most of his business hours, Pavel works with our designers who produce mockups of interfaces based on sketches from his famous (internally) black notebook.

Now me, I’m not as lucky as the developers and designers. Though I attend the twice-weekly meetings, I usually get to work closely with Pavel when it’s time for Telegram’s next monthly update. As THE product manager of Telegram, he pays a lot of attention to how our new features are presented in the blog posts and changelogs. For the rest of my responsibilities as the head of communications at Telegram, I don’t get (or need) input from Pavel that often.

(The story? Hang on, we're almost there!)

In recent years, Telegram has grown – and now I have a team to handle our social media accounts and requests from journalists, another to draft blog posts and manuals, and so on. (All are very small! Don’t go imagining ‘Divisions’ with dozens of people; that’s not the way we do things at Telegram.) But before that, working on my projects was often a lonely business. And one beautiful post-covid summer, it almost killed me (yes, you're ready for the story now).

Funnily enough, I can’t even remember exactly what I was working on. One of those big things that you have to break down into small tasks unless you want them to crush your spirit. I didn’t, and it crushed mine: day after day I would lock myself in a room and emerge after 12 hours of mindless browsing (news, videos of cute bears, red pandas, and cats) – without having written a single line. Procrastination happens to all, but my days turned to weeks, failure piling up on failure. As I reached the one-month mark, I was living in total darkness, beginning to consider – well, various ways out.

That was when I told Pavel about my troubles. As a boss, he’s always been understanding when obstacles prevented us from reaching some objective. In the developer meetings, he would nod and say: “this is unfortunate, let’s hope that next week we’ll see an improvement there”. But my case was different, I had no excuse except “I just can’t” – and more than a month had passed since I was able to do anything at all. Personally, I would have considered firing someone in my postition. But that wasn’t what Pavel did.

He smiled and said: “You know, why not start it slow. Let’s meet for just three hours a day, and you’ll do your thing, and I’ll be doing mine. And then we’ll see how it goes”. We started the next day, and my project was finished before the end of the week. I never got so much done in so little time! We sat across from each other at his table. He would sometimes ask me what I thought of this or that phrase in the interfaces he was planning. We’d joke about things and laugh – as more and more tasks disappeared in the rear-view mirror. The darkness had lifted, and I was whole again.

We still sometimes do those “3-hour sessions” together, especially when something important is going on at Telegram. I’m honored to have spent so many hours working beside Pavel at his desk. After all, everything you find useful in your messaging app today – and I mean ANY app, not just Telegram – is there thanks to Pavel.

Sixty years of innovation: Key moments in business technology
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/sixty-years-of-innovation-key-moments-in-business-technology

From semiconductors to cell phones to generative AI, here are 25 breakthroughs that changed business forever.

😎 If I had to give one piece of advice to people in their 20s who want to build something great, it would be: “Never drink alcohol.” 🍸

🤮 I haven’t drunk alcohol in nearly 20 years, but I’ve seen many successful people ruin themselves with it. Alcohol clouds your mental clarity and intuition for days after consumption. While it might lift your mood temporarily, it’s like taking out a loan — you’ll pay it back with interest. The short-term pleasure brings long-term misery 😵‍💫

🍔 I know it’s hard not to yield to social pressure: humans have evolved to copy the behaviors of those around them. But the habits of the majority are self-destructive — most people around us drink alcohol, eat fast food, and have passive lifestyles. And that’s fine. If you want to achieve something extraordinary, however, you’ll boost your chances by keeping both your mind and body healthy 😼

#lifestories 🐶

Exactly 18 years ago today, I launched VK—my first large company. Below is the story of how it happened.

I graduated from Saint-Petersburg University in the summer of 2006. I wanted to keep in touch with my former classmates, but I knew it would be hard without a website where everyone could find each other. So, in late August 2006, I set a goal—to build a social network for university students and graduates in four weeks.

I was pretty good at coding. At 12, I built web-based games with vector animations and sound effects. At 13, I was already asked to teach older kids Pascal (a computer language) in summer camps for programmers.

And yet, planning to build a fully-fledged social network in four weeks was overconfident. To make it worse, I decided not to use any ready-made third-party modules. I wanted to create everything from scratch: from profiles and private messages to photo albums and search.

The task seemed too large to grasp. Where do I even start? Back then, my brother Nikolai lived in Germany. Nikolai is a brilliant mathematician and algorithmic programmer, but he’s always considered web development beneath him. At that time, he was focused on his Math thesis at the Max Planck University in Bonn. He refused to help with the code but gave advice: “Write the code for user authorization first,” he said. “You’ll get through.”

This made sense. I started with a login page that generated session IDs. Sessions could then be used to identify users, show them their profile pages, and allow them to edit them. Even the sign-up process could wait: I prepopulated the entries for the first few users manually in the database.

That's when I first understood it clearly: Every complex task is just a combination of many simple ones. If you split a big project into manageable parts and arrange them in the right order, you can get anything done. In theory. In practice, you also encounter all kinds of technical obstacles that test your persistence.

In September 2006, I typically wrote code for 20 hours in a row, had one meal and then slept for 10 hours. After a day of work, I’d boil myself a bucket of pasta and eat it with a generous amount of cheese. No other food was required. I didn’t care whether it was day or night outside. Social connections stopped existing. All that mattered was the code.

I tried to make each section of my project flawless, and that took time. Obsessing over details didn’t help to get everything done in four weeks. But being the only team member allowed me to minimize time spent on internal communication. And since I knew every line of the code base by heart, I could find and fix bugs faster.

On October 10, 2006, I had a beta version of the social network up and running. I called it VKontakte (VK), which means “in contact”. It took me six weeks instead of four to create it. But the result was worth it. Users that I invited from my previous project—a students’ portal I’d been building since 2003—signed up by the thousands and started to invite friends.

I kept adding new features quickly, and competitors struggled to catch up. A few months later, I hired another developer. By that time, VK already had a million members. Within seven years, VK would reach 100 million monthly users. At that point, I was fired by the board of VK, so I left the company to focus fully on Telegram.

That experience of single-handedly building the first version of VK in 2006 was so valuable that it defined my career. As the sole member of the product team, I had to do the work of a front-end developer, back-end developer, UX/UI designer, system administrator, and product manager—all at once. I got to understand the basics of all these jobs. I learned the tiniest details of how a social network works.

I also learned that there are no complex tasks in this world—only many small ones that look scary when combined. Split a big task into smaller parts, organize them in the right sequence—and “you’ll get through”.