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.
