Pavel Durov

But at that point, I was pretty bored with my life.

You know, every teenager gets to a point when they have this sort of existential crisis.

What's the point of life?

What am I even doing here?

At some point I decided, since I have to go to school anyway,

I might as well try to do something impossible and become the best students and get an A or what we called five in the Russian system on every single subject.

And that kept me busy for a while.

it was incredibly difficult because you didn't have enough time.

Even if you just studied all the time,

not doing anything else, you didn't have any time left to prepare all the homework tasks and get ready for the tests.

So I ended up using the breaks between classes.

But I got to the result I wanted to get to.

I got the excellent mark in every subject.

And that kept me happy for a while.

Yeah, I still think math is essential.

It's something that shapes your brain.

It teaches you to rely on your logical thinking to split big problems into smaller parts, put them in the right sequence, solve them patiently, try it again if it doesn't work.

This is exactly the same skill you need in programming,

in project management, when you start your own company.

And it's one of the few subjects at school which encourages you to develop your own thinking as opposed to rely on what other people have to say and just repeating their opinions.