Author

From the author of metatraining

I am creating metatraining as a practical system for achieving meaningful personal goals. In this system, the user comes with their own goal and enough motivation to act, while metatraining offers a set of constraints - an achievement pipeline where reaching the goal becomes an operationally clear process. You cannot skip a stage, but you can return to the pipeline where you stopped.

Dmitry Soldatenkov, founder and author of metatraining — **Dmitry Soldatenkov** founder and author of metatraining

Why I am building metatraining

It so happened that the typical start of my career in different places was almost always the same: the project is in crisis, everyone understands that something has gone wrong, and nobody knows what to do next. Sometimes this came from a poorly thought-out project or startup launch. Sometimes from the degradation of something that already existed.

It is not that I deliberately looked for identical scenarios. I was simply not very disturbed by the unknown and uncertainty, and I tried not to refuse opportunities to do something new.

When I began working through the problem of transmitting wisdom in early 2025, it turned out that almost nobody was bothered by the absence of a reproducible methodology. Moving through the chain "worldview ontology - learning - knowledge - experience - skill - personal qualities - metaskill", I did not find a ready-made method or a simple answer.

Seeing in this situation an opportunity to do something new, and not being especially disturbed by the unknown and uncertainty, I began developing my own methodology. The literary metaphor here is Ostap Bender from the Soviet novel The Little Golden Calf: when none of his four hundred "relatively honest" ways suited the specific situation, he invented the 401st. In the same sense, metatraining became my 401st way.

What from my experience entered the project

My autobiography, like any other, would not be able to transmit either the wisdom I would want to share or the experience I acquired. Still, several ways of working can be identified as part of the foundation of metatraining.

uncertainty

Uncertainty is resolved in the moment

Uncertainty is not an obstacle in itself. Sooner or later, it becomes certainty. But working with it requires keeping several competing possible scenarios in mind.

constraints

Necessity and constraints

Reality already contains necessity and system constraints. It is more productive to understand necessity and study constraints than to fight them or pretend they do not exist.

similarity

The similar can be studied through the similar

You cannot study a house completely while staying inside it. If leaving the system is architecturally impossible, that is not a reason to stop studying the house, but a reason to find an available analogy and continue through logic and similarity.

My role in the project

My classical role in projects with high uncertainty is to assess the problem, propose one of the four hundred already known ways or invent the 401st, test the scenario, check whether it works, close the problems, teach another person to manage it, and pass control into prepared hands.

The limits of my role

What I do not replace.

a doctor, psychologist, psychotherapist, or other relevant specialist
an expert in the user's specific goal
the scientific community and the quality of primary research
operational support for the project after the initial stage

What I am responsible for

For the structure and development of the project itself.

the concept and methodological architecture of the tool
collecting, checking, and synthesizing sources
turning ideas and research into practical exercises
the logic of the user path, interface, and feedback
revising decisions when data or practice show that they do not work

I do not present metatraining methods as my own scientific discovery or theory. What is original here is the assembly of existing scientific research, methods, and approaches, as well as the reconstruction of terms and definitions that the methodology needs, but that are absent in an explicit or usable form in the academic environment.

My personal background

By education I am an engineer, and most of my 25 years of work experience has been connected with IT in one way or another. In that field I mastered more than two dozen professions and specializations: from installer to owner and CEO of a company selling IT consumables; from technical support specialist to head of an IT department; from website development to business development director in IT equipment trade; from systems design and author's supervision to project management on both the client and contractor sides.

psychology

I am not a psychologist

I am not bound by the professional framework of any psychological school. I can use individual methods and research results where they are appropriate for achieving goals, without accepting the whole system they belong to.

therapy

I am not a therapist

I do not diagnose or treat, and I do not look at the user as someone who needs to be fixed. Medical research and clinical observations can be useful for understanding the human psyche and designing methods for achieving goals.

philosophy

I am not a philosopher

I do not work inside academic philosophy and do not belong to any of its schools. If a particular idea or way of reasoning is useful for my task, I can use it without accepting the whole system of views around it.

Looking back, I can say that information systems and technologies are not necessarily computers, even though they are commonly treated that way. My experience allows me to examine a system and propose a technology where, on the surface, there is only informational noise.

the 401st way

metatraining is my 401st way

In the literary metaphor of Ostap Bender, when none of the four hundred already available ways suited a particular goal, the character calmly invented the 401st.

When I set myself a goal that perhaps nobody had set in this form before, the result became a tool that perhaps nobody had offered in this form before. That is how metatraining emerged.

The skill of creating unconventional tools for unconventional goals is a kind of wisdom that can be transmitted, but cannot simply be taught.

If you want to understand the project further

The about page describes why metatraining exists and where its boundaries are. The methodology page explains how the transition from goal to repeatable practice works.

About the project Methodology