Why a Storyteller?
As Far As
I can Remember
I always wanted to be
a Storyteller
How an Act of
Kindness, Love and Caring
Changed My Life
my story is like your story
my struggle is like your struggle
my life is like your life
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​What if Business is a reflection of life - success and failure, profit and loss, life and death.
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We all know the end of our stories, because we all share a common beginning and end.
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And there is no room for changes, rewrites or sequels.
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Death is the only certain thing.
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However, we can determine how we are going to live our lives and what kind of experiences we will have.
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We want the best for us.
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That's why the source for every human desire is the desire for transformation.
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Transformation towards well-being and a better self.
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Imagine what we could achieve, if we can help your customers transform their lives and achieve their dreams.
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A
hero
struggle
I was hearing my wife Blagovesta and my son Boris in the other room playing
They had no idea what had just happened.
It was September 2017 and I was sitting at home freaked out because I just realized that my first feature film would not make enough money to pay my debts.
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I felt so sad because I knew the bills were due, but had no idea how I was going to pay them.
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After four years of hard work, dedication and sacrifices I was with an empty bank account and even worse with debts.
I felt that I was failing miserably.
I started to get a shooting pain in my stomach. It thought that it's like a heart attack, but it was lower in my gut.
I felt this pressure coming down and I literally felt like someone was sitting on my neck.
It got so heavy that I couldn’t lift my head. The only thing I could see were the palms of my hands, and they were sweating, yet I was freezing cold.
My whole body was shaking and shivering because I was in so much pain and frustration, yet I was frozen with fear.
I was scared and I felt betrayed, humiliated and lost. All of these emotion shocked me I've never felt this amount of despair and hopelessness which I was feeling at that very moment.
Then suddenly...
WOW, what an INSIGHT...!
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I remembered the day when my journey started and my pain and anxiety disappeared.
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I was around eight years old when everything began in the summer of 1992 at the Kiev's central railway station.
i was sad
and lonely
We were going back home from our summer holiday in Ukraine.
I wasn't playing with my older brother, because I was sad that I had to spend the next three days locked in a train coupe.
I was feeling sad and lonely, because I knew that I would see my grandmother, cousins and friends after one year.
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I started looking at the crowd in the station.
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There were many people, families were sending their loved ones, children were running around trying to have fun, but overall everything seemed very boring.
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I was sad and tired.
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Then a very tall man appeared from nowhere and stopped in front of me.
He smiled at me, but I didn't smile back.
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He looked at my eyes and pushed his right hand into his coat's pocket, he took out a small red flag with the logo of USSR on it.
I heard a thick voice "Here we go, take it and play with it". He kneed down, leaned towards me and handled me the flag. I took it and started playing immediately with the flag, when I lifted my head, he was gone, he had disappeared from the station.
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a transcendental visualisation or a madness
On our way back I started playing with the red flag.
I took the flag and started moving it rapidly from left to right. I was watching the red-yellow colour in front of my eyes when at some point I stopped seeing the flag's fabric in front of me.
I transcended in a strange - a kind of like a meditative state, where I was seeing pictures in my mind as if I was watching a movie.
I started projecting in my mind all kind of movie scenes and stories - from Westerns action films to Asian Kung Fu movies to myself running, flying, swimming or playing football.
I was so immersed in these stories with their vivid pictures and sounds that my parents got worried that I was losing my mind, because I was completely withdrawn from the real exterior world while playing with the flag.
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When we arrived in Bulgaria I started hiding myself from my parents but I didn't quit my mystical transcendental practice and I continued creating stories every day playing with the flag, transporting myself from the exterior world into the world of Neverland.
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Then one day I lost the flag and I felt as if the entire world collapsed. However, I found out that I could use any object from a pen, to paper, to anything which I could move rapidly in order to get in my meditative state of storytelling .
our beliefs
create or destroy us
​In high school literature came natural to me, and I fell in love reading books and even I started writing my own personal diary inspired by the mystical work of Karlos Kastaneda.
However, instead of making my secret passion into a profession. I chose to continue my higher education with the mission to save the world.
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I graduated with a bachelor degree in Ecology and environmental protection and started working as an Ecologist and Environmental consultant but even then when I was creating GIS Models and Spatial Analysis I was finding stories in every case and scenarios which we were analysing.
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And one day I realized that we can't save the planet.
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Because the real problem was the false belief which people have, that we could keep on living by exploiting and destroying our planet and fellow earthlings, without facing any negative consequences.
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So I felt hopeless but at the same time humble. I just accepted the fact that we as a civilization most certainly would face a very extreme crisis if we didn't shift our belief systems.
Our beliefs with our thoughts, emotions, feelings and actions were the real problem.
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So I asked myself what we could do to shift our false belief systems, because it was clear to me that BELIEF was the key factor behind our motivation.
the importance of being important
And Guess what I found?
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I found that STORY and STORYTELLING were the only one common thing behind every powerful and influential system known to human kind. Systems which were forming people's beliefs and behaviours.
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And there are many, many, reasons why story and storytelling are in the core of all religions , politics, entertainment, art and business.
I became aware that I had to stop running away from my purpose and in 2008 I quit my ecological job and devoted myself to study The Art of Story and Storytelling.
I found finally my purpose to help people, transform, create and shift their beliefs by using storytelling.
It was 2008 and I still lived in Dublin, Ireland. Where I decided to become a filmmaker.
And for the next twelve years I studied and worked vigorously in order to achieve my goal to master the art of creating beliefs and shifting and suspending disbeliefs, which basically is the art of cinema and storytelling.
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I became totally obsessed with The Art of Creative Storytelling.
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For twelve years I wrote, directed, shot, edited, produced and sold numerous brand films, dozen corporate short films, several documentaries and two feature films.
what's the story?
​I finished my first feature film No One in 2017. And GOD, how much we struggled to produce this privately financed, independent feature film. It took us three years from start to finish. And we had to beg for money, humiliate ourselves and work for years without being paid in order to succeed.
The paradox was that the movie is about the human struggle for wholeness set in Rhodope Mountains. So we literally had to experience the pains and pleasures of our characters.
Can you see this remarkable and unchangeable trait.
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Nature, people, union...
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I did an extremely bold digital marketing campaign and we showed the film in selected theaters with great audience respond and hundred of thousands of people watching the trailer and going to the cinemas.
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We ended up in negotiating with Netflix and HBO and we chose to sell the movie to HBO Europe.
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I vividly remember the day when I launched NoOne’s self distribution Video on Demand. I was sitting in my living room playing with my son when suddenly a notification sound ringed from my phone. I checked my email and I saw something really amazing. I saw that we have made a sale.
The feeling was incredible, I was feeling appreciated and acknowledged. Then suddenly a new notification, and after that another one. I started laughing, this was one of the best memories which I had regarding my experience of making my debut feature film.
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I felt fulfilled and satisfied that we have created something valuable which people wanted to watch and were ready to pay the price for it in order to experience it.
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Then one day I received a facebook message from a friend of mine warning me that the internet is full with different pirate links with my movie and even a few youtube links.
That automatically meant that this film would not make any more money and we wouldn't be able to recoup our investments (In may 2019 I uploaded NoOne in youtube and it went nuts. At the moment of writing this the film has been seen from more than 26 000 000 people).
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However, I realized that the independent film business model was irreversibly broken, because if business is a repeatable process of creating and distributing something of value which people want or need and are ready to pay to have it, and by having it they satisfy their needs and desires which generates enough profit for the creators of this value to continue to produce it.
Then the entire repeatable circle is broken, because the creators can't produce profits in order to sustain their work, because of so many factors, like piracy, massive amount of content clutter and on top of all that the big sharks in the market.
​I was still sitting at home thinking all of this and still hearing my wife and a kid in the other room playing.
My mind projected this story in front of my eyes but while watching it I wasn't in pain any more.
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The A-ha Moment!!!
I was sitting there but this time I wasn't freaked out because in spite of the fact that I knew the bills were due, I also knew how I was going to pay them.
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So instead of hating the reality I accepted it and I decided to move forward and use my skills and unique experience in service for the people and business, by helping them transform their customers' lives, using the everlasting power of creative storytelling.
I realized that the majority of businesses are totally misusing or neglecting the power of story and storytelling, because either they don't understand and know what exactly story is and what actually purposeful storytelling is or they don't know how to apply and even don't see the point of applying it in their marketing and communication.
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That very moment I decided to make everything possible to help businesses understand what is story and what is purposeful storytelling and to show them how successfully they can use those tools if they want their customers not only to survive but to thrive and grow.
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​I devoted 2018 to sharp my storytelling skills by writing, watching, listening, reading and rereading everything available about Creative Business Storytelling but this time from the perspective of an experience filmmaker and entrepreneur. I created several successful pilot projects which you can find in my blog post case studies.
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In January 2019 I helped Carlsberg create and produce a short documentary film with the objective to inspire and motivate their sales team. And at the same time make them bond with the brand and feel proud and important working for Carlsberg.
The project achieved remarkable success.
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In March 2019 I was offered to direct a commercially oriented comedy feature film "Yatagan" while I was talking with other companies how to apply the art of creative business storytelling.
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I accepted the offer and we shot the movie. The premiere of this new black - brown comedy will be in February 2020.
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However, now I am focusing entirely my time and energy to help companies use the everlasting power of creative storytelling for their businesses in order to move people forward achieving their dreams.
my story is like your story
my struggle is like your struggle
my life is like your life
​​I'm sharing this with you, because I find that my personal story is a great example of how everything is possible and how everything is paradoxical.
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I was born in a middle class family, but in the poorest country in Europe. My family is a mixture of cultures, nationalities and religions. I have grown up between Christianity and Islam. I worked and travelled across USA when I was twenty one years old speaking barely English.
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I moved to Ireland to work whatever I can just to study filmmaking. I still remember my teacher Frank Berry saying to us in the class, that from all of the twenty students only one will make a feature film, this is how cruel and competitive the filmmaking industry is.
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And the one who did it was me, because I dreamt for it and dared to make it. I consider myself a successful filmmaker who at the age of 36 had made two feature films both with substance and value, which go beyond mere entertainment.
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Filmmaking is one of the riskiest businesses. It requires huge financial resources, very skillful and rare talents, tremendous understanding of human nature and behavior and in general understanding and caring about people.
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Filmmaking is from people, about people for people.
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However, You are in the people business too, not the product business. People are senior to products! People are senior to processes employed by companies. No product or sales process will ever be successful if it doesn’t make people senior!
A product is dead; people are not. A process is a function and is always less important than people. To the degree that a company’s sales process becomes more important than people, that process will fail
What if Business is a reflection of a person's life - success and failure, profit and loss, life and death.
​
We all know the end of our stories, because we all share a common beginning and end.
​
And there is no room for changes, rewrites or sequels of that ending.
​
Death is the only certain thing.
​
However, we can determine how we are going to live our lives and what kind of experiences we will have.
​
We want the best for us.
​
That's why the source for every human desire is the desire for transformation.
​
Transformation towards well-being and a better self.
​
Imagine what we could achieve if we can help your customers transform their lives achieving their dreams.
​
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