The Book · chapter 0 · free

Stuck.

Being stuck is not a lack of strength. It is an absence of place.

This book is mostly for people who are stuck. And for those who found themselves in a situation that is not theirs — and live it as if it were.

The seven stages

Everyone is stuck not in a problem, but in an age. Seven stages, seven sentences a person says at that age. The sentence is what you recognise; the years are only the map.

Before anything begins

If you opened this book because something is hard and you don't know exactly what — welcome.

I won't tell you that everything is fine. I won't tell you that everything is in your hands either. First I will tell you what I know about where you are, and then what can be done with it.

What it means to be stuck

Stuck is not the same as unhappy.

An unhappy person knows what is wrong. Knows they are sad, knows why, knows it lasts. Unhappiness has content.

A stuck person does not know. Or knows, and cannot admit it. The feeling is: I can't go forward, I can't go back, and time keeps going.

So from the outside, stuck looks like something else:

• like laziness — “I can't be bothered”
• like peace — “I'm fine”
• like maturity — “it is what it is”
• like being busy — “I have no time for anything”
• like patience — “I'll wait a little longer”
• and most often — like understanding: “I know all that, but…”

“I know, but” is the most accurate sign of being stuck. Because a stuck person usually does know. What they lack is not knowledge — it is the place from which to move.

Seven signs you are stuck

You don't need all seven. Three are enough to recognise yourself.

• The same conversation repeats. With the same person, or in your head, or with yourself — for months, in the same words, with no change.
• You know the solution and you don't do it. You know you should ask for the raise, leave, say it, stop. You have known for a year.
• There is no future longer than a year. When you think “in five years”, you see no picture. Not because you don't know — because you don't want to see.
• Time passes and nothing changes. A year went by. Nothing changed. And you are as tired as if you had done something.
• Everything you do is for someone else. Work, house, obligations, phone — and not one hour a week that belongs to no one.
• When someone asks how you are, you say “fine” — and it is not a lie. You honestly think so. Then three days later you wake up at four in the morning.
• You feel that your life is someone else's. Not “imperfect” — but that you were not in the room when it was decided. That things were simply there: the job, the relationship, the city, the obligations, and the life itself.

If you recognise yourself in the fourth and the seventh — you came to the right place. This book is for you.

Three kinds of being stuck

The difference matters, because each one is solved in a different place.

1. Stuck in your years

This is the most common and the least visible.

A twenty-year-old behaving as if he were seventeen. A thirty-year-old behaving as if he were twenty-five. A fifty-year-old who works, pays and stays quiet — with a twenty-year-old inside who never got to choose.

The sign: no stage in this book fits you. As if something stopped somewhere, and everything after goes against the will.

That is not solved by growing up. It is solved by finding the place where it stopped — and continuing from there. That is why the book follows the years.

2. Stuck in someone else's situation

You did not choose your life. You inherited it, walked into it, or were pulled in:

• work — “I had to, my father asked me”, “there was nothing else”, “after university there was no choice”
• a relationship — “I stayed because of the children”, “I had nowhere to go”, “time passed”
• a city — “I came back because of my parents”, “I stayed because it was needed”
• a role in the family — the one who solves, the one who pays, the one who endures, the one who must not complain
• and the least visible: a whole decade — war, inflation, transition, pandemic — that you survived, and never once said to yourself: “this is not mine, this was simply how it was”.

The sign: you feel no pride, but no guilt either. You feel absence. As if you were watching your own life from the side, waiting to get back into it.

3. Stuck in a decision

The shortest kind, and the clearest.

Two options, both alive, both with a price, and you turn them over for months. You don't decide — you wait for the decision to make itself.

The sign: you can write both choices and all their pros and cons, and it doesn't help. If analysis doesn't help, the problem is not information.

Why you don't get out by strength

Being stuck is not a lack of strength. Being stuck is an absence of place.

A stuck person is usually strong — they endured things that would break others. That is why “be stronger”, “decide”, “be brave” doesn't help them. It insults them: they are already strong, and strength did not help because it was not in the right place.

What helps is finding the place — a concrete point in life, in years, in the story — from which movement is possible. And a place is not found by thinking. It is found by looking.

That is why this book is not about strength. This book is about looking.

What to do first — three things, and none of them is big

If you are stuck and want to start now, here is everything. The rest of the book is elaboration.

1. Write where you are, not where you should be

One page, by hand, no pretty writing:

• I am __ years old.
• I do ______, and it has lasted __ years.
• Not mine: ______
• It was someone else's: ______
• I am afraid of: ______
• I don't know: ______

Don't fix it. Don't explain it. This is not a plan — it is a photograph.

2. Find your stage

Go through the contents and see which part you recognise yourself in. Not the one that fits your age — the one you are actually in.

If you are forty and recognise yourself in the part about the twenties — write that. It is a finding, not a shame.

3. Read only that part, and stop

Don't read the whole book. Read your stage, and the part after it — the one ten years ahead. Then close it.

What is read before its time does not help. It only frightens.

One more thing that must be said

If you are stuck in a situation that is not yours — you are not to blame for being in it.

But you are responsible for what you will do with it from now on.

That is not unfair. It is the only lever there is. The past does not change — the place from which you look changes everything else.

You don't have to get out right away. You have to know where you are.

This chapter is only that — to know where you are. Everything else in the book is how to go on from there.

How this book is read

There is one instruction here, and it matters more than all the others.

Read up to your age plus ten. Then close it.

Not because further is not for you. Because further is not yet yours.

Why ten. Because it is the only measure that works. Five years ahead — you see nothing you don't already know. Twenty years ahead — that is someone else, and you don't recognise yourself; you watch another life like a film.

Ten years is exactly enough to see the person standing there, and still know that it is you.

And one rule above all: if somewhere you stop recognising yourself — stop right there. That is the exact place. You will not miss it.

What comes after that place is not a lie. It is just not yet yours. It stands there and waits — as everything else waited.

Why this book exists

The first time I heard about NLP was in a conversation I did not ask for.

It was a man who was selling something — I no longer remember what — and in the third minute he started speaking at the same speed I speak, sitting the way I sit, using my words. I did not notice at once. I noticed that I felt comfortable, that I felt understood, that I was ready to say “yes” before I had even heard what for.

When he left, I sat for another ten minutes and asked myself what had just happened.

Then I read. The first book I picked up was about the dark side of NLP — how people are analysed, how manipulation is recognised, how to defend against it. It was machine-translated, with mistakes, and I read it with a pencil, correcting what I didn't understand. It took a month.

Then the second. Then the third. Then I took Practitioner and Master Practitioner, went through 18 hours of video and 25 workbooks, and finally understood something that took a year:

NLP is not a technique. NLP is a way of paying attention.

Everything else — the meta model, anchors, submodalities, timelines — are only names for things people have always done. A mother calming a child is setting an anchor. A market seller who says “just have a look” is reframing. A man who talks you into lending him money is running a slippery slope. None of them read Bandler.

This book is an attempt to say what people have always done — and what can be learned from it — in our own language, without borrowed words and without promises.

What this book will not do. It will not tell you that you can be rich if you imagine it hard enough. It will not tell you that illness is a choice. It will not tell you that you are to blame for your own unhappiness, or that it is enough to “change a belief” and it will pass.

That would be a lie, and it is the lie NLP often produces in the hands of careless people.

My opinion is that NLP is worth something — but not as a science. It is worth something as a craft. Just as it is worth knowing how to hold a hammer, even if the physics of the hammer is not fully explained.

One note on tone. This book is written quietly. Not because I think you are fragile, but because I think important things are not said loudly. Everything I have learned about people, I learned in conversations held quite quietly — in a kitchen, in a car, on a bench in front of a building, in five minutes before sleep.

Loud people sold me things. Quiet ones taught me.

So: no exclamation marks. No “10 times more”. No promise that you will wake up as another person.

If, after reading, you do one thing differently — one sentence, one conversation, one step — the book was worth it. If you do nothing, it was still worth what you understood. Understanding is not a promise that you will act. But it is a beginning.

Dejan Milošević · Belgrade, October 2026