Thinking practice for business, products, and sales
Thirst for Reality
How to see the real task and make stronger decisions in business, product, sales, and life when uncertainty, information overload, and automated answers keep growing.
Anton Minin Baranovskii
When a task is flawed, AI, generic advice, and brute effort often only drive you faster in the wrong direction. Instead of growing sales, we rewrite landing pages; instead of scaling the business, we put out fires in the team. First, you must separate facts from interpretations, see the contradiction, uncover available resources, and take the next honest step.
TRIZ in business · systems thinking · cognitive clarity · product and sales · AI context · reality testing
- Introduction, 12 chapters and a finale
- · Practicum
About the Book and Its Meaning
The book was written in sunny Argentina and is dedicated to my Brother and best friend Ivan — a person who is always near, no matter the distance between us.
Thirst for Reality is not just a set of dry instructions. It is the result of a practical path, of mistakes made in real technology products, and of the search for solutions without self-deception.
With gratitude
Alexey Naumenko helped me with this book through his critique, guidance, and careful review. I'm deeply grateful for his honest feedback, precise questions, and support, which made the book stronger, more honest, and clearer.
Alexey Naumenko — LinkedInWhat the book is about
“Thirst for Reality” is a practical guide to thinking in a world overrun by uncertainty, noise, quick fixes, and automated answers. It doesn't teach you to argue with reality. It teaches you to see the task first: to separate facts from interpretations, find the contradiction, uncover hidden resources, and test your solution in action.
It doesn't retell methods or stack them into a list. It collects them into a single practical route: from a vague tension to a precisely named task, from the first version of a problem to a strong solution, from an elegant idea to a test against reality.
At its core is TRIZ as the engineering heart of strong thinking: contradictions, resources, the ideal result, and finding the solution inside the system itself. Systems thinking, CBT, NVC, JTBD, and Lean Startup are used as additional layers: to see more clearly, frame more precisely, account for people, and test ideas in practice.
The route of the book
- 01
See the task
Separate the real task from the first, convenient version of the problem.
- 02
Clear your perception
Sort out what is fact, what is interpretation, and what is fear, a guess, or a habitual conclusion.
- 03
Find the contradiction
See where the requirements collide, and stop settling for a weak compromise.
- 04
See the system
Understand the links, constraints, delays, and rules that hold the problem in place.
- 05
Test the solution against reality
Run a small, honest test instead of trusting an elegant scheme.
This is not a set of scattered methods. It's a single route: from a vague sense of a problem to a precisely named task, a strong solution, and a test against reality.
Who it's for
For people who work on hard problems and don't want to spend their effort in the wrong place.
- Founders
- Developers
- Product people
- Managers and leads
- Writers
- Anyone making hard decisions
The book's structure
Introduction
Why the first version of a problem is almost always incomplete, and where a thirst for reality begins.
12 chapters
The path from event, thought, and reaction to the real task, contradictions, resources, the system, and testing the solution.
Finale
The cycle of a strong solution: how to assemble the book's tools into one working route.
How to apply
A concrete translation of the chapter's idea into action.
Worked through in practice
The book's ideas turn into action: a question, a wording, a map, a hypothesis, or a small experiment.
Where it may not work
The honest limits of the tool and the situations where it can mislead.
Practicum
In every chapter you work on a real task, not an abstract test for the sake of it.
Chapter summaries
A short map of the book, to refresh the meaning quickly and return to the right place.
About the author
Anton Minin Baranovskii is a software engineer with more than ten years of experience. He worked at Yandex and Sber, built government and enterprise systems, and develops his own digital products.
The book grew out of that practice: real tasks, mistakes, contradictions, and the search for solutions that survive contact with reality.
Get the book
E-book — $12.99, PDF and EPUB. Editions in 11 languages. Buy directly from the author or through bookstores.
Buying directly is the fastest way to get the book and to support independent authorship.
Choose an edition and buyThirst for Reality
How to see the real task and make stronger decisions in business, product, sales, and life when uncertainty, information overload, and automated answers keep growing.
Choose an edition and buy