1.1.1. The rise, the fall, and the resurrection
Part I: Recognizing death | Chapter 1: My own death
My name is Paul and I survived financial death.
I come from Poland, where I’ve lived and worked since birth. One day I lost two companies - one that had been running for eleven years and another for three. My debts hovered around fifty thousand euros and were growing. Maybe today that doesn’t sound like much, but back then it felt like a life sentence.
Soon after that I was practically cut off from money altogether. The Social Insurance Institution - where I owed the most (over half of the total debt) - froze my bank accounts, making it impossible to withdraw any money at all, whether for business operations or for living.
For a moment I was not able to buy food.
I had a wife who had run our failed business with me from the beginning, and two teenage kids (17 and 12). An apartment I was still paying a mortgage on. Two cars (one of which I soon lost as part of settling debts).
I wasn’t even 45 yet. I was convinced it was the end. The end of everything. The end of life.
That everything good was already behind me. That the good days were over. That it would never get better.
I was convinced that until the end of my days I’d be doing some shitty job, earning some shitty money. On one hand trying to survive day to day, and on the other trying to pay off those fucking debts.
Which I’d never pay off anyway.
That’s exactly how I thought.
That’s also when I understood when life actually ends. Not when the body fails us. Life ends when we lose hope. A human without hope is dead.
I lost mine. So in consequence, I died.
But at the same time I discovered two very interesting traits in myself:
The second is that I’m resistant to addictions. I describe this in detail later.
And the first is that I’m immortal. Or rather - it’s really damn hard to kill me.
The Finns call it sisu.
Wikipedia explains it as a set of personality traits - endurance, stubbornness, willpower, mental toughness, but also courage, pride, and determination in pursuing a goal despite adversity or physical barriers.
In 2022 the Finns made an action film with that title. At the end of 1944, a gold prospector and former elite commando — Aatami Korpi — falls into the hands of SS troops who want to rob him. He kills them, but becomes the target of an obsessive pursuit by the unit’s commander. A ruthless fight begins, in which Korpi takes numerous wounds and at least twice it seems he loses his life. But he doesn’t give up. He fights to the end, defeats his enemies, and in the finale reaches a bank where he exchanges the gold for money.
So yeah, I’m sisu. I didn’t know it then. Now I do.
I died, but I came back to life. I clawed my way out of the months of misery my debts had condemned me to. I took back the initiative in my life.
More than that - a side effect of my slow, grinding return to life was that one day I discovered I was famous. And respected. My fame was niche - extremely specialized - but its reach was global.
A year after my financial death I started living again, fully. HA! A year and a half after financial death I was earning like in my best years. And eventually I reached the summit - the place only a handful of chosen ones ever reach. The very top of my professional specialization.
A year and a half after the collapse I became who I had always dreamed of becoming.
Sure, it happened in a twisted way, and it was paid for with unbelievable suffering, but I got there.
So be careful what you wish for… The road to fulfilled dreams runs over sharp stones that cut to the bone. Through thorns that tear the flesh. Through nests of venomous snakes lurking in the dark. Through spider webs and everything that crawls, bites, and poisons.
I died along the way. I came back, but there are those who stayed dead forever. Their stories now serve as signposts - like the frozen bodies of climbers on the slopes of Everest. Grotesque warnings carved in ice. Human monuments to failure showing others: here I fell, here the road ends.
But I kept going.
Unfortunately, all that time the stigma of failure weighed on my shoulders. Financial death left a permanent mark. Even though the successes were undeniable (and unbelievable), the experience of bankruptcy never let me forget what had happened.
At the same time I felt that my story - though deeply personal to me - was common and universal. That every day, all over the world, hundreds - maybe thousands - of people live through it.
People who, like I was then, are left on their own. Who thrash in desperation, blindly trying to run out of the maze of obligations and debts, slamming into walls at every turn.
People who die. In loneliness. In shame.
They drown in trauma. Which, to outsiders, looks pathetic.
Because a bankrupt entrepreneur is always assumed to be to blame. They fall because of their own incompetence.
If instead they’d died in a car crash, at least they’d be a victim. Victims can - and should - receive sympathy.
Bankrupts deserve only contempt.
Well, I think differently. And I want to help those who have fallen into the abyss. Who are staring into the beast’s eyes. Who are standing in the open window.
I want to show them that hope can be recovered. Pulled back from clinical death.
But I also want to show others what this really looks like. From the inside. From the side of the soul. That a collapsing entrepreneur is not a loser, not a screw-up, not a business retard - but someone who is actually dying. Yes, physically too.
That all they need is one small chance. Or just a brief break - a week or two. A moment to breathe, to put their thoughts in order. A quick reset.
An inconvenient truth to tell: if someone has gone bankrupt and owes you money, calling them nineteen times in nineteen days just to hear they have nothing to repay you with right now, won’t change on the twentieth attempt on the twentieth day.
The only thing that might change is their physical presence. Which might stop being physical at all.