A word from the author

A word from the author

I hold my Montblanc pen in my hand. I specifically bought it to sign important contracts and documents, like the one lying in front of me today. My hand is trembling and my feelings of euphoria are mixed with total uncertainty. Despite the fact that I’ve read the contract about 10 times already, I wonder what we are getting ourselves into. I look at the amount and can’t believe it – 100,000,000 euros. I’m trying to imagine how much money this hundred million euros is… Even comparing to the 120 million zloty for which we sold our company recently, joining Delivery Hero, this amount today seems completely abstract. If someone had told me 15 years ago that I would be signing such an investment agreement, I wouldn’t have believed them one bit. Nor that three years later our company will be worth more than 5 billion euros… I remember when I was a teenager, I was afraid to set goals too high. While I dreamed of having my own Ferrari, I set a goal of buying a used Corvette. I don’t know what I was afraid of. I don’t know for what reason I didn’t allow myself to dream freely at the time. I don’t know why I didn’t set very ambitious and even crazy goals for myself before.

In practice, it turned out that every goal I set for myself I achieved over time. Fortunately, with each goal achieved, I increased the bar for myself. If I could go back to myself when I was a teenager and give myself advice, I would say: Don’t let other people’s limitations be imposed on you. Set bigger goals for yourself. Allow yourself to dream, even crazy ones. Allow yourself to set goals that seem unattainable. You don’t have to change anything else. Somehow it will work out, you’ll see. No one quite knows how to do it all. Everyone makes mistakes and errs, but take action, in small steps. For all the years you have ahead of you, each small step will add up to a long and amazing journey. Take a small step every day and you will see that you will gain momentum. Step by step you will grow stronger until nothing can stop you.

Introduction — The Power of Momentum

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

• Steve Jobs

While writing this book, I had the opportunity to sit back and reflect on what I have done so far in my life and how I implemented it. This trip to the past, during which I reflected on my successes and failures, projects, products and companies, made many conclusions appear in my mind. One of them particularly touched me, maybe I could even call it the secret of my success… The truth. I didn’t know anything I was doing. Initially, I never knew how to implement it. I didn’t even know much where to start. Add to that the power of internal and external resistance and procrastination, which everyone struggles with, and I didn’t have any particular advantages. However, figuring out these downsides and difficulties showed me what made and continues to make me work so effectively and what I can call my key to success. What made me complete a variety of projects, launch more than a dozen businesses and be able to act immediately is the POWER OF MOMENTUM. It is acquiring the right ‘momentum’ in action. A bit like in physics, in order to move an object that is at rest, you first have to put in energy to overcome the resistance force of the ground. However, it is no longer necessary to put in as much energy as when starting to move the same object at a constant speed over the same ground. Each subsequent movement is already simpler. This principle works for me, too. And I just started to act! It was not important what to start with. It was important to act. If something remained only an idea in the head for too long, after a short time it died and was not implemented. Maybe you have similar experiences yourself. Me, once I start acting, I start to gain momentum in being active and it is much easier for me to put another step, and then another and another. Very significantly, the more costly this first step was (the more effort it required in my eyes), the more I felt that I had already put more energy into the project. You may think that I am referring to large financial outlays or costs incurred, such as time. However, it is not always them. I’m talking about the mental energy, the emotional value with which we feel we are engaging with an idea. For example, it takes a lot of work to create a first business plan, but we know that it is an uncertain project, it may not work out, and we ourselves do not always believe in its reality. And rightly so, because no business plan works out 100 percent. This makes it easy for us to abandon both that Excel and the whole project, despite the large amount of work that went into writing it, such a business plan doesn’t contain much of our emotional energy. In contrast, coming up with a company name and registering it, even as a sole proprietorship, doesn’t require a lot of time, work or cost, but it often has much more emotional value

for us. This is something that is much more likely to give you the momentum to keep going. I must stipulate that creating a company name and logo is something very complicated. At such an early stage, we need to accumulate energy rather than do everything correctly. So, it is better to use our energy for action, rather than waiting or correcting something, and thus not taking action at all. There will be time for changes and corrections, but first we need to have something to modify. Just like any budget and business plan, the company, name, logo, products and other elements need to be modified and developed. Look at the Coca-Cola logo, for example. It has undergone a great deal of evolution over 100 years. Think how many big companies have done rebranding. In my opinion, it is important not to fixate on the name, logo or anything else you create at the beginning. Even on the first idea to start a business. The market will validate our ideas, and the growth of the company will force us to operate more efficiently, better, and to adapt our communications to customers – including the company name and logo.

However, in order for the market to have a chance of vetting your idea and business, you have to get out there in the first place. Therefore, any action is more important than being 100% correct. Back to the physics analogy. An object that is in motion has kinetic energy. If we want to stop it, we must put energy in again, this time to reduce its kinetic energy to 0. The higher the kinetic energy, the more energy we have to put in to stop the object. The same in business. It takes energy to stop a project! And the more energy you put in at the

beginning, the harder it is to stop it. You get to the point where you have a choice:

1. Or put in a lot of energy to stop the project,
2. or put in another small portion of energy to develop the project further.

The larger our company/project is, the more energy we have accumulated. This causes even significant problems, large and costly mistakes that could significantly slow down or even drive any earlystage start-up to bankruptcy, they won’t blow your business away. In the early stages, you need to focus on getting past the barrier, after which it’s much easier to invest energy in momentum than to put in a lot of energy to pull back.

Step by step, we are gaining more and more momentum and energy, which makes it easier and easier to go further and gain speed, and harder and harder to stop us. It’s the same with workouts. If you’ve made the decision to start training, the first visit to the gym comes with difficulty and costs a lot of energy. Buying a pass is also a big step, but not big enough to keep the momentum going. If we catch a cold and don’t go to exercise or go running for a week, we are likely to lose all momentum and energy. The next visit to the gym or the next run will be just as hard as the first one. But once we’ve been doing it regularly for 2-3 months, the next visit is easy. It doesn’t require as much energy as the first one. We’ve gained momentum, and we start to both feel and see results. A weeklong cold won’t stop us now. This is what we call a routine (I refer those interested to the book The Power of Habit). You can look at it from the perspective of one idea and design. But when you have a higher goal and a project doesn’t work out, it doesn’t mean you lose all momentum and energy. Your energy focused on the goal allows you to find other ways to achieve it, and it allows you to quickly throw yourself into action on the next idea - just like that, with momentum.

How did I develop this momentum? What caused me to learn this approach? Where do I get the energy that I put into business like fuel? What do I avoid so as not to drain it? That is, what is important to me; how I think; how I act. This is what I described in this book. I invite you to learn my story and tips on how to act so that the power of momentum will always accompany you.

PS: If you like this book, apply the lessons from it to your business or it helps you in other ways, I would be very happy if you rate it on GoodReads.com, and connect on LinkedIn.