How Far Are You Willing to Go?
Sooner or later, every entrepreneur reaches a moment when he must ask himself a difficult question:
"How far am I willing to go?"
In the beginning, everything still seems simple. You have an idea. You work with passion. The first customers arrive. The first successes give you courage. And every step forward confirms that you chose the right path. But as a company grows, the meaning of that question changes too. At a certain point, it is no longer only about your own future. There are colleagues. Families. Suppliers. Partners. People who placed their trust in you.
Every decision you make can affect their lives. I always felt that very strongly. Sometimes perhaps even too strongly. When we had to invest again, I did not think first about the profit it might eventually bring us. I thought about the people who relied on us. I did not want to disappoint them.
That is why I kept searching. For solutions. New possibilities. Better systems. I had thought that way all my life. When someone said that something was impossible, that was precisely the moment when I began to think. Not because I wanted to prove I was right, but because I sincerely believed there is a solution to almost every problem. That conviction had already helped me through extremely difficult periods.
After the grave crisis of 1981, I had succeeded in rebuilding my life. I knew what perseverance could accomplish. I had already come close to losing everything once. And yet I had risen again. Why should it be any different this time? That experience gave me strength.
But perhaps it also made me believe for too long that perseverance alone was enough to overcome every crisis. At Piramedia, the question of how far I was willing to go took on an even deeper meaning. It was not only about a company. It was also about Marco. My son. My business partner. The young man with whom I shared a dream. Marco was young. Full of energy. Full of ideas. Where others saw limits, he discovered new possibilities.
That was a quality I admired enormously in him. Sometimes I watched him in silence. Then I recognized something of the young man I myself had once been. But Marco also possessed a talent that my generation had never learned to know in the same way. He understood computers as though they were a second language to him. He could imagine possibilities that, at the time, were still almost inconceivable to most people.
I often listened as he explained a new concept. I did not always immediately understand every technical detail. But I saw the light in his eyes. I heard the conviction in his voice. And I felt how deep his passion ran. That cannot be learned. It comes from within. I did not want to restrain that passion. I wanted to protect it. I wanted to give Marco the opportunity to discover how far his talent could take him.
Perhaps that was also why I was sometimes willing to go further than others considered reasonable. Not out of recklessness, but out of love. Love for my son. Love for our shared dream. And love for everyone who believed with us that we could build something that would truly make a difference.
Today, I understand that love can sometimes make us blind. Not necessarily blind to reality, but to our own limits. We continue telling ourselves:
"One more effort."
"One more investment."
"One more step."
Because we are convinced the breakthrough is close. Sometimes it truly is. And sometimes it is not. But when your heart is entirely bound to a dream, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine where perseverance ends and excessive sacrifice begins. I did not always see that distinction at the time. I knew only that I did not want to disappoint Marco or the people around us.
That is why I continued to give. My time. My energy. My trust. And, again and again, part of the security I could have preserved for myself. Some circumstances that arose later caused me grief. With the knowledge I have today, I might make certain choices differently. But I have never regretted the trust I placed in Marco. Nor do I regret the sincerity with which we worked toward our dream.
Every evening, when I closed the Pyramid's doors behind me, I knew that we had given everything within our power that day. A human being cannot do more than that at such a moment. When I think back on those years today, I therefore still feel pride. Not because everything became what we had hoped.
But because we never committed ourselves halfway. We gave ourselves entirely. We lived our dream with all our hearts. That is both the greatest strength and the greatest risk of an idealist. An idealist does not think only with reason. He also thinks with his heart. And a heart that loves does not always recognize its own limits. Only much later did I understand that a person must not change his heart.
But that sometimes he must protect it better. If I faced the same choices today, I would still believe in Marco. I would still want to give him the opportunity to develop his talent. I would still be willing to make sacrifices for a dream in which we believed together.
But perhaps I would pause a little longer from time to time. To ask myself honestly:
"Is this next step still an act of courage?
Or is the dream now demanding more than we can continue to give?" I did not yet possess that wisdom. But for nothing in the world would I want to lose the heart with which I made those choices. Without that heart, I would never have become the man I am today. Without that heart, I would never have met, helped, and brought together so many people. And without that heart, this story itself would never have existed.