Open Hearts
The old man was pacing around his study. Deep in thought. He kept one finger pressed to his chin and occasionally jabbed it into the air in intense concentration. Every now and then he walked over to his desk, glanced at the computer screen, nodded in agreement or shook his head in disagreement, then typed something on the keyboard. Each time he did this, he smiled faintly, and then resumed his thoughtful pacing around the room.
That old man is me. And the scene I just described has become my daily work and my joy. It wasn’t always like this. Only now, in old age, have I finally found in this activity what I had been searching for my entire life: happiness and meaning.
I’m not talking about the meaning of life in some grand, spiritual sense. Spiritual people probably find that somewhere beyond the boundaries of ordinary human experience. But that was never my type. I was never that kind of seeker. I was a purely practical, pragmatic, strongly materialistically oriented man, driven from childhood by some inexplicable longing for… something.
It started very early. While my friends and their little girlfriends were happily making sandcastles and then smashing them, I was piling them up. I enjoyed making as many sandcastles as possible and then just looking at them. How beautifully they stood in a perfect row. And the more I had, the greater my joy. Destroy them? Not a chance! I always left them on the sandbox and looked forward to the next day when I would make even more. When I would multiply the work I had begun. Of course, most of the time someone else’s kids or the weather destroyed them overnight. But I never gave up. I started again, resolutely. I repaired the damaged ones and added new ones. And that truly fascinated me. This strange, characteristic trait of my personality – to create new things and to multiply – became the dominant force in my life.
Time went on and I kept accumulating, multiplying, creating. At school it was mainly knowledge and information. I loved hunting for valuable books in second-hand bookstores, buying them cheap, reading them, and then stacking them in my library. I collected pretty stones and kept them at home. They were free, they were beautiful – and that was reason enough for me. I also tried to multiply relationships. Why have just one girl? I tried to chase several at once and date multiple. I wasn’t very good at it though, and I experienced many rejections. That hardened me. So I turned my bruised heart back to multiplying material things around me – collecting, gathering, hoarding.
When I look back at my childhood and my behavior, it’s really no wonder I eventually became a multimillionaire… actually a multibillionaire.
I won’t write my whole memoir here, so I’ll shorten the story a bit. Puberty passed. During my first part-time jobs I discovered the power of money. And I rejoiced! My unfulfilled longing – that “something” I had been tirelessly pouring into collecting things as a child – suddenly found a new direction, a new form.
I understood that with money you can buy almost anything. And when you have money, people like you – especially if you treat them. So I started buying hamburgers for my friends (especially the girls), paying for cinema tickets, amusement parks, and generally helping them financially whenever I could. Suddenly I became very popular. And girls? I had plenty.
There’s truth in the old saying: “He who greases the wheels, rides.”
I could afford it. I had more money than I needed. I worked like crazy. After school I took every possible part-time job, worked my fingers to the bone so I could treat my friends and be liked by them. That became another motivation. I thought popularity and being liked was what I had been looking for all along. But no. Even there I didn’t find it.
I worked most often in a bookstore. I got a glimpse into the book business. As I already mentioned, since childhood I had been collecting antiquarian books. I had thousands of them at home – not hundreds, thousands! Maybe 4–5 thousand. So it’s no surprise what happened next. Even before finishing school I started an e-shop with antiquarian books. As soon as I finished my education, I immediately went full-time into business. And because I was a hard worker, things went well from the beginning. My turnover was above average right away.
Soon I expanded the range far beyond old books. I could afford to buy stock. I already had enough money, and that strange inner force kept pushing me forward.
My goal became: the first million.
I thought that once I earned my first million, I would finally reach what I had been searching for. I was wrong. I made my first million at twenty-three. My next dream was a luxurious house in the style of Hollywood stars and a garage full of luxury and sports cars. I achieved that too – quite quickly. Before I turned thirty, my wealth had grown to 50 million dollars. And since money makes money… after that everything became easier than it was at the beginning.
My career skyrocketed toward the first billion. I chased it like a hunting dog after prey. The billion became the next big goal. I “knew” that once I reached it, I would finally find peace and happiness.
I didn’t. I made my first billion at thirty-eight. By then I already owned everything a proper rich man should have: luxury villas and apartments all over the world, expensive cars, a private jet.
My business activities had long outgrown the chain of e-shops I had created. I invested wherever I sensed opportunity. Partly I was lucky, but mainly – I worked like hell! And that’s why I kept successfully multiplying my fortune.
One might think that reaching the first billion would finally bring satisfaction. It didn’t. The longing for something true was still there, unfulfilled.
After forty I opened another area in my search for fulfillment: women. Before that I had been hardened toward them because of complexes from puberty and because work left me little time. After forty I went through hundreds. My business was secure, my first billion smiled at me from my account, so I finally started to really enjoy life!
I flew with beautiful women on my private jet around the world, spent time in luxury destinations, on private islands, on African safaris, in exotic Orient, on adventurous expeditions in the Amazon…
It was a mistake. I didn’t find what I was looking for. I realized that as a billionaire it would be almost impossible to find the kind of woman I had once dreamed of. They all saw only the money. They didn’t see me as a person. In the circles I moved in, my ideal simply didn’t exist anymore. So I hardened my heart again and kept multiplying my fortune.
From that period I have several illegitimate children. I multiplied them “for stock”. I provided well for their mothers and their lives, and then I didn’t want to see them anymore. My search in the area of relationships ended there.
By my sixties I had become a multi-billionaire. I owned everything one could possibly think of or point at. Only my heart remained empty. And my soul too. And that tore me apart and destroyed me more than you can imagine. My health began to fail. Despite the best doctors, I started wasting away. I handed over the business operations to supervisory boards and trust funds and withdrew into seclusion.
When I could no longer overwork myself, what illness often brings arrived: slowing down of life’s pace… and a new dimension of searching. I began turning toward spirituality. I read books on the subject (whereas before my favorite literature had been titles like How to Make the Most Money, How to Manipulate People, How to Predict Others’ Behavior for Your Own Benefit…). I searched for the depth of the soul. I found nothing. I even spent four months in a Tibetan monastery – nothing. No breakthrough.
My health kept declining. Doctors were shaking their heads. Because the urge to accumulate was still in me, I visited dozens of them and had the same examinations repeated at the world’s best clinics. Result – the same. No one could find the cause of my wasting away.
I became an empty shell – an empty wreck with staring eyes, still searching for something it could never find. My desire remained unfulfilled. My health crumbled like trees in a forest being cleared for a logging site.
I lost my appetite. I switched to liquid food, soups, nutritional shakes. Later the doctors even had to put me on intravenous feeding. I was thin and light as paper, my mind dull and empty. My whole life felt empty. I began to understand that this planet probably couldn’t offer me the satisfaction I was looking for. I started thinking about God.
Religion had always seemed marginal, boring, and useless to me. Same with God. I didn’t waste time on such nonsense. I multiplied assets. I made money. Many times in my pursuit of millions I had to lie, cheat, manipulate – so of course I rejected, suppressed, and pushed out of my life all the preachers talking about Jesus, sin, and punishment. I didn’t believe in hell or heaven. I didn’t believe in God or the devil. I was a hardened atheist and materialist.
I lived nearly twenty years in a state of spiritual emptiness and searching. Doctors kept me technically alive. Better to say – I was surviving, not living.
And then it happened…
I was 78 years old. Another empty, dull day seemed to lie ahead, just like so many before. That evening I was thinking about God and realized that my only real connection to God had always been the desire to become Him! Not to worship Him like hundreds of millions of people around the world. The only way I could think about God was as my equal. No – better: that I was God, and He could only be some comic book character in my world, whom I would graciously approve and allow people to read about. Not for nothing is the Bible supposedly the most translated and most published book in the world. I sold millions of copies myself and made good money from it…
But let’s return to my understanding of God and to that day of revelation. Because something happened that I had waited for my entire life. I finally found what I had been searching for.
Not immediately – but that memorable evening, that memorable night, brought me a dream that became the beginning of the fulfillment of my journey.
Many prophets and religious people have prophetic dreams and visions. I don’t care about those. They mean nothing to me. I’m no visionary. My dream was very pragmatic – and for that very reason it struck my heart so deeply. It brought me deliverance from mental torment.
I dreamed… No. I cannot tell you that. It is too personal.
I will only tell you what I did the very next day after waking up. I created an internet platform called openhearts.com. Its purpose was simple: It was dedicated to helping children! Children up to fifteen years old from all over the world could write their wishes on this site. Any wishes. What troubles them, what they want, what would make their life easier.
The most diverse wishes from children’s souls began to arrive. Reading them, my heart slowly began to open. I understood. When a little girl from Africa wanted to send a teddy bear – bang! I just passed the wish to my team and the teddy was already on its way to Africa. I paid for operations, for schools, for after-school activities, I built playgrounds, paid for kindergarten and school trips, helped with amounts from a few dollars up to tens of thousands.
I didn’t want to help globally the way many rich people do – donate a billion to some project and feel cleansed of sin. Why? I enjoyed direct, personal help. My passion became reading children’s specific wishes. The pure world of children – so different from the harsh world of adult business – fascinated me, and I felt good in it.
And so my day now begins with coffee… and fulfilling the wishes of children’s hearts.
True, my fortune is shrinking. It’s getting smaller, but it’s still immense. I no longer accumulate. Now I give away. And I’m glad for it.
I have finally found what I had been looking for my whole life: fulfillment. My health has returned. I found meaning in giving. I have no one close to me, and yet I can bless the whole world. I can help wherever I see the need.
I reached fulfillment not through spirituality, but through matter. Through the material world. I became God. The God of help.
And with this feeling of completion, one day I will die peacefully – with the calm in my soul I had been searching for my entire life.
