Biography

My name is Michał Zieliński. For over ten years, I have been primarily engaged in reading and thinking. That may sound trivial, but let me quickly outline the broader context.

I was born in Poland during the collapse of the Soviet Union, then the largest country in the world, during the miraculous blossoming of people finally released from the chains. I began my career as an eleven-year-old entrepreneur with a toy store that I opened at the turn of the century. It was also my first venture that went bankrupt. When I was seventeen, I started working as a sailing instructor and skipper, which I did alongside other activities for the next seven years. During that time, I began studying at the Warsaw University of Technology, but most importantly, I also started a career in finance as an advisor. Sailing and finance go very well together. Before my twenty-first birthday, I became a team leader and manager, receiving a promotion in the Blue Hall of Stockholm City Hall. Yes, the same hall where the Nobel Banquet takes place, after my company rented an entire ferry to transport us there.

When I was twenty-three years old, after changing faculties twice and losing all hope for higher education in my country and perhaps in the World, I dropped out of university six months before defending my engineering degree and returned to the path of an entrepreneur with a company in the passenger transport industry. The second bankruptcy came two years later, leaving me in debt. I went back to work as a sailing instructor, added a skiing instructor to my resume, and became a tennis coach for children, but it didn’t last long.

Next, I became a co-founder of a transport company that delivered goods across Europe. Further mistakes led me to a situation where for over five years, I spent most of my time behind the wheel of a truck, practically managing the whole company from the cabin measuring 4m2. In those conditions, I was able to establish my own forwarding company and started hiring people. Over the last eleven years, as I have already mentioned, my main focus has been on reading books and connecting facts, combining acquired knowledge with empirical evidence, practice, and constantly verifying my experiences. I spent my time behind the wheel contemplating philosophy, and on weekends, I wrote down my ideas during breaks. 

The amazing adventure I had behind the wheel of a truck allowed me to explore all of Europe and its industries from the perspective of someone who was essentially conducting open-source intelligence (OSINT). I visited companies listed on the stock exchanges of Germany, France, Italy, Poland, and thousands of smaller ones in countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium, the Czech Republic, and Austria, developed by smaller capital. Each time, while waiting for unloading in the warehouses of companies that were widely regarded by investors as excellently managed, I read all available information about them, financial reports, learned their history, and talked to their employees and contractors. I reviewed the rest of the companies in my free time.

I still run a company in the transportation industry, although currently with a completely different intention. Transportation is the lifeblood of the world’s economy. Road, sea, and air transport serve me today as one of the places to gather feedback on what’s happening in the market. Today, I mainly focus on thinking, which leads to speculation. I test my theories on the market by investing my own money. I am independent and work alone. Philosophy, speculation, and thinking are fields for loners, in my opinion. They make people mostly solitary. Remember dear reader, good speculators and the weaker ones called traders earn money on the stock exchanges, not on writing about them. Outstanding entrepreneurs, constantly creating and managing huge undertakings, employing thousands of people, deal with business and do not waste time telling stories and conducting trainings for money.