The opening of Everything Will Be OK — the story behind War-Life-Balance, written in an 1882 Lviv book factory. Click the corners, use the arrows, or your keyboard.
“The three most powerful words in any language are not I love you.
They are: everything will be OK.”
In the heart of Lviv stands a building that has watched nearly a century and a half go by. It was raised in 1882 as a book factory, when the city still answered to an empire that no longer exists. It survived two world wars, a Soviet occupation, and the long uncertain dawn of Ukrainian independence.
When I first walked through its doors in 2014, everyone else saw a ruin — a crumbling facade, dead wiring, a bureaucratic nightmare. I saw a hundred and thirty-two years of stories waiting for a new chapter.
I had arrived from Italy almost by accident — a shared car ride in 2013 that cracked open a world of possibility, and then, in January 2014, a one-way trip into the middle of a revolution.
While the country tore itself apart in the streets, I started planting something. Not because the timing was good. The timing was impossible. But impossible, I was learning, is just a description of the starting conditions.
We hung three letters in light above the entrance. They spelled a single word: OK.
That sign became a mantra before it became a brand. It was a promise made to a building, and then to a city, and eventually to anyone who needed to hear it: whatever this is, we will get through it. We will make something out of it.
The factory filled with people who believed the same. An innovation hub grew inside walls that had printed books for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. We were not starting from zero. We were standing on a foundation a century deep — we just had to be willing to see it.
Over the next years we built recklessly and beautifully. An airline between Italy and Ukraine. A trade platform that turned small Ukrainian makers into names buyers abroad would recognise. A network of people scattered across the world who refused to be only refugees.
Some of it failed. Some of it was taken from us by forces no plan could account for. Each time, the next thing we built was bigger than the thing we lost.
And then, on a winter morning, the ground itself moved.
At five in the morning on the twenty-fourth of February, 2022, every plan I had ever made became obsolete at once.
The question stopped being how do we grow? It became something older and simpler: how do we keep existing?
I did not know the answer yet. But I knew where to look for it — in the same place I had found it before. In the walls of a factory that had refused, for a hundred and forty years, to die.
This is only the first turn of the page. The full story — the wartime command center, the bridges built under fire, and the framework that came from it — is in the book.
A decade of building bridges between worlds — told by the man who failed spectacularly, rebuilt relentlessly, and named the philosophy that wrote itself: War-Life-Balance.