My Story

The Sailor Who Learned Responsibility at Fifteen

I was born in Budapest in the early eighties, a city of contradictions. It was still shaped by the Cold War, full of structure but also limits, safety but no freedom. When I was seven, my father, who was a seaman, took a job in North Africa. We moved as a family to Libya, and for almost two years I lived in a completely different world. The air smelled of salt and sand. The streets were loud, the heat constant, and everything around me felt unpredictable.

That experience changed me forever. At an age when most children live inside the walls of their neighborhood, I saw a different kind of life. People looked, spoke, and thought in ways that felt completely new to me. I remember walking through the dusty streets of Tripoli and realizing that the world is far bigger and more complex than we are told. There is never just one truth, never only one way to live. When we returned to Hungary, I noticed how small our old world felt. My classmates talked about things that no longer made sense to me. I could not fit back into the bubble. That early exposure gave me a kind of vision that I would later use in everything I built. It made me curious, adaptive, and comfortable in any environment.

But the real turning point in my life came when I was fifteen.

My parents divorced. My father moved out and disappeared from our daily life. My mother was in a deep emotional crisis and my younger brother was too small to understand what was happening. Overnight, I became the adult in the house. There was no money and no safety net. The fridge was empty. The rent was late. I remember standing in that apartment and understanding that childhood was over, not in theory but in practice. No one was coming to help. I had to act.

So I started to work. After school, I took whatever jobs I could find. I carried boxes, cleaned, worked in warehouses, anything that paid a few forints. It was not noble, but it was necessary. I did not complain or look for sympathy. I simply decided that survival was my responsibility. And in that process, something very important happened. I stopped being afraid of problems. I realized that responsibility gives you energy. It gives you focus. It creates structure when everything else is chaos.

Those years built the foundation of who I am today. Most people avoid responsibility because it feels heavy. For me, it became my oxygen. It gave me direction. It made me feel useful and grounded. I learned that when everything collapses, the only thing that remains is character. And character is not what you say when things go well. It is what you do when nobody watches and when the outcome might not matter to anyone but you.

The years between fifteen and nineteen were the hardest of my life. But they gave me a strange kind of peace with uncertainty. I learned not to panic when things fall apart because I had already seen what that feels like. I learned that control is an illusion and what truly matters is how you navigate through uncertainty. That mindset became the core of how I lead and how I build.

Sailing as My Mirror

During that same period, sailing became my second education. I grew up on boats from 3 months old, and I started sailing alone by the age of 8. By ten, I was racing in local competitions, and by fourteen, I was part of the national league. Sailing was freedom and discipline at the same time. It was also my therapy.

The sea gives you instant feedback. It does not lie. If you are lazy, you lose. If you are arrogant, you capsize. If you are afraid, you freeze. Every movement has a visible result. During the chaos of my teenage years, sailing was the one place where effort always led to outcome. If I worked harder, the boat moved faster. If I made the wrong call, the result was obvious. It was measurable, fair, and real.

Sailing also taught me how to think about structure. Structure matters, but it should never be a cage. The wind changes all the time. You have to adjust, not resist. The shortest path is rarely the fastest one. Sometimes you have to move sideways or even backward to reach your destination. These lessons became metaphors for everything I later did in business. They are still visible today in UniPrisma’s DNA. We build structure that moves, not structure that controls.

Fear, Pain, and Performance

People sometimes ask why I stay calm in difficult situations. The answer is simple. I have been through worse. When you have experienced real loss and hardship, business problems look small. You stop fearing loss because you have already lost. You stop fearing failure because you have failed and survived. That does not make you careless. It makes you free.

There is, however, a shadow side to this mindset. Growing up in survival mode wires you to perform constantly. I became an overachiever, but not for recognition. I was driven by the need to stay safe. I pushed myself harder than anyone else ever could. I believed for a long time that pain was the price of success. That belief gave me strength but also rigidity. In the last decade, I have learned to question that pattern. You do not need to suffer to grow. You can achieve with balance and still stay ambitious. But you can only understand that after you have gone through the other side. You have to prove to yourself that you can endure first.

Responsibility as Energy

Responsibility has been the constant rhythm of my life. It motivates me more than money or recognition. If I do not carry responsibility, I lose interest. It is what keeps me alive and focused. In every company or fund I build, I look for the same energy in others. I want people who take ownership, who act before they are asked, who understand that responsibility is not a task but a mindset.

Of course, taking on too much can also become a weakness. Sometimes I take responsibility for things that are not mine to carry. It is something psychologists call parentification. It starts when you grow up too early. You start to believe that the world will fall apart if you stop holding it. I still have that instinct, and I manage it carefully. But it is also the reason I thrive in chaos. When others freeze, I act. When uncertainty rises, I focus. It is not heroism. It is habit.

The Root of My Leadership

If you remove all the business strategies, the frameworks, the metaphors, my leadership philosophy is very simple: take responsibility, stay calm, keep moving. Leadership is not control, it is rhythm. It is the ability to keep motion when others stop.

When I build teams, I do not look for the most experienced people. I look for those who are curious, who take initiative, who think like builders. Expertise can be learned. Ownership cannot. When chaos hits, expertise hides, but ownership acts. That is why the right mindset always beats the perfect resume.

What It Means Today

Looking back, I see a straight line between that fifteen-year-old boy in Budapest and the leader I am today. The experiences were not accidents. They were the foundation of everything that came later.

When I talk about navigating chaos, it is not a metaphor. It is who I am. When I say use what is on the boat, it is not just an idea. It is a survival principle. When I say the shortest way is not always the fastest one, it comes from lived truth, not theory.

I grew up learning to move through uncertainty with clarity, to build rhythm inside turbulence, and to find freedom through responsibility. That is who I am. Not a corporate manager, not a venture capitalist, not even just a sailor. I am a navigator. Someone who builds structure in chaos, because that is where I come from, and that is where I do my best work.