Sometimes the best thing that can happen to you is running out of options.
A reflection on scarcity, survival, and the unlikely path that led me here
I've been thinking a lot about motivation lately. What makes people actually do things, not just talk about them, not just want them in the abstract, but truly commit. And I keep arriving at the same point: willpower is overrated. Sometimes what really moves people is constraint.
I see it with my kids. You can force them to do things. But that's not the same as them wanting something for themselves. The internal engine is different. It burns cleaner. It lasts longer.
When I look back at my own career, almost every pivotal decision wasn't a decision at all, it was a response. A wall. A closed door. There wasn't abundance; there was scarcity. And if I'm being honest with myself: if there had been abundance, I would have probably taken the comfortable path.
Scarcity felt like punishment. Looking back, it was a gift.
The moment that changed everything happened when I was 18, in Romania, under a communist regime.
The system was unforgiving by design. Exams at the end of 10th grade determined your future, pass, and you continued your education; fail, and you went to work in a factory. No appeals. No second chances. That wasn't a metaphor. That was your life, decided at 16.
I was studying in a math and physics high school. I had two years of private drawing lessons lined up, a year of additional math tutoring, and a clear plan: I was going to study architecture.
Then 12th grade happened.
My motivation evaporated. My drawing got worse, not better. At the free drawing exam, I walked out halfway through. I knew, sitting there with a pencil in my hand, that it was over. I finished the technical portion and waited for the results I already knew were coming.
I failed.
Here's the thing about hitting bottom: clarity comes fast.
Within days, my family had a new plan. My cousin had studied civil engineering. There was a drawing component, so my technical skills would transfer. I would follow her path. There was just one problem.
Civil engineering required a physics exam. And I hadn't touched physics in two years.
But here is what I had: a 9.91 / 10 score from my 10th grade physics exam. A grade I still remember to this day.
I didn't earn that score alone. I earned it with Ms. Godini, my physics teacher, who somehow made the invisible visible, who made me care about things I didn't know I could care about. And with Dana, my tutor, who was barely older than me but had a way of holding me accountable that no raised voice ever could. I forgot my homework twice. She gave me a look. Just a look. I never forgot it again.
Those two years of physics were still in me somewhere. I just had to find them again, in one week.
I spent that week at my grandmother's house. Paper everywhere. Two years of physics crammed into seven days, with one thought looping in the background: the factory.
That was the forcing function. Not ambition. Not a five-year plan. Just a door I refused to walk through.
I passed.
Not with a brilliant score. But I got in.
Every link in that chain traces back to a week at my grandmother's table, surrounded by physics notes, terrified of a future I refused to accept.
I'm not romanticizing hardship. Scarcity is real and it's brutal and I would never wish a communist regime's education system on anyone. But I also can't pretend it didn't shape me in ways that comfort never could have.
The forcing function is real. Sometimes you need the wall. Sometimes the absence of a safety net is the only thing that gets you off the ledge and moving.
I had a love of drawing since I was a child. A teacher who lit up my mind for physics. A family that mobilized when I fell. A cousin whose path I could follow when I had no path of my own. A tutor who believed in homework so much that one look from her was enough to change my behavior forever.
None of that felt like a system at the time. It felt like chaos. But the chaos had a shape, and it was pointing somewhere.