Some people say “I can’t”. I say: I don’t wanna…

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Back before I left Hungary… I remember it was a heatwave, and I was listening to the radio. Two famous comics… There were two bits I remember from that show, some 40 years ago, that were life-defining for me:

1. one of the comics said: there are two paths for the Hungarian intelligentsia: one is alcoholism, the other one is unpassable.

2. the other one, Hofi Geza, warned that you are going to be like the i-beam that is higher than the others in a retaining wall: they will chop your head off… unless they can pound you till you are the same height as the others.

Obviously this was just a confirmation of how I really thought the world worked. I was already non-competitive… to my detriment.

You are supposed to be competitive… that is how you grow.

I was hard-working, yet I was very willing to settle for less. In everything. In friends, boy friends, results… in fact when, out of the blue, I won a national competition for architects, I promptly got ill and laid up for a month.