How much can you tell about a person from their photograph?
When you look at this picture, do the words ‘Handsome, charming, dashing’ come to mind?
Just kidding. Seriously though, a bit about the person in the picture: I’m the youngest child of hardworking Turkish immigrants, born and raised in Germany. My parents gave up everything to move to a completely new country to give their children the best chance in life. I didn’t grow up rich by any stretch. My family was very working class, and I had a big extended family. I saw so many of my relatives slaving away in blue-collar and service jobs, or getting into drugs and crime and even ending up in jail…
So even from a young age, I was very driven. I was determined to break the cycle of poverty/working-class status. I was the first in my family to attend university. I am thankful that I had the foresight to choose highly useful fields to major in: IT and business. After graduating, I landed a coveted position with one of the most desirable employers in the world: none other than Apple Computers, where I worked for seven years.
I did very well there. They treated us extremely well and I gained many friends and experiences, but I slowly got the feeling there was more to life.
People would tell me, “You’re the classic immigrant success story” and I didn’t want to seem ungrateful. In fact I completely agreed with them; I did feel lucky and blessed. But…
I had been ambitious and driven for so long, and I had achieved worldly success, but I felt more and more like something very important was missing from my life and from my heart. I didn’t feel fulfilled.
So I made the difficult decision to scale back to part-time status with Apple, and enrolled in acting school.
I had always been extremely interested in self-development, even from a relatively young age – as far back as when I was a teenager. I always wanted to work on being the best version of myself. Acting school was an excellent choice to help me with this, as the classes we had to take were extremely diverse and helped me with finding my own voice, getting awareness for my body and developing a deep understanding of human psychology.
It was during my time at acting school, that I realized I had many emotional blockages and that I needed to heal a lot of trauma to feel really comfortable on stage and in my acting craft. You see, in Turkish culture, men are not encouraged to express their feelings. Instead, there is a stereotype of Turkish men being aggressive and macho. Anything related to feelings, emotions or vulnerabilities are considered the realm of ‘feminine’ and weak. I realized I needed to learn how to let myself really feel and express my emotions, in order to really open up as an actor.
It was also during acting school that I discovered and really embraced spirituality and philosophy. If I needed to switch my identity and roles within minutes for acting, you can imagine, it raised questions such as, “Who am I, really?” and questions about ego, the true self, and even the nature of reality. I also realized in order to be a great actor: I had to understand who I really was.
So I dove into spirituality-related resources of all kinds. When I wasn’t working or at acting school, I was reading and listening to lectures from people like Alan Watts, Ram Dass and Eckhart Tolle, and got deeply into mystical epistemology.
Since then, I believe I have done extremely useful inner work and healing, deepened my spirituality and expanded my consciousness. And I now firmly believe, personal development and spirituality go hand-in-hand.
So why am I here, you might ask? Well as I mentioned, for a long part of my life, I was hyper-ambitious and driven. You could even say I was ”too lost in ego stories” and chasing worldly success and yearning for acknowledgment/love. And again, even after achieving that success, it still didn’t make me happy; clearly something was missing. So I decided to travel around the world – I realized it may be the next step in my quest for personal development.
At first I did it on a shoestring budget. But while on the road, I started my own IT consulting firm, and after a few smart business decisions, I achieved financial independence. This knowledge is also something that I would like to share with you.
Also, travelling all over the world, being exposed to different cultures and rituals, indeed helped me greatly, in my pursuit of personal development. I learned so much about myself, how to face unfamiliar scenarios, interact with new people… and it also solidified some of the spiritual knowledge that I knew about in theory. I was able to really understand it after seeing spiritual practices in person, all around the world.
I always had a feeling that I was supposed to help people. And now that I have been travelling (since 2018; I have been to 4 continents and over 70 countries) and working as a digital nomad for the past few years, I recently realized, how I am supposed to do it.
I want to help other people: develop a healthy growth mindset, deepen their spirituality, expand their consciousness, raise their appreciation for the mysteries of life and achieve their own financial independence.
In short, I want to use my skills, knowledge and experience to help people become their best selves, and achieve the best life possible for themselves.