My ambition began when I was six years old. At that time, I was not even consciously aware of it.

These are my first memories of realizing that I wanted to become a police officer.

Even today, I still do not know why this desire to become a police officer was so strong or where it came from, but it stayed with me throughout elementary school.

I continued my path at a secondary police school. At that time, we had an educational system structured around four years of police training. And this police school was also a high school.

A Life Built on Chasing Goals

High school

I remember that during my third year of high school, I first developed the desire to become a lawyer. Looking back today, that desire stayed with me until I actually began studying at the University of Law six years later.

It is interesting to see how my childhood dream of becoming a police officer lasted eight years, while my dream of becoming a lawyer lasted six years. I had natural super focus on achievement.

The successes I experienced during high school greatly increased my self-confidence, especially in exams and academic subjects, sports, self-defense training, shooting, police tactics, and military tactics. All of this was part of the education at the police school, which operated under a closed boarding school system where we were present twenty-four hours a day for education and training.

The regime was strict and hierarchical, and it did not suit me well, but because I deeply wanted to become a police officer, I completed all obligations without problems, even when things became extremely difficult.

After graduating from the secondary police school with honors, I started working at a traffic police station. Our work covered the entire country.

Work and College at the Same Time

Immediately after finishing school and getting employed, I enrolled at the Higher Police School for Internal Affairs, which I had to complete while working.

Only the ten best students from the police high school were accepted into the full-time study program. I missed this privilege by only three places. From 230 students, they only took 10 directly. As I found out later, I was in position 13.

But that didn’t stop me. No way, Jose.

It only made me mad and, consequently, motivated to achieve even more and faster.

The advantages those ten students received were enormous. They received the same salary I did while working in the field, but they could fully dedicate themselves to studying and attending classes, while I had to work eight or more hours a day and, at the same time, complete the exact same academic obligations as my former classmates.

Those were difficult years.

I worked and studied at the same time. I spent all my vacation days studying or taking exams. We also had a full-week training program, which I had to use up my already limited vacation time for.

In addition, I had to pay for my own education, while my colleagues did not.

Despite all of this, my path was clear, determined, and focused on success.

After three years, I became one of the first part-time students in my generation to graduate from that faculty, but then I had to wait nine months for a transfer to a better position at work.

Promotions and Ambitions in Police Work

Those times were not easy either. I expected advancement much sooner in police work, but because I had chosen to study without official police approval, which was the standard path at the time, I was forced to wait longer.

After graduating from the Higher Police School for Internal Affairs, I enrolled at the Faculty of Law and began studying again while working.

At that point, I had already been promoted enough in the police to receive support for education while working, which covered the tuition for my third and fourth years of law school. At the same time, I received sixty additional days of study leave, which made studying considerably easier.

Certain exams, almost half of the first and second-year subjects, were recognized from my previous police education, so I only had to complete differential exams along with the third and fourth years of law school, which I managed to finish through determination and hard work.

Before leaving the police after 12 years of service, I also enrolled in a master’s program, which I completed 2 or 3 years later.

After finishing law school, I believed I would continue my career within the police at higher executive positions, but that did not happen. I was too young, too inexperienced, and too ambitious for the police system that existed in our country at that time.

The Bar Exam and Becoming a Lawyer

So when I was around 30, I took the first opportunity I had and entered a one-year judicial internship, which was required to qualify for the bar exam.

For six months, I was practically unemployed and without income. However, I had already started cooperating with a lawyer colleague, and I also had a few clients of my own because I had previously established a small legal consulting business that helped me survive financially during that difficult period.

At the same time, my first son was about to be born, and my bar exam practically coincided with his birth.

After a year and a half of work at the court and studying, I passed the bar exam and started working with an attorney colleague from whom I learned the basics of courtroom representation, legal filings, legal claims, and what it truly means to be a lawyer.

PhD and the Peak of My Career

After becoming a lawyer and beginning my legal career, I enrolled in a PhD program in media law, which I successfully completed five years later.

So by the age of thirty-seven, I had my own law office, several employees, a completed doctorate, and what appeared to be a successful professional career.

I still remember the moment I completed my doctorate. Everyone congratulated me, and then suddenly, one question appeared:

What now?

After nearly twenty years of work, education, and chasing success, I reached the peak of my education and professional career, a point that felt like the highest I had ever reached.

And then came emptiness.

Uncertainty.

Something I had waited for 20 years finally became a reality.

Yet I felt more confused than ever.

I was not prepared for that.

Of course, I still had goals. Becoming a professor. Traveling. Achieving even more financial and business success.

But none of those goals felt truly important anymore.

My greatest dreams had already come true.

The goals that stayed were suddenly felt small.

Too small to matter.

It is difficult to describe the mixture of emotions I experienced. On one hand, happiness and pride that I had come so far. On the other hand, confusion, emptiness, and the question

What now?

The Descent Begins

At that time, my stress levels were already extremely high.

The legal profession had begun to take its toll. Endless hours of work during weekdays and weekends had consequences.

Slowly, I began to realize that, on some levels, my life had already started moving downhill. No, in reality, more of a feeling, because I didn’t have any notable new life project to achieve.

When I was at the peak of my life and expected everything to finally launch me into freedom, when I believed I would finally start truly living, the exact opposite happened.

It felt as if something was pulling me down.

For years, I had blindly chased goals upward, but now I felt something dragging me in the opposite direction.

At that time, I was not fully aware of what was happening. The feelings were vague. I was still relatively young and facing such inner experiences for the first time.

Because of that, I tried to suppress these emotions as much as possible, waiting for things to shift back into a positive direction.

Unfortunately, that never happened.

Then came the reality check.

New problems appeared. Health problems. A brain hemorrhage. Problems in marriage, with children, with clients.

Everything fell apart.

Relationships. Family. Friends. Career. And finally, health.

Everything that had mattered most to me started collapsing like a house of cards.

Looking back today, it feels as if I woke from the dream of chasing success and suddenly found myself standing alone at the top of Mount Everest, unable to breathe, with no new mountains left to climb.

Emptiness.

Emptiness.

Emptiness.

Of course, at that time, I experienced it far less consciously than I understand it today.

I tried in every possible way to suppress those feelings.

My financial situation was good, so I used material things to replace the emptiness inside.

Those were financially the best years of my life.

We bought a motorhome. We bought a sailboat. We traveled around Europe. We sailed. We camped. We skied.

In a single year, I had 24 vacation trips.

From the outside, life looked perfect.

Many people probably envied me.

But internally, battles were taking place that I kept suppressing and avoiding.

Questions such as whether this was really all that life had to offer.

Despite everything, I slowly began realizing that being a lawyer was probably not something I could do for the rest of my life.

The stress and responsibility toward clients were simply too much for me. Opposite lawyers and judges were acting unfairly; the whole system had changed. I was wondering if I was the only one who saw that. It seemed like it. And it probably was.

The Need for Change 

That is why only a few years later, I already knew that something would have to change.

Then, around the age of forty, I suffered a brain hemorrhage caused by a hereditary arteriovenous malformation in my head.

That experience completely changed my perception of life.

For an entire year, I was forced to deal with myself, my own mortality, and survival.

That turned everything upside down.

About ten years ago, I started seriously working on myself, my purpose, and the question of why I am here.

However, I should also mention that, fifteen years earlier, when I first felt signs of stress in the legal profession, I had already begun meditating, attending seminars, and practicing various techniques for personal and spiritual growth.

To some extent, it helped.

But never in the way I had imagined.

There was no final breakthrough.

No final answer.

Only after confronting death through the brain hemorrhage did I begin working on myself on a much deeper level.

I promised myself that I would reach the end of the question of what death means, what the meaning of life is, and why we are here.
That search, and what I found, is something I wrote about separately.

The last several years of this journey have, in many ways, been even more difficult and brutal than the twenty years I spent chasing professional and material success.

But I must admit that the fulfillment I experience today feels much deeper, more meaningful, and far more connected to who I truly am.

Now, in my fifties, I am no longer very young, and I understand far better which things truly matter and what genuinely makes me happy.

Every individual knows best what is right for them.

But every path, mine included, is usually difficult, full of obstacles and hardship.

As the old saying goes:

Per aspera ad astra.

Through hardship to the stars.

If this story resonated with you, you might be at a similar crossroads. Book a free call with Coach Mark and find out what is possible on the other side of success.