Why
I Build

Character is not chosen. It is formed: by what you inherit, and by what you survive.

I grew up in a home of security and love, raised by two academic parents who wanted one thing for us: a future. A safe future, full of love and education, and the certainty that family stands up for family. War, hate, racism: these did not exist inside our family. Hostility towards any religion did not exist. We learned to accept every religion, every people, every nation. That was the reality of my childhood at home.

But there was a second life: the life outside our home. There I met children who had been raised differently, in families where hate was a primary ingredient of the upbringing. And children pass on what they are taught.

There were Swiss people who let me feel that I was not welcome. There were Swiss people who let me feel that I was not worth enough. There were moments in which this country let me feel like a person of second class. Not everyone, and not always. But often enough that a child does not forget it.

And yet the same country gave me just as much. Switzerland is where my family found safety. Switzerland taught me structure. Switzerland taught me processes. Switzerland taught me honesty, reliability and the value of doing things properly. I carry both truths at once: the country that hurt me as a child is the same country that shaped the builder I am today. I would not be who I am without it.

And the very first time I was confronted with the war in my homeland, in Kosovë, in Perlepnica, I did not learn it from the news, not from my family, not from classmates. I learned it from children who bullied me for what I am. Children from families that had carried the mindset of the oppressor with them: the same thinking that was suppressing Albanians in Kosovë, transplanted into Switzerland. Same mindset, different country. They wanted to show me what real hate looks like. What they actually showed me is how a child should never be raised: with hate from day one. With the urge to take, to oppress, to look down on someone for what he is. That was the real lesson. And it is a lesson about mindset and upbringing, not about a people. No nation owns hate, and none is free of it.

The racism, though, continues to this day, and it is chilling. I truly hope that one day people find more time to deal with themselves than with others. I believe our whole living together would be a far better place for it.

Then there is the illness. From a very young age, through my whole childhood and into my teenage years, I carried a severe gastrointestinal disease. I remember that time as a good one, and at the same time as one of the hardest of my life. At one point I had lost so much weight that I was skin and bones. The medication wrecked me. The pain and the infection ate at my stomach from the inside. It was hard.

What that time taught me: you have to fight. I had always fought, against all the negativity around me, but never loudly. Quietly. Maybe that is part of why I got sick. I could not bring myself to hurt anyone, so I carried those fights within myself. I went home, swallowed it all, and stayed silent.

The illness forced me to speak. Not to others, at first: to myself. I had to learn to talk to myself, to understand myself, to face my own fears and solve my own problems in order to find a way out. In that time my father put a spiritual book in my hands. That book led me to reshape my body, my thoughts, my whole being, into a more conscious, healthier, better person.

The illness was a wake-up call. Do not let your life pass you by. Do not waste it pleasing people who do not care about you. Since then I have known that I have to fight, and that I want to leave something behind. As a son, a husband, a father, a brother, a business partner, a leader, a neighbour, a human being on this planet.

I am convinced that experiences like these, whether we want them or not, are wake-up calls from the universe. They are the challenges that prepare you, consciously, for everything external that follows. I wrote more about this in Wake-Up Calls.

And maybe that is the whole answer to why I build. I want to leave something behind: for my father, my family, my friends, my village. The privilege of not having grown up in war, of having these parents, of carrying this history with all its challenges, and yet: here we are. Still standing. Still building. That is the daily fire. Even in the darkest phases, the darkest nights, the coldest winters, it pushes me. And honestly, I love those moments. Because that is when you see what people are truly made of. Who means it, and who does not.