The Truth Behind My Dumb Luck

Here’s the spoiler alert after all the chapters that came before: my business journey—which ended up taking up most of my adult life—wasn’t a lottery ticket.

I was ready for it.

Big time.

This wasn’t a get-rich-quick story.

When I announced my first magazine, I wasn’t dreaming about a new game console or a sports car.

In my professional software-developer world, I was admiring Paradox Users Journal.

That was my inspiration.

Not something flashy or glamorous—just a solid, boring, professional publication that people actually needed.

Carmen would always warn people, “Don’t let him fool you—he’s sharper than he looks.”

I don’t know about sharp. I was sharp, yes—but more importantly, I was obsessively passionate, fueled by what I now recognize as self-diagnosed ADHD and a touch of autism. Once I locked onto something, there was no letting go.

Why was I so fixated on dreaming about a magazine?

It goes back to my childhood.

I won’t bore you with all the details, but here’s the short version of what quietly set me up for all of this.

When I was six or seven years old, I would take a single sheet of copy paper, fold it into quarters—eight tiny pages—and stitch it along the spine like a real newsletter.

Then I’d create a miniature magazine with a pencil and hand it to family members, one at a time, waiting patiently while they read every single page.

Back then there were no reams of paper sitting around. If a store ordered supplies, it might receive a bundle of five hundred sheets—but you didn’t buy them that way.

You bought one sheet for five cents and carried it home carefully, doing your best not to wrinkle it.

Over time I got more ambitious. I started laying out columns, mimicking the look of real newsletters and magazines.

I even added ad pages.

By middle school, I had invented my first printing press.

I nailed four pieces of wood into a frame the size of a sheet of paper and stretched silk cloth across it.

I typed my columns onto carbon paper, turning the letters into tiny holes—very similar to how T-shirt silk printing works today. When I poured black ink onto the silk frame, with my carbon template underneath, the page appeared in print.

There were no copy machines back then.

I’m talking about fifty or sixty years ago, in a small mountain village in Turkey.

That’s when my classmate, Nezih Erdoğan, saw my makeshift newsletters.

He had an instinctive understanding of fonts. He began hand-lettering my headlines in different styles—bold, italic, large, small—whatever the page needed.

Suddenly my silk-printed front-and-back newsletters were starting to look real.

And very cool.

***

Around the same time, I started fiddling with drawing cartoons. I submitted a few to national humor magazines, and one of them—with massive circulation—actually printed my cartoon on the back cover.

That magazine was GırGır.

Every Friday the entire country waited for it to hit the newsstands. I’m not exaggerating—the entire country.

Years later I asked ChatGPT to describe GırGır, and it summed it up perfectly: it was one of the most influential humor and satire magazines in Turkey—and, at its peak, one of the highest-circulation satire magazines in the world.

The magazine paid me 75 Turkish liras for the cartoon they published in 1972—about ₺1,144 in today’s money.

I was thirteen years old.

My daily school allowance at the time? Twenty-five cents.

Soon three major humor magazines were regularly publishing my cartoons.

At school I became a minor celebrity.

Kids would point and whisper, “That’s the kid—the cartoonist.”

I was lucky in another way, too. I wasn’t the class valedictorian, but I had access to a solid education—from elementary school all the way to Boğaziçi University, and later, briefly, a doctoral program at the University of Zurich.

Sixty years later, I still remember the words of our elementary school principal. He used to tell us:

“Every night before you go to bed, ask yourself: What did I learn today? Never let a day pass without an answer.”

I still haven’t.

***

When I graduated from high school and moved to Istanbul for college, I found a new playground.

Babıali Yokuşu—the street where nearly all the newspapers and magazines were clustered—became my daily destination.

With persistence and a lot of walking up and down that hill, I eventually became a regular contributor to several publications.

By 1976, at just seventeen years old, I was officially on the payroll at Cumhuriyet as an editorial cartoonist. 

I reported to Doğan Hızlan. My work appeared alongside artists like Turhan Selçuk and Ali Ulvi.

Cumhuriyet was one of Turkey’s most important and historic newspapers—a symbol of secular, republican journalism.

Founded in 1924 by Yunus Nadi, a close ally of Atatürk, it was not a small place to land—especially at seventeen.

I officially spent four years in college—though in reality it stretched to five—and most of that time was lived on Babıali Yokuşu.

After classes and work, I found myself surrounded by the giants of Turkish media.

I carried a Leica camera case for Ara Güler on photo shoots for years, served tea to Yaşar Kemal at the newspaper, and quietly stepped aside when the paper’s owner, Nadir Nadi—often accompanied by his wife, Berin Nadi—walked into his office.

Dinner invitations came just as casually—to the homes of İlhan Selçuk, Turhan Selçuk, Yıldız Kenter, Cemal Süreya, Ali Ulvi, often Selim İleri, and many others.

Most of the poets and novelists who would later become household names were, at the time, simply working at the paper as copy editors.

I even found myself sitting in Sabahattin Ali’s house during a jury meeting to select the annual best novel.

That year’s winner was Orhan Pamuk.

Around the dinner table, no one had ever heard his name.

Years later, he would win the Nobel Prize.

To me, it all felt normal.

Only much later did I realize what an extraordinary education it really was.

I attended Boğaziçi University and graduated with a degree in Business Administration.

Boğaziçi offered one of the best business education programs in the world, and the university was consistently ranked among the top 200 globally.

My childhood experience as a talented shoe salesman in my father’s store had already given me a practical education in sales, marketing, advertising, and production planning long before I arrived at the university.

At Boğaziçi, I took advanced marketing classes with the world-famous Professor Mustafa Dilber. We studied countless case studies, including Sears, Roebuck & Co. and its famous promise: “Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back.” We also analyzed the AMC case study and examined classic advertising campaigns, including the Alka-Seltzer commercial whose iconic jingle became part of American culture:

“Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is.”

I also learned production planning and the concept of the critical path in manufacturing, including the mathematical calculations behind it.

All of this while I was still a teenager in the Turkish mountains who had never even been to America—learning the critical details of how large corporations were built and turned into giants.

I also took literature classes from Oya Başak, who introduced us to Oscar Wilde, John Keats, and the sonnets of William Shakespeare. We had to memorize them by heart.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark…

And of course there was Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798):

“Water, water, everywhere,

Nor any drop to drink.”

***

As a child, I rarely went out to the street to play soccer with the other kids.

Instead, my father filled my world with books and ideas.

When I started high school, he bought me an entire set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He also subscribed me to Time magazine.

After school, I would walk to his shop, where he sold children’s shoes.

Every Tuesday my personal copy of that week’s Time magazine was waiting for me. I read each issue cover to cover and carefully saved them all in mint condition.

My father also subscribed me to the Unforgettable Composers series. Once a month an LP would arrive—Mozart, Beethoven, Dvořák—eventually more than fifty composers.

That became my soundtrack.

My father had emigrated as a teenager with his parents and siblings from Kırcaali. Like many Bulgarian immigrants in Turkey, they didn’t look for jobs—they built businesses.

Some small, some large, but always their own.

Whether it was in my genes or simply learned behind the counter, I became a skilled salesman in my father’s shoe store by the time I was fifteen.

The rule was simple:

Be honest.

Sell the best shoes the customer could find anywhere.

At a fair price—the same price for everyone.

No traditional Turkish bargaining.

So—dumb luck?

No.

It wasn’t dumb luck at all.