Adrienn Simon
Not a career story. Not a success story. More like a route: how detours can lead exactly where we were trying to go all along.
For a long time, I thought this story was about the places I had been. Eventually I realised that all of those places were only the backdrop. The real journey was unfolding within me.
This is not about where I went. It is about who I became along the way.
Adrienn Simon
I didn’t leave because I wanted to see the world. I didn’t leave because I was looking for adventure. And I didn’t leave because I knew where I was going.
There simply came a point when I had to move. What first felt like losing a place to belong eventually became freedom. While others were looking for home, I learned how to move between countries, languages, cultures and lives.
I didn’t know it then, but adaptability would become one of the most important skills I ever built.
“Some journeys begin before you know where you’re going.”
I travelled through countries, cultures and working environments where I was often the new person, the one without the language, the unwritten rules or the familiar reference points.
Being an outsider meant I had to observe quickly. Learn quickly. Read people. Adapt. Make myself visible without losing myself.
What once felt like not belonging slowly became an advantage: I learned to enter unfamiliar systems and understand how they work.
“Belonging everywhere starts with belonging nowhere.”
Living and working abroad taught me that respect is not always automatic. Sometimes you have to stand up for it.
I saw vulnerability, abuse of power and situations where staying quiet would have been easier. I was never very good at staying quiet.
Sometimes that cost me. Sometimes it put me in difficult situations. But I never wanted comfort badly enough to trade away what I believed was right.
“Silence was never my strategy.”
My first career did not have an office. I cleaned, washed dishes, worked reception, then moved into leadership, training, finance and operations — on ships, rivers, seas and oceans.
There was no single breakthrough. Just hundreds of small steps: openings, closings, inventory, reconciliations, systems, teams and responsibility.
That is where I learned that a career is not built from titles. It is built from capabilities.
“Before I built a career, I built a horizon.”
When one era ended, I had to ask the question again: who am I when the title disappears?
Who am I really? What do I want to create? What remains when the positions, companies and labels are taken away?
The answer led me back to the younger version of myself who learned to stand on her own in unfamiliar places — the one who was never handed a finished map and therefore learned to draw her own.
“Who am I when the title disappears?”
Returning to Hungary put me back at the starting line. Previous titles, countries and experiences suddenly seemed to count for less than I expected.
So I rebuilt. Step by step, for more than a decade inside the multinational world.
And eventually I understood that I was no longer looking for the next rung of a ladder. I was looking for meaning.
“Coming home was the beginning of another departure.”
I learned to work in more than one country, more than one system and more than one professional identity.
Freedom, for me, was never primarily a geographic question. It was an identity question: how much of yourself can you keep, how much of your ability do you use, and how much of your life is built around what matters to you?
That is the code underneath A. TYPICAL: not rebellion against rules, but permission to see more possibilities.
“Freedom was never a place. It was a way of thinking.”
For a long time I thought this story was about the places I had been — the countries, the cities, the seas and oceans.
Eventually I understood that they were the backdrop. The real journey was happening inside me.
For years I thought I had lost my way. Looking back, the map finally makes sense: I was simply moving on a different one.
“The map only makes sense in retrospect.”
Arrival is not success. It is not a final destination and it is not the moment when every question disappears.
For me, it is understanding why the different versions of myself were needed — the outsider, the operator, the leader, the learner, the person who kept asking what else might be possible.
Every version of me was necessary.
“Every version of me was necessary.”
The locations are real. So are the detours, the restarts and the changes of direction.
But the most important footprints are not the places on the map. They are the ways of seeing, working and thinking that travelled with me.
The map shows the journey. The story shows who I became.
“The map shows the journey. The story shows who I became.”