A face behind generosity
Cosmin is one of the members of the team who successfully delivered to Brasov County Council (one of Romania’s most beautiful city in the Carpathian Mountains) a free-of-charge project for the construction of a hospital, in the heat of the pandemic crisis.
Cosmin is a brilliant yet modest engineer from Brasov, whose upbringing came from a family made of an army colonel and a math teacher. He’s extraordinarily passionate about how things work (literally) and used to build computers out of pieces and make small robots from radio scraps. He was trying to convince me, my parents, his parents and a big part of a small town that computers are the next big thing. He was 10 and it was the early 90’.
He eventually chose a constructions university, though, in the summer of the exam, he did not stretch at all with studying, to the despair of his math teacher mother. His parents were completely shocked they did not find him on any of the University’s lists. They called the University and the answer was pretty funny. They weren’t looking at the top. He got in first.
Later on, in his adulthood, Cosmin traded his piano (yes, he also plays piano) for a plotter when he decided to build a small firm of installation project engineering in Brasov.
Some years ago he called me to say “happy holidays” from Paris. He was not on vacation there, he had done a Christmas lighting project and managed the installation of the lights at a big Parisian company.
He travelled a booming pre-2008 economy and the hardship of the 2008 financial crisis. He still goes on. He has a beautiful wife and two very naughty kids.
You might wonder why, of all the exceptional team members in the project, I chose to write about Cosmin. Because he’s my pride these days. I am proud to say we share family blood, and that the values we were brought up together with still ignite everything he does.
Despite not having an impressive wealth, he finds the time to put his efforts into something as genuinely generous as his contribution to a social project. And not even being interested in advertising such a deed, because I am sure he does not really know what marketing or branding is these days. Like a lot of valuable professionals doing their jobs brilliantly from their corner of the world, with no wish or effort for public acknowledgement. That does not mean they do not deserve it though and that we should not make some justice now and then by providing such acknowledgement.
Also, I am proud of how a part of the public sector could responsibly handle such a project together with private professionals and NGOs, meeting during times of crisis and pushing ahead what is really important, without even making such a big fuss about it.
When reading the news about Cosmin’s pro-bono work, and remembering all the things I wrote about him before, I also came to another delightful realization. That we so often think we are defined by what we possess, by our job at some point, or by how much others appreciate what we do, when, in fact, the most powerful engine we have is our own story. Our story shows how professional, educated, ethical, driven, perseverent and successful we really are. And that’s something that does not go away because of a crisis or some hardship times. On the contrary, during such times, it shows what we are really made of.
