Author: Satoru Hirose

 

Let others reveal themselves.
自ら正体をさらけ出させよう。

 

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” – Abraham Lincoln

Disclaimer — this tactic is not for everyone, even though it is based upon the advice from Abraham Lincoln.

In our life, we often come across the situation where we are not sure if we can trust someone else or not. Even if we actively approach the person and ask many questions to find how he/she is, they don’t always express their true self — because asking many questions would often be considered as intimidating and can make the other side quite defensive.

Instead of being aggressive, we can TEMPORARILY put ourselves in a passive mode and pretend as if we knew nothing. In other words, we give someone else the power to take initiative. Then observe carefully.

Are they caring about others or just egocentric? Do they focus on the best interest of others or only themselves? Are they talking about what others want to hear from them, or what they want to talk to others? We can see many things if we let someone else take initiative.

The same tactic can be applied to a business relationship. Although making an agreement in writing beforehand is always the best practice, we can learn a lot about the counterpart if we TEMPORARILY let them take initiative. Are they trying to create a win-win situation or a win-lose situation? Are they forcing us to do more work with less pay, or even for free? Do they use our work for the purpose we didn’t agree before and try to make money without paying a commission or a license fee to us? We wouldn’t know these aspects if we just aggressively approach them.

But — this is a big BUT — as I emphasized the word “temporarily” twice, we will have to say NO to the counterpart in the end if what we observed is not acceptable to us. That’s why and this tactic is not for everyone; not everyone is good at (or prefers) giving a polite but firm NO.

While there are many good people and companies, some people and companies are very evil. This is the fact we need to swallow in our life. And we need to have an effective tactic to distinguish good from bad. What’s your tactic?

 

 

Embrace conflicting forces.
相反する力を受け入れよう。

 

In the Star Wars series, you screw up if you choose the dark side of the Force. But in our real life, that is not always the case.

I’m a strong believer of yin and yang (陰陽) — meaning darkness and brightness. It’s one of the Chinese philosophy that describes how seemingly contrary forces may be interconnected and interdependent in the world.

The concept of yin and yang is not a distinction between good and bad; it is an indivisible whole. We experience many things in our life. No matter how we label them — for example, good or bad — it is our life as a whole. We can’t avoid negative things, such as a death of a family member or a close friend, while we often come across positive things, like finding your soul mate. Everything is connected and forms our life.

We see many “Positivity Porn” and “Pessimism Porn” on the Internet. If we see it from the view of yin and yang, it’s not the matter of which one we follow or believe — it just tells us that we human beings easily lose sight of the interdependency between positivity and negativity. We can’t focus on only one of them because both are part of our life.

Our life won’t go anywhere if we are stuck in negativity. But the same thing happens if we cling to positivity. We can always choose to live with these two conflicting forces, which will show us the real meaning of our life.

 

 

Nothing worth doing ever comes easy.
行うに値することは簡単に見つからない。

 

One of my friends referred my daily doodle as “an illustration poem.” I never thought of myself as a poet — but the origin of the word ‘poet’ is the Greek word meaning ‘create.’ I like it.

No matter what my work is called, this daily creative pursuit is worth doing every day. It gives me a new perspective, makes me a bit more self-disciplined, and allows me to explore the things I still don’t know well.

Facing our own ignorance makes us nervous, but that’s one of the effective way to find our room for learning more and further growth.

The key is to do it yourself — if other people pointed out your ignorance, your ego would create millions of reasons to justify yourself and prevent you from taking effective action. Do whatever you can do to avoid being on an ego trip.

 

 

Your chance is infinite.
チャンスは無限にある。

 

No one wants to feel uncomfortable. But getting uncomfortable often leads us to the next level.

My first experiment of this year is to practice coloring my doodle and sketch using Adobe Illustrator. And the second one is — I’m doing these two experiments simultaneously — to participate design contests at cloud sourcing services as a graphic designer.

Am I a graphic designer? I never got that job before. I’m running a tiny business consulting firm now. People who see my CV would never hire me as a graphic designer.

Working as a graphic designer often makes me feel weird. But I give it a try anyway. At this exact moment, it’s just a short-term experiment – although I’m working on it very seriously – that will give me new perspective, knowledge and experience.

I still don’t know yet what I can become during the rest of my life. And the same applies to you. There is no reason to stay within our comfort zone.