Author: Satoru Hirose

 

Life is NOT like a marathon.
人生はマラソンと似ていない。

 

I took part in a full marathon 8 times: finished 7 times, and dropped out of the last one. I’ve never participated in a marathon since then.

Life is often compared to a marathon. I used the analogy before I actually ran a marathon — how silly I was! Because these two are different in many ways. To name a few:

• We just need to run 42.195 kilometers (26.219 miles) to complete a full marathon. But we never know how long we need to run in our life.
• We can train ourselves as much as we want before running a marathon. But we can’t always prepare enough in a real life.
• Even if we drop out of a marathon, it’s not the end of the world — we can participate in another one if you want. But we can never restart our life if we give up on it and quit living.
• We can be proud of ourselves if we finish a marathon, no matter how hard it is. But our life may end up despairingly and hopelessly.
• And maybe on top of all that – when we run a marathon, we run the pre-determined route from start to finish. Someone creates the path for us before the race begins. It doesn’t happen in our real life, unless we decide to follow someone’s life.

Does the marathon analogy work well? It is up to you. You’ll find it only when you actually run a marathon — perhaps several times, like me.

 

 

Listen to others as if they were their last words.
その人の遺言であるかのように、他の人の話を傾聴しよう。

 

It may be a miracle if people understand each other in words.

Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “Impossible is a word only to be found in the dictionary of fools.” What did he mean to say?

One word has three meanings. Literal, figurative and emotional. What is an emotional meaning? It’s the meaning that each person applies to a word with a certain emotional experience. We don’t understand this meaning unless we get to know the opponent very well.

We understand Napoleon’s word in a figurative sense. If we would stick to a literal meaning, we would never know what he meant to say because in the real world there is no such thing as the dictionary of fools. But we never know what kind of feeling the word ‘impossible’ would give to him — so we might have misinterpreted his word for years.

Quite often, the emotional meaning causes misunderstanding between people. Your boss may get upset or irritated when someone say a certain word, although the word itself means nothing to you. Or your significant other or family members may not like hearing a certain word or phrase on TV or radio. That’s because the emotional meaning of word is in play.

Understanding each other is not an easy task because we need to understand the emotional meaning of their words. Some people have only a few, some people have a lot. We have to start from listening to what the opponent says — without applying our own emotional meaning to their words. In order to distinguish our own emotional meaning from the one of others, we have to be self-aware.

Mindfulness plays a significant role even in communicating each other.

 

 

Never be on the side of the majority.
大多数には属さない。

 

In a business world — especially promotions of info product and TV commercials — there are thousands of skilled marketers who try to sell things to us. Most of the things are not worthwhile, but these marketers are so skillful and make people feel like they have to buy it.

It causes an ironic situation. Even though a company (or an individual) sells a great product or service, people would never buy it if their marketing is not sophisticated. If you are unskilled at marketing and promotion, people would consider your business as a shady or dubious one.

We have to do something different to avoid this trap. Do something that large companies or skilled (if not deceptive) marketers would never do. If people think you are different, there are chances that they evaluate your product/service without having too many cognitive biases.