Author: Satoru Hirose

 

Weirdness is much better than sameness.
奇妙であることは、似ていることよりずっと良い。

 

In Japan, there is a proverb meaning that “if you stick out, you get hammered”.

And this is exactly true. If you are something different from others, you feel strong social pressure that forces you to be similar with everyone else. It happens when you are different enough to be noticed AND similar enough to make people feel that you can be under their influence.

If you are WAY different from others, people just stop evaluating you and say ‘you are weird’.

That gives you freedom. The freedom to stick out. The freedom to do whatever you like to experiment. You feel less social pressure because people think you are weird.

But do it intentionally. Be aware of your weirdness and how it differs from the social norm. Working on the gap will give you a chance to change your reputation from ‘weird’ to ‘remarkable’.

 

 

Catch and incubate your crazy ideas.
ばかげたアイデアを捕えて、育てよう。

 

While I’m sleeping, a lot of ideas come up.

If I don’t jot them down, those ideas are gone. I can hardly recall them. So I always have a small notebook or an iPhone on the bedside.

Even when I write down the ideas, it’s hard to understand what they are. Too abstract. Too ridiculous. Too impractical. Sometimes I can’t even recognize the language I used to take notes.

But that’s okay. That’s how our subconscious is. If we catch a piece of our crazy thoughts in any way, it starts growing. Someday it might become a great idea. Or might remain silly as it originally was.

The only way to generate a great idea is to keep generating ideas. No matter how silly they are. Just keep going.

 

 

Use your biases wisely.
偏見を賢く利用しよう。

 

After I spent 7 years in the U.S., I finally noticed what ethnicism really is.

My ex-boss preferred talking only with Japanese, although the company’s operation was already multinational. “It’s your job to talk to American employees”, he said.

After I came back to Japan, I visited my hometown. Then I realized that people don’t like foreigners with no reason. Most of them say “I don’t understand them”, although they don’t even try to interact with foreign people.

We are all biased in a sense. It’s impossible for us to be completely free from biased thoughts. But it makes a huge difference in our life and business if we are aware of our own biases and take advantage of them as an opportunity.

 

 

Forget many things to make one thing happen.
一つを成しとげるために、他のことは忘れよう。

 

I was a perfectionist who achieved nothing valuable.

I once worked for 4,000 hours a year. Maybe more than that — I was in the office almost every day, including weekends. I wanted to make everything done in my way. Every tiny thing.

Being a perfectionist gave me a lot of things. Unhealthy body and mind. Broken friendship. Lack of focus and willpower. Alcoholic. Even my boss hated me because I did too much. Since everything was against me, I devoted myself more and more to my job. I believed that was the way to make everything work, but it only led me to an ambulance.

It’s not easy to let many things go in order to focus on one thing. The essential one. The one that matters most in your life or business. The one that might change your life forever. We tend not to focus on such ‘one thing’ because we do not have to feel pressured. It’s easy to waste our time in less meaningful things.

But if we really want to achieve something that matters to us, we need to face and overcome the fear of choosing the essential one. Being a perfectionist is, in a sense, to live our life even without facing the fear.