Doodle Card

 

Choose the right person.
ふさわしい人を選ぼう。

 

When we ask someone to do something, there are only two ways of asking: as a laborer or a doctor.

When we look for a laborer, what we expect for the person is to do a certain thing instead of us doing it.

But when we look for a doctor, what we expect is completely different; we expect them to solve a problem that we can’t solve or we don’t know what to do with it.

Problem happens when we ask a laborer to do a doctor’s role, or when we ask a doctor to do a laborer’s role. The former is quite speculative and would not work most of the time — although the odds are slightly better than winning the jackpot, because there are some laborers who want to be a doctor someday. The latter happens quite often, but only causes a lot of frustrations on both side.

Even business leaders are not always good at distinguishing doctors from laborers. It requires careful observations of people, and it is the skill that no business school would teach us.

 

 

Trust makes things better.
信頼はモノゴトをより良くする。

 

Tragicomedy in a workplace often happens when everyone is eager to get credit.

I worked in such a circumstance once. People in the company were keen to find a problem — especially a problem that other person created — and fix it. That’s the battle they fight every day. They desperately wanted to make them look good by winning the battle — oftentimes by making someone else look bad. Funny enough, they also made up a problem that doesn’t exist so as to make someone else look bad. It is like an argument from ignorance, or argument from personal incredulity — if someone else can’t prove that they always do the right things, he or she is considered doing something wrong. Of course this kind of fallacy never creates a collaborative attitude in a workplace.

When we doubt someone, it is better to doubt ourselves first — because our doubt can often be based upon our personal thoughts, not a concrete evidence. And it is always better to trust someone than to doubt someone. Trusting someone in a workplace does not mean we blindly leave everything to them; It means we give people rules and boundaries, and let them play within.

When people feel a sense of control and ownership — even though they just do things within the playground we created for them — they will fully engage in their job. We have to be wise enough to make the most of people’s potential. Doubt never help us achieve that.

 

 

Keep learning & do better.
学び続けて、もっとうまくなろう。

 

“Envy is the ulcer of the soul.” ― Socrates

So how can we avoid being envious? Can we really do that?

Confession: Since my childhood, I have been envious of skills and talents of others. At younger age, I was also envious of good-looking and charming guy — I gave up on it a long time ago, but I still can’t stop feeling envious of other’s brilliance.

Psychologists would say, stop focusing on what we don’t have rather than what we do have, or stop comparing ourselves to others. But in a real-life situation, we (or our products and/or services) are always compared with someone or something else. Even psychologists or self-help gurus, who say envy is a bad thing, always compare someone/something with someone/something else.

Is envy really a bad thing? It can be the source of motivation that makes us better and help us reach to a higher level. In a highly competitive world, feeing envious might be inevitable, and it would not necessarily be a bad thing — unless it connects with inaction. That can be a really bad thing.

 

 

Never give up on your life.
自分の人生は見捨てない。

 

What would you do if no one cares about you? If everything is against you? If nothing works although you think thoroughly and work very hard? If you lose everything?

If you have been lucky enough, you would not have seen these terrible things happening. But they could happen at any time in our life, and you may feel like you want to give up on everything.

We can give up on our employer. Arrogant customers. Government. Bad habits. Or dysfunctional relationships. At any time.

But, even if other people give up on us, we can’t simply give up on our life. No matter what happens. Don’t give up on yourself.

 

 

Check how you live.
いかに生きているか調べよう。

 

We all have a limited time in our life, no matter how we perceive it — either long or short. And probably many of us want to make the most of it.

In the company I used to work for, people were proud of working longer hours. Actually they had to stay in the office for longer hours because of the culture of the company. But it doesn’t necessarily mean they always get more things done. I often saw people filling their time by doing things slowly or doing non-essential things, although they all pretended as if they were working really hard.

If you think that’s not the way you live your life, I agree with you. But even if you think that’s the way you live your life, I wouldn’t argue. Because we all have the right to choose how we live.

No matter how we live, it’s better to revisit how we use our time occasionally. Visualize it whenever possible, so that we would have better understanding of it. You might want to spend your life as you want — because we all have a limited time in our life.