Doodle

 

An idea comes from a noise.
名案は雑音から生まれる。

 

A great symphony is a perfect balance of various noises. If we listen to each of the instruments, we are unable to identify what it is.

A great idea is like that. It consists of various fragmentary knowledge and/or information, and works together. If we just take a look at each fragment, we can’t figure out what it is.

Any meetings in a corporate environment can be quite unproductive because people look for a perfect idea, not a fragment of an idea, in the first place. Or such meetings can be quite destructive because it is quite easy to deny the value of a fragment of an idea. Sadly, or ironically, people enjoy a feeling of accomplishment even when they destroy fragmentary ideas – although these ideas can turn into a great, world-changing idea. That’s why many companies are continuously struggling, and we individuals should avoid this costly pitfall.

Gather pieces of information in your brain and try to formulate them as if you were composing music. This world is waiting for your great idea — a perfect balance of your noisy thoughts.

 

 

Respect your own experience.
自分自身の経験を大切にしよう。

 

Every morning I read a passage from Meditation by Marcus Aurelius:

“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own — not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditation 2.1

And I also tell me one more thing: In our life there is a time to stay away from these toxic people, and I have to distinguish the time to run away from the time to work together.

Marcus Aurelius was one of the Five Good Emperors as well as a great philosopher, but he was not free from his own biases: Since he was Roman Emperor, he was not in the position to run away. His opponent was in the position to run away (or to assassinate him, like the movie The Gladiator).

We — assuming that you are an ordinary person like me — have to be really careful about such survivorship bias, or survival bias. We can see this bias everywhere: books, blog posts, speeches and presentations of highly successful people. What they say is often too lofty or impractical to apply to our ordinary life.

It doesn’t mean that what successful people say is meaningless. It just means we will most likely need to add one or two more insights — that are based upon our own experience and free from the survivorship bias — to what they say so as to utilize their experience and knowledge in our everyday life. And this is the way for us to ‘survive’ in our life.

 

 

Here lies the man who lived his dreams.
己の夢に生きた男、ここに眠る。

 

I’m NEVER told that I don’t have much time left, but I start making my bucket list. I want to live my life more intensely.

The above photo is the cover of my ‘Bucket List’ Moleskine notebook. It has over 200 pages. I am going to be a bit greedy for the rest of my life and will not wait to do things I write down on this notebook. If I would fill out all the pages — I would create the second bucket list notebook for sure. I want to keep having a dream until I die.

 

 

Live with your bucket list.
「死ぬまでにやりたいことリスト」と共に生きよう。

 

One of the most inspiring books in my life is Before I Die by Candy Chang.

It’s like a bucket list in public. It’s also amazing to know that people around the globe have similar (if not the same) wishes like each one of us does.

It will never be late to start something meaningful to you. Like a 2007 American film The Bucket List. Like a 1952 Japanese film Ikiru directed by Akira Kurosawa.

“Before I die I want to ________.”

Every morning, ask this question and fill out the blank. Do something to live the life you want. Every single day. Our life shines most brightly when we are conscious of its end.

And never forget to dream big. If we know our life is worth pursuing something big — really big — we won’t easily give up on our life.