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A Message for Anyone Struggling With Their Career

original Teams & Careers

Some time ago a “vague worry” came up in conversation, and I gave my own comment in response. Looking back later, I felt the content applied more generally, so I’ve reorganized it below. I hope it’s useful for anyone struggling with how to sustain motivation about their career. The intended audience is:

My roots are as a hardcore engineer, but I don’t think what follows is limited to engineers. This starts from the question: is there a “good method” for keeping motivation up? — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — Motivation and the drive for technical improvement are both rooted in individual personal values, so all I can really offer is “here’s how I think about it.” I believe it’s good to treat each situation as a “phase,” matching it to your career plan. Broadly speaking, there may be short-term stretches of boring work, or periods of hardship, but cutting these cleanly into short phases and building up gradually gets you to places you couldn’t have reached in one leap. That’s how I see it. At the same time, I also believe “it’s hard to predict or plan too far ahead, so it’s better not to overdo that.”

I took a job after finishing graduate school, and in my early twenties I was, like a proper member of a large corporation, basically an errand boy while studying the fundamentals. I arranged procurement of prototype parts, swapped candidate components endlessly while taking waveform data, gathered up datasheets, and organized documentation into a form I could show senior and veteran engineers. Once I learned how to use CAD, I kept doing precision calculations to satisfy the specs and change requests my seniors had decided on, building PCBs and measuring waveforms again. In terms of raw development ability, I was probably terrifyingly behind many engineers of the same age who’d graduated from technical colleges or had robotics-competition experience. But I treated this whole period purely as “study.” Was it fun? Honestly, I think it was. I’d calculate for myself why a senior had chosen a particular component value and go ask them about it; I’d act as the hands and feet of a veteran EMC master and get taught the secret sauce (ha) one-on-one late at night out at an outdoor test site (back then, the only 10-meter radio measurement sites were shacks deep in the mountains!). In meetings I sat beside my seniors and learned the company’s overall development flow and how to deal with various vendors.

In my late twenties I went independent. I made a point of thinking through and designing everything on my own judgment. Because of that I ran into terrible trouble more than a few times, and my working hours were the ultimate black-company nightmare, but I don’t think I could have gained confidence in my own skills without that period of repeated near-death struggle. (This would take too long to go into here, so I’ll save it for another time.) What I’m grateful for above all is that the environment even allowed that kind of stance in the first place. My OJT senior got pulled into becoming department head right around that time, and he pulled me into that department with him. Things went very smoothly thanks to that string of coincidences. But what if that kind of environment hadn’t come together? Thinking it through, I probably would have had to take some action, and to put it in template form:

I think a moment would have come to take one of those actions. One positive thing is that, looking back, I can say with confidence that if I’d ended up in an unfavorable situation, I would have taken one of those actions without hesitation. That’s because the idea I mentioned above — “cut things into short phases and build up” — had already taken root in me not long after I entered the workforce.

My early thirties flipped to team management. Once I could see to some degree “what I was capable of,” I thought I’d expand what I could do further by moving to a team. I’d also always figured, personality-wise, that I was suited to being a manager. Some peers took a negative view of doing that kind of management work around age 30 — “too early,” “I’d rather keep developing” — but for me it was effectively “playing manager” (my title hadn’t actually gone up), so I enjoyed it with a kind of “well, someone’s got to take responsibility” attitude. I did product planning, talked people into things, secured budgets, ran the team, wrote schematics, reviewed source code, handled EMC countermeasures, sorted out legal matters, managed the development budget, coordinated schedules, adjusted specs, occasionally got yelled at by the manufacturing plant, arranged promotions, and did whatever was needed — whether that meant speaking on stage or working the sales floor at Yodobashi. Around that time, my mentor pushed me hard to become a “hito-tarashi” — someone who charms people. At the time I couldn’t grasp what that meant at all, and I only truly understood it as lived experience later, when I was CTO in Japan. I was taught all sorts of things: the basics of planning, presentation technique, estimating development costs, controlling internal politics, the right way to do external activities, and just how free we actually are. This was the period when I gained a lifelong mentor.

And with that, my Yamaha career came to an end. The early thirties after changing jobs were pure challenge. How well could I actually hold my own against people who’d built their careers at MIT, Apple, Google? The conclusion: turns out I could do just fine. Japan’s industrial stagnation runs deep, but I thought, huh, turns out Japanese engineers really do hold their own globally after all. At the same time I learned a great deal from them, and it was a period when my mindset properly shifted to a global one. Some of this got covered in articles, but the expansion of my values over those few years was remarkable. Even now I look back on it fondly. (This too would get long if I started writing it out, so let’s save it for another time.)

In my late thirties I’d already decided I would take on a CxO role, but for whatever reason — I have no idea what got into me — a feeling bubbled up that I wanted to contribute to Japan, a country I’d more or less written off (ha). As one way to do that, doing a startup in Japan seemed like a genuinely good idea, so I decided to move back. I hadn’t made nearly enough money to become an angel investor (not bragging, ha), it still felt too early to shift into advisory or support-type work, and if I wanted to live as a working engineer, Silicon Valley would unquestionably make me happier. Instead, the idea that fit my motivation at the time was: could I build a company that could serve as a reference point for others? In Silicon Valley, throw a rock and one out of every two people you hit is an entrepreneur — and that reference exists as a high school classmate, a guy from the neighborhood, a parent, a relative. Because of that, young people see starting a company as something very close to home, and they hear all kinds of useful reference stories from a young age. Japan’s biggest weakness is the lack of that kind of social infrastructure, and I thought there might be something I could do about it. In the end, the business itself unfortunately didn’t turn out great (it’s not that easy!), but since then, now in my forties, I’ve been allowed to advise various people and give talks, so in a changed form, I feel I’ve been able to carry out at least part of what I originally intended.

My forties have had a somewhat go-with-the-flow quality, but the balance has shifted away from being a pure engineer and toward activity as a manager, and further still toward something more like social activism. Engineering obviously still matters — I still read schematics, I still subscribe to Trans Istor Gijutsu, I still buy sketchy items from China and take them apart, and I sometimes carve out concentrated blocks of time to code. But for me, that’s like a pro athlete’s jogging or weight training — doing it alone earns you no praise and nothing to be proud of; it’s simply table stakes. What matters is the further plus beyond that: properly producing social value as output. And the critically important tool for that is management. Right now I’m providing support to the companies I’m involved with, covering everything from technology strategy to fundraising to hiring plans.

Now, as for how much I originally thought through these career plans — honestly, the truth is “I think I’ve always only thought about one or two phases ahead.” When I joined Yamaha, I was aware my technical skills weren’t enough. I’d studied electrical and electronic engineering, but because of the nature of my research, I was in practice basically a software person. So for the first few years after joining, I made a point of thoroughly stealing the skills of the people around me. And I figured that within about three years I’d be able to design on my own. In reality, two and a half years after joining, a transfer put me on a new model project as the lead for electrical design, and I shipped a total of about four models to market. After that, having become “someone who had designed something on his own,” a certain independence arose, and I stopped being placed under anyone as an assistant.

Around the time I started designing on my own, my attention had turned toward the United States. Part of it was that the US was a huge market in the electronics industry, but also, as I noticed the dysfunctions of Japanese-style organizations and the slowing growth of the Japanese economy as a working adult, I found myself vaguely wondering what the real difference between Japan and America was. I kept putting in requests for a transfer to the US, but — luckily or unluckily — none of them ever went through. Even so, there’s no doubt that the various activities born out of that awareness and passion widened my network, and that this ultimately led to my move to the US. (This too is a long story, so I’ll save it for another time.)

By the time I moved to America, I had an unshakeable conviction that I would eventually start a company. I figured this was probably just the only way I knew how to live. But at that point I fully intended to spend my whole life in America (I’d even applied for a green card), so honestly, going back to Japan and all that was completely outside my expectations.

The period running TripleW was the worst (the best?) — I wasn’t thinking about the future at all. Ha. In a good sense, it meant I was fully focused on getting the business off the ground, but my thinking about my own individual career had dropped out entirely. Maybe the plan was to exit, get rich, and vanish from the secular world? But a career keeps going. It’s embarrassing to admit, but even in my late thirties I was being that foolish.

So, where am I now: in the first half of my forties, I want to be involved in as many businesses as possible and expand what I’m capable of at the management level. For instance, right now I’m involved in one M&A deal. I’m also involved with a company trying to get a large loan from a bank. I’m also supporting startup founders who are students or in their early thirties. Manufacturing, communication, AI, healthcare, music, security, pre-disease care, rehabilitation, atmospheric environment, improving the working environment for medical staff, beauty — all of these are themes and areas of activity for me right now. Through the accumulation of all this, by the time I reach my late forties, I want to become “someone who can act on what needs doing without hesitation.” Unfortunately, the “unwavering forties” isn’t nearly that easy, and I’m a pretty hopeless forty-something, dominated by all kinds of illusions, delusions, and confusion. I’d like to evolve a bit more.

Up to now I’ve made products out of “my own preferences and feelings,” and at other times charged straight at “overwhelming social needs.” But society isn’t built that conveniently, and the market exists because all kinds of people are thinking all kinds of things. My hope for myself is that by broadening the diversity of my viewpoints, different “preferences and feelings” and “needs” will come into view, helping me shed another skin.

Technology is a universal passport. With it you can go anywhere. But that’s not the same thing as “acquiring whatever technology happens to be trendy.” Take AI, for example (for some reason I’ve been getting called to speak at a lot of AI-related conferences lately — no idea why). I’m personally involved in developing proprietary AI at a certain company, and the gut feeling I’ve gotten from that is: “this field is commoditizing at a terrifying speed.” In other words, anyone other than someone who can proudly say “I love AI, I spend most weekends reading papers, my dream is to wake up with AI and die with AI” would be wise not to dive in carelessly. The above is purely from the perspective of individual career planning, but there’s a real crowd of people out there who, with fairly soft resolve, are grabbing the short-term coolness of being an “AI engineer” and look set to suffer for it later in their careers. Well, I watch that with a warm smile. In reality, there are still all sorts of hurdles remaining in the world at the stage of social implementation — communication infrastructure, energy issues, or, at a different layer, UI/UX problems. I think building your strength around those areas is more likely to become a skill society will keep needing over the long term.

As for my fifties, there’s still far too much I don’t know, so all I can say is something like, “well, I’ll probably still be somewhere on Earth.” Ha. There’s an overflowing amount in the world to do and to accomplish, so there’s no way our lives will ever run out of interest.

In that sense, all the phases I’ve built up are connected. Or at least they appear connected. Maybe that’s hindsight talking. I don’t think of myself as someone with sharp foresight, but strangely, none of it turned out to be wasted, and I find it remarkable that I somehow managed to sustain motivation and line things up properly in series. The important thing throughout was not letting things stagnate. There are organizational constraints, but life ultimately belongs to the individual. If you ever feel any sense of stagnation, your career plan is in serious trouble.

On the other hand, I have no real idea what will happen a few years from now. If you look into the history of the world economy, it’s said that there was essentially no real economic development to speak of before around the year 1600. Of course humanity was developing to some degree day by day, so it’s not as if there was truly nothing — but compared to the development of the past few decades or even few years in the modern era, it amounted to next to nothing. And this trend, going forward, may only accelerate; it’s unlikely to slow down. If it ever does slow, it will likely happen alongside a sharp population decline and a great depression — so honestly I’d rather it not come at all. So we should basically understand that the future has become something that cannot be predicted. Jeff Bezos, on the other hand, said, “a manager’s job is to decide now what to prepare for, looking three years ahead.” If that could genuinely be executed correctly every single time, I’d have to call it superhuman. But in reality, this year in the US, Amazon is reportedly losing significant market share to Walmart’s offensive. That’s the reality.

No matter how much you break it down into small problems — your own career, title, surrounding environment, department transfers, boss, colleagues, sales, product lineup, and so on — accurately predicting a few years out and maneuvering accordingly is extremely difficult.

Around my third year in the workforce, I had the chance to speak at my old high school, and I remember telling the graduating seniors, “please try to hold an image of yourself five years from now.” The number five didn’t have any quantitative meaning — it was a message to them, about to become university students, to think about what they’d become or want to become “after graduating from university.” A famous person from MIT once said, “look only at the distant goal and the task right in front of you,” and I find that resonates with me. Detailed plans for one or two years out don’t mean much. You hold onto only a distant goal for your career plan (for me, roughly three to five years out), put full effort into knocking down whatever’s right in front of you toward that goal, and every so often check whether you’re still properly facing that “distant goal.”

A person who can’t properly handle what’s right in front of them has no future. But if, after handling what’s in front of you, it turns out not to be pointing toward the goal, there’s absolutely no need — from the standpoint of individual career — to force yourself to keep doing it.

Balancing those two points properly is, I think, the “good method.”

Right after I stepped down from TripleW, an angel investor gave me some advice: “your early forties are prime time, you know.” That’s actually statistically correct — the age group with the most startup founders who achieve an exit is, in fact, people in their forties, and most of those companies were founded when the founder was around forty. You could put it this way: a company built by someone who has already taken a hit or two, and who then fully mobilizes all their accumulated experience and network, has the highest chance of success. That advice really hit the mark. I’m truly grateful for it.

That said, this is undoubtedly true from the angle of “starting a company.” From the angle of “career,” though, I think prime time exists at essentially all times, as much in the past as in the future. A career doesn’t let you cash out just because you succeeded once. People who buy out the startup they built, make a fortune, and then vanish from the secular world entirely are, in reality, quite rare. Most stay engaged with society afterward. Rather than ending, a career just puts you at the starting line of the next phase.

Looking at your career from a somewhat long-term perspective, while letting the events of any given few years play out largely as they will — but arranging things so you can believe that a long-term goal exists beyond whatever you throw yourself fully into right in front of you —

this, I think, is the trick to being a happy working adult,

and the answer to that worry.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2020/02/322/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.