I Chalk Up Another Defeat

My desk — belonging to a self-proclaimed voracious reader who rarely lets books pile up unread — has ended up looking like this.

There are two reasons.

One was the World Cup, the other was “Shido,” a project co-hosted by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and JETRO.

The World Cup reached its grand finale in dramatic fashion today, and Shido reached its own milestone the day before yesterday.

In the end I wasn’t selected for dispatch to Silicon Valley, and I didn’t advance to the next step myself.

Still, I’d like to give myself credit for the very “me” idea of joining, this time as the one being mentored, a project I’d previously been called into as a mentor.

What I was after, you see, was “creating an opportunity to be criticized.”

Once you’ve built up a certain track record and risen to a higher position, you inevitably get exposed less and less to “genuine incomprehension.”

That’s because most listeners consider your position.

Colleagues at the same company, or people close to you in generation, share a lot of the same tacit knowledge, and they tend to have similar views on problems and similar options for solving them. Even if they can’t fully agree, they’ll think, “(Hmm, so that’s how this person sees it).”

And for the most part, they won’t openly oppose you.

Shido includes mentoring sessions and pitches.

In that process, I ran into “genuine incomprehension” — reactions like “what you’re saying makes no sense” — more than a few times.

It was discouraging, but it was exactly what I’d been aiming for.

It let me recall, with real feeling, “Come to think of it, this is basically all I ever got, up until about ten years ago.”

Inside Yamaha, I made new business proposals more times than I can count.

It was extremely rare for my direct manager to say anything positive, so I tried every trick I could think of. I challenged division heads directly, and I appealed straight to executives more than once or twice. But most of it ended in crushing defeat, though the ways I lost varied. Around 95% of the people around me had a tone more like “Kuzuryu’s working hard on something, but I don’t really get it,” and I barely managed to hold my ground on the support of the remaining 5%. Sometimes I was lonely, sometimes I drank away my frustration and impulse-bought things on Amazon that I regretted later — but that’s how I spent my 20s.

Writing up a business plan every time I got a stretch of time off — I really never learned my lesson.

Even into my 30s, that situation didn’t really change.

I just swapped the stage for a startup and the location for Silicon Valley. During fundraising, someone once told me flat out, with no cushioning at all, “leave right now” — not just incomprehension but outright dismissal (very Silicon Valley of them, ha!). Moving somewhere so different meant losing the advantage of “tacit knowledge,” which put me in an even harsher position.

But somehow, oddly, I still never learned my lesson.

I guess I must have been enjoying it.

So, what about these days?

I serve as a director at several companies.

• Pushback from subordinates? That’s nothing.
• The other executives are, for the most part, all gentle people. → There are all kinds of things that are hard about management, but that kind of thing exists on a different dimension from “genuine incomprehension.”

I sometimes come in for hands-on consulting. → Getting shut out and feeling discouraged happens, but it’s not the same as being criticized to your face.

I work as an advisor and consultant. → Nobody says whatever they want to me — the person who says whatever they want.

I teach at a university. → If students don’t understand, that’s on my own lack of ability, so sure, it happens, but it’s just a matter of trying harder.

None of it really packs a punch.

I need more of those moments — where something you’ve carefully built up piece by piece gets crushed in an instant, where something you approached with total conviction gets casually knocked back.

Yes — like the World Cup.

I have deep respect for the players.

Carrying pressure so enormous that no individual should really be able to bear it — the pride of a nation — sometimes it comes down to the width of a toe, sometimes a misread of left or right, sometimes a 0.1-second difference in decision speed, Mitoma’s one millimeter.

That they can stake their whole lives on a contest fought at such razor-thin margins.

Getting discouraged, getting hurt, having regrets, cursing something.

But I think they know that it’s precisely that which leads to further growth and fulfillment.

Not one person standing up there got there by winning every single time.

They’ve been knocked down again and again over the course of their careers, gone to the World Cup multiple times without ever being blessed with a title, and still they believe in themselves — a self that carries that reflection, that passion, that hunger, and gets back up again.

After all, Argentina, who ended up champions, lost their opening match to Saudi Arabia.

The company I brought into Shido this time, “Kansayaku DX,” is one a friend and I founded saying, “we’re going to be working until we’re 80 anyway.”

Thinking of it as a roughly 60-year career in total, we’re actually still not even halfway there.

It’s far too early to settle down — there are still plenty more losses to take and plenty more climbing back up to do.

I can get stronger than this.

Just like the Japan national team going forward.

For now, I want to knock out these rare stacks of unread books quickly and power myself up once again.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2022/12/1541/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.