Inferior feeling drives growth #1

1. Introduction

I am Japanese living in Singapore around 4 years, mainly writing about cultural topics. This is my short sentence that I always use at the end of my posting in LinkedIn. I shared my personal life events and thoughts around each of them piece by piece but this article is to cover comprehensively about how I became the current state of me.

*This article has two parts. A link to the second part is available at the end of the article 1.

A very short summary of my life (up to this point) is

After working as a part of executive committee members in a local office of Japan for a global fund management company(AUM $120billion, as of March 2022), now I am working as one of the global function leaders in the company in Singapore, headquarter of the company.

It seems the life was smoothly progressed. No it was not. If I share it from a bit before that, it starts like this.

I wanted to be a musician and started working as part-time restaurant worker. But I gave up my dream and the second interest was to learn English. After studying in Dublin, Ireland and internship working in a cruise ship sailing around the world, I started working in real estate investment industry. But I got fired during the financial crisis back in 2008/9. It changed my career from sales type of job to Finance after obtained CPA (certified pubic accountant) qualification in U.S.

Then it continues the part described above.

From the next section, let me dive into some details of each stage of the life... why I was dreaming to be a musician in the first place.

2. Giving up my dream to be a musician, decided to go to Dublin to learn English

I was grown up in a small town in Saitama which is next prefecture to Tokyo. Nothing really special about my home town but ordinary outskirt area and being raised relatively in a lower income family.

My father was just a normal business person who worked for several diffident small and medium sized companies. But during his free time (especially weekends), he was working as self-employer to do music sound engineering for live-events. It sounds very professional (yes it is professional) but normally he worked for small town events like summer festival in the town.

His brothers (3 of them) run their small businesses as music instrumental stores in Ibaraki. (next to Saitama) Actually the grandfather of mine (I have never met him since he died before I was born) started the business.

So I was grown up by a lot of "music" related environment.

It was very natural that I started thinking about I wanted to be a professional musician when I was in high school. Although none of my relatives and families were technically musicians.

Except for me, everyone around me in the college was looking for jobs in better companies as much as possible during the last year there. I was not. I had decided to continue to work as part-time job in Italian chain restaurant in Japan and seek for an opportunity to be a singer.

But being a musician was not easy. To make it short.. I gave it up pretty much quickly.

Looking back from now, I can see myself having a misjudgement of my capability to be different from other people without making a clear reason supported by enough efforts.

In Japan, once you start from part-time job (after graduating college), it is very difficult to re-start your career as full time. It is part of society norm as culture. (I can write about this more but it may take long. So not to go deep into it this time.)

"What should I do ? I am totally off the track. Everyone went far ahead of me.."

The second interest at that time was learning English. But actually just one year ago from then I hated English. My major in the university was law. And I failed English credits as one of basic subjects in my 2nd year. So I need to re-take the class in the 3rd year but in where I could meet a very interesting professor. One day he gave us an assignment, which was to go to a town to shoot a video with foreigners by asking about what they think about Japanese culture. (Well it is somehow related to what I am still doing now !)

My english was awful but I realised that somehow we could communicate with a German guy. I realised how interesting the conversation to have with non-Japanese people to hear their thoughts. Or simply, how it is interesting to use English to communicate.

"Ok.. I should learn English to make it as my speciality. "

My family was not a rich as mentioned above. It was not very easy to manage to go abroad for long term like being a university student again. So I went to a language school where I could learn English about just one year in Dublin, Ireland. (I wanted to go to the area where there were only few Japanese students in order to concentrate learning English like isolating myself from ending up speaking in Japanese all the time.)

It goes on to the second part of the story.

*If you are interested in my "Given up dream", Please check my Instagram account. Happy to be connected there too !

Here is a link to my one of my singing in Instagram account.

You can also listen to what happens next by The Curious About Podcast by Diana Shih.