Figuring out how to explore your own possibilities — I find it genuinely difficult. Whether it's work or study, whether you're in your teens or your forties, the moment of judging your own potential arrives for everyone, and it's never easy.
You can't find them without exploring
Right after joining a large company fresh out of college, I went through a period of asking myself: "Will building a career here actually lead to happiness in my life?"
I met with recruiting agents. I waited outside offices of startups I was curious about and asked employees out for coffee, hoping to find something that would expand my sense of what was possible.
Possibilities can only be found by exploring and testing them. "Something better than what I can see right now — something that would give me more than what I have" is out there somewhere. Finding it means spending precious time searching broadly. That's the dilemma.
Running a startup, I feel something similar — the nagging sense that "there might be a better theme to pursue."
You won't become strong without going deep
On the other hand, as long as you keep your options wide open, none of them can grow stronger.
What successful people share is this: they found a possibility they believed in and dug into it with everything they had. It was precisely because they gave up on expanding other possibilities for a period of time that they were able to do it.
Humans are creatures who typically want to keep options open.
- "While keeping my stable current situation"
- "Exploring possibilities on the side"
- "And if I find something, challenging it with an escape route still intact"
If that option existed, most people would take it. The current boom in side projects in Japan feels grounded in a similar instinct.
Constraints and vows
Yet as I described above, the assets that underpin success can only be built when you deliberately surrender the option of "there's something else for me out there" (constraint) and fully commit to the theme you believe in (vow).
There's a manga I love called Hunter x Hunter that features a special power system called Nen (an internal life energy). To explosively amplify the power of your Nen, you're required to "place constraints on yourself and make a vow to uphold them."
This is no fantasy setting unique to manga. It is life itself.
The possibility I'm betting on
I drifted through life for a long time. Two turning points changed that.
The first was facing death during the 2011 Tohoku earthquake. I understood that if I kept only exploring possibilities, I would reach the end of my life having done nothing with them. At the same time, my desire to be close to my family and the people I love grew stronger.
The second was discovering the joy of building products. Invention is my life's goal, but the process itself has become one of the pleasures of being alive.
Family and products. Learning late that these are the only things I want to spend my time on is precisely why I can now move forward with less hesitation and more absorption.
