Longevity as a White Collar Professional: Perseverance amid Constant Doubts

"I found this place is more Japanese than global." Meeting around 40-50 new employees in my company, doubtful comments such as this was sprinkled throughout the otherwise joyful conversations. Unfortunately, they were not joking. The smell of exaggerated promises seeping through the Tower has already been scented and picked up by many a few too many noses. Predictions are already abound about what percentage of the Class will remain in a few months time.

"What do they know? They have only been here for one day!" Our 10-year veterans can surely dismiss the sentiments as "inexperienced sentiments of juvenile energy," bound to be extinguished as the new graduates mature into professionals. Perhaps so, some of the group will definitely grow into their jobs (as have some of my own class), but if their independent thoughts stay vigilant, the odds are that their growing "quietness" sources itself from self-suppression rather than satisfaction.

Let me clarify that by mentioning this, I am in no way persuading anyone to think otherwise from joining the company, or dissuading anyone from attempting to work here. I am just pointing out a worrisome situation that, since it is so gloomy, can only head toward the better. In fact, let me switch gears a little bit here to tell you a story a personally encountered story that made me realize one again, just how important it actually is to stick to something for a long time.

Yesterday, I had the great honor of meeting a friend of a friend, a foreigner who is in her 10th year here in Japan. Arriving here in as a fresh new grad coming out of a foreign college little know here in Japan, she joined a venture company with 6 people (as the only foreigner). 10 years later, as her company grow into a 200-people enterprise, her stock options, her investments, and other independent business activities have made more than just financial stable for her now-blossoming married life in Japan.

Of course, all "rags-to-riches" stories (to term it in a rather exaggerated fashion) mesmerize the listeners by only stating the enormous contrast between the very beginning and now. My story here, even in the original form told to me verbally, skip over 3650 days of toil, worries, and certainly many personal doubts about current direction. Just thinking about what is like for only foreigner in a Japanese venture company (which is still very much Japanese) should make me feel lucky to be in an ostentatiously globalization one, despite continued schism between foreigners and the Japanese employees.

But perhaps the biggest backside of her notedly amazing and highly respectable persistence as a professional businesswoman in Japan is, well, her persistence. By choosing to remain in one company in one country for the most professionally flexible ten years of her life, her pretty much hammered in the nails to the coffin of any plan to experience work life in other countries and industries. And because she is so established both economically and romantically here in Japan, any attempt to change the status quo would incur a cost too much to burden.

As I always say, "life is about experience." Because a person only get one lifetime here on Earth (sorry, an extreme atheist right here), a year spent in one place automatically equals a year closer to death and a year not able to explore elsewhere. The world is simply too big and humanity too complex for any layperson to grasp it all, and living on tiny islands like Japan only make the person feel more closed off to the world. But I would like to try; try to see the world, one step, one profession, and one place at a time...

So I give you two choices: the "specialist" one going for success and wealth based on experiences built in one field and one country, or the "nomadic" one observing and experiencing, yet with blatant disregard for, all rules of social and economic order everywhere. I, as the ever-lasting idealist refusing to give in to the everyday routine, has chosen the less-chosen latter. But what about you? As you start or continue with you profession and life, which will you choose?