3.1 This I Believe

     I encountered an interesting website, whose title is "This I Believe", in a class of a business school. I wrote my essay in the class, and I would like to share it on my blog.


this i believe

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            I believe that anyone should live their own life. As this rhetoric has become banal, used everywhere and anytime, people tend to think they have lived their own lives, as well as I do. However, I am not confident that I really live my own life when the sentence is rephrased like, “I should not live someone else’s life.”

            I had been educated under tight control until I graduated from high school in Japan. Students had to sit in their chairs, keep quiet, and behave very well during classes, and I was repeatedly trained to reach the only “correct” answer to many questions. Those tasks were very easy for me because they were just meant to be done as guided by teachers. Since I started to study at university, many varieties of options appeared in front of me; this was a very tough situation that I had never experienced. As I had just followed teachers’ instruction and never seriously thought of what I would like to do by myself, I tried to have a finger in every pie, and then anything and everything hung in midair.

            The first moment when I chose an option on my own will was when I selected my research topic for a master’s program in Chemistry. Looking back, I was lucky to have such a great professor in his laboratory. His questions, such as “Is your thinking coherent and logical?” and “Is that what you really want to do?” shaped my ambiguous desire and sorted out hazy processes to achieve my goal. After two years of research, I achieved an unprecedented result, which was presented at an international conference and finally patented. With great pleasure at going beyond my expectations, this experience taught me the importance of believing in my choice once I made it.

            The next moment, when I was devastated mentally, was when I was involved in an international project for the new product development. Harnessing my R&D experience, I had every confidence that I could manage it, but the project involved not only research and development, but also business aspects. Foreign scientists displayed their broad range of knowledge from manufacturing to brand marketing and managed the project far beyond my imagination. This was something which had never happened in Japan, therefore I started to realize that I needed other expertise to expand my role further. At the same time, I felt that this might be like the common expression, “The grass is always greener on the other side.” I had to ask myself a question: Do I try to live a life of others?

            Now, I study many things to find, open up, and integrate a new pathway for my life at a business school. This move seems to contradict This I Believe, but who can define a “correct” answer to the many questions coming one after another in my life? 

I believe that I should not live someone else’s life, and that I should strive for the “right” answers to my life. This belief gives me originality.

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