A Short Tribute to Mr. Aoyama
The last 2 days have reminded me of the preciousness of life. I've had the opportunity to meet a wonderfully kind man in late September for the first time while at my girlfriend's family home. He had recently been released from the hospital from cancer treatments and was in good spirits and shared a bowl of home made chicken stew and wine.
We would not meet again until yesterday and he had just been bed ridden while at his home. Despite not being able to get out of bed and under a lot of pain medication, he thanked us for coming by to visit and with the strength he had, he smiled and gave us the the "ok" sign and said that he was all right. It was late afternoon by the time we arrived and evening by the time we left. I wouldn't have expected it, but my girlfriend and I would be his last visitors. By the morning he was gone, but the day before he was still able to eat and walk. The last evening would be the second and final time that I would meet him.
Just after being bed ridden we learned through his family that was in attendance that he was wistful that he wished he was able to finish off a few more letters and messages before the worsening of his condition; no one thought that he would deteriorate that quickly. The idea of New Years Resolutions felt shallow because life is short, unpredictable and we've only one to live.
A Transition from Sony
2012 marks the ending of my career as an Engineer at Sony. It was a privilege working with the team where we would show off a break through flat panel display, the world's first 55 inch LED HDTV. Together as a team, we've gone through and solve a number of incredibly challenging engineering problems that would simply be impossible for any other firm to solve on their own.
I have elected to transition from an R&D position into an IT position in a finance company to get closer to dealing with users, because in the years that I have been working in at Sony before, the biggest missing piece in my working career is getting closer to customers and figuring out what they really want. To me, this is the place where a business is born and money is to be made. I've seen a lot of research projects from academia and industry that would probably not see the light of day as most of them started off as an intellectual curiosity and remained just like that. Attaining success is about finding high impact ideas and executing on them.
Moving to the Big City
As of Jan 19th, I'll be moving into the heart of Tokyo for 2 reasons. The first is to cut down on my commute. Since 2 months ago, I've started working the early morning shift and that means that I need to be at the office by 7:30 am daily to run system checks and then getting on with the day. I've also been hard at work running a variety of other projects and taking on new responsibilities at my new job that I've been pulling 12~14 hour days. Doing the math, 2 hours transport, 12 hours of work, 6 hours of sleep (if I am lucky) leaves me with 4 hours of personal time during the week. If I throw in dinner, getting ready for bed and chores into the mix, I simply means that I don't have a lot of time to do anything else. Time is important and I'll be upping my cash burn rate to recoup time and reinvest that into myself (and so far, reinvesting into myself has had the biggest
The price I'll pay for this move will be steep, but I hope to recoup the costs through better networking with entrepreneurs in Tokyo and more time to myself to exercise and study. One thing that I am quite certain of, living too far away from Tokyo was a bad thing because it severely limited my ability to network and spend time meeting people that I would like to build working relations with.
Move Quickly Upwards and Onwards
I'm upping my ante on what I can get out of my career. The good thing about working in finance is good workers get promoted quickly. From what I've heard from my peers is that I've been doing a pretty good job so far, the next thing is that my successes are visible to management and that I'm also personally grow while cranking out hits and growing my own networks while I am at it.
