The Habits Japan Gave Me—Before I Even Realized I Was Learning Them

Nov 21

When people ask where my career “really started,” they usually expect me to say the U.S. or China.

But the truth is:

I began my working life in Japan and spent the first decade of my career there.

At the time, I didn’t fully appreciate what that meant. I was just a young guy trying to make my way in a country that felt disciplined, gentle, structured, and quietly intense. But looking back now, with decades of distance, I can see something clearly:

Japan didn’t just give me a job. It gave me the habits and mental models that shaped the rest of my life.

Not consciously. Not through “training.” But through osmosis—through culture, environment, and a thousand tiny, repeated cues.

These are the lessons I carried with me, often without noticing, until many years later.

Kaizen - Improvement Comes in Inches, Not Leaps

I didn’t have the word "Kaizen" in my vocabulary when I first arrived in Japan. But I felt it everywhere: in the way teams reviewed a process, in how every worker—from junior to senior—looked for micro-tweaks to make things flow better.

That quiet, relentless 1% improvement mentality soaked into me.

Even today at Yodo1, I find myself defaulting to:

What’s a small change I can make that will put me on a trajectory to make everything easier and/or better?

Ikigai - Purpose Lives in the Small Daily Things

In Japan, people didn’t talk much about “changing the world” or “finding your passion.” And yet, everyone seemed to have meaning stitched into their routines—whether making perfect onigiri or preparing a weekly presentation.

I didn’t know it then, but that was my first exposure to what the Japanese call ikigai.

It taught me this simple truth:

Meaning doesn’t hit you like a lightning bolt. You build it by doing something well, every day.

“80% Full” - Train yourself to know when you’ve had enough

Japan taught me a surprising form of restraint—not in the moral sense, but in the practical one. You don’t need to push to the edge of fullness, effort, or ambition to be successful.

The idea of stopping at “enough”—whether eating, planning, or working—has been one of the most grounding habits I have ever learned.

It’s the opposite of burnout culture. It’s sustainability by instinct.

Walking Outdoors in Nature

I didn’t grow up taking slow walks through moss-covered paths or pausing to listen to wind through cedars. However, in Japan, nature is revered as a teacher and mentor. I was surprised when my new friends in Japan invited me not to play pickup basketball games or go clubbing. They invited me to walk outdoors on the weekend. We experienced nature together, climbed mountain trails and had wonderful conversations.

You don’t conquer nature. You seek it and tune into it.

Those quiet moments in forests and parks became the foundation of what I now think of as my daily mental “refresh button. Nearly thirty years later, I still seek that same calm, and I spend 2 hours each day walking outside. It’s often the best part of my day.

Wabi-Sabi: Imperfection Is Not a Problem—It’s a Story

Japan has this ability to embrace the slightly off, the aged, the cracked. I didn’t know the term wabi-sabi at the time, but I felt its influence. Similarly, Japan’s philosophy of kintsugi—repairing cracks with gold—also didn’t hit me until many years later.

Instead of hiding every flaw, Japan taught me to see imperfections as a reflection of one's personality, like a must-read history book. You can adjust your mindset and view each mistake as a “badge of honor” as long as you are committed to learning from them. And mistakes are, by far, the best teachers in life.

Imperfection gives objects—and people—depth and, yes, beauty.

This new framing has improved my relationship with failure and softened my self-perception. In particular, without this realization, I could never have become a successful entrepreneur.

Gaman: Endure With Grace, Not Noise

Working in Japan means you see gaman everywhere—calm endurance without theatrics.

It’s not suppression. It’s strength without spectacle. It's a key part of the bushido warrior culture in Japan, and it was very counterintuitive and very hard for me to understand until I was introduced to Miyamoto Musashi’s “The Book of Five Rings”. After reading the book about 30 times I started to notice a change in my mindset (footnote: The Book of Five Rings is a short and very accessible in English translation, but also incredibly deep and dense, much like the book that undoubtedly inspired it Dao De Jing from LaoZi which I have read more times than I can count and still study vigorously today). It is a book that must be read many times over your life to understand and absorb, but without seeing it in practice every day in Japan for a decade, I am not sure I would have “gotten” it. After digesting the book, I began to notice the quiet strength in my Japanese colleagues that I had previously perceived as weakness. Let me be clear: this concept truly changed the trajectory of my business career and life massively.

This became one of the most unexpectedly helpful habits in leadership:

Solve the problem; don’t amplify the drama.

Lead by steadiness, not by loudness. I am impatient by nature, and I like hearing my own voice. I don’t shy away from confrontation. So as you might imagine, this habit was challenging for me to put into practice, even after I understood and believed in it intellectually. I still work on this habit every day and will for the rest of my life.

Omoiyari: Think of Others Before You Think of Yourself

Japan is a country built on anticipation—someone quietly opening the door for you, adjusting their pace to match yours, wrapping your purchase with care, cleaning public spaces no one “owns.”

This habit of omoyari, or thoughtful consideration, taught me that the best teams—like the best societies—are built on invisible kindness.

It’s also why I push so hard for “working in the sunshine” today at Yodo1: Transparency in communication is the highest form of respect.

The Decade That Quietly Built My Operating System

I didn’t go to Japan to “learn life philosophies.” I went there to start a career.

But what I got was a foundation that quietly shaped everything that came after: