CEO Essays
Personal essays by Tomoki Nagano, Chairman & CEO. These reflect the author's own perspective and are not official corporate disclosure unless explicitly stated.
161 published
CEO Essays·
On My IPO Day, I Ate Dinner at Home as Usual
"How did you celebrate your IPO day?" My honest answer: I didn't. On July 24, 2026, our company began trading on Nasdaq. That evening, I had an ordinary dinner at home.
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To Bring Joy to Friends — How My Name Became My Life
My parents chose characters that mean "to bring joy to friends." As a boy in Shimonoseki, a port town in western Japan, I simply could not study. Reading without understanding, failing at arithmetic — all I had was sports. When my junior high school had no soccer club, I switched to basketball, practiced relentlessly, and made the prefectural select team.
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Zero English, and a Plane to Canada 15 Days After Graduation
Fifteen days after graduating from high school, I was on a plane to Canada. I could not speak a single word of English. The trigger was one offhand remark from someone I respected: "Why not go study English abroad?" The moment I heard it, one thought arrived — why not, indeed.
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I Cried for a Month in Saskatoon — The Uses of Homesickness
My Canadian destination was Saskatoon — freezing winters, only a few dozen Japanese residents in town. An eighteen-year-old who knew only sports, with zero English, I spent my first month homesick and in tears. People only get serious when there is nowhere to run.
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Barry and Brian — My Teachers Were Friends, Not Classrooms
What saved me in Canada was not a classroom. It was Barry and Brian, two local friends in Saskatoon. Honestly, I barely attended school — I just spent every day with them.
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"Why Not?" — The Single Remark That Changed My Life
Every turning point in my life began with someone else's casual remark. "Why not study English abroad?" sent me to Canada. "There's someone I'd like you to meet" introduced me to my lifelong business partner.
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To the Boy Who Never Knew How to Study
I read without understanding; I failed at arithmetic. Looking back, I wasn't unintelligent — I had never been taught how to learn. So I poured myself into sports, where effort visibly converted into results.
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No Soccer Team? Then Reach the Top in Basketball
In elementary school I lived for soccer — but my junior high school had no soccer club. A moment where sulking would be understandable. Instead, I started basketball and practiced relentlessly: mornings, evenings, holidays.
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Why We Won Small Tournaments and Lost the Big Ones
My boyhood soccer team won almost every local tournament — yet at the big tournaments, we always lost. Winning small but losing big: I've carried that frustration for forty years. Small stages can be won on individual talent; big stages are decided by total preparation and team design.
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The TV Drama That Became My Ignition Switch
As a junior high schooler, I encountered a TV drama called "Okane ga nai!" (No Money!). Watching it, I realized: even someone poor can succeed, and build a life without hardship. "I will absolutely work hard" — that was my life's first resolution, made in front of a television.
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From a Perfume-Loving Teenager to a Cosmetics Chairman
I loved perfume as a high schooler — just a simple "like," with no career calculation. Yet when I job-hunted after Canada, I chose a perfume maker from six offers, because I wanted to work near what I loved. The product development I learned there opened the door to a TSE-listed company, then to my own cosmetics business, and now forms the foundation of BIOT.
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Six Job Offers in One Month — Turning Gratitude into Action
My parents paid dearly for my four years and eight months in Canada. So the moment I returned, I started job-hunting — no break, no "finding myself." In one month, I had six offers. I had no academic credentials to boast of.
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What I Learned at a Tokyo Stock Exchange Company
My product development experience earned me a place at a company listed on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. There I saw a world that runs not on individual hustle but on systems — for quality, approval, responsibility. But once I ran my own company, I understood: a company without systems dies when its founder falls.
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"There's Someone I'd Like You to Meet"
Around the time I decided to go independent, a friend from my trading company days said casually: "There's someone I'd like you to meet." That one remark decided my business life. From the day after our first dinner, that man and I began working together — and for more than ten years since, we have worked side by side, morning to night. Introductions carry a strange power: a trusted person often sees a compatibility that neither party has noticed.
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The Day Two Men at Rock Bottom Started with Part-Time Work
When I met our Senior Managing Director, I was in the hardest stretch of my own life — and he was at rock bottom too. Two people at the bottom usually just lick each other's wounds. "Let's climb up together!" — we worked part-time jobs side by side while stacking up challenge after challenge.
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A Company Is a Work of Art — Why I Build Our Websites Myself
A confession: every website in our group — the holding company's, each subsidiary's, and this very series page — I built with my own hands. "Is that a chairman's job?" I've been asked. My answer is firm: this is precisely the chairman's job.
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Designing a Company on the Five Elements
Our group is designed on the five elements of Eastern philosophy — wood, fire, water, metal, earth. Wood (INSTINCT BROTHERS) grows products and brands; fire (INSTINCT RAS) ignites talent; water (HIROKI GLOBAL) carries trusted materials from around the world; metal (ARTISANS PRODUCTION) transforms materials into products; and the earth — our holding company — supports them all. Standard org charts describe functions; I wanted to design the company as a living organism, where each element generates the next and the whole circulates.
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The Meaning Behind the Name INSTINCT
Our company name, INSTINCT, means exactly that — instinct. I leapt to Canada on a "Why not!"; I began working with my partner the day after our first dinner; our CFO, hearing about human stem cells for the first time, said "it clicked instantly" and bet the final chapter of his global finance career on us. It is the answer your entire accumulated experience produces in a single instant — faster than reasoning, but not without grounds.
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2017: We Started from Materials Science
Our current path began in 2017, with materials science. Countless cosmetics companies are, in essence, planning-and-marketing companies — factories and trading houses supply the rest. We entered from the opposite end: the deepest layer, raw materials, because that is where quality originates.
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The Day We Built Our Factory in Kakegawa
In 2019 we built our own factory in Kakegawa, Shizuoka. Outsourcing keeps you light — no capital investment, no maintenance, no hiring. We built anyway, because I refused to entrust the heart of our manufacturing to others.
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Time Flows from the Future Toward Us
Most people believe time flows from past to future. We believe the opposite: the future flows toward the present. This is not wordplay — it redesigns how you live.
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Yoshuku — Those Who Celebrate First Pull the Future In
Japan has an old tradition called yoshuku — "pre-celebration." Hanami, cherry-blossom viewing, was originally a ritual to celebrate autumn's harvest in advance: feast under the blossoms for rice not yet grown, and pull that future toward you. Long before our listing was certain, we raised glasses "as if" listed; we have already celebrated becoming a trillion-yen company, more than once. Pre-celebration makes a future yours — no longer an unseen goal but a landscape already tasted.
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Abandoning "I'll Do X Because Y Happened"
"Sales rose, so we invest." "Results came, so we praise." "We listed, so we celebrate." The world mostly runs on this grammar of because-then. Its true nature is hindsight: moving after seeing results is safe, but decisively slow — and those who move on hindsight walk forever behind the world. Our grammar is reversed: we invest, so sales rise; we trust first, so results come; we celebrate first, so the future arrives.
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Never Spend the Night at a Waypoint
When people reach a goal, they want to stay the night there — banquets, souvenirs, basking in the afterglow. On our listing day, I had an ordinary dinner at home and was moving toward the next blueprint that same day. It is comfortable, and comfort detains people; one night becomes many, and soon you are someone who talks about the past.
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If I Don't Smile, No One Around Me Will
My most important self-discipline as a chairman is not health or time management — it is my own smile. If I am not smiling, the people around me will never smile. A leader's expression becomes the organization's weather: if I cloud over, meetings cloud over, then the workplace, and eventually even customers feel it.
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Do I Believe in the Law of Attraction?
"Do you believe in the law of attraction?" My answer is slightly crooked: it's not exactly the law of attraction — but without that kind of mindset, you absolutely cannot succeed. I don't believe wishing makes things come true. I believe in a more practical mechanism: positive, excited people who speak of the future attract people; people bring information; information multiplies your absolute number of chances; grab the good ones by instinct, and from outside it looks like "attraction." The reverse is equally true — anxious faces gather only anxious company, and good news is never brought to chronic complainers.
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On the Frightening Face I Wear When I Concentrate
A confession: I, too, have hours when my face turns fierce — when I am concentrating, striving in earnest. After writing so much about smiles, this may seem contradictory. My foundation is to be fundamentally smiling, always wanting to deliver smiles; upon that foundation, my brow furrows at decisive moments.
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Don't Chase Money — Chase Dreams
Chase dreams, not money — and for those who chase dreams, money and numbers always follow. This may sound idealistic, so let me explain the mechanism. Money-chasers act on the profit of each transaction; their judgment turns short-term, and people accurately detect it — and never entrust them with great work.
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What Neuroscience Taught Me at 45
I turn forty-five this year, and I have come to appreciate the power of brain science — not as an academic field, but as a simple truth: human drive is determined less by willpower than by the state of the brain. When I am excited, I work dawn to dusk without fatigue; ideas flow, decisions come fast. The same man, drained of excitement, finds even simple tasks heavy.
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My Thinking Is Probably Nothing Like My Seniors'
The world has many magnificent chairmen leading companies worth hundreds of billions — people whose track records dwarf mine. But my way of thinking is probably completely different from those great seniors'. I was a boy in Shimonoseki who couldn't study; I leapt to Canada with zero English, was saved by friends, climbed up from the bottom through part-time jobs.
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On Always Being Affirmative and Positive
Asked what I can do now, my first answer is fixed: remain positive and affirmative — always. It sounds ordinary, but anyone who runs a company knows how hard "always" is. On days of betrayal and unexpected walls, saying "it's over" is easy.
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I Have Decided Never to Run Away
Asked to state my management philosophy in one word: never run. It sounds gallant; the reality is muddier. In business, moments that tempt you to flee arrive regularly — unpleasant reports, heavy negotiations, cleaning up your own failures — and escape routes are always provided.
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The Math Behind Delighting Ten Billion People
We chase one number — not revenue, not profit, but the number of people we have delighted. Ten thousand, a million, a hundred million — and ten billion. Count person × occasion — delighted by our cosmetics, by their health, ten and twenty years on — and ten billion is almost modest.
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You Grow as Strong as the Number of Your Failures
Our Senior Managing Director has a line that thrills me: "My strength is experience no one in this company can match — in other words, an absurdly large number of failures." Declaring your failure count as a strength: that is our culture. My own judgment today was built almost entirely from failures, not successes. Success obscures its own recipe — luck and timing blur it.
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What You Do After You Leap on Instinct
I have written repeatedly: trust your instinct and leap. Move on instinct, and a moment of "this isn't what I imagined" always arrives. People split in two: those who turn back declaring their instinct wrong, and those who correct course while moving.
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Koshien, First Round, 12-0 — Dream Big Anyway
Our Senior Managing Director once played at Koshien, Japan's legendary national baseball stadium. His high school team's motto: "The dream is national champions; the purpose is building character." Facing that outrageous dream in earnest carried them to their first national tournament — where they lost the opening game 12–0. He laughs: "Even so, it taught me everything.
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At 19, He Filled an Event with 500 People
Another favorite chapter from our Senior Managing Director's story: age nineteen. Having left university, he and his friends launched a fashion event. In his words: "We thought about nothing difficult.
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Senior Director's Theme: Enjoy Life
Our Senior Managing Director's essay opens: "Fifty years of life — my theme is 'enjoy life.'" His crushing loss at Koshien, business ups and downs, the grueling road to listing — all line up under that single phrase. "It must have been constant hardship, but inside my head it was fun. We were changing, growing, attempting what we'd never done — and that feeling converted pain into joy." No one can erase hardship, but you can give it meaning: pain understood as part of a challenge becomes the muscle ache of growth.
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Navigating Uncertain Times
Asked about the hardest stretch of our listing preparation, our Senior Managing Director wrote that he struggles to answer: "It was an endless series of firsts, so it was always hard — but once done, it's done, and I barely remember the hardship. The thrill of moving forward outweighed it." The one pain he did name: not knowing — how long it would take, how much it would cost, walls appearing one after another. People who answered 'Let's challenge it positively!' with 'Yes, let's!' — that was everything." When the road has no map, what works is not a map but the face walking beside you.
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From the Day After Our First Dinner, Always Together
My partnership with our Senior Managing Director began with a single dinner. Introduced by a friend, we ate together — and started working together the next day. No résumé, no interview, no trial period.
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"There Is Nothing We Have to Change"
After our listing was set, our Senior Managing Director thought hard and said: "I've been asking myself what must change now that we're a public company's officers — and my answer is: nothing. The real risk is becoming satisfied, stiff, conservative — ceasing to challenge. Changing in the bad sense is our greatest risk." Exactly.
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0 to 1 on Instinct, 1 to 10 on Logic
Our Senior Managing Director works by an explicit formula, in his own words: "Starting something new — going 0 to 1 — lead with instinct and just try. After the challenge, going 1 to 10 — systemization — use logic, feeding the failures into the system." Having done nearly every job in the company — sales, product planning, finance, factory management — he has run this cycle through them all. The world has instinct-only people, who can start but not sustain, and logic-only people, precise but unable to begin — for at zero-to-one, there is nothing yet to analyze.
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The Thrill of the First Bus Ride Alone
One of our executives wrote in his essay about his oldest memory: riding a bus alone for the first time as a young boy. The timetable had peeled off; he didn't know if the bus would come, or if the one that came was right; he lacked the courage to ask. Tension first — darting eyes, pounding heart — easing into relief, and only upon arrival, exhilaration.
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Festivals, Bamboo, and the Effort to Stand Out
The same executive's essay describes his town's unusual festival of carrying great bamboo poles — a month of preparation, working late with the town's adults, then four performances a day before crowds, walking tall and thinking "look how strong I am!" His reflection: "There I learned the joy of standing out — and that standing out requires effort." Profound. Adults hide the desire for recognition as something shameful; he converted it into fuel. The wish to be seen, rightly connected, becomes an engine of growth — for children, employees, and executives alike.
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What Practicing Until You Hyperventilate Teaches You
His high school basketball chapter is brutal. The seniors were among the prefecture's best; only two first-years, himself included, were allowed into their practices. Outmatched in physique, stamina, and skill, he clung on daily — hyperventilating repeatedly.
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The Road to Trainer for the National Team
As a young working adult, he spent two years walking the rails — excited only by nights out. Then a magazine article: a judo-therapist serving as an Olympic trainer. I could do that — no, I absolutely will." He saw the article in late July; by early September he had joined that trainer's clinic group, a newcomer among twenty apprentices.
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The Night He Missed Olympic Selection and Turned Off the TV
As a national-team trainer, he had one clear dream: the Olympics. Appointed just after one Games ended, he gave three full years — Beijing was within reach. Then the verdict: not him, but his master would go.
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No Geniuses Required — How Ordinary People Beat Talent
His high school basketball team was no collection of prodigies — which is precisely why they discovered something. Unable to win on individual skill, they radically clarified roles: the runners, the coordinated defenders, the set-play executors. Design versus talent — and on a tour of Nagasaki they swept teams they had never beaten.
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The Boy Who Lost His Father at Five
The youngest of our executives began his essay with one line: "I lost my father when I was five." He grew up never knowing what a father was. His teens, by his own account, were nothing to praise — no studying, endless play, and every setback blamed on parents, environment, others. "Looking back, I think I was desperately masking the loneliness of having no father by blaming someone." What pierced me came later: "I am here today, without question, because of the strength of many people." Where the father was absent, a mother, relatives, and neighborhood adults flowed in.
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The First Time He Saw Adults Enjoy Their Work
Of the day he first walked into our company at twenty-five, he wrote: "I was stunned. I had never in my life seen adults working with such joy." Every adult around him until then had been a complainer; work was suffering to be endured — that was normal. But the people here spoke of work with sparkling eyes and debated the future in earnest.
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Falling for the Man Called Chairman
The youngest executive's essay contains a line that makes me bashful: "Honestly, the biggest reason I joined this company was not the business — I fell for the chairman as a man." Embarrassing, but I write about it, because it holds the essence of hiring and organization. People ultimately follow not conditions but a person. Plans change, products change, offices and salaries change; the one thing that doesn't is "I want to go with this person." Those who join for conditions leave over conditions; those who join for a person prove their worth in hard times.
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Learning Is Fun — A Restart at 25
It is never too late to learn — our youngest executive is the proof. A teenager who never studied joined us at twenty-five and discovered, for the first time, that "learning is fun." A man who knew nothing of cosmetics absorbed formulation, raw materials, law, cost, and how to raise people. In his own words: "I wanted to answer his earnestness; I wanted to follow this person — that single wish." People begin to learn not when told to, but when someone appears whom they want to answer.
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Repaying Kindness with Results
Now an executive officer at thirty-one, he states his engine plainly: "I want to repay the debt of being raised here — not with words, but with results." Everyone speaks of repaying kindness; he restricted it to "with results," and that restriction contains his whole growth. Verbal gratitude ends on the spot; deciding to repay with results converts gratitude into long-term fuel — with every product finished and every junior raised, you keep asking, "Have I returned a little more?" Better never to finish repaying: the repaying itself builds you. And he knows the direction too: "What the chairman did for me, I will now do for the generation below — raising not one successor but many." Kindness is not only returned upward; it is passed downward.
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I Want to Raise Many 'Next Me's'
The strongest line about the future in our youngest executive's essay: "I want to raise the next me — not one, but many." Raising a single successor is common talk; "many" is what sets him apart. One successor is chair-thinking — who inherits my seat. His is seed-thinking: plant the experience that transformed him — being faced in earnest at his lowest — into as many people as possible.
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An Ordinary Life in Rural Hiroshima
One of our executives grew up in rural Hiroshima — mountains, rivers, an utterly ordinary family. The future he pictured: "Grow up in Hiroshima, work in Hiroshima, become a grandfather there — a peaceful, ordinary life I took for granted." Today he leads a nationwide business as an executive officer of a Nasdaq- listed company in Tokyo. My point is not "never picture an ordinary life" — the opposite: even a young man who pictured the ordinary can be carried anywhere.
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Couldn't Ignore 'I Love Art'
He studied computers at a vocational school, felt it wasn't him, even took a job once — but could not ignore the voice that had always been there: "I love art." He let go of stability and re-enrolled, this time at a commercial art school in Osaka. A working adult returning to studenthood takes courage. That one step became the foundation of everything: design in Hiroshima spanning graphics to hotel interiors, then Tokyo — department stores, catalogs, photo direction — then independence at thirty.
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Three Lessons From Losing Business to COVID
Alongside design work, he had built an import business from Europe — until COVID stopped the world. Lockdowns severed the trade at its root; the business he had built was finished. But he converted it into three lessons, written plainly in his essay.
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Never Stray From Your True Calling
From the pain of losing his business, he extracted a single line: "Having drifted from my true calling — design and creative work — was itself the greatest failure." Why do people drift from their calling? Because lucrative-sounding offers always arrive from outside it; one's own field looks plain, and the neighbor's grass looks green. Outside your calling, you are one of the crowd — your accumulated strengths don't apply, and you are dragged into battles of price and capital that bigger players win.
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Growing an 8-Team Tournament to 32 Nations
One of the businesses he now leads is a youth soccer tournament. It began as a small one-day event with just 8 teams. Today, with corporate sponsors, it has grown into a national-scale tournament — up to 32 teams over two days.
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Children's Smiles Became My Conviction
Ask him why he continues this work, and his answer is fixed: "The smiles of the children, their teams, and their parents — and repaying the companies that sponsor us." A designer from Hiroshima who lost his business to COVID arrived at "children's smiles" — a landing I find beautiful. His dreams extend along that line: growing the tournament nationwide; supporting players' development and even their second careers; showcasing each host region's specialties to raise the region's own value; and someday delivering all of it to children around the world. All six of our executives landed on "smiles" in their separate essays.
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64 Years After Accident, Lost Memories
Our CFO is sixty-four, and his essay opens with a striking confession: at age five, thrown from the back of his mother's motorbike, he struck his head and lost most of his memories — and grew up with a weak memory ever since. Yet reading his essay, something remarkable emerges: the man who could not rely on memory became a man of records and learning — extracting principles from each experience and applying them forward. His motto, "the unexpected is the norm," expresses a life focused not on the past but on now and next.
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How I Turned Around a Red-Ink Company at 43
A vivid chapter in our CFO's career: when a foreign asset manager's Japan unit was sinking, he took the president's seat at forty-three on a promise to turn it around. His first move, in one line from his essay: "Secure profitability through selection and concentration — pour our limited people only into businesses that earn." Result: profitable in two years; four years later, two billion yen in operating profit, the team grown from five to thirty. No magic — he simply stopped doing everything.
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Lost Job Overnight: Unexpected is Normal
In 2007, one of history's largest acquisitions — roughly twenty trillion yen — swallowed his bank within months, and he lost his job overnight. His own results were excellent; the Japan unit was thriving. Yet everything he had built vanished by a logic of capital on the other side of the planet.
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Human Stem Cells Struck Me Instantly
Why did a veteran of global finance choose us for his final act? Working furiously in Singapore, he received a call from an old audit-firm acquaintance: a Japanese company aiming to list was seeking a CFO. A conversation he would normally decline — but something nagged, so he listened.
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What Do You Work For? – A 64-Year-Old's Question
I borrowed it from the question our sixty-four-year-old CFO placed at the end of his essay: "I ask my sixty-four-year- old self anew: What do you work for?" The weight of the question comes from where he stands — forty years across global finance, success and overnight loss all experienced, and still asking. It is not the question of a man who found his answer, but of a man who chose to keep asking. Most people consider this question once in youth and shelve it.
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Six Essays, All Landed on 'Smiles'
I asked every executive to write a life essay — birth to present to future — with no format, no theme, no required conclusion, each written separately, unseen by the others. When the essays returned, I was astonished. Six utterly different lives — a former national-team trainer, a designer, a global finance veteran, officers risen from the floor — all landed, in their final lines, on the same word: smiles.
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We Are Not a Cosmetics Company
A sentence from our Senior Managing Director's essay deserves to stand as our company's definition: "Cosmetics may be our foundation today, but neither the chairman nor I have ever thought of this as a cosmetics company. What we operate is a company that increases the total amount of smiles in the world — unchanged since the day we met." Define a company by what it sells, and its meaning gets lost the moment the product changes. Define it by why it exists, and no change of product can shake it.
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It Begins With One Smile
Let me share the first article of our internal manifesto: "It begins with one smile. We exist to make one person's life a little better. One smile changes a family; a family changes a community; communities change society; and when society changes, the world changes.
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Health is the Starting Point of Life
The second article of our manifesto binds our whole business into one idea: "Health is the starting point of life. It is the strength to hold dreams, take on challenges, and live each day smiling. That is why we encompass beauty, wellness, food, education, work, and community — all exist to enrich life and deliver smiles." Why does a cosmetics company make health foods and look toward food, agriculture, education?
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A Brand is a Promise
The third article of our manifesto states our position on brand: "A brand is a promise. We do not build brands to sell products. A brand is when people see our name and feel: here, I am safe; here, I can trust.
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Profit is the Strength to Challenge
On profit we offer neither platitudes nor contrarianism. Our manifesto's fourth article is explicit: "Profit is the strength to challenge. We do not deny profit — it is fuel for challenging the future.
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Leaving Behind Culture, Not Buildings
The final article of our manifesto describes our furthest dream: "What we leave behind is not buildings, but culture. But a town is not its buildings — it is culture, and culture is how people live. We want the children of a hundred years from now to say: they were not a company that left buildings; they were a company that left a culture." I have written of the dream of someday building a town; this article exists to pin that dream down.
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Cherish Companions Who Rejoice Together
One of our executives wrote that he decided to join after being struck by words I spoke when we met through work: "Cherish the companions who rejoice together." Truthfully, I never invented this as a management philosophy — I have simply lived my name, Tomoki, "to bring joy to friends." But he heard it through his own pain: having lost a business, he knew firsthand that relationships of mutual rejoicing, not of profit and loss, are the true foundation of a lasting enterprise. Rejoicing together sounds easy and is not. Consoling a companion's failure is surprisingly manageable; the hard thing is rejoicing at a companion's success as if it were your own, without the quiet muddying of comparison.
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Never Give Up. Never Be Defeated. Never Lose Conviction.
Our principles, addressed to the world, are three lines in English: Never Give Up. They may look alike; they fight different enemies. "Never give up" fights your own heart — the voice at the wall whispering "enough." "Never be defeated" fights the outside — rivals, adversity, unexpected waves; pushed hard, you refuse to stay down.
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From Materials to Smiles – The Chain Story
Asked to explain our business in one phrase, I say: "From materials to smiles." Source trusted raw materials from around the world; research them; formulate; manufacture in our own factory; deliver as brands; and at the end stands the smile of the person who uses them. We hold this entire chain within our group — vertical integration, our shape. Because a chain breaks at its weakest link.
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From 100 Units to Mass Production
Among our factory's mottos, my favorite: "From 100 units to mass production." In cosmetics manufacturing, small lots are unwelcome — factories profit from volume, and "minimum tens of thousands" towers as industry common sense. But behind that common sense, how many challenges die? Small brands with fine formulation ideas; companies testing new markets; individuals taking a first step.
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Make the Invisible Visible With Data
Within our group is a company for sourcing and analysis, whose motto is: "Make the invisible visible through data." Cosmetics and wellness have long been worlds of feeling — "it seems moisturizing," "it seems to work," "the ingredient sounds good." Much of the industry stands atop accumulated "seems." We bring data there: analyze what is inside raw materials, verify quality in numbers, and allow only the proven onto Japanese manufacturing lines — converting "it seems" into "we confirmed." Why go so far? Because these things touch skin and enter mouths, where quality is hard to see. The less visible a product's goodness, the more honest a company must be in the invisible places.
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Set Fire to Talent
Within our group is a somewhat unusual marketing and branding company whose motto is: "Set fire to talent." I love this phrase — not "create" talent, not "find" it, but ignite it, resting on the premise that the talent is already there. I have witnessed this premise all my life. Canadian friends lit the fire in a boy who couldn't study.
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Everyone on the Same Ship, A Shared Aspiration
Let me reveal the true purpose of having every executive write a life essay. Aboard the same ship, unless all hold the same aspiration and face the same direction, I alone can do nothing — I wanted to share our hearts as companions and comrades. But truly boarding one is not a matter of being on the payroll; it is believing that no one abandons ship on the day of the storm.
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Management by Executive Essays
A company that has its executives write life essays is rare, apparently. I am convinced it is a serious management method, for three reasons. First, writing is an inventory: executives buried in daily operations will never articulate where they came from and where they are going unless the time is deliberately made.
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One Trillion Yen is Not the Purpose
We hold a long-term vision of a one-trillion-yen market capitalization. Reactions split in two: those who laugh, "How grandiose," and those who ask, "Why one trillion?" To the latter I answer: one trillion is not the purpose — it is a declaration of scale. Our purpose is to bring joy, smiles, and gratitude to every person in the world.
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Deciding by Faces, Not Just Numbers
Let me record my final check when a management decision hangs in the balance. I examine the numbers, of course — market size, margins, risk; management without numbers is gambling. But when the numbers are all in and I still waver, the last thing I look at is faces.
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Our Dream for Food and Agriculture
Among our dreams is the field of food and agriculture. Why does a cosmetics company speak of farmland? Trace how our daily meals, foods, and drinks come to be, and you always arrive at the same place: soil.
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Famous School, Famous Company: Is That Enough?
A question about education has long nagged at me: graduate from a famous school, join a famous company — is that enough? Do not misunderstand: I have no wish to deny academic effort; earning entry into a good school is admirable. What nags me lies beyond it — that at the end of the rails of good school and good company, no answer to "what do I work for?" is automatically provided.
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Someday, Build a Town
Let me speak of our farthest dream: someday, we want to build a town. People gather from around the world; employment is born; people are paid, work together, and enjoy the town-building itself; the world's cultures arrive, mingle, and new culture is born. Because our purpose, pursued to its end, arrives there.
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What Comes After AI?
We already live in the age of the AI wars — companies worldwide racing to develop and deploy, believing the master of AI masters the next era. But a leader must always think about what comes next. After AI, I believe, comes quantum technology.
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Japanese Manufacturing, to the World
Abroad, one feels it keenly: trust in Japanese manufacturing runs deeper than we at home imagine. Carefully made; rigorously quality-controlled; honest. This trust, built by generations before us, may be Japan's greatest intangible asset.
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Ready to Challenge the World
I once counted calmly: our leadership team is unexpectedly well- equipped for the world. Myself — four years and eight months in Canada, then global business at a perfume maker. A CFO with thirteen years stationed in Singapore, seasoned against international investors.
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What I Want 100-Year-Old Children to Say
Let me speak of management's time horizon. Corporate life expectancy is said to be around thirty years; most companies measure in quarters, plan in single years, and call three-to-five-year plans "long-term." As a listed company we fully honor our duties on that clock. But we carry another clock besides — one that ticks in centuries.
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No Success Without Dreams – Yoshida Shoin
I and one of our executives were born in Yamaguchi — home, in the final days of the shogunate, to Yoshida Shoin. The executive closed his essay with Shoin's words: "Without dreams, no ideals. Therefore: without dreams, no success." Its power is that what looks like spiritual exhortation is in fact a perfect blueprint: dream → ideal → plan → execution → success, each step logically joined.
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Life Without Excitement is Harder
One line from an executive's essay stays with me: "Life holds more hardship than not. But a life without excitement is harder still — and no fun." What makes it good is that it begins by admitting the hardship. Those who preach excitement often look carefree; this line is the reverse — a statement of resolve to choose excitement while staring hardship in the face.
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A Team That Enjoys Overcoming Walls
Our Senior Managing Director wrote these words for future companions: "Honestly, our strength may not yet fully merit the pride of a listed company. But turned over, that means our room to grow — our blank canvas — is enormous. But it's all right: we are a team that enjoys climbing over walls." I love the honesty — a listed company's senior director publicly admitting strength "may not yet suffice," where most would posture, then re-reading the weakness as an enormous canvas.
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What Wish is in Your Name?
As this series has often told, my name Tomoki carries my parents' wish: "to bring joy to friends." Forty-five years later, my management philosophy is "cherish the companions who rejoice together" and my company's purpose is "make everyone smile." The name's wish and the life's content have converged. A name is the first blueprint parents give a child — a small prayer repeated every time it is called. Forty-five years of being called Tomoki, I truly believe, steered my life toward friends and joy.
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When Were You Last Excited?
Past ninety installments, today I ask you a question instead: when were you last excited? If you answered instantly, you are in good condition — keep that fire. One of our executives wrote his life story traced only through memories of excitement — the first solo bus ride, the festival month, the challenge toward the national team — and named his ten years without it "the me who was just getting through." Income was stable, business ran; yet the getting-through days were, in his words, "harder still." Excitement withers not from age, but from the disappearance of "things never done" from daily life.
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Who Were the Friends Who Saved You?
Mine has been a life continually saved by friends. Barry and Brian in Saskatoon saved an eighteen-year-old with zero English; a trading-company friend introduced me to my lifelong partner; that partner climbed with me out of the bottom. The man named "to bring joy to friends" has, it turns out, lived a life of receiving joy from them.
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Setback May Be Preparation for Next Encounter
A line one executive placed at the end of his essay, which I reread often: "Failure may have been preparation for the next encounter." He lost his business to COVID — his life's greatest setback — but it taught him to return to his true calling, and on that path he met me. So he could rename failure "preparation." Everyone in this series lives the same structure: past the despair of zero English I met lifelong friends; my partner met me just after losing everything; the man denied his Olympic dream became a businessman beyond that bitterness. In the midst of a setback, no one can believe it is preparation — I couldn't either.
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From Which Future Does Your Blueprint Come?
Let me hand you, one last time, the philosophy of time this series has repeated — as a tool of your own. The future's time flows toward the present: we decide the future first and live today by back-calculation; the listing and what lies beyond were all drawn on the blueprint in advance. Now, a question: from which future is your today back-calculated?
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Who Did You Make Smile Today?
Our company's day can ultimately be measured by one question: whom did you make smile today? Those polishing products work for the smiles of customers not yet met; those running tournaments, for children on the pitch; those closing the books, for shareholders who trust us and colleagues beside us. A day you can answer is a good day — progress, even without revenue.
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Memory of That First Bus Step – First Courage
Nearing this series' close, let me speak of first courage. I once wrote of an executive's oldest memory: a young boy's first solo bus ride — the timetable peeled away, no certainty the bus would come or was the right one, no courage to ask, sweat on his nose. I will quote this story forever, because every challenge in life is a repetition of that first bus.
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And You: What Do You Work For? (100th Installment)
This series began with the question our sixty-four-year-old CFO posed to himself at the end of his essay: What do you work for? Across one hundred installments, I have tried to answer it through my life and my companions' — the boy in Shimonoseki who couldn't study; the Canadian friends who taught him English; the partner beside me since the day after our first dinner; a 12–0 defeat at Koshien; Olympic tears; a fatherless boyhood; a business lost to COVID; a job gone overnight; and the day six essays, written separately, landed on one word: smiles. One hundred essays later, my answer fits in a line.
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Yoshida Shoin — A 29-Year Life Still Moving the World 160 Years On
Season 2 opens with Yoshida Shoin, the great son of my home prefecture, Yamaguchi. His private academy, Shoka Sonjuku, was a humble hut, and he taught there for barely two and a half years — yet from it emerged the men who drove the Meiji Restoration and built modern Japan. Shoin himself died at twenty- nine, completing no great enterprise with his own hands.
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Konosuke Matsushita — The Man Who Turned Three "Withouts" Into Blessings
Konosuke Matsushita, revered as the god of Japanese management, described his origins through three "withouts": born without wealth, without education, without health. Leaving school at nine for an apprenticeship, he founded what became Panasonic at twenty-three and built a global enterprise in one lifetime. The astonishing part: he spoke of the three "withouts" as blessings.
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Soichiro Honda — "Success Is the 1% Supported by 99% Failure"
The son of a Hamamatsu blacksmith apprenticed at an auto repair shop at fifteen, went independent, and challenged piston-ring manufacturing — and failed spectacularly. Hitting the wall of his own technical limits, Soichiro Honda, past thirty and already a company president, enrolled as an auditing student to relearn metallurgy. His true greatness, I believe, was this capacity to bear the embarrassment of relearning: his goal was never his dignity but a better product.
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Ibuka and Morita — A "Delightful Ideal Factory" in the Ashes
Tokyo, 1946, amid the ruins: a small company was born in a corner of a department store — Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, later Sony. Engineer Masaru Ibuka and sales genius Akio Morita wrote into their founding prospectus the goal of "a free, open-minded, and pleasant ideal factory" where earnest engineers could exercise their skills to the fullest. In a defeated nation without goods or money, their first banner was not a sales target but joyful work.
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Sakichi Toyoda — From One Loom for His Mother to Toyota
Sakichi Toyoda was a carpenter's son whose inventions began not with grand ambition but with the sight of his mother weaving late into the night on a hand loom. Wanting to ease her labor, he taught himself loom design — mocked as the village eccentric who shut himself in a barn. He persisted, eventually perfecting an automatic loom that stopped itself when a thread broke: building "no defects" into the machine itself, the headwater of the Toyota Production System.
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Eiichi Shibusawa — 500 Companies, Not One Made His Own
Eiichi Shibusawa — now the face of the ten-thousand-yen note — was born a farmer's son, became a shogunal retainer, witnessed European capitalism at the Paris Exposition, served the Meiji government, then plunged into business. His output defies belief: beginning with the First National Bank, he was involved in roughly five hundred companies — banking, paper, spinning, railways, gas, insurance — single-handedly tilling the foundations of modern Japanese industry. But his true greatness is not the number: across five hundred companies, he built no zaibatsu, no family empire, believing a company is a vessel of public good, not private gain.
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Momofuku Ando — Age 48, a Garden Shed, a Lab of One
Through cascading business failures, Momofuku Ando lost nearly everything in his late forties — only his house in Ikeda, Osaka, remained. At forty-eight he built a small shed in his garden to develop "ramen you could eat just by adding hot water," haunted by the long postwar lines for a single bowl at black-market stalls. He worked alone: four hours of sleep, no days off, one full year.
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Tadataka Ino — He Started Walking at 55 and Mapped Japan
Tadataka Ino's life divides cleanly into two acts. Act one: a merchant, who as an adopted son-in-law rebuilt a failing sake brewery and saved villagers with his own funds during famine, retiring at forty-nine. Act two is the marvel: at fifty he moved to Edo and apprenticed himself to an astronomer nineteen years his junior, bowing to a thirty-one-year-old master to learn astronomy and surveying from zero.
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Hokusai — At 90: "If Heaven Gave Me Five More Years"
I know no one who kept growing until death like Katsushika Hokusai. The Great Wave — the most famous Japanese image in the world, quoted endlessly in global design to this day — was painted in his seventies. Across his life he produced some thirty thousand works, moved house ninety-three times, and changed his artist name thirty times, each change discarding accumulated fame to restart as a newcomer.
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Sontoku Ninomiya — Sekisho Idai: Great Things From Small
Sontoku Ninomiya — the boy reading books while hauling firewood — was a far more formidable businessman than the statue suggests. Floods destroyed his family's fields; orphaned, the family scattered. Living with an uncle who scolded him for wasting lamp oil on reading, he grew his own rapeseed to trade for oil and kept studying; he planted seedlings on waste ground, converted them to rice, and step by step restored his family.
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Yozan Uesugi — "If You Act, It Is Done" — Begun at 17
"If you act, it can be done; if you do not, it cannot — in all things, failure is the fruit of not doing." Every Japanese knows these words of Yozan Uesugi, lord of the Yonezawa domain. When he succeeded, the domain was so deep in debt that returning it to the shogunate was discussed. An ordinary young lord would have hidden behind retainers; Yozan did not.
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Sen no Rikyu — Ichigo Ichie, a Universe in Two Tatami
Sen no Rikyu perfected the tea ceremony — and to my eyes he was history's greatest experience designer. His tea rooms were tiny: two tatami mats, with an entrance made deliberately smaller still. Through the nijiriguchi, even samurai had to remove their swords and bow to enter; high or low, all became simply human upon crossing it.
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Taro Okamoto — The Artist Who Kept Choosing the Dangerous Road
Taro Okamoto, famous for "Art is explosion," was also a man of words, and my favorite of his is this: "When in doubt, choose the dangerous path." At eighteen he moved to Paris for a decade, fought amid the avant-garde, and on returning declared open war on the conventions of Japan's art world — refusing prettiness, rediscovering the raw vitality of Jomon pottery, burning brighter with every criticism. His culmination was the Tower of the Sun at Expo '70: at a fair themed on harmony, he built a bizarre tower that smashed through harmony itself. Controversial then, it is the one thing everyone remembers half a century later.
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Osamu Tezuka — "Please, Just Let Me Work"
Osamu Tezuka, the god of manga, held a medical license and a doctorate. Torn between the stable path of medicine and the then-lowly path of comics, he asked his mother, who reportedly answered: "Which do you love?" He chose manga. What followed was output on a historic scale: some 700 titles and 150,000 pages, effectively inventing story manga — Astro Boy, Phoenix, Black Jack — laying the foundations of anime and manga nearly alone.
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Akira Kurosawa — The Man Who Mixed Ink Into Rain
Legendary stories surround Akira Kurosawa's sets. For the rain- soaked final battle of Seven Samurai, seeing that rain wouldn't register on camera, he mixed ink into it. He reportedly had the unseen contents of drawers filled with period- accurate items.
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Sadaharu Oh — A World Record Born From Swings on a Tatami Mat
Sadaharu Oh's world record of 868 home runs was built not in glamorous stadiums but on tatami mats. After team practice, he would visit his mentor Hiroshi Arakawa's home late at night, swing a Japanese sword, and repeat his swing on the tatami until the mats frayed — the foundation of his famous flamingo leg- kick style. His known words: "Effort is always rewarded.
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Ichiro — The Only Road to "Somewhere Extraordinary"
Ichiro Suzuki articulated the secret of his staggering record himself: "Accumulating small things is the only way to reach somewhere extraordinary." His daily life was the demonstration — arriving at the same hour, stretching in the same sequence, maintaining his own equipment, repeating the identical batting routine down to the angle of his bat. He reportedly disliked being called a genius: "I am not a genius — because I can explain why I get hits." That word, explain, is electric: reproducible small actions, stacked longer and more precisely than anyone else. There is no single dramatic reversal that transforms a company either; there is only today's inspection done exactly, today's reply written carefully — until one day the stack reaches somewhere extraordinary.
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Shohei Ohtani — "No Precedent" Is Not a Reason Not To
To stand at the world's summit as both pitcher and hitter — until Shohei Ohtani made it real, modern baseball called it impossible. At his professional debut, experts openly questioned the two-way attempt: pick one, the body won't last, there is no precedent. Today he pitches, hits, and keeps rewriting history on the world's biggest stage.
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Kazu Miura — A One-Way Ticket at 15, Still on the Pitch at 50
At fifteen, Kazuyoshi Miura crossed to Brazil alone to become a footballer — in an era when Japan had no professional league. Adults reportedly laughed at the boy: no Japanese could earn a living at soccer. His apprenticeship in Brazil was brutal — no language, discrimination — yet he clawed his way to a professional contract and returned to become the face of the newborn J-League.
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Naomi Uemura — Adventure Means Coming Home Alive
First to summit the highest peaks of five continents; solo to the North Pole by dog sled. Naomi Uemura was Japan's greatest adventurer — yet his brilliance, I believe, lay less in bravery than in his timidity. He called himself a coward, and therefore prepared beyond preparation: a year learning dog handling from polar peoples, equipment tested exhaustively, retreat never a shame.
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Nobu Shirase — To Antarctica With Zero Funding
In 1912, Japanese explorers first stood on Antarctica, led by Nobu Shirase of Akita. What makes the feat extraordinary: it was no national project. While Western powers raced for the pole with state backing and cutting-edge ships, Shirase was ridiculed in parliament when he sought funds.
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Chiune Sugihara — Orders From Above, Rightness Within
Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution crowded the Japanese consulate, where acting consul Chiune Sugihara knew a transit visa could mean survival. He cabled Tokyo for permission; the answer was no for those not meeting requirements. The organizationally correct move was obvious: comply.
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Hideyo Noguchi — A Burned Left Hand, an Ignited Will
Born to a poor farming family in Fukushima, the infant who would become Hideyo Noguchi fell into the hearth at age one, leaving his left hand fused and farm work nearly impossible. His mother Shika pushed him toward learning instead. The turning point came at fifteen: surgery, funded by supporters, partially restored his fingers — medicine had changed his own life, and that experience aimed him at it: "I will become a doctor and save people like me." The handicap itself became the tinder of his aspiration.
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Shibasaburo Kitasato — Winning Abroad, Sidelined at Home, Building Anyway
Shibasaburo Kitasato, the face of the new thousand-yen note, lifted Japanese medicine to world level. In Germany he achieved the world's first pure culture of the tetanus bacillus and established serum therapy, a new concept of treatment, becoming a candidate for the first Nobel Prize in medicine — among the first Japanese scientists to compete at the world's summit. Yet on returning home he was frozen out, partly for having contradicted his alma mater's theories; a world-class scientist with no place in his own country.
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Hideki Yukawa — Paper, Pencil, and Light for a Defeated Nation
In 1949 — four years after defeat, amid ruins and food shortages — news raced through Japan: Hideki Yukawa had won the nation's first Nobel Prize. His weapons were neither apparatus nor vast funding, but paper and pencil. At twenty- seven he predicted, by theory alone, the meson — an unseen particle binding protons and neutrons within the nucleus — later confirmed by experiment to the world's astonishment.
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Thomas Edison — "I Found 10,000 Ways That Won't Work"
Thomas Edison left school after three months; the boy his teacher gave up on was educated by his mother. From a basement full of experiments came the incandescent lamp, the phonograph, motion pictures — over a thousand patents shaping modern life. His filament hunt is synonymous with obsession: thousands of materials tested, scouts dispatched worldwide — one of the answers, memorably for us Japanese, being bamboo from Kyoto.
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The Wright Brothers — The Day a Bicycle Shop Beat a National Project
On December 17, 1903, on the dunes of North Carolina, humanity first achieved powered flight — by two bicycle shop brothers from Ohio. Twelve seconds, thirty-six meters; those twelve seconds changed the world. The tale's delight lies in the rival: the era's favorite was Professor Langley's team, famous and funded lavishly by the government.
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Henry Ford — Beyond "a Faster Horse"
When Henry Ford began, automobiles were toys for the rich. His revolution was not an invention but a change of "for whom." Build a car working people can afford — everything was back-calculated from that purpose. The 1908 Model T: assembly-line production slashed build time, and the price fell from $850 to under $300.
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Walt Disney — Bankruptcy, a Stolen Rabbit, and One Mouse
Walt Disney's early life is a catalog of failure. His first animation company went bankrupt. His comeback creation, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, was seized through a contractual trap — distributor keeping the rights, staff poached, nearly everything lost.
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Colonel Sanders — Age 65, the 1,009th Door
Colonel Sanders in his white suit is the world's most famous symbol of late blooming. His life was turbulent: job after job, and the roadside restaurant he finally built was bled dry when the highway was rerouted. At sixty-five, he was left with a small pension and a method for frying chicken.
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Coco Chanel — Turning Mourning Black Into the Color of Freedom
A girl raised in an orphanage came to define twentieth-century fashion. Coco Chanel learned sewing at a convent orphanage, failed as a singer, and rose from a hat shop. Women's clothing then meant corsets — ornaments never meant for movement.
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Estee Lauder — A Beauty Empire Built Hand to Hand
One of the world's great cosmetics companies, Estée Lauder, was begun literally by hand, by a daughter of immigrants in New York. Her origin was a cream made by her chemist uncle, which she applied directly to women's skin in beauty salons and hotels — not explaining with words but touching with hands, showing the change on the spot. "Touch your customer's skin" was reportedly her lifelong creed.
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Steve Jobs — The Exiled Founder and His Dots
The chapter of Steve Jobs's story I find most important is not success but exile. Founding Apple in a garage at twenty-one and changing the world, he was thrown out of his own company at thirty. From that humiliation he never stopped: he founded NeXT, grew Pixar, changed cinema with Toy Story — and twelve years later returned to a failing Apple to fire off the iMac, iPod, and iPhone.
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Ray Kroc — The Future Seen by a 52-Year-Old Mixer Salesman
Until fifty-two, Ray Kroc was a traveling salesman of paper cups and milkshake mixers, diabetic and no longer young, crisscrossing America. In 1954 he noticed a strange order: a small California hamburger stand running eight mixers at once. Flying out, he found the McDonald brothers' astonishingly efficient kitchen — food in seconds, quality consistent, lines unbroken.
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Sam Walton — The Learning Genius From a Country Town
The world's largest retailer, Walmart, began as a single variety store in small-town Arkansas; founder Sam Walton opened store number one at forty- four — another late-blooming giant. His weapon was no brilliant invention but an abnormal capacity to learn. He devoted his life to touring competitors' stores, measuring aisle widths with a tape measure, copying price tags, adopting every good idea instantly.
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Andrew Carnegie — "To Die Rich Is to Die Disgraced"
A thirteen-year-old Scottish immigrant began as a bobbin boy in a cotton mill for just over a dollar a week, climbed through telegraph work and railroads, then bet everything on steel to become the industrial titan of America. Andrew Carnegie's first act is the classic rags-to-riches tale. But what carved him into history was not how he earned but how he let go.
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Muhammad Yunus — A Bank That Began With 27 Dollars
Muhammad Yunus, teaching economics at university, reportedly agonized over the gap between elegant theory in the lecture hall and the reality outside. He walked into a village and found women weaving bamboo stools, borrowing material money from usurers, left with pennies for a day's work. He tallied what they actually needed: for forty-two villagers, a total of twenty-seven dollars.
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Why Celebrating in Advance Starts the Brain's Engine — The Science of Yoshuku
Let me examine our practice of yoshuku — celebrating in advance — from the brain's side. Honestly: "dream it and it comes true" is not supported by science; research reports that merely fantasizing about achievement can trick the brain into feeling it already has the prize, draining energy for action. Studies suggest those who vividly picture the desired future and squarely face present obstacles — psychologists call it mental contrasting — act the most.
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Dopamine Fires on Approach, Not Arrival — The True Nature of Excitement
Research on dopamine, the brain chemical deeply tied to drive, reports a crucial property: it works more strongly while approaching an anticipated reward than at the moment of receiving it. The brain burns hottest not when it has obtained, but while it feels itself closing in. This matches my fifty years of experience exactly — the days running toward our listing were hotter than the listing day itself.
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Smiles Are Contagious — A Leader's Face Is a Corporate Asset
"If I am not smiling, no one around me will smile" — my conviction apparently has scientific backing. Psychology has long studied emotional contagion: people unconsciously mirror the expressions and vocal tones before them, and the mirrored expression moves their own emotions in turn. The facial feedback effect — we don't only smile because we're happy; smiling can nudge happiness — has been studied for decades.
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What Changes When You Write "Thank You" — The Research on Gratitude
On gratitude, psychology has a famous family of experiments: some participants list things they are grateful for each week, others record hassles or mere events, and weeks later the groups are compared — with the gratitude writers reporting greater well-being and optimism. From writing alone, while circumstances changed not at all. The explanation is thought to lie in attention: the brain defaults to scanning for danger and lack, a useful survival habit, and a gratitude practice forces a weekly scan of what one already has and has received.
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The Brain Cannot Leave a Question Alone — Why This Series Ends the Same Way
Let me reveal why every installment ends with the same question. Psychology reports that the unfinished stays in memory: completed tasks are forgotten, while interrupted tasks and unanswered questions linger — the classic observation known as the Zeigarnik effect. Studies also suggest that being asked a question makes people begin observing themselves along its lines, sometimes changing behavior itself.
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Writing Orders the Mind — The Science Behind Management by Essay
When our executives wrote their life essays, one said: "I finally organized what my life has been." That sense of writing-as-organizing has a research pedigree. Psychology has long studied the effects of repeatedly writing about one's own significant experiences; a well-known line of studies reports beneficial changes in people who wrote for some minutes daily across several days. Writing gives swirling events the shape of a story — with a beginning and an end — and a shaped experience leaves the whirlpool of rumination and settles onto a shelf.
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Does Believing You Can Change Actually Change You? — On Mindset
Does believing "I can change" actually help? Educational psychology holds a famous lineage of research: children with a growth mindset — believing ability can be developed — were reported to persist at hard tasks, learn from failure, and improve over time. The size of the effect remains under active scrutiny, but one point recurs: the interpretation of failure determines the next action.
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Environment Builds the Brain — On Standing Somewhere Slightly Higher
Behavioral science repeatedly shows that human behavior is shaped less by individual resolve than by surrounding environments and relationships. Famous research reported that obesity, smoking, even happiness tend to spread through social ties; the standards around you quietly rewrite your "normal" — income, learning, appetite for challenge, all pulled toward the average of those you keep company with. One executive's essay is a living specimen: thrown among the prefecture's best as a freshman, he hyperventilated, clung on, and in six months owned a different body; at twenty-five, another stepped among adults who worked with joy, and his life began to change.
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Habit Beats Will — The Science of Stacking Small
How long until a new behavior automates into habit? Habit-formation research reports an average of around two months — sometimes half a year or more depending on the person and behavior. Quitting after three days is not weak will; it is passing judgment before automation could occur.
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Motivation Can Be Managed — My Daily Routine at Forty-Five
To close the first half of Season 1.5, let me publish my own daily brain-maintenance routine — nothing special, everything with a reason. Morning: look at the blueprint of the future and confirm today's work is part of it, igniting the approach state. Order tasks by closeness to the blueprint, not by mood.
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The Mechanics of Attraction — Expectation, Attention, Action, Result
Asked whether I believe in the law of attraction, I answered: not as magic — but as a mechanism, with conviction. In a classic study, merely giving teachers the expectation that certain children would bloom was followed by those children's actual improvement — expectation changes treatment, treatment changes people, prophecy becomes fact. The brain discards torrents of information every second, keeping what you are searching for — buy a new car and the streets suddenly fill with the same model.
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What "Thank You" Does to the Body — The Physiology of Connection
I have written of gratitude as a habit of mind; here, what it does between people. Research identifies hormones involved in human bonding — rising in moments of trusted touch and cooperation, supporting security and connection — and saying or receiving "thank you" may be one of daily life's easiest switches for that circuitry. A further delight: studies comparing people who spent money on themselves versus on others reported higher happiness among the givers.
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When the Face in the Mirror Changes, the Heart Changes — The Psychology of Beauty
We are a beauty company, so we owe an answer to this question: what do cosmetics actually change? The skin's condition, of course — but psychology suggests something beyond. Research known as enclothed cognition reported that what we wear influences attention and behavior; likewise, many people repeatedly report feeling more confident and sociable on days they wear makeup.
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Connection Is Health — The Science of Companions Who Rejoice Together
This half of Season 1.5 closes by grounding our philosophy — "cherish the companions who rejoice together" — in the science of health. A famous research synthesis integrating data on hundreds of thousands of people compared predictors of long-term health and longevity and reported that the richness of social connection was among the strongest, with loneliness argued to rival widely known lifestyle risks. The director of a celebrated decades-long study of adult life concluded that what most determines happiness and health is neither wealth nor fame, but good relationships.
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The Brain Writes While You Sleep — Sleep and Memory
The next ten essays are original pieces in which I retell what brain science has shown in my own language as a manager and a man. Neuroscience reports that memory is consolidated not at the moment of learning but during sleep: the sleeping brain replays the day, moves what matters onto long-term shelves, and discards the rest. Learning does not end at the desk; it is completed in bed.
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Ideas Arrive When You Walk — Movement and the Brain
Good ideas do not arrive at the desk; they arrive while walking — and that is not merely a feeling. The effect of exercise on the brain is among the most active research areas of recent years: aerobic activity is reported to enhance factors supporting the growth and survival of neurons, with benefits for memory-related regions, mood stability and concentration, and experiments have reported broader idea generation while walking. Until I left for Canada at eighteen I was nothing but an athlete; I could not study, but I never stopped moving my body — and perhaps those years built the foundation of my brain.
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Words Reset the Brain — The Science of Self-Talk
We talk to ourselves all day long, and the quality of those words decides our state. Psychology studies self-talk: addressing oneself by name or as "you" rather than "I" is reported to create distance from emotion, improving composure and performance under pressure. Distance alone changes how the brain handles the moment.
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One Breath Switches the Body — The Physiology of Tension
Before any big moment I do exactly one thing: exhale slowly and long. Research on the autonomic nervous system shows that inhaling and exhaling shift heart rate and bodily state; a slow, extended exhale is reported to support the calming side of the system. When tension shortens the breath, the body concludes "danger" and thinking narrows; deliberately lengthening the breath sends the opposite signal from body to brain.
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We Become Whom We Watch — Mirror Neurons and Leading by Back
That showing beats telling is not mere folk wisdom; it is partly a matter of how the brain is built. Neuroscience has reported neurons that respond while watching another's action much as they do when performing it — the mirror neuron system. Its scope is debated, but the direction, that people trace inwardly what they see, is supported by much research and by daily experience.
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Why the Brain Says "Tomorrow" — The Anatomy of Procrastination
Procrastination is not weak will; it is the natural consequence of how the brain values time. Behavioral economics repeatedly confirms that people steeply discount the future: the same reward feels smaller when distant, while a small pleasure at hand looms large. "Success in three years" loses to "one more drink tonight." The human brain comes fitted with a lens that shrinks whatever is far away.
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We Grow Strong Because We Laugh — Laughter and Stress
When I say we exist to increase the world's total volume of smiles, it is not a sentimental slogan; laughter does measurable work in the body. Studies report lower indicators of stress-related hormones in states of laughter and positive emotion, along with changes in pain perception and immune markers. The magnitude and conditions remain carefully debated, but the direction — that laughter moves bodily state — is widely supported.
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Name the Fear and It Shrinks — On the Amygdala
Becoming the chairman of a listed company does not remove anxiety. Because it does not, I learned how to handle it. Neuroscience reports that attaching verbal labels to emotion is accompanied by reduced activity in the amygdala, the region tied to fear and anxiety — a phenomenon called affect labeling.
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Meaning Over Reward — The Research on Intrinsic Motivation
My answer: raise it, yes — but pay alone is not enough. Psychology has reported that adding external rewards to behavior people already enjoy can reduce the motivation welling up from within, and a widely known framework holds that sustained effort requires a sense of deciding for oneself (autonomy), of getting better (mastery), and of doing something that matters (purpose). I have watched this on the floor for decades: at the same salary, the person who is trusted with a decision grows; at the same task, the person who knows whom it is for endures.
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The Brain Can Change at Any Age — Plasticity as Hope
Season 1.5 closes with the one line I most want to leave: the brain can change at any age. It was once believed that adult brains were fixed. Neuroscience has repeatedly shown otherwise — neuroplasticity, the continual remaking of neural connections through experience and learning.
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