Ego Libre

This might start to appear as a theme, unless I make a decision about it sooner than I anticipate, but I am starting to re-value why am I doing an MBA and what is it going to bring me.

Why? Well, obviously I have doubts about it.I have some prior experience with living with MBA’s in Copenhagen and many of them remain my friends and I track their progress and careers (hi guys ;-), so I already have a base on how to compare the schools and potential outcomes from different career choices.

Ever since I started doing that, I also started having doubts whether MBA is the right choice for me, but none the less, I decided to go for it and try ti find my way in.Now I did and it’s time to review this decision. Today’s though it on MBA and market value.I am a young guy, merely 24 years of age. I have some work experience in various industries and can already fit more on my cv than many people of my age. On the other hand, there are extraordinary entrepreneur’s that shame me by having running and growing mature business by now, but let’s leave that aside.The fact is, that after my Master’s I will probably hit my full-time career. And I need to find a proper job, where to get a serious experience.

Is MBA going to help me? Hardly. Maybe even on the contrary.

Interestingly, the reason why so many people are taking MBA is do just that, but they are in a different position. If you are around my age, having an MBA might impress some, but the fact is that it will artificially inflate your market value.Without a job experience, unless you are lucky or have extraordinary network, you are most likely to be looking at the same job offerings MBA or not. But having those three words on your cv might actually mean that people won’t hire you because they think you would be too expensive or too overeducated for such a position and what’s worse, you might think so as well.

So MBA for early career makers? Probably more a detriment than an advantage. Interestingly enough, I can hardly find anyone who agrees with me on this. Well, it might be because my social circle currently consists of people exactly like that.So round 1? MBA is not suited for me right now as it will increase my market value despite the fact that having this education will not justify it.

P.S: Feel absolutely free to comment on my thoughts here, especially if you disagree. You might change my mind and don’t forget, this is my career I am deciding here Thanks

Forget coke and e, there is a new substance in town.

This blog post on Lifehack.org was fairly interesting and I thought about posting it here FYI, but then I got to point 6. It defined a new term for me: Information addiction. It hit me right there and then: I am an addict. Seriously, I have to cut down. I spend up to 2 hours every day reading news, RSS feeds and designing bags. (Well, that might have been a one off thing But I am complaining that I am busy. I mean WTF?

I will try to limit my daily hit of RSS feeds and news to 1 whiff of information in the morning. That’s it.

And I will start tomorrow. Urghhh. I can feel the cold turkey already.

Can’t…..hit…..the….reload…..button. Should….not…..check….for……new…..mail. Arghhhh…..

And what about you? How many times a day do you indulge yourself in the sinful pleasure of information ecstasy? I would say that for some of you it’s time to think about it as well…

What do you see when you think of the future? What do you think will you be doing in 5, 10 years time? Or even worse, what is the next step going to be? Not the one you are making now, the next one…

I suddenly realize I stare into an abyss.

For years, there were goals in front of me. Points to get to and fairly clear paths leading to them. No more. Well, there is one. I have started new education. So once again, there is a holy grail of a diploma, but this time it’s different. This time I feel it’s my last and I do not see beyond that. Maybe it is premature t be thinking about career and future, but I can’t help it. For the first time, the weight of the darkness in front of me invaded my mind. Past experiences show that everything will work out in the end, but suddenly I am not sure whether I can rely on it. What has changed?

The truth is, in all honesty, responsibility is starting to change my mind. Maybe for the first time in my life I am starting to realize that it is not only about me and my plans, but that I have a partner now, a person in my life who has the same voice baring the same weight as I do and I need to take that person’s opinion into consideration. It is a valuable lesson and hopefully one I will pass. I need to throw away this fear of an abyss and jump.

My girlfriend is coming soon to join me in Australia. She jumped. I admire her for that. Of course I encouraged her, but at the same time wanted to point out, that it is her decision as well. Her jump. But once again, she knew better than me. She saw the abyss and she jumped anyway. My choice is simpler. I do not even have a choice. I just need to keep walking knowing that somewhere in front of me will be a huge decision to make. A deep abyss to cross. I just hope I will be strong enough to face. And I also hope that somebody will be holding my hand while free-falling to unknown ends.

Yes indeed, people change. Their dreams change. And so should their fears.

Do you have anyone who will be there with you?

After excuses and whining, I finally thought about something worth talking and thinking about here.
I have had my first real experience with Australian culture and it got me thinking. Of course this experience was in a club. There is no better place where to compare behavior and culture than in a club after 2 am. And I realized something…

A typical sign of Japanese culture is attention abundance, whereas a typical Australian feature is attention scarcity. This could be expanded roughly to a western versus easter cultures in general. I usually hate these polaristic views such as Hofstede’s famous cultural dimensions, but today I caught myself thinking in their terms. But if I were to use Hofstede’s view, I would add attention scarcity as a new element.

When you talk to a Japanese person, you have 100% of their attention. When you talk to an Australian, you can hope for 10%. Now this is not criticism, this is simply a fact that I need to take into consideration when living here. I wrote a paper on criticizing Hofstede, I just wonder why haven’t I figure this out back then…

If you have some sociologic background, please prove me wrong, but I guess this is another forgotten element of cultural dimension.

So I am leaving Japan. Again. But it feels more definite this time. After all, instead of a short trip to Europe, I am moving to Australia. Moving to another country. Once again.
I thought I would get eventually used to it. But I don’t. Can anyone really get used to it? I am sitting in a friend, passing stations that I know, that have been my world for past year, memories of my friends waving me off at Shinjuku station still fresh in my mind. I feel sad. Tokyo is a fantastic town, but more then anywhere else, it makes you realize that a place to live is only as good as the friends you make there.
And I am worried. I think I can call myself lucky to have such a fantastic friends all around the world: Canada, Denmark, Japan and of course Czech Republic as well as scattered in other places, constantly moving in a way as I do. So you could say, well big deal. Another country, another people, right? It might be so, but I am still worried. It’s getting harder and harder to keep in touch with everyone. I will really need to find a good job so I can pay for all the tickets (and one that allows me at the same time to travel so much) or a job that makes me travel to those places. I had to pass on visiting Pat’s wedding in Canada. I had to pass on visiting Lukas’ wedding in Czech and I won’t be there when his kids is born. I could not see some of my friends in Denmark because they were traveling during the short time I was staying there. Heck, I even have to plan well ahead to be at my brothers’ wedding next year. I mean I feel lucky in one way, but I just wish I could live in the same place or at least a country (or even a continent) as my friends do. At least for some time.
Maybe I am too sentimental today. I am reading Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the shore. There is an interesting passage there (excuse my crappy recollection and translation): “From the first hello when people meet, it is only eternal goodbye after that.”
I said another goodbye. To another bunch of people that I care a lot about. Another bunch of people who are so dear to me, that I would be willing to fly around the world, even just for one day to shake their hands and exchange a friendly, understanding smile. And once again it hurts me in a way that I would have never anticipated when I first met them.
Ah well. Yesterday I was talking about synthesizing happiness. I should practice what I preach. Maybe I don’t even have to synthesize too much, after all I am starting a new life, this time with my girlfriend in a whole new country. Please wish us luck. I am looking forward to it so much, but let’s be fair, of course I am a bit scared as well as excited.
However, for a moment I will pretend to be a bit more Japanese and swallow my felings inside. New horizons are approaching. And so is the Narita Airport station… See you in Australia or wherever whenever… but as we all know and hardly accept… not forever.

I know I should focus more on external topics, but then again I am an egoist, so what do you expect? Today was one of the weirdest days in a long long time.
One of the reasons why I haven’t been posting so much lately was that I spent most of my time fighting bureaucracy on three continents and in the meantime worried myself sick. I will skip the stories of me trying to beat that machine, in the end I got my diploma and could successfully apply for visa to Australia. That actually happened yesterday and that’s where my weird day starts.
I woke up this morning with a terribly hangover and got annoyed since I slept through the hotel breakfast time. I have casually checked email just to find out that the Australian embassy wants me to undergo a medical check and submit an x-ray of my chest. Apparently Czech Republic is among high risk countries for tuberculosis. My flight is on sunday and I desperately need the visa. So I wasted no time and called a few clinics. Found one, took a quick shower and started running. I arrived just in time before the doctor went to lunch and I thought that everything is going to be fine and felt on the roll. The fact is, that I almost failed because I obviously wasn’t in the best shape after jugging down several both of shoukoshu the night before. Most notably I have learned that doing a eye-sight check with such a hangover is a true challenge. None the less I passed.
While having lunch I thought how I am going to write here that it is interesting how everything in my life tends to work out perfectly fine, albeit always at the last moment and in a hurry. Little did I know…
When I got back to office my initial enthusiasm wore off and I decided to call the Immigration Processing Centre in Perth and ask them how long would it take. So I did that. After 20 minutes of elevator music the lovely lady told me she is going to check on my case and she came back she told me that it will take between 4 and 6 weeks. Not hours, not days, weeks! You can imagine how I felt at that point. I was dumbstruck. After all this effort and planning and worrying I cannot succeed anyway. I called my school and told them this great news. They agreed the postpone my commencement date to January. Then I proceeded with further canceling. I canceled my apartment booking in Melbourne. Except that it was uncancelable, so I was thinking about calling my bank and cancel my credit card so they can’t charge me. In the end the guy on the phone budged and canceled it provided they will keep the deposit (more then 300 AUD). After that I needed to change my flight. But alas the Czech office of British Airways was closed. So I went on and called a real estate company in Tokyo and arranged an apartment for a month and convinced them to allow me to check in on sunday. Then I decided to call British Airways in UK. They told me that I cannot change my ticket since it was issued by Czech BA and they are not allowed to do it. Alas it was public holiday in Czech and my flight was on sunday. I was not going to let them screw me like that so I started convincing the woman to do it and she was about to agree when an email arrived.
My visa was granted.
Now that was a real shock! I mean wtf?! First she tells me one month and “I am sorry but we cannot do anything about it.” and “no there is nothing you can do to speed it up” and then this. I thanked that lovely woman and started redoing what I have done. I canceled my apartment in Tokyo. I called the real estate company in Melbourne and inquired into canceling the cancel. Luckily enough they agreed, but I felt like a prick. And then I started calling everyone that I called before to tell them to forget what I said and remember what I always used to say: “everything works out in the end”.
And so it does.
But what have I learned? Actually tons of things.

1. It’s useless to worry.
2. Everything works out in the end. So do your best and go back to point 1) and relax.
3. Australian government has terrible phone support staff, but obviously very effective workers.
4. Never book an uncancelable flight or hotel room if you can help it (20% premium is acceptable I think)
5. Always have a perfectly acceptable plan B and realize it.

The last point is actually the most important one. I hate plans B. I go 100% for plan A and simply KNOW in my heart that it will work out. Generally it tends to work for me, but this time it failed. Well it didn’t in the end, but this time I thought it failed and it shook me quite a bit. It never does that. My plans A are exactly that, frickin’ A. I consciously do not make plans B because I feel it would mean that I would work less hard to achieve A and that is totally silly. A bit like people (yes, I am one of them) who say that they need to study only right before the exam or deadline because the pressure makes them work harder. That is a suicidal cocktail.
So I made a mental note there, have a plan B.
But I also realized it has to be a perfectly acceptable plan. Actually when I heard the news that the visa will take a month and made the decision to stay in Tokyo I hated that idea. I felt like a loser and that my destiny failed me. And then I thought about it. About working in the Tokyo office some more, about going out with my Japanese friends and I thought that a month here is not a bad thing after all and I actually really started liking that idea. And then the email came. My first reaction was: WTF?! And my second was: “Damn it, I really feel like staying that month in Tokyo.”
Now this does not mean that I want to stay in Tokyo rather then moving to Melbourne. It means that I have internalized the idea of being in Japan and synthethized happines around it. And then puff it was gone again. So what I wanted at first was taken away from me, so I took second best option, started liking it and when my previously preferred choice was granted, I thought of it as inferior. Human mind is truly amazing.
I was writing about similar effect here, albeit applied to a different topic.
So the moral of the day. Have a plan B. It is not inferior. Actually there is no absolute hierarchy in our preferences, only temporarily perceived one.

But it is there. One thing living in Tokyo will do to you is to make you realize that homeless people are simply one of us. I have just spent about 2 hours talking to a homeless Japanese, not to men-tin speaking perfect English, about Tokyo. I have met to most intriguing homeless Japanese before. I have met an ex-reality investment guy living in a tent in Ueno wearing a Lacoste t-shirt telling me how his family left him after the stock market crash. I am telling you, if I should take one lesson out of my whole Japanese experience it would be: “easy come, easy go, but hard come, easy can go as well.” In other words: nothing is secure. We live in volatile world and unpredictable society, yet we seem to ignore it. But then again, that is the only way to survive. Except that I share so many opinions about the society we live in with the homeless people that it makes me wonder, whether I will not become once one of them…
If this blog suddenly ends and you never hear of me again, please look for me in Shinjuku station or Ueno park. I will be grateful for breakfast, but do not expect me to return to this madness of society…

I am not going to waste your time trying to explain why it has been more than a month since I have written anything. I have had some post ready on my drive, but none of them seemed relevant enough. Until today, until now.
Today I have a question for your: If you could choose, would you rather be surrounded by people like you or would you rather be an exception?
This is more crucial question than it might sound at first.
But let me tell you how I got to it. It originated, as most good things in life, in a club. Today. Tonight. About an hour ago.
I went to an unknown club with my Japanese friend. This club turned out to be a super-posh ass-hole hang-out cave. Great club by many standards. Invitation to get in, vip feel to it, more staff then customer in early hours and selected crowd. And then me. Feeling totally odd, totally out of place.
After hours of mindless drinking and soulless chatting two things happen to me. One was moment of realization and the other was a good lesson. Maybe they are connected. I met this two beautiful girls, who seemed so incredibly dumb and superficious that I had a blast out of it. Now the funny thing was they were playing me. After a while of me trying to counter their ridiculously sounding stereotypical remarks with pseudo-intellectual comments that I am fairly good at it (and sadly being proud if it), I found out that they were playing me for fun. They were pretending to be these stuck up bitches for fun. Now how many times have I tried a similar game and I still could not see that! Male ego: 0, female intelligence: 1. Now, before anyone starts questioning me, we were not even flirting, the whole conversation was about Tokyo and Japan, which anyone who has been here a while understand how crucial topic in determining people’s intellect and personality are.
So that was the lesson. Some people are smarter than you are even though they seem (/pretend) to be more stupid.
But then I got to think about one thing. I was surrounded by assholes. By rich people with money to spend and lives to waste. A thing I have been running away from for couple of years. I know these people. I know that lifestyle and I don’t want it. But then I thought of one more thing. Which would I prefer: be surrounded by people like me or be surrounded by assholes like that and feel that I am not one of them. I know the answer seems simple, but try to ask it yourself in context you can relate to. Would you rather be a one-eyed man (or a woman) in a crows of blind people, or would you rather be able to discuss with your fellow people what all of you can see? I feel it is crucial and I also feel that my inclining towards the first answer is a good sign of my personality, but one I would definitely like to change. But is it so wrong? Or is it simply a whim of my ego?
I do not know. I hope you do. And if you have never asked you that question before, try to do it. And answer yourself honestly, I know my feelings surprised me… Good luck and good night.

I am about to move to a fifth country to live in. Therefore I might think I am used to these kind of things, but honestly I have been surprised to see some effects on reverse culture shock on me. Maybe it is because I have moved back temporarily to a country I have lived before, but which is not my home country, maybe it is that I am simply more sensitive to it by now, but I clearly see how easily I get aggravated by seemingly simple things.

Basically things just piss me off. It pisses me off how I get treated in shops and restaurants, it pisses me off that I can’t get the food I want and it pisses me off that nobody seems to care. In other words, it is almost perfect example of a reverse culture shock. So even if you spend years and years moving around, it seems you are prone to it none the less.

Ever since I have realized this, I am trying to shut up and this is my way of getting it out of my system before it starts to get really bad. I am quite happy that soon enough I will move to a new country and the cycle will be able to start all over again. Or am I?

Anyways, I know that some of you might be going through a similar thing, after all coming back from Japan means that pretty much everything is different. Good luck, I hope you are coping better than I am

I am in Singapore. This time I do not have a simple sum up story to tell you how this town feels. I am taking a break for that to tell you how I feel… if there is a possibility that some of you care.

I feel ashamed of myself. One thing that I am going to talk about tomorrow when I sit down and try to arrange my thoughts on Singapore will be how luxury hotels are comparably cheap here. I am staying in one of them. But that’s not the story. The story is about a man. Interesting man. A Japanese writer. Wanderer, bohemian, homeless, however you want to call it. A man with whom I have spent several hours in an interesting and stimulating conversation about literature and philosophy for last couple of hours that he missed the last train going to airport, where he currently resides.

Another part of the story is about my hotel room, which was due to full occupancy upgraded to higher class and that coincidentally is a twin room, so I have two beds.

Due to our conversation, this man lost his last train to go back. He will have to sleep on a bench in a park. This man is no homeless in a sense as you might think, he is an intelligent, clean shaved man wearing a Lacoste T-shirt, so no problem there.

Where is the story and why I feel ashamed? Despite knowing it would not be a problem, I have not offered him a place to stay. It was right there, available and no issues with it, yet I did not do it. But I do not feel ashamed because of that. I feel ashamed of the reason. The man assumed that I sleep in a nearby hostel. I did not try to convince him otherwise. I was ashamed that if I offer him this option, he will find out that I am staying in a room that costs more per night than he spends on food per month. I was ashamed of that.

And due to my shame, I have not helped a fellow man.

This man says he writes books as some kind of remedy. I write this post for the same reason. Why is it that people feel ashamed of having more? Is it a complex that has been built into me in by growing in the Czech Republic and the shame that comes with riches? Or is it something deeper transcending more than just my culture? And most importantly, why is that? Why feeling that I have too much means that I offer too little? This shame is a toxic thing and I will have to find a root of it to get rid of it.

And come to think of it, this post is closer to my original intention of this blog anyway. Yet tomorrow, I will probably be back with a review of Singapore. Stay tuned, feel free to comment if you have any thoughts on this.

Hopefully I will be able to understand the origin of the shame. Maybe this man’s books will help. His name is Hideo Asano. You can see his books and maybe even buy them on Amazon or Lulu.