Good To Great

21 Jan 2012 6 Comments

by Ai Kanoh in Books, English Posts, Life, Work


Jim Collins’s Good To Great is one of the books the titles themselves are inspiring (which often means I haven’t read it yet). I love book titles. One of my hobbies is spending time in bookstores just checking around book cover designs, and evaluate the grade of titles, and imagine what is told inside, and learn something from them without reading.

I am deeply interested in copy writing which sell a new idea in the simplest way. Good book titles gives many ideas and insights in how to sell a book-long story, theory, or concept to readers without opening the book, and also the tone, font, and the design even gives you the idea whom it is talking to.

Speaking of Good To Great, I haven’t read it though fully, but basically the book talks about companies’ transformation from good to great, in terms of the business sucess, culture, ethics, and branding, etc, etc. But Whenever I go to a business management section in a book store, the red cover speaks to me personally, “Hey, are you just Good, or Great?”

When I find myself with full of lack and disabilities personally and professionally (which happens so often), I picture a dark forever-expanding cosmos or a tunnel with no end under the ground. Being extraordnally is something beyond imagination. After many years, I want to say I became wiser by ages, but I am not as confident as I was before, anymore. But maybe, though being great as a person is difficult, being great as a pair, as a group, and as an organization is possible. I may not be complete as one, but I may be able to fullfill a part of something Great, and Extraordinally.

I suppose I was too busy to enjoy myself and what I do, and I had never asked to myself if I am actually valuable for someone else; for family, company, friendship, or community, whatever bigger than me. In fact without me knowing so well about it, I am grown up, and expectations are changed .

If my 20th was the journey to find my self, my 30th is the journey to release what I found as myself to the air and go looking for something much more valuable than that. I am in back-and-force yet, but the life, work, and people somehow give me many oppotunities to challange myself to the limit. It asks me, “What’s your contribution more than being yourself?” I can’t answer that now, obviously. But I would be, if I can stay in the right track. I have at least 50 years more if  I am lucky. I want to be more brave and good person so I can travel through this phase successfully.

Family Affair (4) Family Puzzle

08 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment

by Ai Kanoh in English Posts, Family, Life

Family makes me think of time; time of the past we’ve gone through, and the time of the future that we are going to go through. While back in Japan for holiday season, I have been thinking of our family’s silent survival against time. We born, we glow up, we reproduce, and we die, such things.

My granfather got slightly demented after the bath tab insident, and started needing help. That gave our family a new twist. Nurcing care became the center of the family life. My mother and her sisters take turns every day to take care of him and my grandmother. I helped only a little during the stay, clearning, blushing his teeth. It’s not easy, mentally and physically.

My grandfather is in back-and-force. One day he doesn’t even recognize me, and another day he is a wise man and express his sick situation even quating lines from old good books. Some time he is weak and gentle, and wispers how I am a good girl, and another time he is strong and angry. It’s different every day and every moment, but it’s developping, gradually and certainly.

The grandparents start talking about their own death. My grandfather sometimes claims “I wish someone just knock my head off while sleeping” but other time tells “But truth is I still want to live.” My grandmother scares me off saying “If you don’t come back so often, I am not sure if we can meet each other again.” Right, that could happen seriously. It’s difficult to leave family if you know there’s a chance that it can be the last moment or conversation.

On the other hand, my cousin sister delivered a beautiful boy a month ago. The little girl became a mother, watching her own baby looking like wondering where it came from. It was a touching landscape to me. I was holding her baby scarily and thinking “Oh my god, I am holding a person squeezed from my little cousin sister…” A start of a new life of a tiny person is actually a fresh start of life of all family members.

We all get old and die. It had been a mystery why people want kids so badly for a long time, but I kind of came to an undarnding that,for a family, we are one life together and die and reborn again and again just like a whole family is one body with old and fresh cells mixed together. If a baby is born, our sadness of living and dying exclusively is a little reduced and cured.

The continuation of life, the coming and going four seasons and all; I wanted to be out from this track, maybe. I was looking for a way to get out. I never wanted to have a moment I know how I live and die, the schedule, so I kind of chose a life that takes me somewhere I can’t imagine but valuable, exciting, and new. But when I go back and observe the sequence of life that I used to live, I find it is also very beautiful.

Family life is like a puzzle. We don’t know how the picture turns to be till you fit the last piece in. Which piece of the picture I am supposed to be, and how that colors up and fill the whole picture in the end, I don’t have idea yet. What we will see in the end is maybe something that is far different from what we expect. Whatever I would be, or whatever I do, I simply wish I add a beautiful and vivid color in it which gives a punch in the whole picture.