Six fundamental attitudes to secure your success

Mr. Inamori*, mentioned six fundamental attitudes for business leaders to demonstrate for them to live in prosperity and fulfilment. Those are the following:

Last time, I spent some time on why is it so important No 1. Strive yourself much harder than anyone else. Today, I would like to explain the number 2 to 6

2 Be always humble, keep your endeavor

This is obviously important. Those who are arrogant and never know the word of application would not have any support or help from others. Even though they demonstrate their power, the number of people who can be controlled by the power will be gradually decreased, and their controlling power will be limited. Therefore, sooner or later, those arrogant ones may be abandoned from the society or a group.

On the other hand, this is the indication of realizing what you already have. For those who always feel being lack of something may never pay attention what they have already been given.

This principle also has us get aware what we already have and how to make the best use of them.

3 Reflect your daily life

Psychologically, I would like to interpret this to release your emotion. Compared with the people under Latin culture, those who are raised under Anglo Saxon or Japanese culture are not so emotional and tend to hide their emotions. My Brazilian husband is always open his emotions and never get stressed by hiding his emotions or feelings. Such hidden emotions however, eventually are accumulated and embedded into your subliminal mind. Those subliminal minds are said to influence our behavior, affect the facts which are actually happening in our daily lives. This can be interpreted as a negative spiral: hiding negative emotion, being established as subliminal mind, governing our actions, and creating the facts. By reflecting our daily lives works to stop such a negative spiral and instead we can change our emotion : releasing our emotion by daily reflection, rewriting our subliminal minds, changing our behaviors, and ultimately changing the facts/ events.

4 Do good, be faithful, think about altruism

This is sometimes hard to understand non-Japanese people especially Westerns. Japanese tend to value the loyalty and avoid being harsh to our business partners. I would like to take an episode of Naoki Hanzawa. This is a TV drama series of a banker, Naoki, who overcomes a lot of obstacles brought about under Japanese business practices. For instance, in a meeting with Teikoku Air Line, Japan’s top airline company and is about to bankrupt due to the excess debt. Naoki told the management team that you are not serious about the financial condition and don’t look like feeling any responsibility to the company’s status. It is you, the management team, who is actually responsible for the heavy dead. I must insist our involvement into your developing civil revitalization planning. Naoki’s boss looked astonished and scolded Naoki as he was very rude to the top management of a giant company.

This dram has been well watched in Japan nationwide, one of the principle reasons is Naoki’s advocating messages that many JPs business persons have been holding in their mind and have motivation to change.

What Naoki did is actual “good and faithful practice as well as altruism”. On the other hand, what Naoki’s boss did was superficial “good market practice”, which has been maintained under Japanese business environment. Mr. Inamori has always been telling us to do the good things and altruism, taking into account the nature of phenomenon, as did Naoki.

5 Maintain always the gratitude to your life

This is the message of tendering your daily life as if it is the last day of your life. At the very last day of your life, what kind of message would you leave to your beloved ones? Complainants, anger, sarcastic words? If you leave such words, your life looks very miserable.

Leave and send gratitude to others, Mr. Inamori encourages us to do so.

6 Take everything optimistic and do not waste your energy for anxiety

“When I am in a disaster, I think that it is the result of my past sins, faults, or karma. If so, I should not get depressed with that disaster, rather, I have to celebrate. Simply because, all of my karma had to be gone with such a small disaster. My destiny did give me a small unpleasant event instead of taking my life. This is very important to live positively and powerfully without feeling troubles.” Mr. Inamori said.

I totally agree with him. Under Japanese Zen philosophy, everything happening in our lives are the ones we have created so far. We certainly have created some causes in our past to the phenomena which are just happening in front of us. Therefore, there is no use for us to curse our destiny or to blame even others.

Thus, to sum up, the six important practices in our lives are as follows:

Regardless of the entity, either individual or a country, as long as we maintain such attitudes, we can be successful in our business and lives.

Further queries or doubts, please email to ytomizuka@abrilsjp.com

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