Just a few small changes will compound and grow.

Trying to shorten working hours or to become a performance-based company is not something that can be done suddenly tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make any progress if we don’t do anything about it. Therefore, what we need to think about is changing the way we work and the way we live our lives, little by little, aiming for a unit of 5, 10, or even 15 years or so.

Just as dollar-cost averaging does not increase much in the first five years, but increases surprisingly over 10 or 20 years, the same is true for changes in the way we work and live.

I know this may sound insistent, but the reason I say that it is better not to take out a mortgage as much as possible is that a mortgage, in a sense, assumes that your current lifestyle will continue as it is and imagines a simple interest rate improvement in your life.

Instead, what we are aiming for is compound interest improvement, so although we do not know if we will go or what will happen in the future, it is necessary to increase the degree of freedom and leave a variety of options open, and within those options, we need to set them up so that we can freely make a variety of choices, including making mistakes.

For this purpose, as I always talk about, the important thing is just two things: to increase the number of choices, and to continue to challenge without hesitation every day those choices that interest us. And if you keep the ones that work and reduce the ones that don’t, you will be surprised at how much your way of working and thinking will change over the next five or ten years.

I am constantly thinking about how I can shorten my working hours and improve my productivity every day. For example, in learning English, I trained myself to translate short sentences in my head as soon as I heard them in Japanese. Memorizing only words is important, but apparently I can’t remember them that way and get bored. That’s why I gradually get tired of learning vocabulary. I thought that the process of thinking of short sentences would be more enjoyable than simple memorization, and that it would be better to be able to speak short sentences in actual English conversation.

If I keep doing things the same way, I will never be better in the future. If that is the case, when an idea arises that this might be better, even if only a little, I will boldly attack it.

It doesn’t mean that all the learning we have done so far will be totally wasted.
I wonder if such small details affect my working hours and income, but they do.
Implementing different changes or changing the way you do things now has more of an impact on your income six months or a year from now than it does on your income tomorrow right now. That is why, because of this time lag, you need to have a certain amount of leeway through savings such as dollar cost averaging, and you also need to leave yourself a portion of your income that you can invest both monetarily and emotionally, otherwise your income six months, one year, or five years from now will not rise easily.

Creating a virtuous cycle in which you always invest your front end in the future is the key to shortening your working hours and increasing your income. And although the idea that working long hours is fine if you love and enjoy your work will inevitably come to mind, at least in order for us to work sustainably in the medium to long term as we move toward an 80-year or even 100-year life period, we need to work short hours, not long hours, and In order to work sustainably in the mid- to long-term, we need to strike a balance between working short hours and leaving time to invest in the future.

We will think that we just need to gradually improve both in terms of working hours and income. When these efforts accumulate, you will be amazed at how much you can accomplish. However, if such an environment is not in place, it will never happen, so it is important to make sure that the environment itself is also in place in that direction.

In addition, I can control my working hours and have a certain amount of discretion in how I create the market, and I will also make sure that the results of the market I create will lead to my own income. How old I can achieve this goal depends on my current situation, but considering that we live in the age of 100 years, it is never too late to start.

You will see this when you can actually control your own working hours with your own discretion and your own authority. Rather than working hard and long hours to finish a given task and receive some high income, it is better to be able to control your own work and achieve good results in a short time, even if that amount of I think that I would probably still be more fulfilled if I gave corporate lectures.

I actually understand that working hours can be shortened in the future, and I prepare the necessary materials for that, one by one. And as it matures, various things come together, and before you know it, you are getting higher and higher results even though your working hours are getting shorter and shorter year by year.
And this change is being driven by the development of generative AI and various information devices that are helping to shorten our working hours. If something can be covered by technology to some extent and can create value for the customer without our direct hands-on involvement, we will leave it to them as much as possible.

By making small changes, we can acquire various know-how or create an environment that allows us to earn a higher income with shorter working hours. And, as we accumulate small changes in our daily lives, even if they are only small changes, they will become a big change that will become a benefit and will appear in five or ten years time.

By all means, create the right environment, utilize various capitals and technologies, and gradually reduce the number of jobs that do not lead to market value and increase the number of jobs that do lead to market value. So, by all means, let’s make changes every day.