An Old Man’s First Mutterings of the Year…

Happy New Year, everyone.How did you spend your New Year’s Eve?
As for me, I changed the tires on my Impreza to winter specs, and washed and maintained the wheel loader that took a beating in the unexpected heavy snowfall.

For New Year’s Eve dinner, I had the chicken hot pot from “Shimefuji,” a legendary restaurant here in Kitami.
Well… honestly… just… no cheap words are needed here.

The New Year rolled in lazily.
Mochi for the ozoni soup. Apparently, my eldest daughter pounded it herself with a friend using a traditional mortar and pestle at home.
I grilled it on the wood stove…
I don’t really like mochi.
But that’s just because I had forgotten what good mochi tastes like and the right way to eat it.
“Mochi was a preserved food when I was a kid.”
Maybe I was made to eat it too much back then because of that.

Like they say, leave mochi to the mochi maker.

The real deal was insanely delicious.

I watched the video. He revived USJ and Seibuen Amusement Park, and was always so brilliant and confident. Seeing him speak so plainly, looking slightly downward, gave me mixed feelings.
The conclusion is simple. He is a genius at “turning 1 into 100 (multiplication),” but he was not the type of person to “create 1 from 0 (addition).”

No matter what you multiply by “0”, it remains “0”.

Having a “1” means that, even if it’s worn out, there are roads, water runs, and electricity is connected. He is great at casting magic on such prepared grounds, but what he challenged this time was the task of building infrastructure from scratch in a vast grassland with no water or electricity, using just a single pickaxe.
In the interview, he repeatedly said he “couldn’t see the benchmark.” For someone who has found everything through marketing formulas, forgetting the number “0” seems like quite a huge mistake, doesn’t it?
There is no such thing as a benchmark when creating “1 from 0.” A pioneer goes where there is no path.
Forgetting that their workplace infrastructure is already in place, elites and business successors who mistakenly think their own ability is amazing probably can’t imagine that “fear of nothingness” and the “agony of creation.”
If the office toilet is dirty or trash is on the floor, it stays dirty unless you clean it and pick it up yourself. That is what “starting from zero” means.
Those misunderstood folks would become prey for wild beasts the moment they are released from their birdcage into the wild.
I want to say this to those aiming to start a business. The internet is full of nothing but “success stories.”

Survivorship bias. Success stories reach our ears because they survived. Dead men tell no tales. We cannot hear the voices of failures.
In that sense, this video has value.

I couldn’t turn “1 into 100,” but I was able to create “1 from 0.” To sound like a sore loser, turning “1 into 10” was easy for me, but I understood my own capacity, lived small, and was able to obtain the small freedom I have now. That is why I can clearly see his current anguish and limitations. Though, it might have been an overly expensive tuition fee…
The problem is the next one in Okinawa… Massive amounts of tax money are being poured into that. If it ends up remaining “0”, it’s going to be quite serious…

Oh well. The first grumbling of an old man in the New Year (lol).

This was on TV.
But the Pay-Per-View was about 8,000 yen!!…
F1, WRC, and other motorsports, movies, dramas, political and economic news… charge, charge, charge…
We are in a world where free content is losing its value.
The information gap will likely just keep widening…