You Don't Need an 'Origin Experience': Start Building the 'Past for Your Future' Today
This article was machine-translated from Japanese by AI (Claude). It may contain errors. Read the original Japanese article.
When I talk with young people interested in starting a business, I notice that quite a few of them hesitate to take action, saying "I don't have an origin experience," "I'm a humanities (or science) person," or "I don't have the skills."
In fact, I hear there are workshops that ask questions like "What is your origin experience?" before you start a business, so they may end up reinforcing the perception that "if you don't have something special in your past, you're not qualified to start anything."
We tend to look to the past for reasons. It is true that what we have cultivated in the past matters, and looking back on the past can sometimes help us notice things.
Even so, if you worry too much about the past, or think you must not do something unless you have a special reason, that is nothing but a curse. It is truly a waste to narrow your own future possibilities because of curses like "I don't have an origin experience" or "I'm not qualified." (Besides, when people try too hard to find reasons in the past, they can end up retroactively constructing or fabricating the past, or giving it a different meaning.)
The areas where you need "qualification to act" are limited. If a legal qualification is required, you only need to obtain it. If expertise or skills are required, you can study and acquire them. If you are interested in something, you should be able to start even without a big reason.
Still, we tend to look to the past for reasons and qualifications. So when that happens, I think one coping strategy is to shift your perspective to the future.
Create the Past for Your Future, Starting Now
It may go without saying, but for your future self, "your present self" is the past. Put differently, the past for your future self is a past that you can create starting now.
For example, there is an interview article in which the baseball player Yu Darvish recalls that, around the age of 20, he imagined a future in which he was homeless at 40, and, as if he had been told "I'll send you back to when you were 20," he worked hard as though he had been reborn. This is a perfect example of taking the perspective of the future, looking at one's present self, and starting to create the past for that future self.
In the same way, we can create the past for our future selves starting now.
If you start taking action even without much of a reason, and you can actually help someone, that becomes a reason to keep going. If you start something and build a track record, that becomes a sufficient reason for you to be the one doing it. If you keep at it for five years, then to other people it has become a respectable "reason."
Whatever the reason, or even if there is none, I think what remains like wheel ruts when you keep walking and then, having come a long way, happen to look back, is what we call a career, and is a reason of your own.
So if you think, "I will start creating, from now, the past and the reasons for my future self," or "I will create the past for my future starting now," you can probably take on all kinds of challenges proactively.
Summary
If you have a clear reason or origin experience and a story within yourself, it is certainly easier to move. But that story can be spun from now on, too. In that case, it is far more productive to look not at the story so far but at the story you will spin from here.
Just because "there is nothing in your past" does not mean your future will be the same. You can create that something starting now. Even if you cannot turn what "wasn't there" in the past into what "was there," you should be able to make it "exist" from now on.
If you go in that spirit, intending to create your reasons from here on, I think you will surely be able to start moving, even if you feel there is nothing in your past.