Pride comes from accumulated passion

What is it to be proud? It is important that you are proud of the work that you do. However, where does that sense of pride come from? How can we be proud of what we do?

The sense of pride requires you to pour your passion into an area. Keep pouring, then after a good amount of passion, things might work in your favor, and you get a sense of pride. The more you pour, the prouder you can feel about what you do.

Now the question is how can you maintain passion for something for a long period of time. People get bored easily, or feel overwhelmed by the difficulties in keeping it up. On top of that, we experience the trick of time that we don't feel we are getting any closer to the goal for a certain amount of time. It normally requires three years until we start to see any results of efforts we have put.

Let's take the challenge to go global as an example. We established a subsidiary in Singapore in 2014, which was three years ago. Our strategy was to make our operation in Singapore as the core to expand into the ASEAN market. However, what we found after three years was that the market size and demand was not big enough.

Three years later, meaning this year, we targeted different parts of the world; Japan-related companies in China, and local companies in India. Since our resources were limited, this simplification of the target markets was a good move. Now, we are getting support from Chinese engineers working at Japanese companies in China, and local engineers working at local companies in India.

Companies in China became much more active than before. Next week, we are getting our first purchase order from a local Indian company in the financial market. This is an indication that what we offer can potentially meet universal requirements. I am quite excited about and proud of this achievement.

Our potential is not limited to Japan. I know how much passion was poured into the global market by the members involved in the global activities; when we started, the picture was completely ambiguous to us. We kept pouring our passion into the idea of expansion, and now we see new paths, and can say we are proud of that.