About twenty years ago when I was working as a management consultant in Japan, Google released Google Earth. Pulling together satellite and aerial images, the app allowed users to explore Earth as a 3D globe.
During that time, a colleague of mine was filled with excitement. He explained this was the very first time that people other than astronauts could experience seeing our planet from the outside.
At that time, I didn’t understand and couldn’t share his excitement from the perspective shift. Nor did I know that the feeling he experienced had a name. The overview effect.
According to Shortform:
Many astronauts have described a dramatic shift in perspective when they look back at Earth for the first time and see the whole planet, undivided by political divisions or national borders. Psychologists call this “the overview effect,” the feeling of awe and deep connection to humanity that astronauts experience on their first flights.)
(Side note: Here’s an excerpt of William Shatner’s book where he shared his experience of the overview effect when he went to space with Blue Origin.)
It was only last year where I learned about the overview effect. That’s also where I connected the dots. I finally understood the awe of my Japanese colleague twenty years ago.
Though Google Earth can’t replace experiencing overview effect in real life, it had made it accessible in a digital format for the rest of us.
For me, I think to be able to see Earth zoomed out from a different perspective, it serves as a reminder of seeing things in terms of the big picture. The image of our planet as a whole serves as a trigger to reframe my daily struggles at a bigger scale. Seeing the long game.
It’s also an invitation for me to step back. To consider what truly matters. Sometimes we need to take one big step back to see.
A reporter once asked Charlie Chaplin what he considered his best work. Chaplin replied:
The next one.
This tiny story reminds me of the Japanese idea of Kaizen.
Kaizen is made up of two Chinese characters. Improve and Good. It is central to the philosophy of the Japanese car company Toyota. It embodies the idea of continuous improvement.
To understand there is no such thing as best. To acknowledge there is alway room for improvement.
I stepped out of the express train that carried me from the airport to the Tokyo station.
It was a hot summer day. Unlike what I’ve been used to from the Californian dry climate, it was humid. Wet and sticky. Humid. Humid. Humid.
This was my first time here in the Land of the Rising Sun. You could say it was a dream come true. To be able to finally visit the country that was home to video game companies like Sega and Nintendo, which made the video games I was obsessed with in my childhood years.
I was here in Tokyo to study Japanese for six weeks in Mitaka, a city situated in the western part of the metropolis. And the very first challenge was to find my way to my homestay family’s house.
To get there, I needed to take the orange line. Also known as the Chuo Line.
This orange line was and still is one heck of a train line. The train back then was wrapped entirely in orange, but there were different types of services.
- Rapid
- Commuter Rapid
- Special Rapid
- Commuter Special Rapid
The Rapid service stops at every station, where as the other types would skip certain stations making those types more “rapid.” (To make things more complicated, the Rapid line itself skips 3 stations on weekends.)
In any case, if you were heading to a station that might be skipped, you ought to be careful of which service type your train was.
So I dragged my big suit case onto one of these orange trains. The orange trains would be what I commuted with between the school and my homestay. It would be the train that carried my newfound friends and me to the center of the city to get culturally shocked. These orange trains would carry me when I later come back to study for a year and work for many years more.
The orange train.
That’s where my adventure in Japan began, and this blog is where I share what I’ve stumbled upon.