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Current problem As a lifelong learner of a wide range of subjects, I need robust tools to manage my acquired knowledge and act as an idea pad for content creation. My minimalist mindset also requires the number of deployed tools to be as few as possible. This post is a summary of my journey in notetaking with Obsidian. I’m going to go over why Obsidian is a great (although not perfect) tool for notetaking, project management and journaling....

Winter is a wonderful time to slow down, savor our learnt experiences this year and recap what went well and what we should adjust next year. Like Kari Leibowitz stated in How to Winter, the dark cold season can be enjoyed and utilized with the right mindset. I heed Kari’s advice and recollect the gems I collected in 2023 to align myself in the right direction this year. In 2023, I continued my learning journey both professional and personally....

Learning is my biggest hobby, and I am always looking at ways to improve both my skillset and learning methods. As my main professional interest is using NLP to build recommenders, I have been using the kinesthetic learning approach in the past few years, to learn while actually coding personal projects using NLTK, SpaCy and various Japanese language modelling libraries. This approach, while fun and provides instant feedback, lacks a foundational structure....

In today’s competitive business landscape, companies often focus their innovative power on creating new products or technologies, but forget to prioritize the most important aspect: creating unique value for their customers. I recently read a book キーエンス 高付加価値経営の論理 on Keyence’s value-added approach and how it contributes to its high profit margin....

People often have stereotype or fantasy that artists receive their inspiration from high above, as if the “drop of gift” appear all of a sudden. Wouldn’t it be eye-opening if professionals reveal how that process actually works? In fact, numerous books have been written by artists to disprove the “muse” myth, showing that it is nothing romantic but just consist of routine hard work. In this blog post, I’ll talk about what unites novelist Murakami Haruki, advertising legend James Webb Young and choreographer Twyla Tharp in the creation process....

Now that generative AI has become a household name, most people has already chatted with a bot whether you’re aware of it or not. Some users are aware of its sporadic shortfalls and especially hallucinations, and thus will deliberately take its output with a grain of salt. In areas such as generating a poem or image for fun, unbound creativity might not hurt that much. But what if it is in a religious setting, when there are straight thresholds for interpretation?...

Nakano Yoshihisa, a 79-year-old entrepreneur, is a role model I am going to introduce in this blog post. I first came to know him via his book, and was deeply moved by his youthful energy to live everyday as a new journey to explore. who is Nakano Yoshihisa Growing up in post-war years without parents, Nakano was used to living alone and making all decisions by himself. His resume included developing new products/services in various department stores in both Japan and overseas....

The decline of physical bookstores is a common problem worldwide, but is especially severe in Japan due to a rapid aging population. As an avid reader, who always dashes to the nearby bookstore wherever I visit to check out content people care about, I am keen to learn any new business solutions in this area. In this post, let’s take a look at some of the innovative things Japanese booksellers are doing in this headwind....

The advent of mobile phone makes consuming news an anytime, anywhere habit. With it comes anxiety and other mental health issues induced by nonstop consumption of negative content. We’re going to look into the reasons driving us to overdose on negative content, despite knowing for sure that it feels unpleasant. Then we’ll examine some coping strategies to stay informed while maintaining our composure. why do we consume negative content? We are programmed by our genes to be more attentive to negativity....

A rapidly aging population is a common phenomenon for most developed countries. This is especially true in Japan, where it is estimated that by 2040, a third of the population will be over 65. This impacts various public policies such as social support system and a shrinking work population. Due to this trend, the government is keen on promoting an active and healthy elderly population. In this blog post, let’s look at a local role model for aging wisely, and what advices she can offer to the younger generation....