You Aren't Stuck Being Who You Were: You Can Become Who You Want to Become
Deciding Your Own Identity
I used to put off the things I didn't want to do and drift through life lazily, and because of that, I don't have many good memories from my school years. Japan is a society obsessed with university entrance exams — from a young age you're taught that you need to study hard and keep your grades up all the way through elementary, middle, and high school. But within Japan's rote-memorization style of education, I never managed to study steadily, day after day, and I was never exactly what you'd call an excellent student. There's a genetic component to raw intelligence, sure, but combine that with an inability to grind consistently, and it becomes very hard to be judged "excellent" within the Japanese school system.
In my case especially, I had strong ADHD-like traits. I forgot things constantly — missing homework deadlines, showing up late, genuinely unable to wake up in the morning no matter how hard I tried, unable to focus in class, doodling in the margins of my notebook instead of listening. I was scolded by teachers all the time for forgetting to turn things in, and I'd shrink into myself every time, carrying it without much support from my parents on that front.
Japan has a strong culture around punctuality — being late simply isn't okay, and an orderly, on-schedule life is treated as a virtue. By the time I left Japan for France at twenty, I'd more or less developed something like a trauma around the idea that I was incapable of functioning within society's systems. That alone was enough to make me decide I would never start my working life in Japan. On top of that, my high school had a low hensachi (a standardized academic ranking score you don't really hear about outside Japan), which only deepened a visceral fear that I was destined to become something like the trash of society — stupid, unable to follow the rules, a burden on everyone around me.
Then I started working in France, and all of that stress simply vanished. Plenty of colleagues showed up later than I did. Office life meant slow mornings and afternoons spent chatting over coffee, people laughing together while working in the same room — something I'd never once heard of at a Japanese company. I was genuinely shocked, at first, by how often everyone stepped out for a coffee break or just sat around talking.
But it turned out this created a great atmosphere at work. It let me build flat, relaxed relationships with colleagues and managers, without the constant tension I was used to — and that fed directly into higher productivity. The numbers back this up: France's GDP per hour worked sits at roughly $90, against Japan's $60, and Japan has ranked dead last among G7 nations in hourly productivity for over fifty years running, despite working some of the longest hours in the developed world. Working less tense and working flatter doesn't mean working less effectively — often, it's the opposite.
Sources: OECD, "GDP per hour worked" (2024 data); Japan Productivity Center, reported via The Japan Times (Dec 2025); Nippon.com, "Japan's Productivity Ranks Lowest Among G7 Nations for 50 Straight Years."
By Japanese standards, I was the kind of person typically rated "below average"...
By Japanese standards, I was the kind of person typically rated "below average" — someone who showed up late and couldn't follow the rules. But changing my environment, and being surrounded by different assumptions about what's normal, changed everything. In the very areas where I'd once been written off as incapable, I found something closer to real confidence than I'd ever had — and that confidence built its own momentum, pushing me to keep improving the same areas that confidence had unlocked.
There's actually a name for this. Psychologists call it the Golem effect when low expectations from others quietly erode your performance, and its inverse, the Galatea effect, when a shift in your own self-perception alone is enough to lift it. I'd spent years inside a Golem effect without knowing it. France is where the Galatea effect finally got its chance.
Math is the clearest example I have. In Japan I was bad at it, full stop. But at university in France, I took a bookkeeping and accounting class for the first time and scored 19 out of 20 — first in the class. I wasn't naturally good at it; that score came from grinding steadily through the material and asking classmates for help with both the subject and the French language. I went straight to French friends who actually had bookkeeping experience and asked them to teach me, and ended up scoring nearly double what they did. Someone made a comment that landed somewhere between backhanded compliment and jealousy: "well, of course — you're Asian." It's almost funny, since that's the exact opposite of how I actually relate to math. But pulling off a result in France that would have been unthinkable back in Japan gave me real confidence in myself.
What I'm trying to say is this: no matter what failures or successes happened in your past, it's the you of right now who builds the self living in the present. What matters is whether you can absorb all of it — the failures and the successes alike — and act, right now, toward a new goal.
Honestly, I still catch myself flinching before trying things, replaying old failures, sliding into "someone like me probably can't do this." That's fine. It's okay to act while still uncertain, still hesitating — it's precisely in those moments that taking action matters most. Even just 1% a day is enough: write something, make a piece of content, build a product, play some sport, eat something good. I just believe this process of doing connects, eventually, to a better version of myself tomorrow — and I act on that belief. Thinking about it isn't enough. What matters is actually doing it.
The past can't be changed, and it's easy to get stuck in it. But it's just one part of a longer process — a failure to learn from, a hinge to grow through — not a verdict to keep relitigating against yourself. Don't tie the present too tightly to the past, and hold on — hard as it is — to the belief that your mindset can change starting now, starting any time. Push the Galatea effect as far as it'll go. Keep updating the idea of who you are, the way you'd push a software update: you 1.0, then 2.0, then 3.0, each one a little better than the last.
That's exactly why I built the 1% Better Diary.