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i've been been fortunate to have not faced real fear so far. however, i do think uncertainty is a situation i've regularly embraced, although i'm unsure if it's because of the thrill or simply pure stupidity and or laziness on my part. a favorite example is when i hitchhiked the entire japanese archipelago in about a month with less than the equivalent of $100 in my wallet back when i was a university exchange student there.
basically, i went to japan without having any language skills prior to going. long story short, i'd already felt burned out from college towards the end of my freshman year, saw a flier for study abroad opportunities on campus, applied and was somehow accepted to a year-long exchange program despite having no affiliation with the japanese language department. and at the end of my first semester there, ~5 months in, we had over a month-long break where i had nothing planned. i'd heard a dutch student talk about hitchhiking and so with very little money i decided that's what i'd do, just packed some clothes and my running shoes.
my first step was to take a bus down to kagoshima, which is the most southern point of kyushu. from there i knew i wanted to go north and so made a sign indicating i was heading to kumamoto. amazingly a truck driver picked me up and actually drove me there! the man tried to give me cash while driving and sadly the bill flew out the window; and then he bought me dinner as well as a hotel room, which i was super sketched out about but then he just left! the walks could get long, once when i was walking through a ~800m tunnel in the middle of nowhere, a couple of young guys, also college aged, stopped and asked if i wanted a ride. one of the guys took me to his family's house where they insisted i stay for what ended up being almost a week.
one of my favorite hacks was using a 500 KRW coin, which is roughly the same size as a 500 JPY coin but 10x the value, on japanese vending machines. it was stealing, in retrospect, but it kept a 19-year-old me on my toes and moving. by the time i was able to leave kyushu back to honshu, i'd slept on park benches, received money from a homeless person, and 10x'd my japanese language skills more than i'd done at the university.
such stories continued until i reached tokyo where through the repeated kindness of strangers, i was taken in and cared for. after 4 weeks, i was a bit exhausted and didn't want to go any farther. but this trip left such a huge impression on me that i finished my year, graduated university and ended up getting hired for my first job in japan (just before the sub prime crisis!). and upon returning, i finished the remaining legs up to hokkaido.
this willingness to embrace uncertainty has led me to be abroad since then and it's continued into my career as well, getting into tech, startups and then frontier tech like crypto. and though i'm not sure where i'm going for certain, i've enjoyed the journey so far, particularly as i feel i must tone it down a bit, getting older and because of kids and family obligations.
not sure if this meets your requirements, but enjoyed strolling down memory lane! 0 reply
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