My tax accountant said that the settlement of accounts of the last year was not good. The reason is that I did not work hard. I watched the account book. Wow, sooner or later, I will starve to death! After two days of depressive mood, I went to a public bath. Admittance fee of 750 yen (about 10 dollars) gave me an idea of 500,000 yen (about 6,500 dollars)! In the bath, I developed a new two-day workshop about encouragement.
After I came back from the bath, I said to my secretary, “Behold! We shall be rich!” She laughed and said, “May raccoons prosper you!” A Japanese proverb: “Don’t count the skins of raccoons before you catch them.” In English they say, “Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched.”
The basic idea of the new course is to explain “encouragement” from the concept of “courage”. Jane Griffith and Robert Powers wrote in their “Adlerian Lexicon”: “Courage is the willingness to act in line with the social interest.” In Japan, however, encouragement is often understood as a method to soothe people. I decoded the sentence as follows: “Courage is the willingness to act in line with the social interest, contributing to people and to the world without self attachment, even when mental suffering or physical danger may be expected.” I designed a textbook. It was too hard a work to prepare 17 pages in two weeks, but I did it. Anyway, I need raccoons!
Fortunately, many people came to learn. They are satisfied to obtain systematic understanding about encouragement. I am also satisfied not only because I have gotten many raccoons, but also because people in other areas of Japan request me to come to teach. It is indeed true that necessity is the mother of invention.