"Expertise Will Save You": Palmistry and Career Theory in the Dutch Countryside🔮

"You should live your life with expertise."

He said this calmly while looking at my palm.

"The one thing you must never forget in your career is expertise. It will save your life."

--- Wait, is my life not going well?

At that time, I had just graduated from graduate school and had come to the Dutch countryside for my first job, which I had obtained with great difficulty.

I was going to be involved in an IT project at the office of a huge American multinational corporation, working side-by-side with Indian engineers.

It was my first full-time job.

However, I wasn't in a sophisticated IT city like Silicon Valley, but in a rural town where you'd want to ask, "Where in the Netherlands is this?"

There were many migrant engineers from India at the workplace to support the IT projects.

Back then, everything was vague for me—what kind of life I should lead and what kind of career I should build.

Although I had gotten a job just by going with the flow, I didn't know where my path was leading.

At that time, just after the dot-com bubble burst, outsourcing to India was accelerating in the IT industry.

As a result, many engineers were being sent from India to support the projects of large American companies.

He was one of them.

"I think I'll go back to my country in two or three years."

Saying that, the small, quiet engineer, who had left his wife back home, continued to code calmly every day along with his colleagues from the Indian team.

--- And for some reason, today it's palmistry.

I had become friends with my Indian colleagues, and sometimes they would give me work advice.

I was the only Japanese person in a foreign land. In my days driven by loneliness and anxiety, interacting with them became my emotional support.

Then one day, he suddenly said.

“I can read palms.”

“Really? Then I’d like you to take a look at mine.”

I was a young person driven by a vague anxiety about the future.

That’s why I wanted a signpost—fortune-telling, tarot, horoscopes, anything would do.

After lunch, I held out my left hand to him. He looked at it closely and told me a few things.

But I don’t remember any of the details at all.

However, there was one thing.

The words he repeated over and over again stayed in my heart forever.

“You must absolutely develop expertise. That will save your life.”

“But don’t worry. You’ll find that expertise eventually.”

——Really? Where is it?

Expertise.

When you’re young and someone tells you to “develop expertise,” it doesn’t really click. It’s too vague and elusive.

While thinking that my life would surely continue for a long time, countless options flickered in my mind.

If anything, I was full of anxiety about that very thing.

What is my expertise?


How should I go about deepening it?

What kind of work should I master?

To begin with, I don’t even know if I like my current job.

“What kind of expertise should I have?”

I asked him.

He smiled quietly and said,

“I don’t know that either. But it will come to you eventually, so just watch and wait. It will be fine.”

———No, if expertise just fell into your lap by watching and waiting, everyone would be an expert...

For the year that followed, I continued to work while feeling my way through the dark.

Back in Japan, I was in an awkward position—neither a fresh graduate nor a second-year recruit.

From career-lost to “professional,” I changed jobs repeatedly. Twice in just one year.

Even so, a headhunter found my resume. It seems my graduate school experience in the Netherlands caught their eye.

And so, unexpectedly, I ended up in the ultimate professional role.

That job built the expertise I have today.

———Expertise is something that becomes visible only after you have built it up.

It is natural to understand nothing at first.

Every day, while honestly facing the work in front of you, you keep asking yourself, “What will this turn into?” and “Is there a career unique to me at the end of this path?”

In that process, at an unexpected moment, you begin to see what only you can do.

And when that moment arrives, your life begins to move in a big way.

A career is not just about changing jobs repeatedly.

It is about "investing in and designing your own career" while strategically weaving in job changes.

Perhaps expertise is something that forms before you even realize it.

Expertise is not something you "find," but something you "build up."

When you face your work every day, there are moments when you think, "This might suit me," "I might be good at this," or "It might be interesting to delve deeper into this."

Don't let those moments pass you by; try them out, keep at them, and deepen them.

———"You should live with expertise."

I still cannot forget the words an Indian engineer said to me in that remote Dutch countryside.

That is the foundation of a career.

Now, do you have an expertise you can confidently be proud of?

And does that expertise make you stronger?

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