I use the “beef seaweed soup substitution method” a lot these days. When working, I ask myself the question “Wouldn’t it be much better to cook a bowl of beef seaweed soup for someone I love in that time?” If it’s more valuable than cooking beef seaweed soup, I proceed with the task; if not, I don’t.

Until April this year, getting even a bowl of seaweed soup from my heart wasn’t easy. Because I set the hurdle of the beef seaweed soup substitution method very low. I believed I should just handle all the incoming work and things I had to do. And the results were quite disastrous.

So I started raising the beef seaweed soup hurdle very high. The seaweed soup cooked just in thought since then would probably be enough to feed five thousand people with twelve bowls left over. Though it’s a secret that I actually haven’t cooked any seaweed soup throughout the entire first half.

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One of the tasks that recently passed through the rigorous beef seaweed soup gate was re-reading Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist.” I apologize to those who haven’t read the book, but Santiago’s treasure was under a tree next to the monastery where he spent a night at the beginning of the book. Doesn’t it remind you of the lyrics from Cho Yong-pil’s song “I Wish It Would Be Like This Now”? The climax lyrics of this song are as follows:

I wish it would be like this now
Let my tired heart heal in your shade
Tell the person about to leave on a long journey
That what's precious is right beside them

The song lyrics sound like saying that leaving is meaningless, so let’s take care of our surroundings. But the book focuses more on the process than the result. In the book, Santiago could only find out where the true treasure was after going through all that process. Would Santiago have known the location of the true treasure if he hadn’t left?

Like this, there are things you can only know by leaving. When you get swept up in surrounding matters, it becomes difficult to look at yourself from an objective perspective, so if you throw yourself into a completely unrelated place, you can view everything from an objective perspective. After leaving like that, you realize various aspects of yourself, just as the unfamiliar surrounding scenery is new.

When people commonly talk about “leaving,” they think of physical situation changes. When you say the verb “to leave,” physical location changes like moving or traveling come to mind. But we also experience other forms of “leaving.” Changes in my preferences and domain changes in my career are also a kind of “leaving.”

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In the second quarter of this year, I thought deeply about my career. I strongly felt that I wanted to experience the immersion of my late teens and early-to-mid twenties again. I spent time pondering what I should do and in which domain to experience this moment of immersion again.

The opportunity to read this book also came from a conversation with a friend about worries about the future. What kind of work should I do and live? What do I really want to do? As we shared worries similar to laments, we both found ourselves retracing some point in the past. It wasn’t simply recalling good memories of the past, but recalling a topic that could penetrate life - what we were most focused on in moments when we didn’t need to worry about various practical concerns. So we were both thinking of “The Alchemist.” That’s not a common occurrence, right? I started reading it.

The book presents treasure as a goal for intuitive goal presentation, but it’s closer to a MacGuffin. The treasure isn’t that important; the biggest theme is Santiago living out his Personal Legend. And in that process, Santiago loses his money several times and even faces a crisis where he might lose his life if he doesn’t become the wind. He gets frustrated and angry in the face of all these adversities, but he overcomes them by listening to his own heart.

The moment I realized this, it felt like most of the concerns I had earlier disappeared. Thinking about it again, the reason my friend and I were recalling the past wasn’t just simple nostalgia saying “childhood was good!” but rather the thought that it was the pure joy that our hearts were telling us in times when there was no noise triggered by various real-world problems. Like this, all answers might be within ourselves.

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Now that the direction of the story has been set, let me talk about practical matters. Throughout my career, I’ve grown by solving problems by doing new things or doing better at things I’ve already been doing. That’s why “what problem to solve” was always followed by “how to solve the problem well.” Early in my career, I could feel like I was growing simply by spending more time, but after my career accumulated, simply increasing the amount of time didn’t solve things. Naturally, growth also became an important topic this first half.

Looking at people who grow quickly, there are those who excel at anything within months of starting. On the other hand, there are people who remain stagnant even after years of investment. Let me retrace the beginning of this year when I received disastrous results on what I had tried to do.

Before, whenever I received such disastrous results, it always concluded with thinking I should manage my time better. This year too, I almost reached the same conclusion, but there was advice that greatly changed my direction. The advice was to approach it not as managing time, but as managing energy.

My head rang with a thud. To accomplish things, you ultimately need sufficient energy. Working hard without knowing it’s hard because it’s so fun lacks sustainability. After that, countless moments of not wanting to do it await. To endure that, basic physical strength is important. To get up when you don’t want to after work and exercise, to do things you don’t want to do to achieve your goals.

Focusing, building physical strength, just executing… I feel quite embarrassed mentioning such basic things again, but nothing seems more appropriate as a clue to solving complex problems. We live in an uncertain and complex world, and the flow of the world is too changeable for us to predict specifically. In such situations, through the process of facing and solving problems this first half, I came to realize that the only thing we can do is to firmly maintain the basics mentioned above.

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The harder the problems I face, the more I get the impression that fundamentals become more important. Just like how the speaker in “I Wish It Would Be Like This Now” and Santiago in “The Alchemist” both return and learn what’s truly precious.

All the concerns mentioned above are ultimately for a happy life. The beef seaweed soup gate is ultimately not for working efficiently, but a kind of resolution to save time so I can at least cook a bowl of beef seaweed soup for the people I love.

It’s also interesting that this piece I pulled out for my first half retrospective ended up being polished for a month, and that the end of that polishing is on a plane returning from completing one departure. When this departure ends and the end of the year approaches, when I look at this piece again, I hope I will have served quite a lot of beef seaweed soup to the people I love.