Why the Finns Are Different

Whereas America and Japan's education systems are increasingly high-stakes, winner-takes-all competitions for scarce resources, the core value in Finland's school system is equality—wa. Harmony.² The country has no private schools. Even universities are public. All students not only start out with the same opportunities but they also leave the school system with remarkably similar outcomes. The gap between high and low achievers, as well as between rich and poor students, is small.³ “We don't know what our kids will turn out like—we can't know if one first-grader will become a famous composer, or another a famous scientist,” Krista Kiuru, the Finnish minister of education and science, told The Atlantic. “Everyone should have an equal chance to make the most of their skills.”⁴

The Finns made a conscious choice decades ago to create a harmonious education system. Up until the 1960s, Finland separated students at age 11 into two different tracks, one more academic and one more practical. The decision to completely redesign the school system with a focus on giving all children the same education was, according to Jukka Sarjala, a former director of the country's National Board of Education, partly a moral one. The goal was balance, pure and simple. Some people worried that achievement levels would fall; instead, excellence was the byproduct of balance and harmony. Wa in action.

For children and parents struggling through the chronically underfunded, underperforming, and overstressed American and Japanese education systems, all this friendly cooperation makes Finns sound like strange beings from another planet, not just another country. Pasi Sahlberg, the author of a recent book on Finnish schools, shares this quote from another Finnish writer: “Real winners do not compete.”⁵

What? Real winners do not compete? Fierce competition is deeply ingrained in American culture and in the cultures of many other nations. To Western ears, “Real winners do not compete” may sound like 1984-style doublespeak, like “war is peace” or “freedom is slavery.” Next you'll be telling us that up is down. Black is white. What's going on here?

Fighting for Peace

The idea that real winners do not compete is not only at the heart of Finland's surprising educational success, but it is also at the heart of aikido as well. At a very fundamental level, the physical techniques in aikido are based on leverage, timing, and mechanics—pure physical efficiency. Why compete muscle to muscle if you are faced with an attacker who outweighs you by 100 pounds and is clearly stronger than you? There is always a more efficient way than entering into a senseless competition. At a philosophical level, aikido teaches you to tame your ego and find harmony with your fears. It's the ego that wants to scream out, “I must win no matter what!” But the flip side of that drive to win is often a fear of losing.

An aikido master would never pick a fight. In fact, not fighting and finding a better, more harmonious outcome is often the most efficient way to end a conflict. When a fight is necessary and there is no other way out of a physical altercation, of course, an aikido master would be up to the challenge. But the ultimate goal is always wa—harmony.

Master Ueshiba, the founder of aikido, was a soldier, samurai, and master of many other deadly martial arts. He was also a very spiritual man who believed that peace on Earth was attainable. These two parts of his personality and background combined to create aikido. The idea is that you never have to compete with your opponent. As soon as your opponent has made the decision to attack you, he has stepped outside of harmony, and that means he has already lost.

From a Western perspective, this idea of fighting to achieve harmony instead of fighting to crush your opponent is counterintuitive. But the idea of harmony, or wa, is deeply ingrained in Japanese culture. The culture encourages solutions to problems that are good for the group or society as a whole. It discourages competition in the traditional sense. Of course, this doesn't mean passivity. Far from it. It means focusing your energy and resources in a way that creates peak performance and success without causing prolonged, distracting strife. As a Westerner living in Japan, I found much to admire in the idea and practice of wa.

In aikido, harmony is combined with grueling physical training to create a class of warriors striving for peace—“warriors of the light,” as Paulo Coelho has called them.⁶ An aikido master like Ueshiba would be capable of taking on any opponent, trained in any discipline, armed or unarmed. But the goal and spirit of aikido is different from most other martial arts. The Finnish idea that real winners do not compete would make perfect sense to an aikido master. In aikido, you are not so much competing as you are balancing.

Fighting to protect your opponent does not mean being unassertive. As I learned during my time in the Marine Corps, one of the most elite fighting forces in the world, securing a swift, efficient, and decisive victory is the best way to keep your opponent from harm. In fact, striving for harmony is often the secret to true, lasting victory. Think about it: Would you rather be bogged down in trench warfare for years or move swiftly toward a win-win resolution of the conflict?

Harmonious Hiring

I spent many years working with Western Fortune 500 companies that were expanding into Japan, opening new offices in Asia, or beginning joint ventures with other non-Japanese companies. One of my responsibilities was as an executive recruiter, or headhunter. To successfully do business in Japan, Western firms needed to have executives with impeccable Japanese language skills and an ability to fully navigate Japanese culture. Occasionally, we'd find a Western expat whose language skills were good enough, but for the most part we needed to hire bilingual Japanese professionals. But what local successful Japanese professionals would want to take a chance on an untested new project run by a bunch of clueless Westerners?

In Japan, the corporate landscape is dominated by massive conglomerates known as keiretsu. Corporate culture at these firms is all-embracing. Many young, single men just starting out actually live in corporate dorms. It's like joining the military and living in a barracks. And yes—these big firms are still mostly staffed by men. Even today, in Japan women find it difficult to get hired for certain corporate jobs and, once they are hired, find the glass ceiling very, very low.

Young Japanese women go to the same elite colleges as their male counterparts. As a matter of fact, mirroring similar trends in the United States, more Japanese women than men now have college degrees.⁹ They push themselves just as hard and are just as successful. Many study abroad and develop top-notch foreign language skills—primarily in English. And yet, when they graduate, they either can't find a job or they get hired for entry-level clerical positions and find they can't get promoted. Moreover, once they get married, these high-achieving females are expected to resign so they can stay at home and start raising a family.

Surveying this landscape, I realized there was a way to win without competing. I could hire these incredibly talented, brilliant Japanese women and take advantage of this huge pool of bilingual professionals that the local Japanese companies were totally ignoring. The Western firms we were working with were thrilled to hire these highly educated bilingual women. The women were thrilled to get careers worthy of their skills. It was a win-win-win situation—even the Japanese firms that were reluctant to hire women, our potential competitors, won in the sense that they could carry on their corporate cultures without disruption.

Rather than compete head-to-head with local Japanese companies and get bogged down in trench warfare, fighting over the same pool of male worker bees they had always hired, I found a solution that allowed me to win without competing. As I was taught in the Marine Corps, I found and exploited a weak spot. As I learned in aikido, I used leverage and positioning to overcome a much stronger opponent. This is the essence of harmony—wa. The fact that I was able to advance the careers of a portion of the Japanese population that was unjustly cut off from professional opportunity was just a bonus.

This approach to the problem of hiring was perfectly in the spirit of wa, and in the spirit of aikido. And it illustrates the incredible potential of an approach to conflict that prioritizes harmony and strives to meet everyone's needs. When you aim to protect your opponent as well as yourself, you often end up seeing and seizing new opportunities that you wouldn't otherwise have seen.

The New Polaroid: Winning through Cooperation

Like Kodak, Polaroid was slow to respond to the digital revolution in photography. For a company known exclusively for printed photos, this could have been a fatal mistake. In fact, it almost was. Thanks in part to its failure to embrace digital photography—and in part to some legal troubles—Polaroid went through bankruptcy, twice, and churned through six CEOs in four years.¹⁰

Polaroid could have failed. This iconic brand could have vanished completely. It could also have attempted to compete head-to-head with the companies making the digital cameras that had nearly put it out of business. Instead, Polaroid went a completely different route: It sought out strategic partnerships.¹¹

The company realized that its still-well-known brand was its biggest asset. They focused on three traits they felt defined their brand—sharing, visualization, and affordability—and went looking for companies with whom they could partner that were making products matching those traits. They licensed the Polaroid brand to companies making tablets, televisions, and a variety of small cameras designed around sharing.¹² For example, they've got a couple of small digital cameras that have built-in printers, and a small photo printer that connects to your smartphone to instantly print your Instagrams and other digital snapshots.

Instead of competing in a market where they had no expertise and their competitors had a five- or 10-year head start, Polaroid went in a different direction. Becoming a brand-management company instead of a manufacturing company was a huge change for them. Many companies wouldn't have been able to make this kind of change. Corporations may not be people (except, oddly, in the legal sense), but they do have egos. They're run by people, after all. They can react emotionally; they can go to great lengths to avoid losing face. Polaroid had to let go of that ego in order to let go of its manufacturing business and lend out its name to other companies.

The benefits of this unexpected move were huge. Polaroid's profit margins have expanded significantly, since its overhead is so much lower. It's succeeding, and it's helping a bunch of small companies succeed in the process. The companies now making Polaroid-brand cameras would have had to struggle for years to build up the kind of brand recognition they gained instantly by partnering with Polaroid. Instead, thanks to Polaroid's decision to approach the problem in a spirit of harmony, they're now succeeding together.

Have you ever faced a situation like this in your life? Have you ever felt like you're too far behind your competition to ever catch up? Maybe you somehow got off on the wrong foot with your boss while your colleague seems to be permanently ensconced on her good side. Maybe you felt like you'd never get that goodwill back. But what if, instead of competing with this colleague, you could discover a way to practice wa and achieve true victory through harmony? When you look at a situation in the spirit of harmony and start to think about win-win situations, new opportunities often present themselves. That is the Mushin Way.

Harmonious Progress

Harmony can mean cooperating with the people around you, whether they're colleagues or potential competitors—or both. But it can also mean something deeper. It can mean being in harmony with your circumstances and not trying to push or force a situation.

If you've ever tried to learn to play an instrument or speak a new language—or lose weight—you know progress doesn't come in a straight line. For many of us, this is a challenge. It's why so many guitars sit gathering dust in the backs of closets, and so many New Year's resolutions fail in February. When you can't see that you're making progress, it's hard to stay motivated.

But of course, you are making progress. It's just not happening as quickly as you want it to. I remember the frustration I felt when I was first learning aikido. I could see the beautiful movements my teachers were making—why wouldn't my body just execute those movements? I felt the same way again when I had part of my lung removed during my cancer treatments and had to relearn many of the skills I had gained over years of painstaking practice. It was like going back to being a beginner again. It was a very humbling and very frustrating experience. My fight with cancer was the same way—every time it seemed like I was getting better, I'd have another bad day.

It would be wonderful if progress happened in the way it feels like it should—a straight line, going steadily upward. It would be great if you could learn five new words in Italian every day and, at the end of a year, you'd know all the words and—hey, presto! You speak Italian. But in reality, progress comes in waves. You move forward and then you fall back. You learn a bunch of new words and then you get confused on the grammar. You lose three pounds and then you put two back on.

Understanding How Progress Really Works

I like to picture progress as an upward sloping sine wave.¹³ Remember those from math class?

A sine wave is a repetitive curve that moves up and down across an axis. Making progress in learning a new skill or advancing toward a goal is like following a sine wave along an axis that's slanting upward. Sometimes you'll be on the upswing, and sometimes you'll feel like you're sliding backward. But the overall slope of the line is upward. You will get to your goal. It just won't always feel like you're moving in the right direction.

Of course, we'd all love that curve to be as flat as possible. We'd all love to see the impact of our efforts right away. In business, if you've just gotten a promotion, started a new project, or if you're starting a new company, it's hard not to be impatient to see results—particularly if you have other stakeholders breathing down your neck. You may feel outside pressure to show results, as well as your natural internal drive to succeed. But true harmony lies in producing results over the long term and not panicking over short-term setbacks.

You must focus on staying at your one-point, nen (as discussed in Chapter 4), and not let the pressure to succeed knock you off your course. You have to be able to accept your situation for what it is—that means seeing it clearly and not focusing on a distracting tangent, but instead moving into a state of mushin where you reflect the world as it is (as discussed in Chapter 5). If you're working on bringing a new product to market and consumers aren't biting, the harmonious response is to see through your customers' eyes and take relevant action. Don't just hope it will start to sell. Harmony means seeing the situation as it is and adjusting as necessary.

Harmony means accepting things as they are, and as they are not. That means accepting with gratitude the progress we make, and also accepting with equanimity, or heiki (as discussed in Chapter 1), the setbacks we inevitably face. You will make mistakes. You will have good days and bad days. The key is not to despair on the bad days—to remember that the overall trend is upward. That as long as you keep going and don't give up, that sine wave of progress will start to pick you up again.

One way to hold onto this sense of harmony and balance is to track your progress. If you're trying to learn a language, see if you can take tests on a regular basis or join a conversation group and get people to rate your proficiency. Tracking your progress over the long term will help you look beyond day-to-day setbacks and see the overall trend.

As I explained in Chapter 8, journaling can also help you get a harmonious view of your progress. Writing down specific action steps to move your business and personal projects forward brings the sine wave to life. When you feel like you're not getting anywhere, it can be helpful to look back to a month or a year ago—how much were you struggling then? You may find you have come further than you think. Gaining this kind of perspective will help you hold to your one-point and remain in harmony with your situation.

The Honorable No

Seeking harmony means understanding the reality of your situation and accepting that situation as it is, and as it is not. It means looking for a win-win solution and finding opportunities to cooperate. It means remembering you don't have to compete to win. But it doesn't mean being passive.

In fact, in some cases the harmonious path actually involves starting a conflict. A false peace in which one or both parties is still unhappy is no real peace at all. Staying at a job you hate just because you want to avoid upsetting your boss or adding extra work to your colleagues' to-do lists is not harmonious. Approaching that situation in the spirit of wa requires you to speak up, give reasonable notice, and find a vocation that better suits you. After all, a solution isn't win-win if it's only a win for the other person and not for you.

For many of us, remembering to take responsible (not selfish) care of our own needs is the hardest part of seeking harmony. It's all too easy to spend our lives worrying about everyone else's needs first. We know our parents expect certain things of us, so we focus more on finding a “good job” than finding a job that fully uses our talents and pushes us to grow. We know our bosses are under a lot of pressure, so we take on more and more projects until we feel completely overwhelmed. We know our spouse wants to take time off to be home with the kids, so we stay on the corporate ladder even though it's not the career we dreamed of; or we'd like to take time off to watch our kids grow up, but we rush back to work in order to maintain the lifestyle we think we should have.

Mahatma Gandhi once said that “a ‘no’ uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a ‘yes’ merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.”¹⁴ I call this “the honorable no,” the no that protects you and your needs, the no that opens the way to true harmony because it respects your energies. Understanding and honoring your opponent's energies is crucial in any conflict, but you can't ignore the other side of the equation. Gandhi obviously couldn't ignore the oppression of his people just to keep a surface-level peace with Britain. True harmony had to mean freedom first.

When in your life have you needed to utter an honorable no? You may not be a freedom fighter, but you do need to build a life that protects your own ki as well as the energies of those around you. In Chapter 9, I shared the story of the time I turned down the opportunity to buy my boss's consulting company in Japan. That was an honorable no. When have you needed to start a conflict in order to seek harmony?

The Honorable No That Saved My Company—and My Sanity

I built my aikido academy from the ground up. It took me years to make the business a success. I worked harder than I'd ever worked before. In fact, as discussed in Chapter 4, I worked way too hard, went years without taking a vacation, and completely burned myself out.

I love my aikido academy. I'm incredibly proud of it. I love my students and staff, and I'm amazed at the many lives from ages 4 to 84 that I have positively impacted over many years. But once I finally practiced what I preached and found my true one-point, I realized I was starting to hate the day-to-day management of the place. The stress of managing the business day in and day out was preventing me from being the best leader I could be. I was caught in my very own success trap, having achieved an unprecedented level of successful misery. Be careful what you wish for!

Taking some time to think about that situation helped me find the clarity to honorably say no to being successfully miserable. The more I thought about it, the more I started to think that my true calling was to bring the principles of aikido to a wider stage as a keynote speaker, author, and consultant. That's why you're holding this book in your hand.

I had to honorably say no to my very successful aikido academy in order to say yes to this higher calling. I had to honorably say no to running the day-to-day operations of my academy to create true harmony. This no wasn't what my staff wanted to hear—it meant a lot of change and upheaval, and change can make all of us anxious. But in the end, this no led to greater harmony because it respected my energies and my need to direct my energies in a new direction.

It also respected my staff's energies. Saying no and stepping back allowed my staff to step up. It gave them new opportunities to develop and grow as leaders. Ultimately, it was the right answer for everyone involved. But I had to start a conflict in order to get to that deeper state of harmony.

Where in your life right now are you saying yes merely to please or to avoid trouble? Where are you preserving a surface-level, false harmony at the expense of your own needs and ultimately everyone else's? I urge you to honorably say no and push forward to true harmony. If there's a situation in your life where you're holding onto ego and perpetuating needless conflict instead of looking for ways to cooperate, I urge you to find a way to win without competing. Make Gandhi and me proud.

Aikido teaches us that seeking peace and harmony is honorable. It also teaches us that there are different ways to achieve peace and harmony. You can't resolve a conflict by simply burying your own true thoughts, feelings, and goals any more than you can resolve a conflict by clinging to an oppositional stance and digging in to endless trench warfare. Harmony is found when all energies are in balance—yours and your opponent's.