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22 May 2007

Skybox

I wound up having five different assistants in Nara (not six), and they helped me for a couple days each. That can be a problem because you do not get the chance to become a team in that short a period, but in Nara it worked out just fine.

Wakayama was totally different, especially in the beginning. Here we got no for an answer time and again. I was travelling with Miho (that's actually Yoshiko, above--more about her in the next post) and I felt that it would be better if we moved to the south, somewhere halfway down the coast, and find ourselves a good hotel from which to work. The only thing was that the appointments were again scheduled throughout the week and all in the north around Wakayama City. Blast!

And that’s when I lost it myself: after two days of struggling and getting no for an answer I began to lose my patience and felt uneasy about what was going on. I gave Miho a hard time about the appointments and in doing that I made the biggest mistake I could have made. I killed the team spirit and wasted my precious, vulnerable assistant. And nobody was more sensitive to that than Miho. I apologize for that and I want to stress that she was a great help while she was with me, and that I enjoyed her company very much.

At the same time, I also realized what we were doing wrong. We were simply trying too hard. We pushed the rope instead of pulling it gently and we were aiming only for paradise, paying no attention to the road we were travelling on. You see how easy it is to fall into the trap, even for me.

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