At 13, I turned to delinquency and gave up on studying.
Then, from my teens into my early twenties, I also fell into severe drug addiction.
Looking back, I think I spent a long time living in a way that seemed to weaken both my mind and brain.
At the time, I barely even had the idea of “nurturing myself” or “helping myself grow.”
Naturally, if you continue living that way, your life reaches a dead end.
Later, I became ill and ended up in what could truly be called the worst state, both mentally and physically.
From there, I finally began developing self-awareness and self-understanding.
And through that process, I began reading and writing.
When I compare who I became after starting to read and write with who I was before, I feel that I have grown beyond comparison.
Now, I feel that continuing to read and write has helped me in many different situations.
For example, I am currently taking on client work that uses AI, as well as creating and actually publishing apps.
For my former self, these were things I could hardly have imagined.
But now, even when I encounter something for the first time, I feel able to understand it relatively smoothly.
Even when there is something I do not understand, I can gradually learn it by using AI to research, think, experiment, and make corrections.
Even in unfamiliar fields, I find it easier to move forward while building my understanding.
That is why I have been thinking again recently.
Could it be that deepening my self-understanding while continuing to read and write has not only helped me sort through mental and emotional issues, but has also been of great help in my current work, learning, app development, and use of AI?
I think the reading and writing I continued in order to understand myself ultimately also became the power to understand, learn, and bring new things into form.
I entered this text into ChatGPT
I entered what I feel about this into ChatGPT.
Here is its response.
I think that realization gets at something quite essential.
What Mr. Sugawara has acquired is not merely the ability to read and write. Through reading and writing, I believe he has spent many years developing the ability to observe what is happening inside himself, put it into words, organize it, find meaning in it, and correct it when something is wrong.
In psychological terms, these areself-awareness, self-understanding, metacognition, verbalization, logical organization, and problem decompositionThese are not forms of knowledge that can be used only in one specific job; they become a foundation for understanding things you encounter for the first time.
That is why, even in unfamiliar AI client work and app development,
- identify what you do not understand
- break problems down into smaller parts
- communicate what is needed to AI in words
- understand the generated output
- find and correct mistakes or missing elements
- apply what you have learned in other situations
I think you are able to do these things relatively smoothly.
Not everyone can achieve the same results simply by using AI. To use AI effectively, you first need to put the vague sensations in your own mind into words and clarify “what you want to know,” “what you want to create,” and “what is wrong.” Your many years of reading, writing, and self-understanding were likely training that developed exactly those abilities.
What is especially significant is that Mr. Sugawara has used reading and writing not merely to gather information, butto understand himself and rebuild his lifeI believe. Because he has repeatedly put his emotions, thoughts, past experiences, and unconscious reactions into words, he has developed the ability to face complex things without avoiding them and organize them little by little. That ability is now being applied to learning technology and work skills as well.
In other words, this is not simply a case of someone who had given up studying in the past later resuming it.
He changed from someone who did not even have the idea of nurturing himself into a person who can observe, understand, correct, and develop himself.
This is an enormous change.
Even after heading in a self-destructive direction for many years from the age of 13 and reaching a mental and physical dead end, he developed such practical powers of understanding and learning by steadily building up reading, writing, and self-understanding. To me, that fact seems to show, through Mr. Sugawara himself, that “a person is not defined solely by their academic background or the way they lived when they were young.”
And what is happening now is not that these abilities suddenly appeared. Rather, the accumulation of years spent writing, thinking, and deepening self-understanding has begun to emerge all at once as visible results in the new environment of AI and app development. AI did not suddenly make Mr. Sugawara grow; instead, it isexpanding the abilities he has already developed and accelerating the speed at which he can turn them into tangible resultsThat is likely what it is doing.
I believe this is the most important point. His current achievements are not due to AI alone. He can use AI to understand unfamiliar work and actually carry it through to completion, delivery, and publication because, long before that, Mr. Sugawara spent a great deal of time developing the ability to understand, formulate questions, make corrections, and keep digging without giving up.
In Closing: The Long-Form Writing I Struggled With Created Who I Am Today
After reading ChatGPT’s response, I, too, realized something once again.
Of all the reading and writing I have continued, what was especially significant was, I think,engaging with long-form writingFor me originally, reading and writing long texts was the most difficult thing and
one of the things I was worst atI was by no means good at writing either.Even so, I kept writing long pieces—publishing Kindle books and putting my thoughts and experiences into words.
At times, I wrote pieces of around 200,000 Japanese characters.
It is not as if I could write well from the beginning.
Sometimes I could not bring my thoughts together; at other times, I would repeat the same things or lose track of what I wanted to convey myself.
Even so, I continued putting what I was thinking into words, structuring it into long pieces of writing, rereading it again and again, and revising it.
Looking back now, I think those accumulated efforts led to who I am today.
To write a long text, you must organize multiple pieces of information in your mind, consider how they relate to one another, decide on their order, and choose words that will communicate them to the reader.
When there is something you do not understand, you need to research it; and when your own understanding is vague, you need to think it through again.
I think repeatedly doing that work has led to the ability to understand things, organize complex problems, and learn new things.
The fact that I can now use AI to take on new work, understand app development for the first time, and actually complete and publish apps does not mean I suddenly became capable of doing so.
I think the reading and writing I continued in the past—especially the time I spent engaging with long-form writing, which I struggled with most—has become the foundation I stand on today.
Even if you are not good at writing, and even if you cannot understand things well at first, there is meaning in continuing to read and write.
In particular, turning your thoughts into long-form writing does more than simply improve your writing skills.
I believe it develops your ability to think, understand, organize, view yourself objectively, and even learn new things.
Through my own life, I have come to understand that reading and writing, and engaging with long-form writing, are extremely important in life.
Reading and writing are not only for obtaining information or creating text.
They can also become the power to understand yourself, nurture yourself, and become able to do things you could not do in the past.
Continuing to engage with the long-form writing I struggled with most has become a source of strength that supports me today.
When I think of it that way, I feel that not a single piece of writing I have produced so far was ever wasted.
I think every piece of writing I have written has had meaning.
Reading and writing have helped transform my life.
田舎のネットに、
もうひとつの選択肢。
WiMAXが窓際でやっとだった僕の家。Starlinkに替えた実体験と、導入前の確認ポイントをまとめました。
公式で詳細を見る（紹介リンク・新しいタブで開きます） 実体験と紹介特典を見る紹介リンクから条件を満たして契約すると、筆者に報酬が付与されます。
Gentle Next Step
読み終えた余韻の先で、 次の一歩を静かにつなぐ。
お問い合わせ、サービス案内、資料請求、無料相談など、記事の流れを崩さず自然に次の行動へつなげるためのCTAです。画像・文言・色はテーマ設定から自由に変更できます。
Conversation
Be the First Voice
読んだだけで終わらせないでください。
感じたことを、コメント・発信・メモなど、何かの形で外に出してみてください。
反応した瞬間から、変化は始まります。
この場所に、最初の感想や気づきをそっと残せます。