Originally written in Traditional Chinese: 東京第一晚，我只決定了一件事：坐在誰旁邊
On my first night in Tokyo, I made one decision before dinner: who to sit next to.
At the welcome dinner of my Minerva Immersion Week, I chose a seat beside a Japanese classmate who has spent thirteen years writing middle school textbooks at the Japanese parent company behind Shimajiro, the tiger character known in Taiwan as Qiaohu. Parents in Taiwan half-jokingly call him the "Tiger God": what parents say ten times may not work, but when Qiaohu says it once, kids listen.
My first question was simple: "AI has moved so fast in the past few years. Have you, or your company, done anything special about it?"
She went deep. From textbooks, to helping students become good citizens, to why, as AI arrives, going back to basics and keeping things simple matters more than ever. Then she said something I keep thinking about: "I am trying to define the problem I am really supposed to solve."
Thirteen years in, still asking which problem is worth solving. That is professionalism. She is a far better educator than I am, and I told her so.
I already hold a master's degree. Minerva is my second. What I said at that table was this: getting the diploma itself changed nothing. The learning journey changed everything. It changed how I think and how I act.
The question for this era is no longer "What have you learned?" It is "Who have you become?"
What changes us is rarely the textbook. It is usually the person sitting next to us. I also noticed this: the further you go, the humbler people become. If you never meet remarkable people, the world looks small, and your decisions shrink with it.
Around that table sat MDA classmates, alumni and newer students: several cohorts at one table. That is the value of the Minerva community, and why I chose to continue with World Wise. It has the network advantages of a traditional MBA, but it attracts people who want to break frames and grow in learning and critical thinking.
Try this this week: find one person who is better than you at something. Sit with them for fifteen minutes. Ask: "With AI changing this fast, what have you changed in your own work?" Then talk less and listen more. Decide your question before you sit down. When the question is yours, the answer stays with you.
If you want a seat at a table like this, Minerva offers two paths. The MDA is Minerva's master's degree: I study it while working full time, with Immersion Weeks in London, Seoul and Tokyo to learn face to face with classmates. World Wise is Minerva's executive leadership program, for people already leading teams who want to learn alongside others determined to break frames. I am on both paths. What I recommend most is not the credential. It is the people at the table.
Take a seat at this table
- 👉 Minerva MDA (Master of Science in Decision Analysis): apply
- 👉 Minerva World Wise executive leadership program: express your interest
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