The World Got Bigger Again

Reading changed my life. I wrote about that already.

But what I didn’t mention is what happened next. Because reading didn’t just change how I spent my commute. It set off this whole chain of events that I really didn’t see coming.

A Quiet Feeling

After I started reading, my day-to-day life as a teacher didn’t change much. I still showed up to school every morning, coached track practice, ate lunch in the staff room, talked to students between classes. From the outside, everything looked the same.

Honestly, I liked my job. The students were great. There’s something really rewarding about watching a young person figure something out, whether it’s a skill in the gym or something bigger about who they are. Teaching gave me that almost every day, and I didn’t take it for granted.

But all those books I’d been reading had shown me how much was out there. Different ways of thinking. Different industries. Different countries. Different lives. And slowly, without me even noticing at first, this quiet feeling started growing.

Not dissatisfaction. Not frustration.

More like… “huh, I wonder what else is out there.”

I wasn’t unhappy. I want to be clear about that. I just couldn’t stop thinking about all the things I hadn’t seen yet.

Money, Though

Here’s the thing. You can be curious about the world all you want, but curiosity alone doesn’t get you very far. You can’t exactly quit your job and fly to Europe on enthusiasm alone. I mean, it’s not impossible. But it’s not much of a plan.

If I ever wanted to actually do something with all this restlessness, I needed a financial foundation. Nothing crazy. Just enough breathing room to take a chance someday without everything falling apart.

As a public school teacher in Japan, my salary was stable. Predictable. I knew roughly what I’d earn this year, next year, ten years from now. For a lot of people, that kind of certainty is a gift.

I get that.

But for someone whose head was filling up with ideas about other lives and other places, it also meant I could see exactly where the ceiling was. And teachers in Japan can’t take on side jobs. So if I wanted to build anything beyond my salary, I needed to find another way.

I just had no idea what that looked like.

A Book About Money

I had a close friend from college who was studying at a graduate school at the time. Smart guy. The kind of person who thinks about things from angles you wouldn’t expect.

One day he recommended a book to me.

A book about money.

Now, I’d been reading a lot by this point. History, philosophy, business, psychology. All kinds of things. But I’d been avoiding the topic of money without even realizing it. Something about it made me uncomfortable. I think I associated it with greed, or with those guys you see in movies screaming at trading screens in expensive suits. That whole world just felt off to me.

But I trusted my friend. He wasn’t like that at all. He was thoughtful, calm, the kind of guy who actually sits with a book before forming an opinion.

So when he said “you should read this,” I figured, okay, why not.

That book completely rewired how I thought about money.

It wasn’t about getting rich. It wasn’t about tricks or shortcuts. It was about understanding what money actually is, how it moves, and why most people never stop to think about it clearly.

I was one of those people, of course.

Up to that point, my relationship with money was pretty simple. Earn it. Spend it. Save a little. That’s it.

But this book introduced me to an idea I’d never really considered: that how you use your money can expand your options. Not to buy more stuff. But to create freedom. To give yourself room to move.

It sounds obvious when I say it now. But back then? It genuinely felt like my whole field of vision had opened up.

Starting From Zero

That book is where I first encountered the concept of investing.

Until then, I’d thought of investing as something close to gambling. But it wasn’t. It was a way of putting your money to work while you go about your life.

I was interested. But I had absolutely no idea where to start.

So I did what had worked before. I went to the bookstore. I read everything I could find. I spent hours on brokerage websites and financial news sites, trying to figure out the basics.

It was rough, honestly. The financial world has its own language, and at first, none of it made any sense.

Interest rates. Treasury Yield. Commodity. FRB. ETF. PER. CPI. PPI…

It might as well have been a third language. Seriously.

I remember sitting in a cafe after school, staring at a brokerage website, reading the same paragraph over and over and still not getting it. That familiar feeling again. The same one from when I first started reading books and realized I didn’t know anything. Humbling, but not discouraging. I’d been here before.

So I just kept showing up. Every day, a little more.

I’m not the quick-learner type. I’m just stubborn.

Eventually, I decided to focus on U.S. stocks. The American market makes up a huge portion of global equities, and the liquidity is high, so it seemed like a reasonable starting point.

But this decision came with an unexpected side effect.

To follow the U.S. market properly, Japanese-language news wasn’t enough. Breaking news, earnings calls, detailed analysis. The important stuff was almost always in English.

So I started reading the Financial Times. The Wall Street Journal. Bloomberg. I found podcasts like Marketplace and started listening to them on my daily commute.

The same commute where I used to read novels had quietly turned into something completely different.

And so had I.