Linguistic five years was easily the biggest decision I've made in my entire life.

I've never lived abroad.

I never learned a foreign language, and I never taught English either.

And quite honestly, the thought of standing in front of 40 school kids for 20 hours a week scared the absolute tele hub.

Naturally, a lot of people ask me why I came here.

There was no one reason, but ultimately it revolved around a combination of ambition, romanticism and fear.

Orbit nine with 1st 2 decades of your life, you're kind of on an academic conveyor belt, going through school, doing tests and exams every year without really thinking that far ahead.

And then for many people when they reach the age of 18 and they come off the academic convertible when they graduate from school.

All of a sudden they have no plan and no sense of direction.

And that was me when I graduated from school back in 2008.

I knew I wanted to go to university, but I didn't really know what course I wanted to take, so I took film studies because it was the only thing I was good at the only courses I've done well in where media and film.

I go on a in a in a business.

I got Bay and in English I got C So it was great and I thought Golf University and become the next Martin Scorsese and it was gonna be magical.

But they're suddenly around September, which is when you start university in the UK I realized becoming Martin Scorsese is not that easy.

And all of a sudden I realized there was probably making a big mistake on After speaking to some film studies graduates on my local supermarket, I realized that studying film university probably wasn't the best thing to do.

So I postponed my degree on Take a Gap year to get sense of direction and get some clarity on who I waas on what I was doing.

So in September 2008 with all my closest friends going off to university, I went off in the other direction and start planning my gap here.

Now some people spend their gap here traveling the world, swimming with dolphins and building villages in Africa.

And to me, that's what I wanted to do.

I wanted a year of unbridled adventure and discovery was gonna is gonna be amazing.

And then I got a full time office job staring at Excel spreadsheets for 40 hours a week.

And it was the worst year of my life ever.

Having finished school and delayed my degree for a year, I now found myself in an office job in an energy company, just moving numbers around a spreadsheet five days a week.

My adventurous plans to travel around the world were destroyed by my lack of money on, even though I had two jobs, the relatively small amount money I made just about covered my monthly expenses.

That certainly wasn't enough for any riel overseas travel on.

After a few months, I just became depressed as I realized my gap here wasn't going anywhere, just nothing rubbish for someone like me.

He likes to be creative.

He likes to make things.

Being trapped in an office job with absolutely no creativity was just a horrific fate to be consigned.

Teoh.

But it was while I was working this mind numbing office job that my imagination started to take over, sitting at that desk for hours on end, doing nothing of any real value.

I became obsessed with the idea off entrepreneurship, and I got addicted to reading autobiographies and biographies of self made millionaires.

People who had come from nothing on got on to do great things on while started sitting at this desk doing nothing, I became consumed by this idea.

I started my own business one day in the future, and it became a bit of a running joke with my colleagues.

I side sitting there on my lunch break reading books, as opposed to sitting with the usual crowd.

I didn't mind at first.

I found it quite funny.

But when I started talking about my dreams and my ambitions about starting a business, I kind of was met with lots of pessimism on laughter.

Everyone was kind of very dismissive.

In the UK, you'll find people who are ambitious to kind of shot down and ridiculed.

More often than not, he tells someone about your plans, your plans to do something great, you usually just be dismissed on.

Uh, yeah, you just kind of put you down.

It's quite the opposite to America in that regard, where everyone believes they can do something great and there's a real sense of entrepreneurship embedded in the culture.

But after six months of reading all these stories of entrepreneurs and becoming completely consumed by the idea of starting a business, I came to the worrying realization.

I lack the self confidence in the sort of self belief to ever become an entrepreneur.

Andi, I knew I would never succeed.

So I came to the conclusion.

The only way I was gonna ever level up was to do something really bold and out of character for me at the time.

I just I did.

I would give myself the ultimate challenge of living and working abroad on learning any language in a completely different country on throw myself into the thick of it University.

Quite honestly, this idea of living and working abroad really scared me, really was outside my compensation on the area of the world.

I knew I wanted to try living in Asia because I wanted to see the world from a completely different perspective.

I figured if I could live in the country in Asia on try and acquire a new language and adapt to a different culture than I could probably feel like I could do anything, and I knew as it was outside my comfort zone, there was a chance that it might work.

After doing some research online, I discovered the easiest job to get overseas was in English teaching job.

So in early 2009 I switched my degree from film to business on English linguistics.

The final piece of the puzzle fell into place in April 2009 when I went to visit my then girlfriend.

He was on a ski season in the French Alps, having the time of her life, which I definitely wasn't envious about.

It was on the trip to France that fake kind of jumped in and steered the direction my life would take.

On the flight over, I found myself sitting next to a friendly middle aged couple, Onda.

We chatted for the duration of the two hour flight.

We go on to the inevitable subject of what I wanted to do after university.

Andi.

I told them that I wanted to go and travel the world on, become an English teacher on live from work overseas, as luck or fate or destiny or coincidence would have it.

Their daughter was working as an English teacher in Japan on the Japan Exchange teaching program.

The jet program on do.

They told me of their daughters amazing experiences in Japan on Apparently, she was having the time of her life and further out the duration of the flight.

They sold this idea to me, this idea of living and working in Japan.

After I got off the plane, there was a four hour coach journey from the airport to the ski resort on for the entire four hour journey.

I just kept thinking of this crazy and exciting idea of living working in Japan whilst listening to Phil Collins because for some reason it was the only artist I had on my phone at the time.

But I didn't know a great deal about Japanese culture.

I've never really been into animal mango.

I watched quite few Japanese films and lots of films set in Japan on I had lots of images and misconceptions about the country, but it was I was excited by what I didn't know about the country and what I could learn rather than what I already knew.

I just pictured myself walking through these beautiful rice fields and temples, singing karaoke E and drinking beer with strangers and salary men having romantic encounters like Lost in Translation.

I always wanted to visit the country that two weeks just didn't seem like enough.

It was so far away that I never thought I'd ever be able to go on.

I realized by living and working there, I'd really be able to absorb the culture and truly appreciate the country and the language in the people.

And so by the time the coach pulled up with ski resort, remember getting off with this idea that I was going to live work in Japan.

In fact, I remember saying to my girlfriend when I got off the bus, I've decided to move to Japan on Duh.

I don't think she took me too seriously on to be honest, No, even I to myself that seriously.

But my mind was made up there.

And then it was from then on that I started to read and learn about the culture on the next few years through my awful boring job through a degree that I didn't really enjoy in university studies, that board May Japan was my guiding star.

This idea of living and working.

Japan gave me a sense of direction and purpose, and it made me realize the importance of having a dream and a sense of direction and a because after that, I became really motivated for the first time ever, actually put some serious effort into more academic studies in 3.5 years later, off that decision on that fast, lo and behold, I found myself sitting in a chair in my tiny apartment, swinging about noisy hall, having stood in front of hundreds of people and spoken in Japanese manage classrooms with 4 18 ages in just learned how to read and communicate in a completely alien language.

All my confidence issues and lack of self belief completely disappeared, faded away, and I feel what can truly do anything I want.

Now if there's one thing I wanted to take away from this video is I have a dream.

Be bold, make it scary, make it challenging and then go on, do it.

Push yourself out of comfort zone on.

You will feel amazing when you go off in triumph.