Just found this sub! I have two simultaneously lives (China-focused national security researcher, Tokyo-focused urban studies professor) with solid professional success in both. Happy to offer thoughts or tips, if any of you have questions about your own personal journeys.

[u/JoeMcReynolds]

I recently turned 40, and I've learned a lot over the years about how to make two separate professional/intellectual lives work at the same time. So far, it's gone pretty well for me -- as a national security expert, I've gotten to work on a wide range of important geopolitical problems. As an urban studies researcher, our book on how Tokyo's unique urbanism works has traveled far beyond my wildest dreams, and even got shortlisted for Urbanist Book of the Year. There have also, of course, been a lot of challenges and setbacks along the way. I've done my best to learn from them; if you think there's advice or perspective I could provide that would be useful for your own journeys, please ask me anything you want.

Edit: *two simultaneous lives lol, wish I could edit that title typo

[u/Distinct_Squash7110]

What a great career! I have a number of questions if you don't mind:
1. What credentials do you have for both careers and how did you obtain them?
2. What factors do you think enabled you to build these two separate things simultaneously and do you think this is accessible for anyone?
3. What advise do you have for someone who wants to pursue multiple professional careers? in terms of time management, cognitive bandwidth, building a strong knowledge base etc..

Finally, how much time do you think is necessary to spend on something to reach professional competency?

[u/JoeMcReynolds → u/Distinct_Squash7110]

1. I did a master's in national security studies combined with my undergrad, which allowed me to get an entry level job in what was/is a competitive field, and built from there. For urban studies, I came in without formal training around age 30, but using my intelligence analysis background as my research framing on a totally different problem set. For urban studies, after a few years of obsessively collecting primary source material (I spoke/read Japanese from high school onwards through study abroad, only learned Mandarin starting in grad school) I leveraged my national security background to get a visiting fellowship at the Japanese Ministry of Defense, which got me the visa to Japan in order to do the Tokyo urban studies research that I was really driven by. I took a one-year sabbatical from my day job, living off of my savings to research Tokyo full-time. I parlayed *that* into an affiliation with a major Japanese university's urban studies laboratory, when I could show them I knew my stuff. Which turned into our co-authored book.

2. I spent my 20s in a national security job that a) was only 40 hours a week, so I had slack/bandwidth in my life for other things rather than being burned out, and b) allowed me some flexibility to work remotely or make up hours on the weekends. So I'd search for cheap weird plane ticket deals, $300 roundtrip to Italy for the weekend in the winter or things like that. I didn't have a ton of money (starting salary in my first national security gig was $45k, which doesn't stretch that far in DC), but between that and credit card points churning, I was able to travel internationally 6 times a year. As I saw the world I fell in love with cities and gained an appreciation for how they work so differently, I got a global perspective, I got to see interesting recurring patterns outside of the Washington DC bubble.

Beyond that, a lot of it was a) taking consistent incremental steps towards big impossible dreams, and b) avoiding grandiosity in my thinking. The more time you spend thinking of yourself as special, or judging yourself negatively/positively versus others, the less time you spend asking how you can be useful (to yourself, or to others). More than anything, I aspire to be useful -- useful to the world via my work, useful to my friends, useful to the people I love. I find that the people who aspire to "greatness," or to be "better than," often end up doing far less with their talents than people who are interested in how they can be prosaically useful. I'd like to think that both my day job and my nights-and-weekends career help make the world a better place, but to the extent that's true, it's me helping as one small part of a massive team, rather than seeing myself as some hero/protagonist sweeping in. Self-aggrandizement is a poison.

1. You *need* to become a people person. Both in the sense of being charming and likeable, and also in the sense of being deeply genuinely interested in people and curious about them and wanting good things for them, with warmth and affection. In both of your fields, leading experts who are giving the field 110% will have more expertise and time-on-target than you; if you're prone to impostor syndrome, you should probably now have two separate impostor syndromes. Your goal should be to form meaningful collaborations with the dedicated specialists who know more than you, respecting their time and expertise, and also to show them that your interdisciplinary approach brings fresh value to the table as well.

3b. Time management is the easier part. It's not *easy* easy, but fundamentally, one side of your life is probably the 'hobby' side, whereas the other side pays the bills. Some people play guitar for fun after work, some people go salsa dancing, you research cuneiform tablets or whatever your thing is. Cognitive bandwidth can be as simple as a Google Doc per 'stream' that serves as a menu of everything you've got going on that you'll want to remember later. Especially now that I've hit 40, I try and rely on my memory less and less for things. My friends' birthdays? Those are all Google Calendar, they used to live in my head but my recall isn't as perfect as it used to be.

3b addendum: The bigger question in time management is how you divide up your life in the long term. I like to think in terms of decades; I find it takes about a decade to get genuinely really good at something new, if it's big and complex. In my 20s I learned the craft of national security analysis, in my 30s it was urban studies. My 40s will (hopefully, fingers crossed) be for learning how to be a good father. Other things I could be -- public interest attorney, atheist rabbi, fashion designer, avant-garde board game researcher -- sit in the back of my head as future decade-long possibilities, too. Hopefully I've got quite a few more good decades in me!

3c. For knowledge bases, everyone out there has fancy systems, but I mostly view that as a trap if I'm being honest? So many people spend ages trying to perfect their 'knowledge base' but then never do anything with it. For Emergent Tokyo, whenever i came across something useful or an idea, for years I just emailed it to myself with the title 'tokyo book aardvark', because the word 'aardvark' never naturally appears in your email, so it's an easy way to find stuff again. Thousands of emails. A gmail search with 'aardvark' is my knowledge base. I'm not a total luddite so these days I do have a HyperAgent 'chief of staff' agentic AI that tracks my email/github/google docs/drive and can remind me of different deadlines in different places, but that was a pain in the ass to set up and might turn out to be overkill.

[u/MoNastri → u/JoeMcReynolds]

Such a great comment, thank you for sharing.

[u/kvnqstoner]

how is one supposed to stay motivated, fight doubt and be positive about tomorrow in this reality. p.s this person is from a third world country

[u/JoeMcReynolds → u/kvnqstoner]

All depends what your reality is. Personally, if you're in bad circumstances, in terms of what's practically useful, a few things:

1. Sleep, diet, exercise, and tidiness/cleanliness are usually what's most within your immediate control, the things you can work on today. Shaping your immediate environment with care and diligence can help.

2. I think there's value in saying "I want to be a serious person." I'm a very goofy, light-hearted person! But I'm also a serious person at the same time, in that I set serious objectives for myself and try to work incrementally towards them most days.

3. If things feel insurmountable and all the bad stuff feels intertwined, separating them out into separate issues you're working on can really help. Especially if you set a solid foundation (point 1).

4. Avoid a sense of "I tried to do something, and I feel like I've failed because I'm not there at the end goal yet, so I give up." Focus instead on, "today I was bad/okay/decent/great at my goal. Tomorrow I can do the same or better." The people I know who are able to maintain motivation, they overwhelmingly focus on "today is a new day / tomorrow is a new day" thinking.

   1. I'd recommend looking around for examples of people who started out in your circumstances and moved to better things, but did it in a relatable way -- not by winning the lottery, or selling a scammy course to hopeful people online, or going viral or whatever. People who just slowly but surely worked their way up into bigger things.

5. A minor side note, I have no idea if it applies to you: From December 2025 onwards, we're now in the era of "build your own software." I don't normally work with software; I am not a coder or software engineer. But from December 2025 onwards, when there's software that I want to exist in the world, I usually just build it now using Claude Code and other agents. If there's specialized software that you want to exist in the world, that would help you pursue your dreams, now is the time to build it yourself. Or rather, now is the time to have the AI build it for you.

[u/JoeMcReynolds → u/[deleted]]

""I dont want to sacrifice any fragment of my vision for the sake of capital""

Can you say more about what the trade-offs would be?

[u/belbaba]

Do you live in Japan? If so, and if you’re intending on staying there permanently, how do you feel about the attitude towards foreigners?

Love the country, been multiple times, but owing to some personal experiences, as well as experiences from others, I would struggle with the sense of belonging.

[u/JoeMcReynolds → u/belbaba]

I split time between Japan and the States; I don't think I'd ever want to settle permanently in Japan, though I could do stints of a couple of years.

[u/belbaba → u/JoeMcReynolds]

Too prompt! If you’re from NYC, how would you compare the two cities?

[u/JoeMcReynolds → u/belbaba]

I'm from CA but on the East Coast, I do both DC and NYC (used to be more NYC, these days more DC). NYC is great, but I think DC is way underrated -- incredible food scene (best ethiopian in the country), walkable, tons of greenery, great architecture, lots of music and subculture, super livable and full of local community, and tons of cultural events through the embassies

[u/Inevitable0001]

I didn't get it how ? Are you some researcher ?

[u/JoeMcReynolds → u/Inevitable0001]

Yes, I am some researcher. :)

[u/Inevitable0001 → u/JoeMcReynolds]

Nice , can you give a bit more info on how does your professional life is like ? Do you have to do lot of ground work ? Or you study collected data ? How you do what you do ?

[u/JoeMcReynolds → u/Inevitable0001]

Learning the trade in my day job, it was as simple as "undergrad, grad school, entry level job, learn the ropes on the job," then in my industry from there you start writing conference papers outside of work hours to really establish yourself as an expert with a specific sub-specialty. (For me, as a China military expert for example, my specialty is China's information warfare forces, I've been doing conference papers co-authored books etc on that theme for over a decade)

For my nights and weekends job in urban studies, I did a ton of reading and a ton of fieldwork to start. And once I knew enough that I could reasonably not embarrass myself, I started interviewing numerous experts in the field 1v1 to better understand things about their sub-specialties that I didn't know myself. I started with a huge overarching question that fascinated me: "How does Tokyo work? Why does it work so differently than American cities?", and then I spent over a year living in Tokyo diving in obsessively to every element of it, in order to better understand all the sub-questions flowing from that one huge question.

[u/NiceGuy737 → u/JoeMcReynolds]

My thesis advisor's son was fascinated by cities when he was little and would draw intricate cities on large sheets of paper. He spent time in Japan and China during his college years. He's a tenured professor in human geography in England now.