Smart Girl Business
Forward to The Curious Nail Who Stuck Out by Jenessa Carder
Trigger warning: Self-harm, harassment
“I’ll teach you about baseball! We live near Fenway Park (a baseball stadium); let’s go to a game!”
“I got a pumpkin! Come over, and I’ll show you how to carve it!”
“Let’s have a Friendsgiving (a Thanksgiving holiday with Friends)!”
“Can you teach me about dumplings?”
“Whoa, chicken feet are amazing!”
“Oh, a lychee is kind of like a grape!”
These were just a few exchanges that caused my grad school friends from Mainland China, Malaysia, Thailand, India, the island of Taiwan, and Japan to affectionately give me the honorific title of “Honorary Asian.” I recall their struggles adapting to student life in the US, where individual opinions and classroom interaction are valued more than textbook intelligence. Each one was an intelligent human who braved another culture and language to better themselves; instead of celebrating their graduation and living with zest as they achieved their dreams, they lived in fear with the mounting stress of deportation as an immigration countdown clock began that very same day. They were talented people who spoke outstanding English, even to the point of joking in English, which is extremely difficult to do if you’ve ever learned another language. Talented people who had invested years of their lives in the US economy had only 3 months to find a job, not just any job, a job that would be willing to prove why they were a better fit than an American. Most, by the way, succeeded in finding a desirable job.
In 2019, I announced my acceptance of a role that would relocate me abroad and my intention to move to Japan. The announcement left few surprised, as by this point in life, I’d developed a reputation among my social network as the explorer—the one who studies cultures and people and takes every chance to work with foreign clients when no one else wants to.
The stars aligned long ago in graduate school with a mandatory course on multicultural business behavior. This class became foundational to my work opportunities with major multinational companies. I traveled the world for workshops every day.
“Dad, I think I just lost the client. The workshop went so badly. Their faces were stoic, with no emotion or feedback,” I recalled as I entered a hotel lobby in Copenhagen!”.
“Remember our trip to Norway? When we saw families who ate dinner together at a round table and did not even say a single word to each other?” “Oh, right—it’s a Scandinavian thing…” I recalled. “Yes. You’re American, and you’re animated when you do workshops. You have intonation when you present. I’ve seen it. You engage people. You expect there to be feedback to you from your audience. That isn’t at all the Scandinavian way we saw. Remember the dinner table.”
In reality, I didn’t lose that client. Instead, I went on to do great work in collaboration with them. My newfound awareness taught me how “American” I was in my manners and business etiquette. This experience taught me to watch out for these cultural tensions as I interact with others. I am unique.
___
By the time fall leaves dissipated into winter snow, I arrived in the Land of the Rising Sun (Japan), nervous for my personal life yet confident in my craft.
In early 2020, I had a frank conversation with the Japanese interpreter I worked with at the time. “Everything I do is never good enough and always redone, even though he takes my exact words and ideas and rephrases them. It’s like I’ll never be accepted,” I said, sniffling and wiping my tears, fighting back terrible thoughts. Of course, all the while, I fretted like the rest of the world about our future fate.
“It’s his first time working with a foreigner and probably a woman more senior than him,” explained the interpreter. The interpreter constantly helped to truly interpret for both parties by bridging the communication and cultural gap.
“No matter what you do, you’ll never be Japanese. You’ll always be American,” another Japanese friend explained to me. “But that’s not necessarily a bad thing; it’s just who you are. It’s also what is valuable.”
“Yes, you feel down because, in Japan, it is the nail that sticks out that gets hammered. In general, it is not good to be different. But just know you’re unique even if others and society try to change you,” explained yet another “halfu” (half Japanese, half foreign) friend.
While these words of advice comforted me, I recalled how I like to be unique, how I am American, how I am a woman, and how I am advanced in my career. These are all parts of me.
Should I feel so excluded for being everything I am naturally and have achieved? What was wrong?
___
“I’ll just never be good enough!” I exclaimed as heavy pellets of water dropped from my face multiple times in late 2023. I had over 15 years of experience in my industry and field by this time, which was more than most peers in Japan. As a country, Japan tends to reward company loyalty with an ability to shift disciplines, resulting in professional peers with shallow discipline experience. I was overworked and compensating for people below, beside, and above me. That day, my seniors and juniors yelled at me for not doing my job right. Both those days, I experienced the worst self-perception of my life. When applying for jobs in Japan, many people told me that my experience does not equate to being business-savvy in Japanese. My years of experience are invisible to my level of Japanese. During these times, self-doubt creeps in—am I really good enough? Does this country actually value my uniqueness? Do people see value in my uniqueness? Surely, my uniqueness is of value since the local people invited me to come live in Japan. My client successes and accreditation were numerous indicators of my contributions.
___
As most of life’s elders state in a seemingly ubiquitous way, as life unfolds, one sees more and more connections throughout how each step has led to another. Life as a resident in a new place, learning and not yet mastering a language has led me to understand what it’s like for children to have emotions and not be able to express them— to be trapped feeling emotions they want to convey but are unable to release, except through explosions of emotional tantrums. Or perhaps similarly for those who have health conditions that cause a deterioration of communication, to be trapped in your own body with feelings and intelligence that they cannot convey. The experiences helped me realize that my studies as a designer trained my eyes in visual acuity, which had become my communication crutch in a world where I could not read. This trapped feeling has given me more empathy for my international friends who struggled to establish themselves away from home in a land where their comfort foods are rare, their credentials are invalid, and their unique speech patterns or accents are a scar. All these moments are a search to be heard, to be seen, to be shared, and fundamentally, to be human. To be the nail that isn’t hammered down. To be who they are.
The day it all came together was the day I read a passage from the book: “Mismatch” by Kat Holmes.
“We have rules in school and society against physically harming each other, but for some people, being left out is treated as a fact of life. It’s just part of the way the game was designed. It’s fairly common for people to treat social rejection as a necessary part of learning to survive in a world of humans.
Yet multiple studies show that social rejection might manifest in our bodies in ways that approximate physical pain…More specifically, they found that the regions of the brain that ‘regulate the distress of social exclusion’ were similar to the regions that have regular physical pain. In other words, being socially rejected might directly affect our physical well-being.
This rejection has many consequences: Anxiety, insecurity, anger, hostility, feelings of inadequacy…A sense of being out of control.”
Inadequacy. How many of the stories above are about not fitting in? Exclusion is the same to our brains as physical pain? No wonder my brain struggled with dark thoughts, which manifested in the most extreme moments of isolation and pain.
There’s a common theme in triumphal moments: a desire to watch out for each other. A desire to overcome, to assist, to see life from someone’s perspective, to embrace their unique gifts and abilities. To think creatively.
It is that attitude that one of my employers in Japan had from day one. They included an interpreter for me, the only person not fluent in Japanese in the room, and said, “We believe in inclusion. It is about talent and not the level of language you can and cannot speak.”
The issues and challenges shared in the paragraphs above aren’t limited to Japan or my life. They are not simple stories of cultural clashes and language barriers. These are real experiences of inclusion and exclusion.
We all have experiences where we have felt “abnormal”, or like “a misfit”, and desire others to include us precisely as we are. The irony is that even though we all feel this way, humans are not trained to think inclusively. Managers rarely receive training to become managers; they just become managers. Teachers are not always comprehensively trained to accommodate the unique needs of children; they just have to figure it out when something happens. Inclusivity is something we all need, but there is little language, study, or data around it beyond the fields of accessibility and diversity.
This book will be one part memoir storytelling and one part toolkit. It aims to explore how inclusion is more than creating accessibility and more than creating diversity. Through tales from my life in Japan, I hope you discover more about your personal journey and your own stories, realizing those moments in your life where you’ve yearned for a more inclusive environment, too. Throughout the pages, you’ll discover a framework that explores our identities as humans. This framework explores apparent or outer identity markers and non-apparent or inner markers of our identity, and how the moments in the stories either help support these identity markers or exclude these markers.
As you turn the final page, may you be inspired to shape a more inclusive future in your daily lives and share your own stories.
Help build the future where we all can be nails who stick out and create places, products, and experiences for other nails who stick out, too.
Summary
The Curious Nail Who Stuck Out is a groundbreaking guide to inclusive business design, blending personal storytelling with practical frameworks. Drawing from real experiences living in Japan during and post the 2020 Pandemic, Jenessa Carder explores cultural nuances across industries like travel, food, and transportation. Each chapter combines powerful inclusion strategies with cultural insights, culminating in an original business framework designed to spark innovation, drive growth, and expand audience reach. Whether you’re a business leader, UX/UI designer, entrepreneur, accessibility, social impact or SDG specialist or Japan enthusiast, this book offers a framework and thought-provoking perspectives for creating more accessible and empathetic products and services. Jenessa's framework dives deep into inclusivity, expanding on existing diversity and accessibility frameworks from design thinkers and diversity advocates. Each chapter's stories explore the physical, biological and cognitive markers of human identity, unpacking the markers the world experiences and those we keep inside. Designed for the utmost usability, chapters cluster stories based on industries: Real Estate, Business Services, Government, Medical, Tourism and Mobility, Food and Hospitality, Education, and Humanities.
About the Author
Jenessa Carder is an international customer experience strategist, inclusive design advocate, and award-winning business transformation leader. Her career spans global agencies, consumer goods, entertainment, and digital innovation, blending design thinking with behavioral science. A former university professor and art director, she consults across the USA and Japan, helping organizations build accessible, people-centered strategies. Jenessa regularly speaks at industry conferences and contributes to business publications. The Curious Nail Who Stuck Out is her first independent book, offering fresh perspectives on inclusion, innovation, and Japanese culture. Trigger warnings in her book: self-harm, sex, harassment.
You can connect with Jenessa at:
https://expressanything.design
https://www.linkedin.com/in/expressanything
Paperback book:
https://www.lulu.com/shop/jenessa-carder/the-curious-nail-who-stuck-out/paperback/product-846pv7q.html?page=1&pageSize=4
Other formats, such as an audiobook, Japan-print edition, and Japanese language books, are in progress.
