A round red doll with two blank eyes waiting to be filled. One you paint when setting an intention, the other when achieving it. A quiet companion through whatever comes between the now and the then.

Growing up in a Turkish-German working-class home, living in Japan was a distant, improbable dream. So was earning a degree from one of the world's top universities, and building a career inside Blinkist, one of Europe's most successful tech start-ups.

Yet against all odds, I had achieved all of this.

My CV read like a huge success story: Tokyo, Oxford, Berlin, 3 uni degrees, start-up career, manager of managers. All built on the dangerous belief that as long as I worked hard enough, "success" would keep coming my way.

But the darumas I'd brought back from Japan – they had remained one-eyed for all those years. The external success didn't do anything for my internal happiness. I still dated unavailable people, struggled with boundaries at work, and would think my way through problems to avoid feeling through them.

A handful of small and large life crises forced me to face my self – and my life's dynamics.

Through it all, I've come to believe that it's precisely the space between those two eyes of the daruma that signifies the most important work of our lives:

the slow, often reluctant work that takes place at the hinge between self and system.