I’d imagine people usually feel anxious about making a drastic life change like picking up and moving to a new country. But I remember sitting in the airport in Los Angeles, Tony Tony Chopper water bottle in hand, feeling excited and eager to start my new life. All I could think about was finding a favorite matcha cafe to spend my mornings in after touching down in Tokyo. 

Growing up in Southern California, I had always been interested in Japanese culture and cuisine. During the pandemic, I became obsessed with anime: the characters who never gave up, the friendships, the quiet slice-of-life moments. I was infatuated with the sound of the language and the minimalist aesthetic. The shows made me want to experience it all for myself. 

In January 2025, a little less than a year after I graduated from UC Irvine, I boarded that flight to move to Japan. 

I’ve never been someone who followed the “safe path.” Even in college, where I studied business administration and management, I avoided internships that would lead to a 9-to-5 corporate career. Deep down, I knew I wanted more freedom than that.

But freedom is expensive in America. I was working four jobs after graduation — as a full time visual merchandiser at Lululemon, owner of a small sticker business, real estate sign manager, and organizational manager at a lacrosse club. I felt weighed down by the financial pressure of just existing. It felt impossible to be able to afford rent, health care, and other basics without getting a corporate job.

So when I stumbled across an ad in June 2024 about teaching English in Japan with an Eikaiwa, or conversation school, I applied on a whim. I went through an all-day interview process and got the job. I didn’t hesitate. 

Although they were supportive, everyone around me thought I was crazy for leaving behind a seemingly stable life in California. Why wouldn’t I want to be close to family and a long-term boyfriend? But Japan had been calling me for years, and this felt like my chance. 

Six months of paperwork, packing, and goodbyes later, I was on my way. 

When I arrived in Japan, something about it immediately felt right. Best of all, I could afford to live alone. For 74,460 yen (or $483 a month), I ended up in an apartment in Nakahara-ku, which is part of Kawasaki City and about 15 minutes by train to Tokyo. 

My apartment has plenty of natural light and even a tatami room (a traditional room with straw mat flooring for tea ceremonies), just like the ones I’d seen in anime. In the U.S., I’d never be able to afford something like this on my own. In Japan, it felt attainable, even comfortable, on my 277,500 yen (about $1,800) a month teaching salary.

The cost of living surprised me in other ways, too. A filling meal in Tokyo — like a traditional teishoku (meal set) with a beef rice bowl, miso soup, eggs, and a drink  — could cost just 1,000 yen (about $6), compared to the $20 I was used to paying in California. My company covered my commuting costs and groceries didn’t break the bank. For the first time, my basic needs were covered without me constantly worrying. 

Teaching was never my passion, though. It was an “in” that allowed me to move to Japan, and for that I’ll always be grateful. But after about six months, I realized I wanted something different.

Now I make social media content for a language app for $175 a week and work as a freelance digital marketing assistant for $25 an hour. The number of hours for the latter has varied so far from about 50 in August to three in September when we were in between clients to 22 in October, since I traveled to Hawaii and Okinawa that month.

Being here has freed up not just money, but mental space. I can focus on pursuing hobbies like creating content about moving abroad, going to the gym, studying Japanese, and connecting with locals, instead of always stressing about how to make ends meet.

Moving hasn’t been without challenges. Sometimes the language barrier feels frustrating and overwhelming, like when I need to go to the bank or post office, call my phone carrier, or navigate a doctor’s appointment. I often rely on AI to translate or ask a friend to help. This, in part, is what motivates me to learn the language better. 

And I miss my friends and family back in California. There are days when I feel the sting of loneliness despite being surrounded by millions of people. I’m an extrovert, but even for me it can get tiring to go out of my way to overcome the language barrier and make friends. 

These struggles have made me more independent and patient, though. And when I slide the door shut on my tatami room and step out of my apartment each morning, I feel a mix of belonging and gratitude. This is my chance to live the life I dreamed about while watching anime as a teenager. 

I don’t know how long I’ll stay in Japan. But for now, I’m cherishing every moment. I feel like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.

Ashley Peters is a digital creator and marketing assistant based in Japan, sharing stories about life abroad, language learning, and creative growth. Follow her journey on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.

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We’ve all dealt with emotionally immature people: They get defensive at the slightest criticism, they constantly deflect blame, and then they try to guilt you into feeling sorry for them.

Emotional immaturity is a growing problem, and whether it’s in your personal or professional life, communicating with them can be a real struggle.

As experts on the psychology of communication, we know that if you’re not careful, you can also easily run the risk of seeming emotionally immature to others. Why? A lot of us automatically use certain emotionally immature phrases without even thinking about it.

Here’s a list of the most common ones to avoid:

People who are emotionally immature often won’t take responsibility for their own actions when something goes wrong. So what do they do? They extricate themselves from situations by immediately stating that they are not to blame. 

DON’T MISS: How to use AI to be more productive and successful at work

An emotionally immature person will do everything in their power to not take responsibility for their actions, and a common tactic is to make it seem like you, or literally anyone else, is in the wrong — not them.

You can almost imagine a little kid saying this one. This phrase is a way for them to avoid any true accountability or genuine communication with the person they are engaging with.

This is a combo of gaslighting — trying to make others believe a false reality — and shifting the blame again. The message they’re sending: You’re the problem, not me. Another toxic phrase in this vein is “you’re being too sensitive.”

People use that simple “whatever,” often with a shrug, to say, “I’m done discussing this.” It’s an emotionally immature method to shut down the paths of communication and figuratively walk away from any further discussion.

Here we go again with the gaslighting. People who are emotionally immature rewrite reality, both for themselves and, possibly more importantly, for others. When someone says something like this, they’re typically trying to evade responsibility and make you think something else happened.

In this case, emotionally immature people walk away from any complicated issue by throwing it onto someone else and dismissing any and all responsibility. It’s the perfect example of transference.

Another example of invalidating other people, and one that is used in both personal and professional relationships. By saying phrases like this, an emotionally immature person is dismissing the other person’s concerns and opinions, and belittling their reaction.

Yes, it’s usually best to focus on the future. But emotionally immature people will often accuse people who bring up their mistakes of harping on the past. They don’t want to learn from their mistakes and they don’t want an honest discussion about whatever is happening. They want to move on without addressing the issue.

Here’s an example of how emotionally immature people passive-aggressively avoid taking responsibility for what they say. It might sound like they’re trying to smooth things over, but it’s actually more of a way of critiquing someone, then distancing themselves from their statement. 

Emotionally immature people often use broad generalizations. Instead of engaging in constructive honest conversation or using specific examples, they will issue an accusatory blanket statement and use that to avoid any further discussion. 

If there’s one phrase that really sounds like a kid said it, it’s this one. How many of us used “but all the kids are doing it” argument trying — usually in vain — to get our parents to allow us to do something? But emotionally immature adults use it, too.

They’ll pull out the time-honored “everyone’s doing it” argument as a justification for something they want to do or already have done. Of course, they’re blameless if they’ve done something wrong, they were just going along with the crowd, after all.

Kathy and Ross Petras are the brother-and-sister co-authors of the New York Times bestseller You’re Saying It Wrong, along with other popular language books, and co-hosts of the award-winning NPR syndicated radio show and podcast ”You’re Saying It Wrong.” They’ve also been featured in media outlets including The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post and Harvard Business Review. Follow them on Bluesky.

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For Dawon Matthews, pursuing entrepreneurship has always been a “no brainer.”

After he was charged with a felony at age 19, Matthews couldn’t find a job in the corporate world, so he decided to carve his own path, he says.

“Once they see a felony behind a person they don’t even care about what credentials you got. You’re just not accepted in that society,” Matthews says.

Now, Matthews, 32, currently owns five companies, most notably his successful Houston, Texas food truck, Goodies Soul Kitchen.

Born in Philadelphia, Matthews had a “rough start” in life, before his family moved to the metro area borough of Norristown, he says.

“Growing up, I didn’t have any mentors or anyone I wanted to be like. I just had a bunch of people that I didn’t want to be like,” he says.

Matthews excelled in high school, but got into legal trouble in college.

As a freshman, he was charged with aggravated assault after a party brawl, for which he was expelled from school and served 6 months in jail. While on probation, he was charged with a DUI.

“That just led to me going down a hole of just going in and out of the system,” Matthews recalls.

Though Matthews earned an associate’s degree from Manor College and a B.A. in business from La Salle University, he applied to over 200 jobs in a two-month period with no luck. He started his first company “due to the simple fact that I couldn’t get a job with my college degree,” he says.

Today, his businesses collectively bring in over $1 million in net revenue annually.

‘Always looking for the next thing’

In 2017, Matthews launched his first business, a cleaning company called Wonderful Cleaning, in the Philadelphia area with his childhood friend Darnell Hinton.

He chose to enter the cleaning industry because it had low startup costs and didn’t require background checks for business owners, he says.

“As long as you can get some bleach and some hot water and some spray bottles and some rags, you can turn this thing into a business,” Matthews says.

His first job was cleaning his brother’s house, but with help from his high school football coach, Matthews landed more lucrative commercial cleaning contracts.

By the end of year two, Wonderful Cleaning brought in around $12,000 in revenue each month, and Matthews transitioned into being the “middleman,” hiring other cleaning crews to fulfill his contracts.

With the revenue from Wonderful Cleaning, Matthews and Hinton bought a pickup truck and started a second business, R&R Junk Removal, in 2020.

A few months in, they were able to purchase a dump truck, and R&R Junk Removal brought in over $100,000 in its first year, according to Matthews.

Matthews also used his income from the two businesses to buy single-family properties, which he refinanced in order to buy duplexes and triplexes. He currently owns 16 properties in the Philadelphia area, from which he makes around $11,000 a month in profit.

In January 2024, Matthews moved to Houston: “I felt like I reached my success in Philly, so I wanted to get out of there,” he says.

Not all of his business ideas were hits: right after moving to Houston, Matthews sold a couple of his properties to start a nightclub. It didn’t work out, he says, and he ended up losing over $170,000 on the venture.

After that, he decided to try the restaurant industry.

“I’m always looking for the next thing,” he says, “and then that’s when I came up with food.”

Matthews took out a $40,000 loan to buy a food truck and launched Goodies Soul Kitchen in August 2024, which he operates with business partner Jessica Ahwash.

Finding success in the food industry

Other than working at KFC during his freshman year of college, Matthews didn’t have any prior restaurant experience when he started Goodies.

There were plenty of growing pains: “I didn’t even know how to turn the trailer on when I first started,” Matthews says.

And just one month after launching Goodies Soul Food Kitchen, the chef he hired quit unexpectedly.

“I don’t know nothing about food,” Matthews says, but “I had to figure out how to become a chef” until he could hire another.

For Matthews, developing Goodies’ business model was paramount.

He was inspired by the success of chains like Chick-Fil-A and Chipotle: “These people aren’t doing anything different. Their food isn’t different than any other food you’ll see at KFC, Popeyes or anything like that. But what is different is the service,” he says.

“Looking at it as a businessman, the money isn’t in food,” he continues. “The money is in the service and the quality and the systems that you produce. That’s where you reach your success in the food industry.”

In his view, Houston’s late night food scene was “not that good,” so Matthews decided to market Goodies Soul Kitchen as an evening option for clubgoers.

Goodies Soul Kitchen’s offers fried fish, lamb chops, chicken wings and fried chicken, as well as side dishes like mac-and-cheese, sweet potato casserole and fried cabbage.

The truck currently operates four days a week from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m., and Matthews has four employees who run the truck and handle food prep.

Unlike many other food trucks, Goodies Soul Kitchen is always based at the same location in downtown Houston. On average, they serve about 300 customers each week – more on a “good club night,” but less when it’s raining, he says.

This summer, Goodies Soul Kitchen brought in around $20,000 in revenue each week, Matthews says, and the truck has been profitable since the beginning.

In 2024, Goodies brought in just over $1 million in gross revenue, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It, and according to Matthews, they’re on track to make even more in 2025 with catering contracts and holiday parties.

As of September this year, Goodies has made over $665,000 in sales.

Food is the future

Following the success of Goodies, Matthews opened another food truck, Birds and Buns, which sells hoagies, tacos and chicken wings, in March 2025.

“I thought, you know, what the heck? We did really well at this business model. Let’s do another one,” he says.

He plans to sell most of his other companies in the next year in order to focus on his food businesses.

“They say you start to find what you want to do for the rest of your life around this age,” Matthews says. “I think I found my love for entrepreneurship in hospitality.”

Aside from his business goals, Matthews is also committed to employing recovering addicts and former felons.

“Here, you’re not judged by a paper,” he says. “You’re not judged by a record. You’re judged by your skills.”

Managing all of his ventures isn’t easy, Matthews says, but his mantra is “choose your hard.”

“Being poor is hard. Being rich is hard. Being happy is hard. Being sad is hard, right? So it’s the reality of just choosing your ‘hard.’”

Matthews is currently preparing to expand Goodies into a brick-and-mortar location with a sports bar and burger shop.

Going forward, it’s “Goodies to the moon,” he says.

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Ask anyone what they think keeps a relationship strong, and they will probably tell you it’s love. There’s some truth to that: love is what draws us together in the first place.

But after years of studying couples as a psychologist, and as a husband, I’ve realized something that research keeps confirming: The real factor that keeps couples together, long after the honeymoon phase fades, is compromise.

Psychologists define love as an emotion. And like all emotions, love fluctuates with stress, sleep, health, and the thousand of other factors that shape our daily lives.

So you can love your partner deeply and still get annoyed, frustrated, or angry with them. Love won’t shield you from conflict, nor will it solve your disagreements.

That’s why even the happiest couples argue and have rough patches, regardless of how much love they have for each other. The difference is that strong couples know love can’t fix everything — but compromise can.

Compromise happens when you balance what you want, what your partner wants, and what’s best for the relationship itself.

Every couple brings together a set of habits, values, and experiences. Expecting perfect alignment is unrealistic. Instead, healthy couples learn to negotiate their reality. They turn “my way” and “your way” into “our way.”

But compromise only works when it’s rooted in a strong sense of we.

Research shows that couples who describe their conflicts using “we” language (we decided, we talked, we figured it out) feel more connected and satisfied after disagreements. When both partners see compromise as a shared effort, not a loss, it strengthens the bond between them.

Compromise doesn’t always look romantic. Sometimes it means agreeing to watch a movie you’d never choose yourself. Other times, it means listening to your partner vent about something while resisting your desperate urge to offer solutions.

In my own marriage, I’ve learned that a relationship rarely demands massive sacrifices. Instead, you’ll be presented with the choice of whether or not you’re willing to meet your partner halfway.

Today, it might be who takes on which chores. Tomorrow, it might be about how you spend your evening together. Next month, it might be about how you navigate your family holidays. It might involve finding middle ground, taking turns, or agreeing to something else that neither of you had considered.

What matters is that you’re both heard and respected, and that no one feels that they have to “win” or “be right.” When you consistently make enough space for one another’s needs, you’ll build something that love alone rarely does: reliability.

Mark Travers, PhD, is a psychologist who specializes in relationships. He holds degrees from Cornell University and the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the lead psychologist at Awake Therapy, a telehealth company that provides online psychotherapy, counseling, and coaching. He is also the curator of the popular mental health and wellness website, Therapytips.org.

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Sammi Ekmark, 29, co-founded personalized greeting and gift card company Ink’d Greetings in 2023 alongside her husband Andrew — a major pivot from her previous career as a star tennis player.

Ekmark picked up the sport when she was 10 years old, and by the time she was in college, she was playing on a Division I team where she was individually ranked among the top 50 tennis players in singles in the United States.

“I really focused on tennis. I was 92-0 in high school, so I never lost a match,” said Ekmark. “I played every single day for two and a half hours after school,” she said, adding that this was on top of her matches and tournaments on weekends.

Her goal was to become a professional tennis player, so she said she would often prioritize the sport over her academics and social life.

It didn’t take long for university recruiters to notice. As high school graduation approached, she received many offers from colleges around the nation. Ultimately, she decided to go with Arizona State University (ASU), which gave her a full-ride scholarship to attend the school and play for their Division I team.

Unfortunately, one night while playing a late tennis tournament in college, Ekmark planted her feet wrong and tore her ACL (anterior cruciate ligament), one of the main ligaments in the knee. This is known to be a major injury in sports.

“A lot of the times people do consider ACL [tears] a massive career ender,” she said. “When I got my injury … It made me take a year off, and it was very tough. Tennis was still my life, but it was hard to get back into it as good as before.”

Ekmark recovered from the tear and got back to playing tennis, but along the way, she also developed an interest for business after taking an entrepreneurship class at her university. Although she had dedicated much of her life to the sport, she ultimately decided to pivot and focus on building Ink’d Greetings.

Today, her business brings in over $25,000 in revenue a month, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

Ekmark’s story is like many others in the sports industry. Athletes — particularly those who dream of going pro one day — dedicate years of blood, sweat and tears to train, and often backed by families who help bear the time and financial commitment.

In the U.S., parents spend on average $3,000 annually on their children’s sports, with 64% reporting rising costs in recent years, according to a 2025 report by insurance company New York Life.

However, less than 2% of more than 500,000 athletes in National Collegiate Athletic Association schools are drafted into a professional sport, according to NCAA data.

“I unfortunately wasn’t as serious about academics as I would have liked to [have been] … I was there for tennis, and I know probably a lot of athletes are like that,” said Ekmark. “So sports, if you want to [play on] a high level, are an extreme sacrifice …. The room for error is so small.”

Those who want to play professionally often have to prioritize their sport over everything else. So, what happens to the 98% of NCAA student-athletes who don’t go pro? Well for some, life after sports can be very challenging.

“After they graduate, there’s a lot of mental health [issues] and [some face an] identity crisis,” Kate Fitzgerald, former student athlete and co-founder of SPORTx, a student athlete venture studio at Arizona State University, told CNBC Make It.

“A lot of athletes graduate with these incredible skill sets, but they have no true, quote, unquote, corporate resume experience to get them a job … they’re in a sense, behind,” said Fitzgerald.

While many student athletes are forced to play catch-up after university, Ekmark says that the qualities that make a great athlete are the same qualities that make a great entrepreneur.

“I think the best entrepreneurs are going to be people who were former athletes,” she said.

In June 2024, the House v. NCAA settlement was approved which ushered in a new era for the college sports industry, specifically in compensating athletes.

Following this landmark ruling, Division I college athletes who played from 2016 to 2025, are set to be given $2.75 billion in back pay. Previously, the athletes couldn’t legally collect on their name, image and likeness (NIL) from their schools.

Colleges can now also “spend up to $20.5 million per year, escalating most years by at least 4%, to directly pay athletes. While many star athletes have been paid on the side by NIL collectives for the past four years, this officially ends the era of amateurism,” according to previous reporting by CNBC.

The NCAA historically operated under this amateurism model, which limited student-athletes in what compensation they could receive. Today, some agree that the new NIL landscape will be great for student-athletes who want to become entrepreneurs or capitalize on their own brands.

“The opportunity is bigger than ever now, because they can start that [entrepreneurship journey] while they’re an athlete,” said Ekmark.

“So the NIL [landscape] has created the opportunity for athletes to actually set themselves up for success in life after sport,” said Fitzgerald. In practice, student athletes today can be compensated for endorsements, commercials or other deals that utilize their name, image or likeness.

Colleges have also stepped in to support their athletes with their entrepreneurial endeavors, such as Arizona State University’s SPORTx program, which aims to mentor the school’s athletes, help them navigate the new NIL landscape, and launch, build, expand and grow their businesses.

“I think that we need to start giving athletes another route … and we need to start instilling it in their minds earlier than when they fail and when they can’t go pro,” said Ekmark. “I think it does need to be in college like what [some schools] are doing now. And I think that entrepreneurship is probably the best route.”

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