If I did not understand it myself, I could not explain it 🐧

Being able to translate wasn't enough.

You pass on what the client said to the engineers. That part, I could do fairly easily.

The rewarding part was explaining what the engineers built, back to the client.

The person who explains it to the client is the Japanese person in the room. That's me.

If I didn't understand it myself, I couldn't explain it well.

I got assigned to all sorts of projects, so each time, I had to go and understand the thing myself.

Understanding it, and getting to a state where I could actually explain it. That was the high point of the job.

So before a meeting, I always, without fail, made something like an agenda or a table of contents first.

So I wouldn't get lost in the middle of the meeting. So I wouldn't forget something, or go blank.

Once I started preparing like that, explaining things to people got a lot easier.