#357 Haruki Murakami

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/f30c6b0bec4420ad

The episode you're about to hear is about obsession. It takes Hiroki Mirakami over thirty years.
to find his two obsessions, which is writing novels and running.
But once he finds them and dedicates his life to them
He discovers a lot of useful ideas.
That you and I can use in our work, and that is what his autobiography, that is what this book is about. One of my obsessions
has been making this podcast.
So I can collect and distill the knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs.
And I made a tool
to make sure that I never forget these lessons and I can pull them up on demand.
When I need them. That tool is founders notes.
And you can now get access to
the same tool that I use. Founders Notes lets you tap into
The collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs
on demand when you need them.
Since two thousand eighteen.
I've been putting all of my notes and highlights for all the books.
that I've read for the podcast into this giant searchable database.
That you can now use.
So anytime you hear me, you're gonna hear me reference a bunch of past founders on this episode.
And on all the episodes I make for founders. When I talk about an idea from Jeff Bezos or Walt Disney or Sam Walton or Charlie Munger or Warren Buffett or J. Paul Getty or Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce,
That ability to pull up their thoughts and ideas, that's just me searching through founders' notes and pulling up their ideas.
This is really important to get across.
When you subscribe to Founders Notes, what you see in Founders Notes, that's the tool I use. There's I don't have a different version. You see the exact same thing that I use.
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From history's greatest entrepreneurs.
directly into your brain quickly. I made a private podcast feed.
That comes with every single subscription to founders notes.
I call that private podcast feed Sage Advice.
I just made an episode for that feed that is about James Dyson. So I take sixty hours of reading because I've read both of his autobiographies. So you take
His forty year career
Which is then distilled down into sixty hours of reading, which then I distill down even further into a twelve minute episode.
That is rapid fire IDAs.
From James Dyson.
on company building directly into your brain. And I found those ideas by searching through founders notes. So the idea with these mini small episodes is I want to create another tool where if I can condense somebody's entire career, multiple books,
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I'm a little hesitant about writing this book.
This is a book about running.
Not a treatise on how to be healthy.
I'm not trying to give advice here, like okay, everybody, let's run every day to stay healthy.
Instead
This is a book in which I've gathered my thoughts.
About what running has meant to me as a person.
Just a book in which I ponder various things and think out loud.
No matter how mundane some action might appear.
If you keep at it long enough.
It becomes a contemplative
Even meditative act.
Once I was lying around a hotel room in Paris.
Reading the International Herald Tribune.
When I came across a special article on the marathon.
They were interviews with several famous marathon runners and they were asked
What special mantra goes to their head to keep themselves pumped up during a race?
I was impressed by all the different things that these runners think about.
As they run twenty six point two miles.
If you don't keep repeating a mantra
Of some sort to yourself.
You'll never survive.
One runner.
Told his mantra.
Here it is.
Pain is inevitable.
Suffering.
Is optional.
Say you're running.
And you start to think, Man, this hurts. I can't take it anymore.
The hurt part is an unavoidable reality.
Бо вет анімур.
is up to the runner himself.
So I suppose it's all right to read this as a kind of memoir.
Centered on the act of running.
This book does contain a certain amount of what might be dubbed.
Life lessons.
They are personal lessons I've learned through actually putting my own body in motion.
And thereby discovering
That's suffering.
Is optional.
That was an excerpt from the forward of the book that I'm gonna talk to you about today.
Which is what I talk about when I talk about running
A memoir and it was written by Haruki Mirakami.
So before I jump into the book, I wanna give you background.
Into the unexpected way.
expecting to make a podcast.
about this book. I didn't even know this book existed before a couple of days ago. So
I actually stumbled across this book on Twitter.
So then what I did is I love to read
I always read physical books.
But what I'll do is if I discover a new book, I will test it out by buying the
the Kindle version and I'll start reading it.
And then usually if I like the first few chapters, then I'll order the physical book because that's the how I prefer to read and that's how I like to make the podcast and everything else.
I start reading the Kindle version of
This book.
On my phone, on the Kindle app on my phone, and I could not put it down. I read the entire book.
In like a day and a half, maybe two days at most on my phone.
This really is a memoir about his two obsessions.
His first obsession is writing.
His second obsession is running.
And so in the book he says, unless it's totally uh unavoidable, he runs every single day. Not only does he run every single day.
This is his schedule when he's writing
A novel.
He wakes up at four AM.
He writes for five or six hours completely uninterrupted.
Then he'll go and run a ten K
He will also swim after that, then he'll read, listen to music, run errands, and then he falls asleep by nine PM.
usually there's a nap in the like a quick thirty minute nap in the afternoon as well.
And he does this seven days a week.
And so even though it's obvious that he's got a very intense and disciplined personality, he clearly believes in consistency.
Over intensity.
And so that's why he spreads everything out over a seven day week.
to keep the momentum going day to day. And so he talks about this. He says, listen, the point being
is to let the exhilaration I feel at the end of each run.
Carry over to the next day.
Even though he's physically capable of running more than a ten K every day, he purposely pulls back. He wants that exhilaration, I feel at the end of
each run to carry over to the next day. This is the same sort of tack.
That I find necessary when writing a novel.
I stop every day right at the point
Where I feel I can write more.
Do that and the next day's work goes surprisingly smooth.
I think Ernest Hemingway did something like that. In fact, it's really funny.
Again, I didn't even know this this book existed, you know, say two weeks ago, and yet in my right hand right now.
is Ernest Hemingway's book.
Ernest Hemingway on writing.
I had read the book.
Completely marked it up, took notes on it. I didn't think
It was
Enough. I've read and I don't know if I've told you this.
I might have mentioned it last week, but in the last month alone, I've been hitting like this dry streak over and over again. So I've read three full books.
Well literally got to the end of of all three books.
And then when I got to the end, I was like, These are not episode worthy enough.
So anyways, one of those three books was Ernest Hemingway on writing and he talks about this in the book.
Hemingway did not want to drain himself completely in uh every day. He wanted to have a little bit left.
So then he could pick up writing the next day.
And I think this is an overlooked key for these long term projects. Again
I am obsessed.
with hedgehogs. Hedgehogs are the people that do something for a long period of time.
Haruki Mirakami is one of these people. He's been a novelist for 45 years. He's still writing. Go to the last few weeks of the people you and I have been talking about. Bernard Arnault.
That's a hedgehog. He's been running L VMH for forty something years. Sam Walton, J Paul Getty.
The founder of Rolex, Steve Jobs, you see this over and over and over again. Walt Disney.
And so I think the point that Mir Kami's about to make right now is really important because this is about how the hell do you manage these long term
decade long
Projects.
And he says, Do that and the next day's work goes surprisingly smoothly.
I think Ernest Hemingway did something like that to keep on going.
You have to keep up the rhythm.
This is the important thing for long term projects.
Once you set the pace the
The rest will follow.
The problem is getting the flywheel to spin.
At a set speed.
And to get to that point.
Takes as much concentration
And effort.
As you can manage.
That is why routine is so powerful. This is also another reason I believe that routine is so powerful. I don't know why.
But the older you get, the busier you become.
And so as you're reading this book, the way I would describe this is he goes back and forth
between these dual obsessions and how they sir one each obsession serves the other.
And so he begins and he starts talking about like why did he pick a career as a novelist? Why did he pick
Running is the most important physical activity in his life. He talks about the importance of p picking things
that are authentic to your true self, something that suits you.
And something that you can do for a long period of time. So he says I started running in the fall of nineteen eighty two.
So it's actually
A few years after he publishes his first novel nineteen seventy nine.
So he picks up running a few years later, says I started running in the fall of nineteen eighty two.
And have been running since then for nearly twenty three years.
even longer now because this book is like fifteen, sixteen years old.
And there's gonna be many times in the book where you see why he picked a career as a novelist.
and why he chose to run. One of it is he's a loner. He likes to do things without
Relying on other people.
And things are as simple as possible. It's like, Well, if you want to be a writer, all you need is a pen and a piece of paper. If you want to be a runner, all you need is shoes.
You don't need teammates, you don't need any kind of equipment, you don't need anything.
And he says, long distance running suits my personality.
And of all the habits I've acquired over my lifetime
I have to say that this one has been the most helpful.
And the most meaningful.

Has also made me stronger.
Both physically
And emotionally.
I am not much for team sports.
That's just the way I am.
I think that very simple sentence is one of the most important sentences
In the entire book.
That's just the way I am.
It is clear from reading this book that Mirakami knows who he is.
I was just re reading
highlights from one of my favorite talks. I know I've talked about this a million times. It's running down a dream.
How to survive and thrive in your career you love. And when I got to this part because I was also reading the transcript, and when I went back on this section, I added the note after I was like, You must find a business that's authentic to you.
You cannot fit if you're gonna do the business over long term.
You cannot fake who you are.
over the long term.
And there's a line that Bill Gurley says in that that talk, Running Down a Dream.
How to survive and thrive in a career that you love.
And he's he's talking to
University of Texas NBA students.
But he says you can't fake passion.
somebody else that really loves the job will outrun you.
Somebody else sitting in some other MBA program has a deep passion.
for whatever career path that you're going down.
And they're gonna smoke you.
If you don't have it yourself.
Murakami could not be running for four decades, he could not be writing for four decades unless it suited him.
Unless it suited his authentic
Self.
And he immediately draws the analogy from running to writing. It's the same thing in the novelist's profession.
As far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as winning or losing. Maybe numbers of copies sold,
Awards won and critics praise serve as outward
Standards
For accomplishment in literature, but none of them really matter.
This hits so hard. The judge what he's saying is the judge within reigns supreme.
This is my interpretation of what he's saying.
What's crucial is whether your writing attains the standards
You've set for yourself.
Failure to reach that bar.
It's not something
That you can easily explain away.
Then he continues to steam and goes right back to running. For me
Running is both exercise and a metaphor.
Running day after day, working day after day, right? Running day after day, piling up the races bit by bit.
I raise the bar.
And by clearing each level I elevate myself. That's why I've put in the effort day after day.
to raise my own level.
And then a few pages later it goes back to this the importance of picking a a a craft, a profession that suits you. That is
authentic to you, that you're not just looking around and mimicking what other people are doing.
He's he's gonna talk about like if you think about what this paragraph I'm about to read to you right now.
This is why he's been able to write fifteen books over forty years.

Countless numbers.
Of short stories.
He says, I'm the kind of person who likes to be by himself.
to put a finer point on it, I'm the type of person who doesn't find it painful to be alone.
I find spending an hour or two every day running alone.
Not speaking to anyone.
as well as four or five hours a day alone at my desk to be neither difficult nor boring.
I've had this tendency ever since I was young.
When given a choice, I much preferred reading books on my own.
Are concentrating.
Over being with somebody else, I could always think of things to do by myself.
And then he goes into some of the psychological benefits of running or just spending time
W letting your mind wander. And so he has a great phrase on this. You know, you can uh there's a bunch of different ways you can do this. He just chooses it to get to this uh destination uh through running, but he says I run in order to acquire a void.
Running gives him a calm and empty mind. Obviously he he says like an occasional thought is gonna slip into this void.
'Cause people's minds can't be completely blank for long periods of time.
But running gives his ability to give his brain a a a rest. It gives him the ability to acquire a void.
And I think it's during these voids, whether it's in a shower and a long walk.
uh running, swimming, whatever it is that you're doing where you get this like download, this very valuable download.
From your unconscious. In fact
This is something that's popped up uh several times in the books. I think David Ogy
is the really the person that uh communicated this idea best to me. So I'm gonna read
An actual quote.
from his book Og on Advertising.
And he says big ideas come from the unconscious.
This is true in art, in science, and in advertising.
But your unconscious has to be well informed.
Or your idea will be irrelevant.
Stuff your conscious mind with information like books and podcasts and conversations, right?
Then unhook your rational thought process.
You can help this process by going for a long walk.
And that's Ogabe's words, obviously in Mirakami's words, he's running.
Or taking a hot bath, or drinking half a pint of
Kind of liquor, I guess. Suddenly that if the telephone line from your unconscious is open, a big ideal wells up within you.
And there's also another mental or psychological benefit from in his case, uh Miracami's case, running
Physical exercise has is come up a bunch of time in the books as well.
He's in a i in industry like a lot of people are, uh every entrepreneur.
You're just going to be misunderstood and criticized.
you know, maybe he writes a novel and he thinks it's great and you know, it doesn't sell as well and people critics g kinda pound it and make'em feel bad.
And so he says something. He says, uh it's not much fun to be misunderstood or criticized.
But rather a painful experience that hurts people deeply.
As I've gotten older though, I've gradually come to the realization that this kind of pain and hurt is necessary part of life.
And I would say unavoidable. In fact, Jeff Bezos has a great line about this where he says, If you absolutely cannot tolerate cr critics,
Then don't do anything new or interesting.
Back to Mirakami.
If you think about it, precisely because people are different from others.
That they're able to create their own independent selves. Take me as an example. It's precisely my ability to detect some aspects of a scene.
That other people can't.

That differ from theirs.
That's allowed me to write stories that are mine alone.
And because of this
We have an extraordinary situation in which quite a few people read what I've written.
So the fact that I'm me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. That's that's gotta be one of the best lines in the book.
So the fact that I'm me
And no one else
is one of my greatest assets.
Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.
So we've established it's unavoidable.
It's it's very constant to human nature and history, so what do you do?
So he uses exercise, vigorous
physical exercise as a way to relieve this emotional stress that he goes through.
That everybody goes through.
When I'm criticized unjustly from my viewpoint.
Or when someone I'm sure will understand me doesn't
I go running for a little longer than usual.
By running longer
It's like I can physically exhaust.
that portion of my discontent.
Praise w it's actually processing.
You know, the struggle, the painful emotions.
Through physical activity. There's a great line
in this biography of Teddy Roosevelt that I read, his wife and his mother die on the same day, if I remember correctly. And so he goes and he he says like when he's going through emotional turmoil, he does this early in his life, he does this throughout his entire life.
That he needed
physical tests of endurance to chase away that oppression that was bearing down on him. And this is what Teddy Roosevelt said about that.
Black care
Rarely sits behind a writer.
Whose expanses and pace is fast enough.
And it's one way to turn a negative experience
an emotion into a positive result. And Mirakami talks about this in the book.
And one of the results of running a little farther than usual
is that I become that much stronger.
If I'm angry
I direct that anger towards myself.
If I have a frustrating experience.
I use that to improve myself.
So before he was a writer or a runner.
He actually was an entrepreneur and his first business.
was a jazz club. And I think there's a little
There's value into to covering the section for a little bit.
Because it also gives you an idea of
Really the kind of his fierce work ethic.
that he was able to apply even in a business that wasn't suited for himself. But again
He th this this business I think lasts seven years where his second business as a novelist
Last at forty five. So I think that that's actually instructive. It's like well
If you wanna be in the game for a long time, you wanna get to the top of profession, you really should try to find something that suits you and that's authentic to you.
And so he talks about this. Most of the people I knew had predicted that the bar
Wouldn't do well.
They figured that an establishment run as kind of a hobby wouldn't work out.
that somebody like me, who was pretty naive and most likely didn't have the slightest aptitude for running a business
wouldn't be able to make a go of it.
Well, their predictions were totally off.
To tell you the truth
I didn't think I had much aptitude for business either.
I just figured
That since failure was not an option.
I'd have to give it everything I had.
My only strength
has always been the fact that I work hard
And can take a lot physically.
I'm more of a work horse than a race horse.
And if you think about it, there's already been hints, the fact that he's more of a workhorse
Than a race horse.
Yeah, just look at how he set up his schedule. It's like you know what, I'm gonna work
I'm gonna have the same schedule every day. I'm gonna put my faith in consistency and routine. I'm gonna wake up at four AM. I'm gonna write for five to six hours every day.
I'm gonna run a ten K.
I'm gonna swim, I'm gonna nap.
I'm gonna run errands.
Uh,'cause he he talks about later on and I'll get to this the fact that he just thinks he's a morning person, his brain works better in the morning, so he he
takes like low level stuff for the afternoon. Like he can swim, he can run errands.
You know, go listen to music.
And then I'm gonna go to bed early and I'm gonna do it again and again and again. That is a workhorse.
And his schedule at this time in his life when he's running the jazz club, when he's running the bar, is gonna get real crazy'cause he's gonna be for a short period of time, there's gonna be overlap between the two professions.
This we're not there yet, though. He says the work itself was hard. I worked from morning to late at night until I was exhausted. I had all kinds of painful experiences.
Things I had to rack my brains about and plenty of disappointments.
But I worked like crazy and I finally began to make enough profit to hire other people to help out.
As I neared the end of my twenties.
I was able to finally take a breather.
To start the bar, I had borrowed as much as I could from every place that would lend me money.
And I'd almost repaid it all. Things were settling down.
Up until then.
It had been a question of sheer
Survival.
of keeping my head above water and I didn't have room to think of anything else.
Now at this point of his life he can take inventory. He's like, Well, I'm about to turn thirty
Am I gonna be running this jazz club forever? Is this what I want my life to be? I took a deep breath and I slowly gazed around.
Turning thirty was just around the corner.
And pretty much out of the blue, I got the idea to write a novel. And this is the crazy part. He says I can pinpoint
The exact moment
When I first thought I could write a novel, he's a huge baseball fan.
So it says it was around one thirty in the afternoon on april first, nineteen seventy eight.
I was at Jing Yu Stadium.
That day alone.
in the outfield drinking a beer and watching the game.
And all of a sudden a thought me.
You know what?
I could try writing a novel.
And listen to how he describes his experience.
Something flew down the thought that idea, right? That little voice inside of him.
Something flew down from the sky at that instant and whatever it was.
I accepted it.
I had never had any ambitions to be a novelist.
I just had this strong desire to write a novel.
No concrete image of what I wanted to write about.
Just the conviction.
That if I wrote it now, I could come up with something that I'd find convincing.
This was in the spring of nineteen seventy eight.
And by the fall.
I had finished a two hundred page work.
Handwritten. He writes it on pen and paper.
Handwritten.
on Japanese manuscript paper.
And it's about to get crazier. Listen to what he does here.
And after I finished it, I felt great.
I had no idea what to do with the novel once I finished it.
But I just sort of let momentum carry me.
And I sent it in to be considered for a literary magazine's new wr new writer's
Prize.
This is the crazy part.
I shipped it off without making a copy of it.
This is nineteen seventy eight. It's the doesn't have a digital back up.
I shipped it off.
Without making a copy of it.
So it seems I didn't much care if I wasn't selected and vanished forever.
This is the work.
That's published under the title
Hear the wind sing.
I was more interested in having finished it.
Then in whether or not
it would ever see the light of day.
There is a name for what he just did, and that name is Autotelic.
Autotelic is an activity.
Done for the sake of itself. Autotelic
Is also the very first name. When I had this idea like almost a decade ago.
Hey, I'm gonna make a podcast about the books I read. The very first name
I chose for the podcast.
was autotelic. You can see this because in the URL for the RSS feed.
For the podcast.
It still says auto telic.
Autotelic, an activity done for the sake of itself. If this guy sits down
He has this thought, this
Rike of light lightning, this almost Eureka moment.
This is the
Hey, I have this intense desire.
To write a novel. He does so in a few months.
Writes it by hand, over two hundred pages written by hand.
And then sends it off.
Not even thinking what happens if it's lost in the mail. What happens if they throw it in the trash?
That is an activity done for the sake of itself.
It just so happens that is going to be his first ever
Published novel.
And this part of the story just made me laugh out loud because he says by the next spring
When I got a phone call from the publication
Telling me my novel had made the short list, I had completely forgotten that I'd entered the contest.
My novel won the prize and was published that summer. The book was fairly well received.
I was thirty.
And without really knowing what was going on, I suddenly found myself
labeled a new
Up and coming writer.
I was pretty surprised.
But people who knew me
We're even more surprised.
And at this point in his life the fact that he was a work horse
Wind up benefiting him immensely.
After this,
While still running my business.
I wrote in second
Novel.
And so he is thirty, but when he was a younger man
In his twenties, when he's an older man in his seventies, his discipline and work ethic are constants throughout his entire life. What do I mean by this?
Listen to what he's doing.
Every day for three years I ran my jazz club.
Keeping accounts.
Checking inventory, scheduling my staff, standing behind the counter.
Mixing up cocktails myself.
cooking and closing up in the wee hours of the morning and only then
Writing at home, at the kitchen table.
Until I got sleepy.
I felt like I was living enough for two people's lives.
Physically, every day was tough.
With these first two novels, I was only able to write in spurts, snatching bits of time here and there.
A half hour here, an hour here.
And because I was always tired.
And felt like I was competing against a clock as I wrote.
I was never able to fulcentrate.
And so then it is this point in his life story that he makes the most important decision and the riskiest decision.
that he ever makes. He decides I'm going to go all in.
On being a writer.
Even though
Most of his income.
is coming from the jazz club and not writing.
I felt I had been given a wonderful opportunity to be a novelist.
A chance you don't get every day.
And a natural desire sprang up.
To take it as far as I possibly could.
And write the kind of novel.
I'd feel satisfied with.
After giving it a lot of thought, I decided to close the business for a while.
And concentrate solely on writing.
At this point my income from the jazz club
Was more than my income as a naviest.
A reality
That I had to resign myself to.
Most people I knew were flat out against my decision.
Your business is doing fine, they said. Why not just let someone else run it for a while?
And then you go off and write your novels.
From the world's viewpoint, this makes perfect sense.
And most people probably didn't think.
I'd make it as a professional writer.
But I couldn't follow their advice.
I'm the kind of person
Who has to totally commit.
to whatever I do.
I had to give it everything I had. If I failed.
I could accept that.
But I knew
That if I did things half heartedly.
And they didn't work out.
I'd always have
Regrets.
This is the part where he bets on himself, despite the objections of everybody else.
I sold the business and though a bit embarrassed about it.
I hung out my sign as a novelist.
and set out to make a living writing.
I just like to be free.
For two years to write, I explained to my wife.
If it doesn't work out.
We can always open up another little bar somewhere.
I'm still young and we can always start over.
All right, she said.
This was in nineteen eighty one.
And we still had a considerable amount of debt.
But I figured
I just do my best.
And C
What happened.
I figured
It was do or die.
So I put
Everything.
I had into it.
And this is one of my favorite parts of the story. I'm gonna read my note to you before I read the paragraph that prompted the note.
And I wrote He knows.
He found his path.
The sense of relief.
That occurs when this happens in your life is worth all of the struggle to get there. And this is what he writes.
When I finished the novel I had a good feeling
That it created my own writing style.
My whole body
Thrilled at the thought of how wonderful
And how difficult.
It is to be able to sit at my desk.
Not worrying about time and concentrate on writing.
There were untouched veins still dormant within me.
I felt
And I now could actually picture myself.
Making a living as a novelist.
And even though he was excited, he's like I found my style. This book is better than the previous ones I have written.
When he tries to get it published, the editors
did not like it. They said they were looking for something more mainstream.
and didn't like the book is called A Wild Sheep Chase.
They didn't like the book at all.
And I recall how unenthusiastic
Their reception was
This part is so important and there's so many parallels to the history of entrepreneurship.
It seems back then my notion of
But the novel was pretty unorthodox.
Readers though, this is so important, right? Editors like oh we want some more mainstream. Okay, well why?
Because you want more readers. Well, what happens when he puts out this unorthodox, this differentiated product into the market? Readers, though, seem to love this new book.
And that
Is what makes me happiest.
There's a great quote.
About
This from James Dyson.
If you can try to go direct to the end user of your product because he said the entrenched professional.
is always going to resist.
far longer than the private consumer.
Thank God that gatekeeper, that publisher didn't get in the way.
Oh, we don't like this. We're looking for something more mainstream.
That is the entrenched professional, right?
But the private consumer is like we love this, give us more.
Now we've been talking about this journey from bar owner, jazz club owner to novelist.
But how does this tie with the book?
With his
This diary, this uh inner monologue about running.
How did he he's not a runner yet. Now he's a novelist. He solved that problem.
But he hasn't found that second obsession that second obsession that's gonna serve his first obsession.
How does he do that? Well, he tells us a problem arose.
With my decision to become a professional writer.
The question was how to keep physically fit.
Running the bar required hard physical labor every day.
And I could keep my weight down.
But once I started sitting on my desk all day writing
My energy level gradually declined and I started putting on pounce.
I was also smoking too much.
As I concentrated on my work.
Back then, I was smoking sixty cigarettes a day.
I decided that if I wanted to have a long life as a novelist.
I needed to find a way to keep fit.
And maintain a healthy weight.
And so this is where he's looking at okay, there's all kinds of sports I can choose. Like why am I gonna choose running?'Cause it's who he is.
It's his description of running.
It's the same for writing and reading.
He says running has a lot of advantages.
First of all, you don't need anybody else to do it.
And no need for special equipment.
You don't have to go to any special place to do it.
As long as you have running shoes and a good road.
You can run to your heart's content, and so
He
In the mornings he r he writes, in the afternoon he reads.
Reading, writing, running, no special equipment. You need a pen and paper or a typewriter. You need some shoes. You need a uh you know, a nine dollar book.
But you don't need anybody else to do these things.
And an added benefit are s all those things are positive healthy habits and they
crowd out the more obsessed you become with running, with reading, with writing.
The more they're gonna crowd out things that don't serve them. And so he just said, Hey, I was smoking sixty
Cigarettes a day.
I think he's seventy five, seventy six years old today. Would he be alive if he didn't kick the habit? Maybe not.
But ha why did he kick the habit?
Because he couldn't run in smoke.
Not long after I also gave up smoking.
Giving up smoking was kind of a natural result of running every day.
It wasn't easy to quit, but I couldn't very well keep on smoking and continue running.
This natural desire to run
Became a powerful motivator.
For me to not go back to smoking.
And a great help in overcoming the withdrawal symptoms.
And this line is so great. This sentence so great. Quitting smoking.
Was like a symbolic gesture of farewell.
To the life that I used to lead.
And then he talks about the difference of kinda like struggling through a profession or an activity you don't like.
Like team sports, he hated that.
Loves running so he can do it all the time. He can give everything you got.
Didn't you know, he's an introvert. He talks about over and over again. He's like I I I just wanna control who has access to me.
Well, if you're running a bar, you have to s it's a service business. Anybody can come to the door, you have to serve them.
Didn't like that.
And so he talks about this aspect of his personality again, just this fundamental he did this this really important work of understanding who he actually is inside.
I could never stand being forced to do something I didn't want to do.
At a time I didn't want to do it.
Whenever I was able to do something I like to do, though.
When I wanted to do it.
And the way I wanted to do it, I'd give it everything I had.
And so by switching into a profession that was more suited to his authentic self, he's able to
redesign his entire lifestyle. Listen to how different his lifestyle was.
as a novelist than when he was running a bar.
The happiest thing about becoming
A writer.
was that I could go to bed early and get up early.
When I was running the bar, I often didn't get to sleep until near dawn.
After I closed the bar and began my life as a novelist, the first thing that we
And he talks about him and his wife decided to completely revamp their lifestyle.
The first thing we did is we decided to go to bed soon after it got dark and wake up with the sun.
So my new simple and regular life began.
I got up before five AM.
Went to bed before ten PM.
People are at their best at different times of the day.
But I'm definitely a morning person.
That's when I can focus and finish up important work I have to do. Afterwards, I work out or do other errands that don't take much concentration. At the end of the day, I relax.
And don't do any more work. I read, listen to music, take it easy, and try to go bed early. This is the pattern
I've mostly followed up until today.
Thanks to this.
I've been able to work efficiently these past twenty four years. And now he's into, you know, forty years he's been doing this.
I also found this interview.
When I got to this part
I I was al also reading and uh listening to interviews that he's done and I found this interview about his daily schedule very interesting.
It was this from this two thousand four interview.
And so he describes his daily schedule, but I think the the last few sentences is really what's important.
So he talks about, you know, I get up at four AM, I've already told you this, he writes for five to six hours.
Then he'll go run
uh ten kilometers and swim fifteen hundred meters.
Then read a bit, listen to some music, and go to bed ear. Now this is the important part.
I keep to this routine every day without variation.
The repetition itself becomes
The most important thing.
It is a form of mesmerism.
I mesmerize myself.
To reach a deeper state of mind.
The power of routine.
is a recurring theme throughout the entire book. He goes back to it. I'm struck.
By how except when you're young
You really need to prioritize in your life.
Figure out
In what order you should divide up your time and energy if you don't get that sort of system set by a certain age.
Йлак фокус.
And your life will be out of balance. I placed
The highest priority
On the sort of life
That lets me focus on writing.
Why? Because writing is an act of service. So he's gonna talk about the relationship that he has with his readers.
The entrepreneurial equivalent.
is relationships that you have with your customers. What did h what did Henry Ford tell us?
That money comes naturally as a result of service. Focus on service.
Mirakami built his entire life.
His entire lifestyle, what he focuses on, his routine.
about this act of service because he believes what he's about to say in beautiful language
is that the most important relationship he has in his life
is with his readers. The most important relationship that entrepreneurs have in their business is with their customers. I place the highest priority
On the sort of life that lets me focus on writing. Why?
Because I felt that the indispensable relationship
I should build in my life.
Was not with a specific person.
But with an unspecified number of readers.
My opinion on this has not changed over the years.
I've consistently considered
This invisible
Conceptual relationship
To be the most important thing in my life.
Actions express priority. How you spend your time is all that matters. It's not what we think.
It's not what we believe, it is only matters what we do.
And you can tell what's a priority, what's the most important in your life to how you spend your time, actions.
Express.
priority. He has another genius thing that I've ta talked about a lot.
And again, this isn't something that's uh
I don't even know if it's explicit. It's just this idea I had where it's like it's weird that so many entrepreneurs
Focus on like the cust like converting customers that don't like them or
being concerned about like criticism of their product or their business. It's like wait a minute, your business is built by serving the customers that love
What you do and ignoring the rest.
And this may be the first time
I had this like idea, this vague notion in my head, and I don't know if I've even can even express it the w the right way.
To how I truly think about this.
But this is mirror what Mirakami writes here is like the closest that I've got. It's like yes, that's exactly this like weird idea that keeps popping up. So he says you cannot please everybody.
Even when I ran my bar, I followed the same policy.
A lot of customers came to the bar.
If one out of ten enjoyed the place
And said he'd come again.
That was enough.
If one out of ten was a repeat customer
Then the business would survive.
To put it the other way, it didn't matter if nine out of ten didn't like my bar.
This realization lifted a weight off of my shoulders.
Still, I had to make sure that one person who did like the place really liked it.
In order to make sure he did, I had to make my philosophy.
And stance clear cut.
and patiently maintain that stance no matter what.
This is what I learned through running a business. He does the exact same thing.
Think about it if you're a novelist, you know, what's gonna happen. Yeah, any new book, especially if he becomes famous for doing this.
Every time you release a book, you're gonna have a million people review the book.
You know, maybe
Seventy percent says this sucks.
You know
Ten percent says it's okay. Ten percent's like, Yeah, I kinda like it, but ten percent really love it. And so he talks about the fact that he just focused on
writing an uh what b other people thought was unorthodox, but it was completely authentic to him. It was differentiated from the other novels out there.
And it found its market. And over time, since he was doing this for the long term, he says every time he released a new novel, he had more readers.
It didn't matter if a new novel came out and ninety percent of the stuff said, You know, that's not for me.
That ten percent
Loved it.
And then they told other people, and that ten percent slowly grew over time.
And he has a great line in the book to describe this perspective. He says there's no need to be literature's top runner. And I was like, Oh, I read that.
And in the context of everything else that's going on in the store, it's like oh
He approached building his customer base the same way
You would approach building up.
and increasing the length of distance that you can run.
Slowly.
Over time.
Year after year.
And so then he illustrates this point.
through training through running. This goes back to this idea of he's clearly if you analyze what he's doing, he's like clear
prioritizing consistency over intensity.
And it's clear as he's talking about b these dual obsessions that his skill at running and his skill at business were built the very same way. There's just this little bit every day.
I'm gonna read this to you and then I I I I w I wanna quote one of my favorite essays, which is How to Do Great Work by Paul Graham.
So Mirror Comey says.
When I first started running, I couldn't run long distances.
I could only run for about twenty minutes or thirty minutes, and that left me panting, my heart pounding.
My leg's shaking.
It was expected though, since I hadn't really exercised for a long time.
At first I was also a little embarrassed to have people in my neighborhood see me running.
It was the exact same feeling I had upon first seeing the title novelist.
After my name.
But as I continued to run and obviously continued to rate
My body body started to accept the fact
That I was running.
And I could gradually increase the distance.
I was starting to acquire a runner's form.
My breathing became more regular. He's saying I'm acquiring more skills, right? My breathing became more regular.
And my pulse settled down. The main thing
Воз на спі ордес.
so much as running every day without taking a break. And so
This is line in Paul Graham's essay How to Do Great Work.
I think is episode three fourteen, if I remember correctly.
And
It you know something that I'm I'm really trying to orient my own
career and in
Like obsession.
Around.
It's that consistency over decades after decades. And so what Paul Graham says is the reason that we're surprised.
is that we underestimate the cumulative effect of work.
Writing a page a day doesn't sound like much.
But if you do it every day, you'll write a book a year.
That is the key.
Consistency.
People who do great things don't get a lot done every day.
They get something done rather than nothing.
And of course done over a long period of time.
And so then it goes back to this power of routine.
What does Mirakami say so like three meals a day
Along with sleeping
Housework and work.
Running.
was incorporated into my daily routine.
And then immediately after this he goes back to this idea that you and I keep discussing. It's like
If it suits you, you're gonna do it for a long time. If you do it for a long time, you're gonna get really good at it. And if you get really good at at it at something, money is w is a result of that process, right? So he says when I tell people I run every day, some are quite impressed.
You must really have a strong will, they sometimes tell me.
To tell you the truth.
I don't even think that's much of a correlation between my running every day and whether or not I have a strong will.
I think I've been able to run for more than twenty years. And so now, you know, thirty five years or forty years, whatever it's been present day.
But I've think I've been able to run for decades for a simple reason. It suits me. Go back to
Well, Paul Graham said, I think it's in the same essay on how to do great work. He says when you follow what you were intensely interested in.
This strange convergence happens.
Where you're working all the time and it feels like you're never working.
We just saw this.
on episode was it episode three fifty five on with Bernard Arnault?
That's on a rare
Bernard O'Neill interview. He's seventy five years old when the interview is given.
And he talks about the fact that like
This guy's up.
pushing himself, you know, twelve hours a day, seven days a week on Saturday mornings like super excited.

Uh toward like
visits on a store trying to like find any like slight little detail that's off and he just has a great
Mine on this because
Yeah, when are you gonna retire? It's like I have fun every morning.
I have
Fun every morning is another way to say this suits me, this activity suits me.
Goes back to what Bill Gurley said in that talk, running down a dream.
somebody else somewhere else has a deep passion
for whatever career path that you're going down.
And they're gonna smoke you.
If you don't have it yourself. I'm sure there's somebody that's like
I love Arnauds.
business. I would love to do that too, but they don't have the passion and you can't fake it over decades.
And so we go back to mirror Kami on this a few sentences later, no matter how strong a will a person has.
No matter how much he may hate to lose.
If it's an activity he doesn't really care for
He won't keep it up for long.
I just did this post.
Trying to summarize
The most important lesson I learned from spending two hours with Sam Zell before he passed. And the the the most important lesson, I mean

Yeah, had me fired up and I think about it all the time.
But if I had to say just one lesson from spending time with him.
Was go for freedom.
Freedom allows you to control
What you work on.
If you control what you work on.
Then you can work on what you love.
If you love it, you'll do it for a long time.
And if you do it for a long time, you'll get really good at it and money will come as a result.
And one of the most in important unstated things
If you're really paying attention to
As I was reading this and if you're really paying attention to what he's saying, and it's obviously in all these biographies too, is like nobody can do this for you.
Nobody can tell you if your profession, if your craft, if your work is actually authentic.
To you. So he ties us in. That's why I've never recommended running to others.
I've tried my best never to say something like running is great, everybody should try it.
If some people have an interest in long distance running
Just leave them be and they'll start running on their own.
If they're not interested in it, no amount of persuasion will make any difference.
Nobody ever recommended or even desired
That I'd be a novelist.
In fact, some people tried to stop me.
I had the idea to be one.
And that is what I did.
I love that.
I'm obsessed with this idea.
I I've been uh I do a lot of talks at companies and conferences and stuff and there's a lot of Q and A too and I've been asked to do th this
question in d in various forms uh a bunch over the years and it's like, you know, how can we encourage more people
to be entrepreneurs. I'm like it's an inner thing.
I'd be shocked if this wasn't the exact same experience you had. But the exact same experience that Mirakami sang.
I had the idea to be one and that's what I did.
The the greatest way.
The funniest way.
our most memorable way that I think about this idea is this this I don't even know if this is true, but there's a story about Mozart.
Where a guy comes to him
And it says Mozart, how do you write a symphony?
And Mozart replies, You're too young to write a symphony and the man goes, But you were writing symphonies when you were ten years of age.
And I'm twenty one. And Mozart goes, Yeah, but I didn't run around asking people how to do it.
Mir Kami just said.
Not only did no one ever recommend that I be a novelist, they try to stop me.
But it doesn't matter. I had the idea to be one, and that's what I did. One of my favorite all time quotes from Coco Chanel.
It's exactly the same idea. She goes,
I decided who I want to be.
And that is who I am.
And so there's something else that that's important to add to this. Just because you love what you do, you have a passion for it, you want to do it for a long time, doesn't mean that you're gonna want to feel like doing it every day. Yeah, I obviously.
It's impossible that every day of your life
You're gonna wake up like I'm I wanna do this right now. I have to do this.
And so there's this great conversation that happens.
between Mirkami and Olympic runner.
So he says no matter how much long distance running
Might suit me.
Of course there are days when
When I feel kind of lethargic and I don't want to run.
Actually this happens a lot.
On days like that, I try to think of all kinds of plausible excuses
To call it off.
Once I interviewed an Olympic runner, this guy's last name is Seco.
And I asked him.
Does a runner at your level ever feel
Like you'd rather not run today.
Like you don't want to run and you'd rather just sleep in.
He stared at me.
And then in a voice that made it abundantly clear how stupid
He thought the question was replied.
Of course.
Uh
The time.
The difference is the people.
they reach the top of their profession, they reach Olympic levels, the equivalent of Olympic levels in their profession.
They do it regardless of how they feel. One of my favorite movies that's come out in the last few years has been Dune. The fur I like Dune one and two.
But I've watched the first one I don't know, like eight times.
And I love this part where
Paul Atreides has to he's he's supposed to be training on and learning how to fight and sharpening his skills.
And there's a scene in the movie where he tries to get out of it. He's like, Oh, I'm not in the mood, and the response by the trainer was perfect.
What's mood got to do with it?
There's a paragraph in Henry Ford's autobiography that's written a hundred years ago that talks about the same problem that is constant in human nature. The fact that how we feel
Our mood.
It cannot affect
The commitments that we have
to our work and to serving other people.
He says I pity the poor fellow.
Who's so soft and flabby.
Then he must always have an atmosphere of good feeling around him before he can do his work.
There are many such men.
And in the end, unless they obtain enough mental and moral hardiness
To lift them out of their soft reliance on feeling.
They are failures.
Not only are they business failures, they are character failures also.
It is as if their bones
Never attained a sufficient degree of hardness.
To enable them to stand on their own feet.
There is all together too much reliance.
On good feeling.
In our business organizations.
And so then I want to move on to one of my favorite lessons in the book.
And so for a while he had the idea is like okay, every year at le I'm gonna run at least one marathon.
And he did this a bunch.
And he gets a little cocky.
And the the lesson here is never try to cheat the work. There's no shortcuts.
And what happens is he goes to this
like emotionally devastating thing because like oh I've run marathons before Oh yeah, and I haven't been really training that much, but you know, like
I can just show up and it'll happen.
He finishes the marathon, but he had to walk.
to finish the marathon. And one of his rules was like no walking. Absolutely no walking. He he holds himself to very high standards.

Standards.
He failed to live up to his expectations.
And the fact that he had to walk to finish
This marathon just made him like
He was like in tears. He just could not believe it. And I loved his
Self assessment.
Of what he did wrong.
He's like, There's three reasons that I failed.
Not enough training.
Not enough training.
And not enough training.
Without knowing it.
I had developed an arrogant attitude.
Convinced.
that just a fair to middling amount of training
was enough for me to do a good
Job.
It's pretty thin.
The wall separating
Healthy confidence
An unhealthy pride.
And his reaction to this was perfect. You go back to the basics and you recommit yourself to
He says as I ran this race.
I felt I never
Every yeah.
Wanted to go through that again.
right then and there I decided that before my next marathon I was gonna go back to the basics, start from scratch.
And do the very best I could.
train meticulously and rediscover what I was physicable of. Tighten up all the loose screws
One by one.
Do all of that and see what happens.
And part of what happened is, you know, he said, as you get older, you get busier
He becomes
you know, more well known. He's got all kinds of different opportunities to go his way. A lot of those are just
you know, the external world is m largely an external distraction.
And what he realizes there's always gonna be more reasons not to run.
not to spend the time doing this than there are to do that. You have to hold on to the few precious
Valuable reasons. And he says
Even if there were two of me, I still couldn't do all that has to be done.
No matter what.
I keep up my running.
Running every day is a kind of lifeline for me.
So I'm not gonna lay off running or quit just because I'm busy.
If I use being busy as an excuse not to run, I'd never run again.
I only have a few reasons to keep on running.
And a truckload of them.
To quit.
All I can do is keep those few reasons nicely polished.
No matter what, just keep doing it.
He's been talking about running. See how it goes back and forth? He's like
We're gonna talk about running for a little bit, but then we're gonna draw a life lesson from there and we're gonna apply it to our craft.
And so he goes, if I'm asked what's the next most important quality
Is for a novelist.
That's easy.
Focus.
The ability to concentrate all your limited talents on whatever's critical at the moment.
Without focus you cannot accomplish anything of value.
I concentrate on my work every morning. I sit at my desk and focus totally on what I'm writing.
I don't see anything else.
I don't think about anything else.
After focus, the next most important thing for a novelist is hands down endurance.
If you concentrate on writing
three or four hours a day and feel tired after a week of this.
You're not gonna be able to write a long work.
Focus and endurance.
Can be acquired and sharpened through training.
You'll naturally learn both concentration and endurance when you sit down every day at your desk and train yourself to focus on one point.
This is a lot like training muscles.
You have to continually transmit the object of your focus to your entire body.
And make sure it thoroughly assimilates the information necessary.
For you to write every single day and concentrate
On the work at hand.
And gradually
You'll expand the limits of what you're able to do.
The great mystery writer Raymond Chandler once confessed
That even if he didn't write anything.
He made sure.
He's to sit down at his desk every single day and concentrate.
I understand the purpose behind his doing this.
This is the way Chandler gave himself the physical stamina
A professional writer needs.
Quietly strengthening his willpower.
This sort of daily training was indispensable to him a few weeks ago when I did George Lucas' biography.
in that biography talked about that George Lucas wrote Star Wars the same way. Yeah, he w he found
writing Star Wars unbelievably difficult. So what do you do? It's like, Okay, I'm gonna write from nine to five.
I'm gonna sit in the desk. I can do two things and two things only.
I can either write
Or I can stare at the wall.
And so Lucas sat at his desk for eight hours a day, no matter if he wrote a single word or not.
Something else that jumps off the pages of this book is the fact that he is
fully alive. He has given in to his obsessions. He's
organized his entire life around these handful of things that he truly loves to do.
The personal relationship he has with his wife.
the taking care of his health.
The writing.
the complete control over his schedule. And I I just think
this paragraph is just gives you an idea. It's like you want
You want to organize your life so you feel alive with capital letters.
Alive. And there's a d actually before I read this, there there's something I also save on my phone. It's this picture of Sam Walton.
And it's a quote.
overlaid a picture on top of Sam Walton that he said in his autobiography. He says the great thing about entrepreneurship
is you get to spend your time building something you enjoy.
Most people don't get to do this.
They're stuck in jobs they hate.
I had the time of my life and you feel that Mirakami

worked himself into a position where he's having the time of his life. It may be a different life than you would choose, or that I would choose.
But it's what it's what it's what makes him feel alive.
And I think this paragraph gives insight into like what's important to him. He says most runners run
Not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest.
If you're gonna whittle away the years, it's far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive
Than in a fog.
And I believe running helps you do that, exerting yourself to the fullest.
Within your individual limits.
That's the essence of running and a metaphor for life.
And for me
For writing as well.
If something's worth doing this goes back to him, it's gonna sound a lot like Edwin Lan.
How is quote
This this hilarious quote.
from Edwin Land. He says there's a rule they don't teach you at Harvard Business School.
It is if anything is worth doing, it's worth doing to excess.

Version that.
If something's worth doing
It's worth giving it your best.
are in some cases beyond your best.
Now, that can also be a very dangerous piece of advice because
His whole thing was like consistency over intensity, I'm gonna do things for a very long time.
I wanna, you know, end my run.
With still a little bit in the tank so I can run be excited and exhilarated and run again tomorrow. Same way that I he writes his novel, same way the Hemingway.
Wrote his novels.
But Mirkami makes the mistake.
And he pushed it too far, and this actually leads him to fall out of love.
With
running for several years. He runs
He decides hey
I'm running a marathon every year. I'm doing triathlons. I'm gonna run an ultra marathon. I think it's like sixty something miles.
And he talks about completing it and just hitting a wall and almost feeling like he's dying, but having this like crazy will to f to
to push through. So I'm gonna get to that. But then
He's gonna talk about the fact that
It gave him
Depression.
And so I'll pick right up in the story where he's already hit this wall. He's like, Oh sh I'm I'm in trouble here. I have like twenty something more miles and I can barely move.
Ultimately using every trick in the book I managed to grit my teeth and make it through thirteen miles of sheer torment.
I'm not human.
I'm just a piece of machinery.
I don't need to feel a thing.
Just forge on ahead.
That's what I told myself.
I'm not human.
I'm a piece of machinery.
I don't feel a thing.
Just forge on ahead.
I repeat this like a mantra.
A literal
Mechanical
Repetition.
And I try hard to reduce
The perceptible world to the narrowest parameters. All I can see is the ground.
Three yards ahead.
Nothing beyond.
My whole world

Of that ground.
Three yards ahead.
No need.
Think beyond that.
And the effect of going too far of burning himself out.
was detrimental. It says the most significant fall off from running the ultra marathon wasn't physical, but mental.
What I ended up with was a sense of lethargy, and before I knew it, if I felt covered by a thin film
Something I've dubbed.
Runner's blues.
After this ultra marathon, I lost the enthusiasm I'd always had.
for the act of running itself.
I no longer had the simple positive stance I used to have.
So
This is something that's very fascinating.
And I don't think it's uh obvious to many people, but I really do believe that great entrepreneurs
likely have low introspection.
And I'm not talking about early in their lives. I think introspection, especially early in your life, is extremely important. I'm saying once you've found the thing that you know you're going to commit to, introspection is not always helpful. So let's define what I mean by introspection.
The examination or observation of one's own mental and emotional processes.
Probably very necessary before you find your life's work.
But after questionable, do you think Sam Walton woke up every morning is like
What should I do today?
Should I continue to build this retail empire? Should I watch my cost?
Should I keep visiting stores? No, he there was no introspection. He was like a shark. He woke up and he just swam.
There's a simple genius to that. So
In Mirakami's case.
The the ultra marathon burns him out, he gets the runners group blues. It takes several years and a lot of this like lack of excitement about running.
before he picks up the passion again and does it on a daily basis.
And once he works his way through this depression through this runners blues, he does a recommitment.
There's this great book on Vince Lombardi.
Called the Lombardy rules.
And rule number six is really important.
And it says the essence of commitment is making a decision.
The Latin root for decision is to cut away from.
As in an incision.
When you commit to something
You are cutting away all your other possibilities, all your other options.
And that is the story of Mirkami's memoir, this commitment to his dual obsessions.
I didn't start running because somebody asked me to become a runner.
Just like I didn't become a novelist because someone asked me to.
One day out of the blue I wanted to write a novel.
And one day out of the blue I started to run.
Simply because I wanted to.
I've always done whatever I felt like doing in life.
People may try to stop me.
And convince me I'm wrong.
But I won't change.
I expect that this winter I'll run another marathon somewhere in the world.
And I'm sure come next summer.
I'll be out in another triathon somewhere.
Giving it my best shot.
Thus the seasons come and go.
And the years passed by.
I'll age one more year and probably finish another novel.
One by one I'll face the tasks before me.
And I'll complete them the best I can.
Focusing on each stride forward.
But at the same time
Taking a long range view.
Scanning the scenery.
As far ahead as I can.
I am.
After all,
A runner.
And that is where I'll leave it for the full story. Highly recommend reading the book. I devoured it, like I said, you know, day, day and a half. You could probably read it in a weekend.
If you buy the book
Using the link that's in the show notes.
On your podcast player, also available at founderspodcast.com. You'll be supporting the podcast at the same time.
That is three hundred.
And fifty seven books down.
One thousand ago.
And I'll talk to you again soon.