
What Startups Can Learn From Haruki Murakami - naish
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/what_startups_can_learn_from_haruki_murakami.php
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seregine
Goes to show that anything you enjoy, if you think about it hard enough, can
be applied to startups. It's all human experience. Feynman said it as "The
whole universe is in a glass of wine."

<http://hackvan.com/brain/msg00058.html>

Personally, I don't like this example. I love Murakami's novels because they
contain mystery and loose ends, and they don't pretend that human lives neatly
wrap up into stories. Murakami doesn't tell me what to think, he shows me
enough complexity and paradox to make me think. The blog post, on the other
hand, is name-dropping him to repackage the same motivational bullet points.

~~~
hugh
Indeed. I was expecting a lot more from the title than it delivered -- perhaps
some kind of in-depth discussion of how the largely somewhat bizarre plots of
Murakami's books can be related to startups. Maybe the end of the world in
Hard Boiled Wonderland And The End Of The World tells us something about how
to cope with time pressure, or sitting at the bottom of the well in The Wind
Up Bird Chronicle is something to do with getting your best work done in
isolation. Or, er, something.

But nope, just a list of random platitudinous advice which could be related to
just about any successful person.

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eugenejen
I never thought one day I will see people relate him with startups when I was
22 reading his novels 18 years ago.

One of my favorite quote from his "Norwegian Wood" is : ""The true enemy of
this bunch was not State Power but Lack of Imagination". "This bunch" was
socialist university students.

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jlc
29 is not a "late bloomer" for a novelist. That's considered somewhat
precocious, actually.

~~~
whacked_new
What an intriguing factoid. Could you elaborate on this? Where and why?

~~~
jlc
Novelists (and short story writers) who publish a first book in their twenties
are perceived as wunderkinder. It is considered much more usual to begin
publishing books in your thirties. I'm basing this on my experience as a keen
reader of "literary" fiction and as a fiction writer (with a handful of pubs,
but no book, dammit). And no, if I published one today, I wouldn't be
considered a wunderkinder ;-)

Now, I'm pretty confident in my assertion that this is the general perception,
but I haven't compiled the facts to see whether perception coincides with
reality. Certainly, I can think of many young first novelists from over the
years: Michael Chabon, Philip Roth, Zadie Smith, Bret Easton Ellis, David
Foster Wallace. Yes, Neal Stephenson, you hackers, you. But if you check out
the press and reviews on their first books, you'll find that almost the most
salient fact about them is their age.

Assuming most first fiction books are published in the writer's early
thirties, why would that be? Writing fiction requires a lot of disparate
skills. It takes a long time to develop them, and they tend to develop
asynchronously. The typical case, is a young writer with the technical skills,
but not enough life experience to really get inside anyone's head, which is
necessary in fiction, of course. (Certainly, it sometimes works the other way
around.) Some young writers are so good at the technical aspects that the
reader is willing to look past shallowness of characters, a tired theme, etc.
And their books are published despite flaws. I'd say this is the case with
Zadie Smith's _White Teeth_ for instance.

And of course (he says cynically) sometimes books are published for reasons
other than their quality.

Murakami, BTW, has all but disavowed his first two novels.

~~~
eugenejen
His first two was the reason I started to read his stuff. It just like those
punk band. Even it is green, but you feel there will be something if they keep
on working, and after years you know everyone listen to their stuffs. Even
though when they look bad later to see how embarrassed it was. But the spirit
is the essence.

