Jiro Ono: The documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” brought attention to one of the greatest sushi chefs in the world, and the dedication and consistency behind that greatness. In a recent podcast, David Senra covered Jiro, with more details from additional research. Below are a few notes from the podcast that stood out to me.
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Level of commitment
- Did the same job almost every single day for 75 years
- Up by 5am and back from restaurant 10pm every day while his kids were growing up
- Doesn’t like holidays
- "All I think about is sushi...I would make sushi in my dreams” (Good luck trying to outdo someone who is working in their dreams!)
Steve Jobs said when making the Mac: “The [existing computer line at Apple] wanted to build something great; the Mac team wanted to build something insanely great. The difference showed”. Jiro wanted to make insanely great sushi:
- Each of his vendors has to be the best vendor for that specific ingredient. And each vendors is a specialist (tuna, rice, etc).
- Octopus: used to massage for 30 mins before boiling, now I massage for 40-50 minutes
- Rice: we have a rice supplier who only sells to us (wouldn’t sell to the nicest hotel in Japan). We put a heavy lid on the rice that adds pressure and takes two people to lift. And we serve it and devised techniques to serve it at the right temperature.
- Apprentice for Jiro: “10 years on fish, then they let you cook the eggs. I made over 200 eggs. Every single one was rejected until I finally made one Jiro liked. He tried all of them”
Miscellaneous
- Didn’t start his own restaurant until he was 39
- "Jiro's restaurant was immaculately clean. It may be the cleanest restaurant in the world"
- When his son opened his own restaurant, Jiro said “now you have no home to come back to. He said that I would be buried in the place where the restaurant is. Failure was not an option. There is no turning back”. When Jiro left home at the age of 9, he was told “you have no home to come back to. I had to work to survive. That has never left me.”
James Dyson made 5,127 prototypes of his vacuum over a 14 year span until he felt it was ready. David Senra’s podcast on Dyson raised the bar for me on what persistence looks like:
- Dyson: “For 3 years I made vacuum cyclones myself. I made a new prototype every day for more than 1,000 days. The truth is that while it’s easy to say now how important persistence was, it demoralized me terribly. I would crawl back into the house every night covered in dust, exhausted and depressed because the day’s cyclone had not worked. There were times when I thought that it would never work, that I would keep on making cyclones never going forward until the day I died. After a few years, my doggedness and self belief, without any evidence that they were justified, were beginning to look more and more like insanity. I was 31 years old when I tried making my first new vacuum. I was 45 years old when I had the first fully operational, visually perfect, Dyson dual cyclone vacuum…I believe in progress by stages. And the iterative development I have described is Edisonian. That persistent trial and error that allows you to wake up one morning after many many mornings with a world beating product.
- “Play with ideas until they work; do not just sit and think about them. It is when you actually design the product that some of the most interesting things happen.”
- “It is scary. I am scared all the time”
- “You want a single message expressed clearly for a new product; you cannot mix your messaging”
- “Customers only come to you because you’re eccentric. They can get conformity anywhere…There are 7 billion people thinking in train tracks. Try to be a little bit unconventional; shake things up”
