What Startups Can Learn From Haruki Murakami | Hacker News Reader

What Startups Can Learn From Haruki Murakami

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21 pointsnaish7 comments

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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