This morning I spent a couple of hours at a Sumo stable. They’re called stables, of course. Because stables are the place where the young stallions are formed into champions. The Sumo wrestlers (for some reason the word wrestler doesn’t feel right here. Doesn’t capture their essence and finesse) start their exercise regiment at 6:30am, so when I joined them at 8am, they were already 90 min into it. And they’ll be going at it till the evening falls.
Sumo is probably the sport with the largest ratio of practice to performance time. They invest endless hours, go through killer routines, literally change their bodies, all for a competition that on average lasts 10 seconds. 15 tops.
As time passed, I looked beyond the routines and started seeing them. These Sumo. Here’s the ‘little’ one with the surprising power, the baby-face one with the low voice.
There’s the one that has seen it all, knows he will never be a Yokozuna, but continues to live these life of honor and perfect himself, day in, day out.
And you’re also hearing. Hearing their cries of pain as they go through these routines for the millionth time, already familiar with the pain that is about to arrive, their cry almost welcoming the pain as an old friend. But most importantly, you hear hai. Every second, with every comment, every shout they get from their coach, you hear はい hai. The head goes down, and there’s no argument. Just acceptance of the criticism and immediate attempt to right the wrong. To take another step in the never ending climb towards perfection.
Eight hours later, I met perfection. It was hiding at the basement level of an unassuming building in the middle of Roppongi. The name of this weilder and creator of perfection is Chef Masakatsu Oka, of Sushisho Masa. In his 7-seat restaurant, Chef Masa is creating perfection every night. He doesn’t dazzle you with effects, no. Rather, he opens his treasure chest and tells you a story. A story of respect to the fishermen who set sail from Hokaido up in the north, to Amuro, down in the south and gave him the opportunity to share his art with you on that particular moment in that particular night.
He tells the story of each fish and seafood. What’s their name, what’s their Japanese name, where are they from, what is their level of fattiness and many other details he knows no one will be able to remember. Especially as one creation follows another, in an endless stream. Yet he tells you this story, and you know it is important. It is part of his strive for perfection. You see the perfection in every movement he makes.
“Generalization is flawed thinking only when applied to individuals. It is the most accurate way to describe the mass.” — Shibumi, by Trevanian
The most important treatise on Japan and perfectionism IMHO, is Shibumi, which the quote above is taken from. As I get to walk the halls of Shimbashi station, where Nicholai Hel took shelter for many nights after the end of WWII, and walk below the Sakura as he did with General Kishikawa, I can’t help but wonder whether these two examples of perfectionism I have experienced in a single day, are not part of its requiem. Is perfectionism dying, or is it dead already?
So as generalizations come, here’s mine. The Japanese culture is bred for perfection, and in our current day and age, that may be its downfall. Other cultures, more ‘agile’ and ‘adaptive’ can move faster, create better startup cultures, and take a lead in the world of our future. If Japan wants to take back its rightful place, it needs to redefine ‘perfect’. It needs to go up a level.
“The perfect is the enemy of the great” says an old saying we all seem to live by these days. I am sure that Chef Masa hated that saying if anyone ever dared saying it to him. Probably no one had the courage. They just said hai. Our world, though, is run by it. Mediocracy, Trevanian will say. And he might be right. Evolution, one could argue. Our world is moving in such a rapid pace, we do not have time to perfect anything before it’s gone. Replaced by something else. Our geological layers are not measured in eras, millennia, or epochs. They are measured in years, if we’re lucky. Months, in most cases.
If you’re doing a startup, that is doubly true. If you’ll spend five years perfecting your solution, you will one day wake up and see that the market moved on, and your perfect solution is irrelevant. Startup founders suffer from the opposite pain of the Sumo wrestler. Knowing that their solution is not perfect yet, but jumping into the ring nonetheless, because that’s the only way to survive and eventually thrive.
So what is perfectionism in startup-land? The product is not perfect. It’s never perfect. It is too complex often times to even provide the possibility of perfection. But still, one can strive for perfectionism. Perfectionism in the process of learning. The process of evolution. The process of listening to the problem you are trying to solve, and the people who suffer from it, and the technology that is available, and continuously improving your organization’s learning velocity and yield as you adapt your misconceptions and figure out that which may never be a perfect solution, but with a bit of luck, and a lot of hard work, might just be the right one.
Perfectionism is a path to be chosen, and while we may live in an era where we are deprived from the opportunity to build a perfect product, we still have the ability to continuously perfect our processes, our ability to learn and adapt, our decision making skills, and most importantly, our culture. The short cycles are not a cop-out to creating junk. Rather, they are an opportunity to go a level higher, and define a new, larger, definition of perfectionism, and like the Sumo wrestler, and like Chef Masa, come every day to work and take another step towards that top we’ll never reach.
