Every time I call my wife or my friends or my mother or whoever and I say, “I fucked it up this time,” and then at the end of it, I feel okay. I resolved what I can do with this.

Well, that all comes from your network. And so even today with, well over 300 million people on LinkedIn, most people have yet to learn how to use their network, in order to ally with their network, in order to find the right economic opportunities. And that’s one of the things that I’m still working on.

Many times when I found myself at a personal crossroads – when I graduated from Hitotsubashi University and was unsure about whether I wanted to go into research or become a businessman, when I quit my job at the Industrial Bank of Japan (currently Mizuho Bank), when I founded Rakuten, when I tried to buy Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS) – I always visited my dad in Kobe to ask his advice. Like my wife, my dad was a behind-the-scenes counselor to me.

My wife, my children, my friends, myself. I’m my own strongest critic. I am much tougher on myself than anybody I know, consistently.

Never date anyone who is mean to you or others. Kindness matters.

I think revising is the same as writing, at least when it comes to the essential truths I wrote about in “Write Like a Motherfucker.” It’s all work. It’s all part of the process. Writing and revision are not two entirely different things, even though they demand slightly different things of us.

By the time I was 19, I was saying, “I’m going to be a writer. This is my path.”

The way I often find what I’m going to write next is by writing.

I think it would be this thing that I learned when I was writing my first book. It would be surrender to your own mediocrity, which sounds kind of sad, right?

So much of what I’ve learned, so much of what’s good in my life, was learned because something bad happened, or from making the wrong decision. Through bad decisions I learned how to find the ways to make the right ones.