Yes. Because in the end, experience is what counts. The more experience you have, the better you are. And that’s true of anything you do in airplanes, dogfighting in combat, or anything like that. Your chances of coming out on top depend on your experience level. The more experience you can get, the better chance you have of surviving in a war, or in any situation where you are faced with an emergency.

So, yes, it is very hard work, and there are days where there’s something I have to do in the book, something I have to learn or put myself and the characters through that I am… That makes me fearful or sorrowful. But I do think also that this aspect of writing is over reported at the expense of the pleasurable aspect as well. If writers didn’t love to be in this space between themselves and their language, they probably wouldn’t do it. You’d give up.

I don’t remember which writer said this, but in an interview, a prolific novelist was asked, “Do you write only when you’re inspired, or do you write all the time? Do you wait for the muse, or do you just kind of knock it out? You can just sort of spin it out?” And he said, “Well, I do wait for the muse. I write when the muse comes, but fortunately she shows up, like me, every day at 9:00 a.m.

One day you write nothing, the next you write eight pages. It’s not in your hands.

I want to emphasize the deep gratitude I feel toward my dad. He is my mentor, who shaped me into the person I am today.

If so, stop that. Stop thinking, and act.

In Rakuten's case, adjustment certainly took time. At first, meetings often felt awkward. The first board meeting after the Englishization decision took four hours to complete – double the normal duration. But whenever executives asked if they could say certain things in Japanese, I told them no. I knew that the challenge would pay off – and it has.

Because there are so many business we do across the boundaries. So, I think this is the only way a Japanese service company can really, truly become the global organization.

My “act first” process is not foolproof. It can result in mistakes. In other areas of my business, we’ve changed policies that drew criticism from our customers, launched services too early, and pursued acquisitions that failed to close. But I consider these necessary risks, taken in the pursuit of innovation. In business, there will always be ideas that fail and projects that disappoint. But we learn these things by acting.

Until then, I had thought that the goal of a business person was to get ahead in a big company, but at Harvard I learned that starting a business was the greatest possible achievement in business. In the United States, people who start small companies are praised.