Ask Iwata: Words of Wisdom from Satoru Iwata, Nintendo's Legendary CEO

by Satoru Iwata

decision-making means gathering and analyzing information and managing priorities, and that as you discover your priorities, you should see where they take you as you work through your decisions.

I believe that whether people decide to accept what they are told or not is entirely based on whether they think “You’re only saying this to benefit yourself” or “You’re saying this because, deep down, you believe it.”

The number of things we should be doing is always greater than what we can actually do. If you try doing everything on your list, you’ll only wear yourself out.

when the whole group can earn praise without working insanely hard, things get better and better on their own, creating a virtuous cycle where the work only gets stronger.

it’s imperative to figure out the bare minimum of operating tasks that need to be completed, regardless of how taxing or unpleasant they may be.

Nothing ever starts out perfect. It’s all about repeated trial and error. You try out different things and realize, “Oh, that’s better, let’s do that,” gradually improving the overall design.

if you want to make any big picture changes, the first thing you need to do is find the bottlenecks and fix them.

Every kind of change involves rejection of the status quo, but such rejection promises to make many people unhappy. After all, it took them a tremendous amount of hope and frank enthusiasm to get to where they are.

if you’re able to find the fun in discovering new things, almost everything you do can become interesting.

Once we’ve done our best, we have a response to what we’ve done, and whatever feeling we experience is our reward. When the reward feels like it’s greater than the energy and effort we’ve expended, we don’t give up. But when the result of all our efforts is a disappointment, we tend to fail.

the time you spend thinking about totally random stuff is never wasted.

Those who can persevere without thinking that they’re suffering, and thereby discover valuable things, are able to derive happiness from that alone.