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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Satoru Iwata
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June 3 - June 9, 2024
It was during these interviews that I realized that 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.
For me, the thing I couldn’t do before was meeting every single employee and talking with each person one-on-one. Once I did that, I made so many discoveries and realized that this should have been a top priority all along. Even once we had the company back on its feet and business returned to normal, I never gave up these dialogues with every member of the staff.
I also believe that everyone is different and always changing. Sure, lots of people never change. But I would never want to work under a leader who failed to understand that people can evolve.
The more frustrated someone is, the more important it becomes to listen to them. Unless you make a point of this, anything you try to say goes in one ear and out the other. If you interrupt them midsentence and say, “It’s more like this,” it’s only natural for them to think, “This person has absolutely no clue what I’m saying.”
Work always involves some level of difficulty. Otherwise, we wouldn’t call it work.
In my experience, there are two types of interviewers: those who make a person feel at ease in order to get a sense of who they really are and judge their candidacy accordingly, and those who believe an unrelaxed person, though unable to speak their mind, will reveal all kinds of things about themselves, like how sociable or strong they are.
I’m the first type. My belief is that the second type of interviewer is able to glimpse only a part of somebody’s potential. Until you’ve let a person be themselves, the conversation hasn’t really gotten started.
Apart from “What made you join the company,” there’s another question I like to ask: “Out of all the work you’ve done so far, what was the most interesting thing? And what was the most painful?” This is all about them, too—making it easy to respond, and above all giving you a sense of who they are.
At the start of your career, it’s only natural that you won’t yet know about all kinds of things, but it’s extremely important not to be embarrassed that you don’t know. If your primary motivation is to make the people working above you think, “Wow, this guy’s so clever,” they’re going to see through you every time. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, you’ll come across as vain and leave a bad impression. At the end of the day, what the company wants most from its new hires is someone who is happy to admit they don’t know everything. But at the same time, they don’t want you to ask your
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New hires always seem to be divided between those who welcome criticism and those who don’t—those people whose actions you can safely criticize and those you have to call out with the utmost care. There’s an enormous gap between the two. This vastly influences how much responsibility someone can take on, and how much they are able to absorb.
The people who can take constructive criticism are capable of learning an incredible amount in a short period of time. And when a person like this starts working at the ...
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Depending on how you approach it, work can feel dull. But, if you’re able to find the fun in discovering new things, almost everything you do can become interesting. This realization can be a major turning point in enjoying your job.
Being human means having potential. I see the role of the organization as making sure that everybody’s latent potential is fostered as effectively as possible. The organization will squander its resources if energy is wasted on irrelevant tasks, but if you can direct that energy to the right place, you can exert incredible influence on the outside world.
If you force yourself to study things that have no bearing on the world around you, the material will have no way of sinking in. So, rather than waste your time, it makes far more sense to prioritize the things that you truly enjoy, whatever speaks to you.
Since programming depends on pure, uncompromising logic, a single contradiction will prevent the system from functioning properly. Machines don’t make mistakes. All mistakes result from external forces. And so, when the system isn’t working, the fault is clearly your own. But the second programmers finish a program, they all try it out with the assumption “This is going to work like a charm.” In reality, though, nothing ever works like a charm the first time. All the same, the moment they click Run, they have utterly convinced themselves that they have written every piece of code impeccably.
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You can be younger than me, with fewer years at the company and less experience, but if you’re able to write a shorter, faster program, you don’t need me to tell you that it’s good. A program that does the same thing, except shorter and faster… There’s something great about that. How could I not tip my hat to you and learn from your example? If someone can do something that I can’t, regardless of whether I like or dislike their personality, I’ll still admire their ability. And if that makes me impartial, I suppose I am.
Lots of people flick on the television without any thought the second they get home. The reason they turn on the television even when they don’t have any specific show in mind is the confidence that once they’re home, as long as they press the power button on the remote, something will happen, which feels better than doing nothing. I think this is the main reason why television assumed such a presence in our lives.
It’s fun when you’re both good at different things. I guess it’s reassuring when other people bring strengths you’re lacking to the table. I knew for sure that I could trust Iwata. Conversely, if you’re both good at the same kind of thing, it’s easier to butt heads, and you wind up in all kinds of situations where somebody has to give in.
A good name takes on a life of its own, even once the group or organization has dispersed.
On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer.
