One in ten

A long time ago, a young Japanese man decided to start his own bar. His bar did well, even though he noticed that only a tenth of the people liked his bar enough to come back. The other nine never returned. But that’s all he needed to sustain his business—one in ten.

He ruminated on this observation, and wrote:

“It didn’t matter if nine out of ten didn’t like my bar. If that one out of ten was a repeat customer, than that’s enough and my business would survive. This realization lifted a weight off my shoulders. But I still had to make sure that the one person who did like my place really liked it. And in order to make sure of that, I had to make my philosophy and stance clear-cut, and patiently maintain that stance no matter what.”

He stood his ground and his bar accumulated a small but growing fanbase of loyal customers. But as time went on, there was a different issue bugging him: He was super introverted and yearned to be alone. Running a bar forced him to face people all day. This drained him. Something had to change. Suddenly he got the idea to write a novel. He started working on it immediately. His writing was unorthodox and different from others. But it was authentic to who he was, so he kept writing, using just pen and paper. When it was done, he sent it to a publisher. Mind you, this was the only copy he had, so by sending it out he also parted with his book. If the publisher threw it out, his whole book would be gone. He patiently awaited their response. But he remembered that it doesn’t matter much what one publisher thought, because all it takes is one in ten.

Months later he’d forgotten about the book and moved on, until he got a phonecall. It was the publisher. That author is Haruki Murakami.