Full Transcript for #439 How Eiichiro Oda Works

So every few months, my friend Eric Gleiman, who's the CEO and co-founder of Ramp, will text me, do an episode on Ichiro Oda. So Ichiro Oda is the legendary creator of One Piece. He is the most successful manga artist of all time. And so manga is just a Japanese term for what we would call in the West manga. comics or graphic novels so oda's creation one piece is one of the most successful and highest grossing media franchises in history it's the best-selling manga and comic book series in history is also with over 600 million copies in circulation worldwide in fact oda has the guinness world records for the most copies published for the same comic book series by a single

author But the reason Eric asked me to do an episode on him is because Oda is often described as a maniac because he's got this insane work ethic, a very eccentric lifestyle, and essentially just this inhuman daily schedule. And so what I want to focus on is the details of how he lives and runs his life because I feel his habits are truly extreme.

So I want to do a basically how Ichiro Oda works episode. Now, there's no books or biographies on him. In fact, he's intensely, extremely private. He doesn't even allow his face to be photographed. So what I've done is spent the last week going through all of the interviews I found on him and then made an outline essentially in his own words of him describing how he works and how he built, again, one of the most successful media franchises in history.

And so one of the things I love most about Oda is the fact that he is just designing the product that he wants to use. He says, I set out to draw the manga I wanted to read when I was young. When I started, I had to draw things that didn't exist to get attention. There were plenty of heroes who fight demons and save the world. The market was saturated with that kind of story.

I wanted to do something different. So he knew by the age of four what he wanted to do for a living. He wanted to be a manga artist. He was 22.

When he starts creating One Piece, it's still ongoing to this day, and he's 51 years old. And so when I read this part of the interview, when he's like, I wanted to do something different, I thought of Peter Thiel's book, Zero to One, which again, if you can summarize it, essentially differentiation is the whole game. Over and over again in that book, Peter will say, do not build an undifferentiated commodity business.

He has this great line in there where he says, all happy companies are different. All failed companies are the same. They fail to escape competition. Even in his early 20s, Oda knew he would lose if he just did the same thing that everybody else was doing. And then Oda talks about what he was trying to do. The most important thing is to respect the fans.

He was a fan himself. He says it's basically impossible for me to create the series with the whole world in mind. I don't even try. The deeper I got into reading and researching how Oda works, it reminded me very much of the way that Ed Catmull would talk about the way he built Pixar. Their approach is almost identical in spirit. They essentially just put faith in the simple idea that if they made something they wanted to see, that others would want to see it too.

And so he goes back to the fact that, hey, this is impossible. I can't create the series with the whole world in mind. I don't even try. I assume that if Japanese children enjoy it, so will everyone else. So I don't worry about it. And I love the implication of what he's saying here, that human desires are much more universal than they are local.

In fact, when I'm reading this, this is something that one of the most important ideas I came across when I was studying David Ogilvie and really any of the people that built very valuable advertising agencies. They would talk about the fact that what works in one country almost always works in other countries as well. So then Oda is asked, how do you keep coming up with such amazing stuff this far in the game? This is his answer.

Having to create manga every week really cuts down on the time you have to think about the story. And I believe that the more time you have to think, the better the creation. I cannot separate my personal life and my manga creating life. Everything I do can be connected to my manga. If I run into somebody, I immediately think, how can I use this in my manga? That is just the way that I work.

Everything in my life is about my manga. I've planned to create manga ever since I was a kid, so I have a huge stockpile of potential ideas. I never run out of ideas or worry about having to come up with a new setting. I have a notebook with all these ideas crammed in there. So I just open it up when I need something new. In terms of my process, I like to imagine different possibilities.

Like it would be cool if things went like this or it would be cool if something like that existed. A lot of it is based on people's dreams or desires. Like I wish my arm would stretch so I could reach that drink over there. So he's talking about the main character, which is Luffy. is made out of rubber and his arms and entire body stretch.

And so one of the main themes running through every single interview I've ever read about Oda is this, he's got this very fertile and vibrant imagination. And then he puts no limit on where that idea can take him. And so one of these interviews, he literally just breaks down the process of what he's doing. He says, I start with the storyboards and then I send them to my editor.

Once he says they're good, I blow those up and place them on manga paper. I add in where the text will go and start the penciling and then the inking. I draw the characters and the backgrounds are added in. I try to have the least. This is the most important part of the section. This is why I'm reading to you. I try to have the least number of people possible touching the work.

If too many people are involved, I often end up not being satisfied with the final product. He describes himself as a perfectionist. He is also almost fundamentally incapable of delegating. This will come up over and over again. These interviews take place over two decades. And what I loved about it is his philosophy, his approach to work was remarkably consistent since the very beginning.

This idea, it's like, hey, if too many people are involved, I end up not being satisfied with the final product. We're going to go back to that day over and over again. There's this great book on Steve Jobs called Insanely Simple. There's a great line from Insanely Simple that I thought of when I read this. The quality of work resulting from a project is inversely proportional to the number of people involved in the project.

I had the opportunity to sit down and speak to Toby Luque and had this great conversation with him. Toby Luque is the founder of Shopify. And I had a conversation and did an episode on my other show with Toby. And he said something in that conversation that was interesting. He said, inside Shopify, we think the best team size is one because a single author can hit high notes that are unreachable by a team.

So then Oda goes back to this idea, I'm creating this for myself with a single individual in mind. I think he says he creates it with the 15-year-old version of himself. Would the 15-year-old Oda like to read this comic that's in front of him? And then he also talks about the fact that he pushes himself to the very limit. If you are anti-delegation, if you're a perfectionist, if you have a seven-day– he's got a seven-day-a-week schedule– He's got a deadline.

He has to update the story every seven days. He's going to have to push himself to the physical limit. He says, the thing is, I get bored easily. So if my manga was just about the action or the comedy or tear-jerking moments more than anybody, I would get bored. So I change up the style of the series to keep up my motivation to draw the series.

You want to know my real secret? I think of the plots and scenes when I'm tired. The only way that I can think of a new idea is to think about it without sleeping or eating. That's the only way that I know because humans can only come up with truly new ideas when they reach their limits. So every time I'm done with my manuscript, I am completely exhausted.

He talks about this over and over again, that when he's approaching a deadline, he will sleep just three hours a night, normally between the hours of 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. And so like a decade, decade and a half into his career, he was asked, what's your secret for dealing with success? That's what he said. To this day, I've never truly felt pressure about becoming successful.

I always try to stay focused on making manga for just a single audience. You read manga by yourself. So whenever I draw manga, I only have one reader in my mind, myself as a 15 year old. I have no idea how other people would feel. So I turned back to the 15 year old me to make a judgment on what is awesome or not. I always try to stay true to myself.

And somehow it resonates with the kids who read my manga. There was so many times when I'm reading these interviews that Oda does that I'm not thinking about him. I'm not thinking about manga. I'm thinking about Steve Jobs. I guess I have Steve Jobs on the brain. It would just come up over and over again. So I want to read a couple of the quotes that came to mind when I got to this section, this interview of Oda.

And this is Steve talking. He says, we cook up new products. You never really know if people will love them as much as you do. It's exactly what Oda just said. Another Steve Jobs quote about this. We're gambling on our vision, and we would rather do that than make Me Too products. And then Steve continues. Sure, what we do has to make commercial sense, but it's never the starting point.

We start with the product and the user experience. It's very similar to what Oja said. His starting point is, would the 15-year-old version of me think this is awesome? And then I thought of this quote from Steve Jobs when he was being interviewed by Michael Moritz. This is what Jobs told Michael Moritz. He says his taste wasn't that different from other people's.

The difference was that he got to be really stubborn about making things as good as everyone knew they could be. And then Steve said, making something great rarely takes more money. It just takes more time and a willingness to persevere. His point is that the standard is himself, but only if you refuse to let yourself off the hook. And then another thing I found really interesting about Oda is he's a perfectionist.

He's very set in his ways, but he has this great ability to improvise. So he says, I only have the ending of one piece in my mind and nothing else. He continues, but knowing the end point, I weave the story and make story arcs that build up to it. So there's this great book called Working Backwards. It's on the way, basically how Jeff Bezos works.

And when Jeff Bezos was running Amazon, there was a phrase inside Amazon that would be repeated over and over and over again, decade after decade. It says, be stubborn on the vision, but flexible on the details. That's a statement I think Oda would agree with. I think that's the way Jeff Bezos worked. One of my favorite books on Henry Ford, and I've read, I don't know what, 10 books on Henry Ford.

There's this guy that worked with him for 40 years, and he wrote this book called My 40 Years with Ford. And there's a quote inside that book that is about Henry Ford, but sounds a lot like Oda. With the obvious exception of his single purpose goal of a cheap car for the masses, a set policy was next to impossible with him. It was impossible because by nature, he was an experimenter.

And the way I think about what Oda was saying is because he knows exactly where he wants to end up. He says, you know, I have the ending. I already know how this thing is going to end. It frees him to improvise how to get there. And I think that's one thing he has in common with a lot of history's greatest entrepreneurs. Let's go back to this.

I draw a lot of color illustrations. Recently, it takes me more time to think about what to draw than to actually draw it. But if it's an incomplete idea, I would get bored while drawing. So until I find something that I really want to draw, I just think. Sometimes the entire day. I feel like now it's harder to choose what to draw than when I started serializing One Piece.

I think I told you this before, but one of my favorite all-time podcast episodes that I've listened to in the last few years was on Rick Rubin's podcast. He interviewed Jimmy Iovine. And Rick was talking about the very first time he ever met Jimmy because Jimmy's exactly 10 years older than Rick. They had very similar careers. Essentially...

The way Rick says is like everything I did, Jimmy did, you know, 10 years before I did. And on this podcast episode, Rick tells a story when the first time he ever met Jimmy Iovine, I think Rick said he was 19 years old. And he said he was startled by something Jimmy told him because Rick went and played Jimmy some music. And Jimmy's response was, I wish I could make something that simple.

And Rick's like, I'm sure you have. What do you mean? And Jimmy Iovine's point was that the innocence and your ignorance that you have when you're a beginner, it leaves. But that that ignorance and that innocence is very powerful. And one of the problems with the inability to make something as simple as you could do when you first started out is that you just have too much information that you no longer know when you should just stop.

And the way Jimmy describes this is this great maxim where he says, I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then. Before we get back into how Achera Oda works, I want to tell you about Ramp. I told you that my friend Eric Gleiman, the co-founder and CEO of Ramp, is the one that told me about Oda. I want to read this letter that Eric recently wrote to tell you about Ramp.

Eric wrote, Seven years ago, Kareem and I wrote our mission on a post-it note. Save companies time and money. Today, 85,000 businesses use Ramp to save over a billion dollars a month. In September alone, we saved them 1.5 million hours. That's like giving 9,000 people a working month back. Our mission hasn't changed, it's just gotten bigger.

This year, we built Stack for faster closes, accounts receivables to get you paid, AI spend management to measure your return on intelligence, Router to pick the right model, So your team only learns things once. Plus 476 more features. We are building a company that helps you build a great company. Chapter one was about what we could build.

Chapter two is about what you can. And the job is not finished. That is the end of Eric's letter. If you are not already running your business on ramp, now is a great time to join 85,000 of the world's most ambitious companies that are growing 3.2 times faster than the average American business. These are companies like Uber, Andral, Visa, Stripe, and Shopify that run their businesses on ramp.

Many of the top founders and CEOs I know run their business on ramp. I run my business on ramp, and you should too. Go to ramp.com today to learn how they can help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue. That is ramp.com. And so I think some background on his early life and who influenced him would be helpful to understand.

You know, this is like zealous approach to his work. And one I find personally attractive, I guess, is the way I would describe this. I think of founders in a very similar way that Oda thinks of what he's doing. I like the fact that it's one of the only podcasts in the world made by a single individual. I like having control over it, like feeling close to it, I guess, is the way that I think about it.

And I'm sure if I got a chance to talk to Oda, that's the way he'd feel about his work. But it starts back from like very early age, like at the age of four, he said that he resolved to become a manga artist in order to avoid, quote, having to get a real job. Then he talks about the fact that his biggest influence on his life was Akira Toriyama.

There's no way, by the way, I'm pronouncing any of these Japanese names or words correctly. So I apologize in advance. But Akira Toriyama was the one that the manga artist that created Dragon Ball. And he is the reason that Oda wanted to serialize One Piece in the same magazine. So Weekly Shonen Jump. And the way that Oda got a job before he created One Piece at that magazine was interesting.

So at the age of 17, Oda submitted his work, which is called Wanted, and won several awards, including second place in the coveted Tezuka Award. That got him a job at Weekly Shonen Jump magazine. And then just a few years later, in 1997, One Piece began serialization in that magazine in Weekly Shonen Jump. And so that was in 1997. In 2016, in this interview, Oda described going to bed at 2 a.m.

and waking up at 5 a.m. He said he had maintained that schedule for roughly 15 years. When asked why he didn't sleep more, he explained that an extra hour of sleep meant losing an hour he could spend working. He even said that planning to sleep four hours made him dread wasting that additional hour. After submitting a manuscript, though, he would allow himself a day of longer sleep.

When he was younger, he said he was sleeping approximately two hours every 48 hours, broking into 15-minute naps. A published account of his 2015 production schedule described the following rhythm. Monday through Wednesday, he would write the story, dialogue, and rough storyboards. On Thursday through Saturday, he would draw and finish the manga with his assistants.

On Sunday, they do color illustrations, covers, and then the artwork. He was effectively running a continuous creative production cycle. And then this gets into his extreme mentality. Reflecting on the intensity of his ambition in his 20s, Oda admitted that he had been so devoted to creating manga that he was willing to miss a parent's funeral if it conflicted with his work.

This intensity continues. He told a new editor to be prepared to die for One Piece. A former editor recalled Oda greeting him with a startling instruction translated as die for One Piece. The editor explained that Oda expected anyone working with him to demonstrate the same extraordinary commitment to the manga that he demanded of himself.

Another editor said that he might someday encounter a writer more talented than Oda, but doubted he would ever encounter anyone who worked harder.

In a 2022 interview, he described him seeing his family only about once a week, partly because he found family time so relaxing that it disrupted his working intensity.

And then it goes into this extraordinary creative process. He personally draws nearly everything that moves, including smoke, clouds, and waves. Oda has assistants, but historically, he has insisted on personally drawing every living or moving element. That includes people, animals, crowd scenes, smoke, clouds, and the ocean. His assistants handle backgrounds and other supporting details.

He explained that assigning moving elements to other people produces subtle inconsistencies in the art. Even with this enormous franchise behind him, he has resisted turning its central artwork into an assembly line operation. And then, of course, because the comic is so successful, it's adapted into, you know, cartoons, other forms of media.

There's this great show on Netflix I actually started watching as I started researching Oda. It's a live action adaptation of One Piece that I actually highly recommend. I thought originally I would just watch it with my son. I watch it way more by myself. I find it very engaging, actually. But then Oda talked about the fact that, again, he's perfectionist in everything.

He has such a hard time handing it over to somebody else. He just refuses to do that. And he says Netflix agreed that they wouldn't go out with the show until I agreed it was satisfactory. I read the scripts, gave notes, and acted as a guard dog to ensure the material was being adapted in the correct way." And then he even instructs his editors about this.

He specifically instructed his editors not to give him too many story ideas. Oda preferred editors to evaluate his work rather than invent the material for him. His reasoning was simple. If an idea comes from someone else, he would feel less excited about drawing it. He wanted complete creative ownership, and he welcomes honest criticism from his editors.

An early editor told Oda that he wasn't drawing attractive female characters. Oda said the remark bothered him so much that he couldn't sleep. Instead, he spent the entire night practicing. He also studied hand-drawn Disney animation, advancing through movies like The Little Mermaid frame by frame to copy expressions and understand how the animators communicated emotion.

It was also interesting that he didn't think One Piece was going to be his life's work. He originally expected One Piece to take just five years. When Oda began publishing One Piece in July 1997, he imagined the entire adventure lasting approximately five years. In a 2022 interview, he admitted he had badly underestimated the scope of what he was creating.

The original five-year plan had grown into a series approaching its 30th anniversary in 2027.

He says he has repeatedly underestimated how much time remains until the ending. Okay, another thing about this. So we have this maniacal work ethic, this intense desire for control, this unrelenting perfectionism. He's also a very eccentric dude, as you can imagine. And this comes down to his living in workspace, which you can actually see some of this on YouTube.

His house doesn't really look like a home. It looks more like an amusement park. So I took note on some of the things that just happened to be in his house. So he's got a bunch of arcade games. He's got a miniature train. He's got an elaborate dragon-themed bathroom. He's got a giant stuffed giraffe, a life-size Terminator, a pet jellyfish, a shark's head coming out of the wall above his toilet.

And there is mess and clutter everywhere. And inside his house, he throws giant parties too. And one of the reasons he does all this is really interesting. He actually says that he deliberately wants younger manga artists to see how wealthy and successful a great manga creator can become. So the estimates of his net worth is anywhere from like $250 to $500 million.

And they estimate he makes somewhere between $20 to $40 million a year from his creation. He also likes to have fun, and again, it goes back to this very vibrant imagination he has. He literally had the secret of One Piece placed in a treasure chest at the bottom of the ocean. To celebrate the 600 million copy milestone, Oda wrote down the truth about the treasure called One Piece and about Monkey D.

Luffy, who's his main character, on a sheet of paper. The paper was then divided, and the revealing portion was placed in a treasure chest and submerged on the seabed as part of a promotional project.

The plan is to retrieve it and reveal its contents after the manga concludes. After nearly three decades of asking fans to search for a fictional treasure, Oda arranged to put a real treasure into the bottom of the ocean. And this is more about this just love and this obsession with his work that I find very interesting. What makes Oda so unusual isn't simply the amount he works.

It's that he appears to get an extraordinary amount of personal fulfillment from the work. He described drawing manga as a pastime rather than a stressful occupation, even as he acknowledged the extraordinary demands it places on his life. The central paradox of Oda is that he has dedicated almost his entire adult life to writing a story about freedom and adventure while accepting an extraordinary restrictive life in order to create it.

I think it's probably obvious to you by now. I don't think, I think this is compulsive. I don't think he can actually help it. Here's a great illustration of this. He brought his drawing equipment to the hospital because he couldn't stop working. He brought his tools and continued producing artwork. Rather than being relieved at having a break, he felt anxious about not drawing.

He compares his weekly manga production to a race in which another deadline is always approaching. And then we go back to this idea where he said there is no separation between his life and his art, his life and his work. He once spent 12 consecutive hours on the telephone discussing a single story with his editor. His editor actually fell asleep during the conversation.

They were having a creative discussion about stories, characters, and what should happen next. Another one of his editors reportedly became so conditioned to receiving his calls that he experienced phantom phone vibrations. This editor slept with his phone resting on his chest so that he wouldn't miss a call. Eventually, he began feeling vibrations when the phone wasn't actually ringing.

Oda routinely calls editors at unusual hours and becomes annoyed when they don't answer. And then the amount of work that he does that you never see is just incredible. He has 17 separate notebooks devoted to a single story arc. In this interview, he also showed four separate notebooks dedicated to characters' special abilities. The amount of material that Oda maintains behind the scenes is staggering.

Then it goes back to this idea that he gets anxious and I would say borderline depressed when he feels he's not doing his best work. I am a total wreck when I can't do my job well. I wind up moping if I don't feel like I fully completed a good story. I cannot rest until I make up for it the next week. This goes back to the idea that he knows where the story ends, but he improvises along the way.

He invented some of the most important characters in One Piece almost at the last minute. The pirate characters collectively known as the Supernovas became central to the series, but Oda revealed that he hadn't planned them in his original notebooks. When an editor expressed concern that this storyline needed more excitement, Oda spontaneously created nine additional rookie pirates.

Accounts of the editorial meeting described the designs emerging within just a few hours. Oda had created a vast new branch of his fictional universe under immediate deadline pressure. Then it goes back to his early life, the fact that he wanted to be like his hero. One Piece was rejected for sterilization three times, but Oda refused to take it to a competing magazine.

He was asked why he hadn't tried other major manga magazines. His answer was that he wanted to publish in Weekly Shonen Jump because that's where his hero Akira Toriyama had worked. He wanted to succeed where his idol had made history. And then more about the fact that he's intensely private. You see these interviews with them and they always like blur out his face.

He was like this. He's like this at 51. He was like this at 17. At 17, he refused to let a newspaper publish his face. So he drew himself instead. This is after he won a major manga competition. He says despite his achievement, he didn't want people knowing what he looked like. And then we go back to his insistence on being differentiated.

He believes artists should create trends rather than follow them. He discouraged artists from simply adapting their work to whatever was currently popular. Instead, he argued that their responsibility was to take something they personally found interesting, even something the general public didn't understand yet, and make it popular. He believed that artists possessed a rare ability to change public taste rather than merely satisfying existing demand.

I think Oda would agree with Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid, and Steve Jobs' hero. His personal motto was, don't do anything that someone else can do. And then we get back to this tension in his life, the fact that he has spent his life essentially changed to a desk, all the while building this fictional story about, you know, constant traveling, being an adventurer.

So he was talking about, okay, well, what happens after you conclude One Piece? Like, what is your life going to be like? His dream after finishing One Piece is to become a perpetual traveler. After finishing his manga, he imagined traveling continuously, sleeping in a different place every night. He also said he wanted to travel around the world visiting hot springs for the rest of his life.

For a man whose life has been structured around the relentless repetition of weekly deadlines, the fantasy of constantly moving somewhere new is enticing. And so there's these reoccurring characteristics that stand out when you're reading. Again, what I found him to be remarkably consistent over, you know, these interviews take place, like I said before, over multiple decades.

Yet he's got these three reoccurring characteristics that just reappear over and over again. Number one, he's got this extraordinary tolerance for repetition. And I believe that tolerance for repetition is really just tolerance for depth. As you and I see in these biographies over and over and over again, if you focus on one thing long enough, you discover truths that the distracted miss.

And I just love that line, extraordinary tolerance for repetition. We've talked about this over and over again, the fact that many of these great companies, many of these great founders, they identify a handful of principles and they repeat those principles for decades through maddening repetition. If you listen to the episode I did on how Elon works, it talks about in that episode, Elon repeats the algorithm so much over and over again in so many of these meetings that people literally, the people he's talking to mouth the words.

before they come out of Elon's mouth. You see this in the actions of great entrepreneurs, too. Go and read all of Jeff Bezos' shareholder letters. The very first one he writes in 1997, where he talks about it's day one. He repeated that it's day one for Amazon for two decades. What's also interesting is every subsequent, I think he wrote, what, 21, 22 shareholder letters after that? At the end of every single one, he reprints the very first one.

Bezos, too, had a tolerance for repetition. These people, they get really great at what they do. They work on consistency relentlessly. The second thing that jumps out to me about Oda, he is simultaneously excessively and extremely disciplined and spontaneous. And I think the greatest illustration of this is he's talking about, hey, it's getting harder and harder to draw these things.

And sometimes I just have to sit at my desk and think. Remind me of George Lucas when he was writing Star Wars. I think his schedule, if I remember correctly, was something like, I want to say like 8.30 to 5.30 every day. And he had a simple rule. He could either sit because he hated writing. He loved making films, but he hated writing. But he was also a control freak, so he wanted to write the films that he was going to make, right? And I think the simple rules that he gave himself was, I can sit at the desk and I can write or do nothing.

He refused to allow himself to be distracted. He can't pick up a book, can't watch TV, can't do anything else. You can either write or you do nothing. And then finally, the thing that jumps out and repeats over and over again to me about Oda is his imagination appears to be just the organizing force of his entire life. It's incomprehensible to me that from a single mind, you have this story coming out that's almost 30 years in the making.

This has got to be one of the most incredible creative acts in human history. And then before we get back into this, I need to tell you about Vanta. Vanta, Vanta, Vanta. When you're building a company, you learn that trust is what closes deals. That is what Vanta helps you do. You may have the best product, but no buyers will sign a contract without proof of your security.

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Earlier in this episode, I mentioned how Peter Thiel wrote about the importance of differentiation in his book, Zero to One. Also in the book, he wrote one of my all-time favorite quotes, which is,

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And you can do that by going to Applovin.com. That is Applovin.com. And then let's go back into this incredible work ethic. He's a perfectionist who has repeatedly admitted that he cannot make himself work in a more efficient or conventional way, even when he desperately wants to. There's one of my favorite things I have saved on my phone is a few years ago, Jerry Seinfeld was interviewed by the Harvard Business Review.

And I just got to read this excerpt from the interview because it's exactly this. Again, most successful TV show of all time, most successful manga. They're literally doing it the exact same way. So Jerry Seinfeld asked, you and Larry David wrote Seinfeld together without a traditional writer's room, and burnout was one reason you stopped.

Was there a more sustainable way to do it? Could McKinsey or someone help you find a better model? Jerry Seinfeld responds, who's McKinsey? The interviewer says, it's a consulting firm. Seinfeld responds, are they funny? The interviewer says, no. Seinfeld says, then I don't need them. If you're efficient, you're doing it the wrong way. The right way is the hard way.

The show is successful because I micromanage it. Every word, every line, every take, every edit, every casting. That's my way of life. And Oda works the exact same way. Oda admitted that he deliberately keeps thinking until the last possible moment before a deadline. He says he never managed to become the kind of creator who finishes work comfortably ahead of schedule.

He acknowledged that finishing earlier would give him more personal time and make life much easier for him. But then he said something extraordinary, that unless he keeps working on the story right up until the deadline, he didn't feel he had done his best. He equated using every available minute with giving his maximum effort. After 12 years of success, this is a different interview, he admitted he still couldn't figure out how to produce stories efficiently.

He said he wished he could produce his manga in a systematic, professional manner, that he wished he was able to generate stories reliably and finish them on time and then have more free time. But he concluded that his personality wouldn't allow it. He could not stop searching for a better idea merely because the story was good enough. He says that for his best ideas to come, he has to sit at his desk and draw his way toward them.

He rejects the idea that he's a genius who simply had brilliant ideas while walking down the street. Instead, he describes sitting at his desk, thinking intensely, and making drawing after drawing until the ideas appeared. The process of drawing itself helped him discover what he wants to say. Oda repeatedly chooses what he finds creatively exciting over what would make his life easier.

He could delegate more, draw less, simplify his plots, create fewer characters and finish manuscripts earlier, but by his own account, he finds it extraordinarily difficult to accept compromise. That tension between his creative ambition and the physical limits of a human life is the strongest central theme in the biography of Oda.

And that is where I'll leave it. That is 439 books down, 1,000 to go. And I'll talk to you again soon.