#439 How Eiichiro Oda Works

So every few months, my friend Eric Lyman, who's the CEO and cofounder of Ramp, will text me, do an episode on Echiro Oda. So Echiro 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 comics or 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. It's also with over 600,000,000 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's 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 wanna focus on is the details of how he lives and runs his life because I feel his habits are truly extreme. So I wanna do a basically how Echiro 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. Says, He 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 wanna 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 could 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 all happy companies are different. All failed companies are the same. They failed to escape competition. Even in his early twenties, Oda knew he would lose if he just did the same thing that …