Maintained by Nathan Keene
Education Coordinator

Farther and Farther, Faster and Faster (Latest Article) Set Your Goals, Change Your Life & Celebrate! Networking Relationships Can Greed Be Good? You Bet... The One-to-One Dance Card Learn how to ask for referrals Managing Your Business Cards Select from this Pull-Down Menu to view previous Educational posts

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (a Business)
Entrepreneurial advice from a Japanese marathon man (and best selling novelist)
by Nathan Keene

If you're a big New York Times best seller browser, or if you just enjoy contemporary novels, you've probably heard of Haruki Murakami. Mr. Murakami started his career in 1978 with the breakout novel Hear the Wind Sing. He followed up with hit after critically-acclaimed hit, by 1987 selling 2 million copies of Norwegian Wood in Japan, then reputedly going on to publish the novel in 40 languages.

Less well known until recently was that Mr. Murakami is also a dedicated marathon runner. His most recent book is What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, a memoir, as you might guess, of his life as a runner since his first 5K back in 1983.

O.K. So what does this have to do with networking?

Usually my reading is a momentary escape from the ups and downs of my business, but one piece of wisdom in Murakami's book makes an undeniable connection between running and writing—and, I think, what we do as independent businesspeople:

"In every interview I'm asked what's the most important quality a novelist has to have. It's pretty obvious: Talent... If you don't have any fuel, even the best car won't run.

"The problem with talent, though, is that in most cases... once it dries up, that's it.

"If I'm asked... the next most important quality..., that's easy too: focus... Without that you can't accomplish anything of value, while, if you can focus effectively, you'll be able to compensate for an erratic talent or even a shortage of it... I sit at my desk and focus totally on what I'm writing. I don't see anything else, I don't think about anything else.

"After focus, the next most important thing... is, hands down, endurance. If you concentrate on writing three or four hours a day and feel tired after a week of this, you're not going to be able to write a long work... You can compare it to breathing. If concentration is the process of just holding your breath, endurance is the art of slowly, quietly breathing at the same time you're storing air in your lungs... Continuing to breathe while you hold your breath.

"Fortunately, these two disciplines—focus and endurance—are different from talent, since they can be acquired and sharpened through training... And gradually you'll expand the limits of what you're able to do. This involves the same process as jogging every day to strengthen your muscles and develop a runner's physique. Add a stimulus and keep it up. And repeat... I guarantee the results will come.

"In private correspondence the great mystery writer Raymond Chandler once confessed that even if he didn't write anything, he made sure he sat down at his desk every day and concentrated."*

How much time do you spend every day doing what it takes to market your business and build your capacity? What if, in spite of the latest economic catastrophe, in spite of the time consuming minutiae of keeping the phones untangled and the plumbing fixed, you just sat down at your desk once a day and concentrated on your business as a whole? What if every day you just made or followed up on one new referral? How different would things look in 365 days? How different would they look in five years? Ten?

Most of us don't run marathons overnight.

*Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Philip Gabriel trans. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008)