The O’Toole Chronicles: What Jiro dreams about

I recently reviewed this cool documentary called Jiro Dreams of Sushi and wanted to share it with some of you. On the surface, the film is about an elderly Japanese sushi master named Jiro Ono and his tiny restaurant, Sukiyabashi Jiro, inside a Tokyo subway station in Ginza.

Jiro is a one-hundred-year-old sushi master who dedicated his entire life to perfecting the art of making sushi. He spent his entire life doing essentially the same thing, day after day. Each day, he selected fish at the local market, prepared the rice, made the sushi, and served his awaiting customers. It sounds so simple, but as he wandered into the daily routine, he found out that this routine was a lifetime dream being fulfilled each day. And after many decades of recognition as one of the finest sushi chefs in the world, he still believed he could get better.

Think about that one for a minute.

Most of us spend our careers trying to reach the point where we can say, “I have made it.” By all objective accounts, Jiro reached that milestone and apparently thought that another mountaintop was waiting for him to ascend.

I guess the first lesson learned from Jiro is not to confuse success with completion. We ask ourselves professionally as we continue to toil away at our given job-are we ever really done learning? Have we finished perfecting our trade?

Jiro understood that excellence isn’t an event; it is a habit. It comes from doing ordinary things extraordinarily well, again and again, especially when no one is watching. Jiro started working in a restaurant at the age of seven and became a sushi chef in 1951. In 1965, he opened his restaurant in Ginza. In 2023, he gave some management responsibilities to his eldest son, Yoshikazu, but Jiro is still very much involved. Jiro’s younger son, Takashi, like his brother and father, is a top-rated sushi chef and manages a separate Michelin-starred restaurant.

Respect the details: Respect the small things and pay attention to details. Jiro knew that a great meal wasn’t simply created when the sushi was placed before the customer.

It began hours earlier-with selecting top ingredients, preparing the rice, controlling temperature, and paying attention to details most customers would never notice. Jiro knew that others sometimes get consumed by the so-called “big picture” and forget that big results are usually the accumulation of a thousand small decisions.

Preparation is work: Jiro always shows us that preparation matters. You don’t rise to the occasion simply because the occasion is important. Jiro succeeded because his preparation was something that happened before work, it was the work and it never stopped.

Lead by example: Make no mistake, Jiro was a demanding boss, but no one was asked to do more than Jiro himself.

Stay a student: Even though Jiro was the master teacher to hundreds of protégés, he remained a student himself. Jiro was constantly curious, and he learned on the job each day. The day we stop learning is the day we stop leading.

Embrace repetition: In sharp contrast, most of us get bored easily and we sometimes complain that we are living and reliving Groundhog Day. Instead of reveling in the awesomeness and specialness of our chosen profession, too many are counting down the days on the calendar toward retirement and recalculating our projected retirement checks. On the flip side, Jiro loved the repetition of the day. While he allowed for some innovation, he embraced consistency and he executed the fundamentals correctly on the hundredth time with the same care he gave the first time. Jiro, at one hundred years of age, still loves coming into work. He feels blessed to be so lucky to have a job that he simply adores. But there is more to the story.

Your name is your standard: Jiro understood that his name was on the line each time he served a meal. His name was the standard. We can all learn from this one.

Whether you are running a restaurant, a business, a law firm, a government agency, or coaching a Little League team, people will eventually associate your name with the quality of what you produce.

Titles don’t matter; awards come and go, but your name and reputation remain forever.

To this minute, after a lifetime of devotion to his craft, Jiro still dreams about sushi.

I imagine that if we all adopted Jiro’s work ethic, discipline, respect for details, demands of ourselves, commitment to remaining students, and refusal to let today’s success become tomorrow’s excuse, our companies and our jobs would have a much better, more positive outlook.

Go grab some good sushi.