Failure Bounces Off the True Believer

"In the third month, Mitsunori readjusted the pinball machines so he made ¥50m and then he went back to losing another ¥50m in his fourth month. Mitsunori was prepared to lose everything to make a fortune. His son would be no different. Pachinko culture was embedded in his DNA."

"It was a humiliating reverse – one that for most people would be crushing. For Masa it was simply one more twist in the roller-coaster pattern of failure and success that has characterized his tumultuous life. In the decades after the dot-com crash the diminutive SoftBank boss reinvented himself. He became the twenty-first century’s ultimate conjurer of capital, masterminding a new-age, transnational tech-and-finance empire that still touches many of the most dynamic parts of the world economy. Through will-power and guts Masa turned into a figure who embodies a gilded age of tech-utopianism, benign globalization and borderless finance."

"‘He [Masa] would keep staring at me, with those eyes, as if they were telling me to keep calling him a genius,’ Mitsunori remembered, ‘and so I ended up having to call him a genius.’ Just in case the foreign visitor failed to absorb the message, the doting father added: ‘Because Masa is convinced that he’s a genius, the good ideas follow. If you truly believe you’re strong, you’re a genius, then failure just bounces off you, you drive failure away through sheer will-power.’"