What "One Win, Nine Losses" Taught Me About Failing Forward

Having spent years in business in the UK myself, Tadashi Yanai's One Win, Nine Losses is the book behind this personal record of what I've actually started doing at 66. It's an unusual book: written by the businessman who built UNIQLO from a single suit shop into a global company, yet the title itself openly states that nine out of ten of his ventures failed. Reading it well after stepping back from running my own business, it landed less as a management book and more as a book about how to carry failure and keep going.

Ten paths branch out, and only one grows into a tower — the idea that one win out of ten is enough.

Accepting the ratio of "one win, nine losses"

Yanai writes candidly about how most of his new ventures failed — a withdrawn overseas store, a struggling online fleece business, failed ventures into sporting goods and vegetable sales. What kept the company growing, he argues, wasn't avoiding failure but being willing to fail nine times so that the one success could be grown into something large.

This echoes my own experience building 41 sushi restaurants and six production facilities across several countries. Back then, I tended to talk mostly about the wins and quietly set the failures aside. Looking back now at 66, the ventures that didn't work actually outnumbered the ones that did. Before starting something new now, I say to myself out loud: "It's enough if this becomes the one win out of ten." I've realised that the belief that something has to succeed on the first try is often exactly what stops us from starting anything new later in life.

Throwing success in the bin

Yanai repeatedly warns that clinging to past success is the biggest danger of all. Even after the fleece boom, he notes, stagnation began precisely in the divisions that got comfortable with that earlier win. Success, in his view, is something to enjoy briefly and then let go of.

At 66, I still catch myself replaying old stories of things I once did well. Reading this book helped me draw a line between telling those stories and leaning on them as a reason to stop trying anything new. Now I try to keep one "not yet familiar" project going at all times — a new tomato variety in the greenhouse, or a small position in an investment sector I've never looked at before — rather than one more retelling of what I used to be good at. Enjoying old age, I've come to think, isn't about being proud of past achievements; it's about continuing to reach for what you don't know yet.

Letting go of an old trophy while tending a new seedling in the greenhouse next door — not settling into past success.

Applying business planning to life planning

Yanai insists that a business plan only becomes real once it's written down; a plan that stays in your head is just a wish. He returns repeatedly to the importance of pairing concrete numerical targets with specific action steps.

Financial worry, I think, is often really a worry about vagueness itself. I hold property in the UK, the Philippines, and Japan, and keep investing over the medium-to-long term through Trading212, Vanguard, and IBKR — but I used to rely mostly on a general sense that things would probably be fine. Now, once a month, I actually write out my asset position and a few years' worth of living cost projections, on paper or in a spreadsheet, the way Yanai describes. Once vague worry becomes a number, it turns into a concrete problem you can act on. I've come to see managing money worries this way as just as much a healthy-longevity habit as managing physical health.

Bringing "ask people to complain" into relationships

One episode that stays with me is Yanai's decision to deliberately collect harsh customer complaints rather than avoid them — the idea being that only listening to convenient feedback hides a company's real weaknesses.

Much of the pain in relationships, I think, comes less from actually hearing something difficult and more from the constant bracing against the possibility of hearing it. Now, before meeting someone I find difficult — or genuinely don't want to see — I take a moment to ask myself what that person might actually be worried about. It's a small practice of treating their words as information rather than attack. It hasn't made every relationship easy, but it has noticeably shortened the time I spend bracing myself.

A jagged speech bubble gradually softening into a calm one — the practice of receiving harsh words as information rather than attack.

The experiment–verify–withdraw cycle

Yanai describes testing uncertain ventures on a small scale, checking the results quickly, and withdrawing without hesitation if they don't work — arguing that dragging things out indefinitely is the greatest waste of time of all.

Calling anything I do at 66 a "job search" sounds grand, but for me it looks like trying a new format for a blog post, or turning years of sushi craft into a video course. I used to think starting anything required a complete plan first. Now I try to run a short version of Yanai's cycle: try something small, and move on quickly if it isn't working. Living each day with a sense of excitement, this book taught me, isn't about waiting for one big success — it's about never letting the small experiments run dry.

Respecting people as people

Fast Retailing's management philosophy includes a clause about respecting the humanity of each individual employee — a surprisingly human-centred line from a business famous for chasing numbers.

I don't have a settled answer to what goodness or happiness really are. But since reading that line, I've started ending each day by asking myself how attentively I treated the people and living things in front of me — while stroking Meg, our cat, or working in the garden. I can't answer the larger question of where every life comes from or where it goes, but treating each small encounter with care is something I can do today, regardless.

Meg the cat in the garden at dusk — a quiet moment for reflecting on how attentively I treated what was in front of me that day.

One win, nine losses applies to ageing too

Finishing this book, what stayed with me most was that the ratio "one win, nine losses" applies not just to business but to ageing itself. There are simply more things I can no longer do than things I can. Joints stiffen, I wake several times a night, and I don't hold onto things as well as I used to. And yet, if even one of those nine "losses" can be turned into a new way of enjoying life, that feels like enough. That, I think, was this book's real gift to me. Living in the present may not mean counting the nine losses, but tending carefully to the one win that remains.

The book I mentioned here:

Tadashi Yanai, One Win, Nine Losses (Shincho Bunko)

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Tadashi Yanai and his era

Tadashi Yanai was born in 1949 in Ube, Yamaguchi Prefecture — part of the generation, like my own (born 1960 in Hokkaido), that grew up as Japan moved from postwar reconstruction into rapid economic growth. He was raised in the modest, unglamorous setting of his father's small menswear shop. After graduating from Waseda University, he briefly worked at a major supermarket chain before leaving to join his father's company — reluctantly, by his own account. He describes himself as introverted, in contrast to his famously bold father, and this starting point — turning a family business he didn't particularly want to inherit into a global company — seems to sit at the foundation of his thinking.

The twenty years from the first Hiroshima store in 1984 through the 1990s fleece boom, the stock listing, and the failures and second attempts at overseas expansion, span exactly the period of Japan's bubble collapse and subsequent stagnation. While many companies turned defensive, Yanai pursued a management style unusual for its time: rapidly cycling through experiments and withdrawals rather than relying on charisma or instinct. His insistence on writing plans down and codifying the company's philosophy into 23 explicit articles may well be a product, in part, of his own quieter, less charismatic temperament. That a successful executive would title his own memoir around the sheer number of his failures is itself unusual — and it points to a quiet, disciplined figure who valued recording why he lost more than simply announcing that he won.