Every Friday, I share concise, actionable insights for growing your business, optimizing your time, and expanding your mindset. Co-author of multiple million-copy bestsellers.
One Room. One Book. Radical Simplicity (3 Min Read) | Vol. 187
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January 23, 2026 | Read Online
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry One Room. One Book. Radical Simplicity In April, I'm taking my first trip to Japan. While planning, I stumbled upon a business that blew my mind. Morioka Shoten is a one-room bookstore in Tokyo's Ginza district. They only sell one book. Not one kind of book. One book. Morioka sells a single title each week. That's it. The store doubles as a gallery, featuring art inspired by that week's selection. Sometimes the author is in residence. You can buy the book, talk about it, experience it—or you can wait until next Tuesday and see what's next. When I first read about this, my brain did that thing brains do: That can't work. And yet, it does. Morioka Shoten has been thriving since 2015. Visitors travel from around the world to experience it. The owner, Yoshiyuki Morioka, spent ten years working in traditional bookstores before launching this experiment. He noticed that book launch events—when the entire store rallied around a single title—were always his most successful nights. The energy was different. The conversations were richer. People actually bought the book. What if one book was all a store needed to thrive? The shop's slogan captures its philosophy: “A Single Room with a Single Book.” This isn't minimalism for minimalism's sake. It's not a gimmick. It's a living, breathing example of what happens when you have the courage to go small. Really small. Audaciously small. Most of us struggle to narrow our focus to five priorities. Morioka narrowed his to one. And in doing so, he created something thousands of bookstores with thousands of titles never could—a destination. The lesson isn't that we should all sell one thing. It's that radical simplicity works even when it defies our imagination. We assume more options mean more opportunity. More products. More services. More yeses. But addition has a cost. Every book on the shelf competes for attention. Every item on your to-do list competes for focus. Morioka removed the competition entirely. Sometimes the path to extraordinary results isn't figuring out what else to add. It's finding the courage to ask: What if I took almost everything away? I don't know which book will be featured when I visit in April. Honestly, it doesn't matter. I'm going for the lesson, not the literature. One question to ponder in your thinking time: What would happen if I cut my priorities in half? And then in half again? Make an Impact! Not subscribed? Become a Twenty Percenter here. |
Jay Papasan
Every Friday, I share concise, actionable insights for growing your business, optimizing your time, and expanding your mindset. Co-author of multiple million-copy bestsellers.
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