ONE's true superpower
There is no better compliment to be paid to one than I'd work with them again. The field is irrelevant. The barriers to entry immaterial. The skill or talent barely worth mentioning. For someone to want to work with you again, they find your work ethic acceptable and your output adequate, but your conduct and work persona exemplary, and they welcome more in the future.
The idea of the difficult artist and the asshole superstar may still have cachet, but there are only so many bridges in this world. You really want to get somewhere; not burning bridges is not enough; build them, too.
When it comes to getting far, ONE writing three commercially successful series at the same time is testament to his skill at working with others. 'Merely' writing means three sets of negotiations with editors, three sets of discussions with artists, prescripts to produce regularly, three storyboards to check through and provide feedback on, three sets of marketing efforts to work on, and increasingly, associated anime, games, and merchandise to be consulted on.
That alone is a lot of work, and you don't do it by being difficult. It helps that ONE has been friends with many of these guys for ages, some going back to when he was a struggling wannabe uploading comic strips in a bid to be noticed. He credits his fellow one-time struggler Bose with pushing him to make a new series Versus, and we know that he and Murata have been working wonderfully together since 2010. It has meant that ONE has been able to focus of the bits he really loves, which is making up stories. Lots of stories.
Does it mean that one is doomed to lack of success if one is less personable? Absolutely not but it does up the difficulty level. You do more of everything yourself, including the bits you are not so keen on. It takes longer to hire assistants and harder to keep good ones. You must knock on more doors, especially if you are easily nettled by editorial policies. Industries are small -- even big ones have only a few hundred actors -- and they talk. Over the decades, people being a little less keen to reach out and involve you in projects adds up to a lot of lost opportunities.
Talent and smarts get one in the door of a field. Everyone in that field has those. Being in the right place definitely helps, and no one can know what one may do that catches the zeitgeist, but one thing you can control is to seek to be a person others find worth working with again.
