Ikigai & Kaizen: The Japanese Strategy to Achieve Personal Happiness and Professional Success (How to set goals, stop procrastinating, be more productive, build good habits, focus, & thrive)

by Anthony Raymond

If you learn to recognize these infractions before they accumulate, then you can put a stop to them—preventing undesirable circumstances from escalating into situations that are detrimental to your aspirations.

know how to fulfill a need, quench a thirst, alleviate pain, or make people smile) then: You are important. Your product is important. And you provide value to the world.

freedom to make choices that contribute positively to our personal well-being as well as to the well-being of the world around us.

enemy of goal accomplishment is inactivity.

despair, or fatigue.

hate writing, [but] I love having written.

Our daily offenses never make the 5 o’clock news. Instead, our lives are burdened with a thousand little depravities, a thousand little sins, or a thousand little cuts.

“seven deadly sins.”

there will soon come a time when you’ll have to decide to hop on board and flee the safe harbor that you call home.

We may be ready to set sail in pursuit of our dreams. But if we allow ourselves to be held back by the creatures of the deep, then our vessel will fail to reach the blue water; the grand adventure of our lives will amount to nothing more than a fish story.

most, if not all, of the attainable self-realization in modern societies can come only from career…

not afraid to express ideas, not afraid to ask questions… Allow people to perform at their best by ensuring that they’re not afraid to express [their unique] ideas or concerns.

suggestions about how a process could be improved. Corporations naturally evolve hierarchies in which cross-department communication

making men understand that telling you the truth will not offend you.

Emergent strategies tend to naturally evolve out of intended strategies, and often lead to more fortunate outcomes. Such is the evolutionary

I don’t like going [to the] gym [and] I don’t touch a weight unless they’re paying me to do it… What are your personal fitness

But we don’t necessarily keep track of our metrics because we expect our logs to reveal something insightful or revolutionary about our workout technique. Instead, we track our daily fitness progress for the same reason that Jerry Seinfeld tracked his daily joke-writing progress. Because ritualizing and gamifying the process helps us to stick to the process.

Instead, the husband’s bout of absentmindedness was merely the match in the powder barrel—the spark that ignited a store of relationship problems that had been accumulating for a long time. Or, to put it another way, the tartar sauce incident was merely the “final straw that broke the camel’s back.”

the couple has communication problems and neither one believes that the other truly respects their individual contributions to the relationship.

big problems in life are rarely incited by a single solitary event. Instead, personal catastrophes are often the final result of a long and cumulative process—i.e., Lingchi (“death by a thousand cuts.”)

improve their situation or mend their wounds. Charity is admirable. But be advised that personal development is a quest that will not be pursued by the majority of those around you. Stagnation is the default state of man. Most people will resist aid or change—especially

Some situations cannot be improved upon. Some relationships cannot be salvaged. Instead, the correct course of action may be to let sleeping dogs lie. Acceptance is often the only gift we can give those who are estranged. Forgiveness may be all we can

is typical to consider what an ideal version of yourself might look like. What could you have become if only things were a little different? If only you had scored higher on that exam… If only you had taken that job offer in London… If only you had married your first love…

all the possibilities… all the sorts of people I could be… all of them got reduced every year, to fewer and fewer. Until finally they got reduced to one—to who I am. And that’s who I am.

our attempt to discern if we are “winning or losing” is necessarily subjective and reliant upon input that is modulated by the perceived success of those around us. Our ancestors of the Pleistocene lived in small groups of 25 people. Calculating positions in the social hierarchy was easier for them. However, our attempt to compute the same metric is complicated by the nature of our current media-saturated world. We all carry devices in our pockets that allow us to instantly compare our own lives to the lives of everyone in town, and even to the lives of people who reside on the other side of the planet. Perhaps

I ever wanted was to be rich, and to be successful, and to have three kids, and a husband who was waiting home for me at night to tickle my feet... And [now] look at me! I don’t even like my hair.

Ally’s relative fortune should be clear to us all. As a young, beautiful, and well-paid Boston attorney, her life is much easier than 99% of all the humans who have walked the earth. And yet, we might note that her Ikigai is misaligned. She is repeatedly stricken down with weltschmerz—melancholy experienced when reality fails to conform to the idyllic visions of the mind.

Like greyhounds chasing a mechanical hare around a track, the contest was never meant to be won. The hare will never be theirs.

Our most well-laid cornerstones can be deformed by illness, abuse, financial destitution, and unpredictable catastrophes—perhaps incited by nothing more malevolent than the whims of the weather.

The holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete;

each successive day should be slightly more ambitious than the day before.

successful day is one in which we succeeded in mustering the tenacity needed to keep marching forward.

we seek to merely outpace the person we were when we closed our eyes last night. He is