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

When our bodies are comfortable, well-fed, and safe, then our lower mind (aka our “lizard brain,” “reptilian complex,” or “limbic system”) would prefer to remain inactive. Though our conscious mind is well aware of next week’s looming deadline, our lower mind thinks that next week is a million years away. It lives in the here and now. The future is an abstract concept that doesn’t require immediate attention. Hence, it’s easy for our lower mind to ignore it.

Each time you encounter a new career opportunity, ask yourself: Could this be my Passion? How much do I love this skill? Could this be my Vocation? How good am I (or could be) at this skill? Could this be my Mission? How much will this skill benefit the world? Could this be my Profession? How likely am I to get paid well for this skill?

You might find your passion in a well-paying profession. But unless you’re producing something that the world really needs, you may not feel like your work has much meaning. You can have a vocation that pays well. But if you have no interest in the field, then the work can be torturous. You might succeed in discovering your mission, and you may indeed have a passion for it. But perhaps you’re just not very good at it. Thus, you might forever be stumbling in your career—never really feeling like you’re “getting it.”

The shifting sands of emotion that comprise his mental state are subject to a phenomenon that researchers call dynamic inconsistency. When William arrived home, he had the mindset of a conscientious student—ready to pursue his academic interests with great fervor. But now, he has the mindset of a gadabout—longing only to relax and socialize.

The more uncertain we are of the potential benefit of a task, the easier it is for the lower mind to concoct reasons to avoid doing it. Procrastination is your brain’s way of telling you that it doesn’t see the immediate value in expending the energy that you’re asking it to devote to the task at hand. Your lower mind is very good at pursuing short-term pleasures. And very bad at assessing the potential value of long-term goals.

Nothing will incite you to procrastinate more than the realization that the work you are about to force your body to do is utterly pointless and devoid of any existential value. People are often at their worst when they are coerced into performing a rudimentary cognitive task, all the while knowing that the product of their toil benefits absolutely no one.

This is why you must seek out and devote yourself to a meaningful cause. This is why you must sail with purpose. This is why you must choose an Ikigai that is true and righteous.

A thousand little problems come together to form a big problem, and your life goals are subject to Lingchi—a death by a thousand cuts.

Often, the achievement of a grand life goal is dependent upon a serendipitous discovery—of the sort that cannot be unearthed while sitting in front of the television set. This is why consistent daily action is so essential. Because it is only by walking the path that new paths will emerge. If you remain stagnant and cease your forward movement down life’s winding road, then the adventures that lie beyond the next bend will never be revealed to you.

As each new opportunity reveals itself, you must be ready to objectively assess its associated risk and manage your personal fears, misgivings, and doubts about the venture.

Once you come to accept the transient nature of your health, wealth, family, and finances, then the inevitable changes to these constructs need not be so surprising when they finally occur. While we must always strive to avoid undesirable outcomes, we do so with the acceptance that entropy will forever be our contender.

As Marcus Aurelius wrote: Is any man afraid of change? What can take place without change? What then is more pleasing or more suitable to the universal nature? … Can you take a hot bath unless the wood for the fire undergoes a change? And can you be nourished unless the food undergoes a change? And can anything else that is useful be accomplished without change? Do you not see then that for yourself also to change is just the same, and equally necessary for the universal nature?

Most of our “bad decisions” are nearly imperceptibly bad in the moment. A dream is not the kind of entity that can be killed by a single well-placed blow to the head. Instead, our dreams die a slow death, instigated by a million little mishaps—most of which we bring upon ourselves. Your ability to remain cognizant of this Lingchi phenomenon—to identify the “thousand little cuts” that slice away at your life goals—is necessary for the evolution of your personal productivity skillset, and essential if you wish to avoid succumbing to the many temptations of man.

Our failures in life are usually the result of a long chain of poor decisions. With Hansei, we take time to carefully consider each link in this chain, and identify how our past mistakes have caused us to stray from our life goals.

Hansei, we don’t play the “blame game.” Instead, a Hansei-kai is a temporary safe space in which you look inside yourself in an attempt to account for the role that you have played in the formulation of the problem.

Acknowledging mistakes and accepting responsibility for failure. Finding ways to identify and halt the repetition of bad habits. The implementation of changes needed to ensure that our future goals can benefit from past lessons learned.

Painful memories often behave like weeds. Stomping on them might only succeed in deepening their roots. But drenching them with sunlight might cause them to burn out.

During a Hansei-kai, practitioners are not allowed to celebrate a “flawless victory.” There is no such thing. Instead, every action has room for improvement, no matter how perfectly it was executed.

Your brain is programmed to resist change. But, by taking small steps, you effectively rewire your nervous system so that it does the following: “unsticks” you from a creative block, bypasses the fight-or-flight response, [and] creates new connections between neurons so that the brain enthusiastically takes over the process of change…

This first step takes some discipline to achieve, but not as much as you might think. With Kaizen, we hope to muster the tenacity to complete little actions in the present, with the eventual goal of pursuing big gains in the future. To the lower mind, the successful completion of a minor goal makes the next goal appear all the more doable. When taken in aggregate, this accumulation of tiny daily victories can lead to big life changes.

With Kaizen, we identify the problem, break it down into small achievable goals, and we put one foot in front of the other—progressing steadily forward in pursuit of our prime objective. With Kaizen, we don’t spend too much time worrying about the vastness of the challenge that lies before us. Instead, the next step itself is the only challenge we’re concerned with.

In Kaizen, there is no such thing as “good enough.” We are never permitted to be “set in our ways.” That old line your grandma used to say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” is antithetical to this methodology. Instead, with Kaizen, we are vigilant to rectify the little inefficiencies of our lives in whatever form they manifest. While we will never achieve perfection, there is great value to be garnered in our devotion to its continual pursuit.

Kaizen bets are (by definition) “little bets.” Note that the Pareto Principle dictates that: Roughly 80% of consequences will come from 20% of the causes. In the business world, this means that: 80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients. 80% of your leads come from 20% of your ads. 80% of your revenue is generated by 20% of your products.

The holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mould yourself through the gaps.

Nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.

Of all the virtues we can learn, no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve the quality of life, than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge.