More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Your brain exists to help you survive, not to thrive.
Our mind often seems to be pursuing two contrary sets of goals. The activities that we should be doing are often not the activities that the lower mind necessarily enjoys doing.
Ikigai is a Japanese life strategy that emphasizes the importance of finding your “true calling.”
The term is comparable to the adopted French phrases “raison d’etre” (your “reason for existence”) or “joie de vivre” (your “zest for life”). More colloquially, one’s Ikigai is often described as: My reason to get out of bed in the morning.
It is easier to destroy than to create. Most people in this world don’t create anything. If you’re part of a team that creates a product that is of some genuine value to mankind, then your vocation is a righteous one. The more value you provide, the more righteous your cause will be. And the more apt your lower mind will be to summon the forces of intrinsic motivation each workday.
It’s tempting to think that being fully autonomous means that you have the power to do whatever you want to do, whenever you want to do it. But electing to merely satisfy each carnal desire that spurts into consciousness is an enterprise that almost always leads to despair.
Because a rudderless boat only has the freedom to sail in circles. A life lived without an Ikigai is a life of aimless drifting. This is not the kind of autonomy we seek.
concomitantly,
Goals require action to accomplish. The opposite of action is inaction. So the enemy of goal accomplishment is inactivity. This inactivity is typically the result of a psychological state of apathy, sloth, despair, or fatigue. More generally, the behavior manifested by these emotions falls under the rubric of “procrastination.”
To procrastinate is to voluntarily delay an intended course of action—despite expecting to be worse off for the delay.
This is when the perceived value of the labor comes into question. When your brain has trouble envisioning the resultant benefit of engaging in a laborious task, then it will utilize negative emotions to prevent you from doing the task.
Unfortunately, real life is laden with such troublesome probabilities. The realized value of our labor—particularly when it comes to academic pursuits—cannot be forecasted. We just don’t know if the information we’re learning will ever be very useful to us. So, we devise reasons to defer the labor that is required to learn it. Of course, this avoidance strategy applies to other domains too:
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.
Work is much easier (and procrastination wanes) when the worker is convinced that his labor will result in genuine value—if not to himself than to his fellow man (preferably to both).
pernicious
Man has been blessed (or cursed) with the unique ability to question the utility of his own existence.
Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: “pati.” It does not mean “to flow with exuberance.” It means “to suffer.”
To the amateur, the game is his avocation. To the pro it’s his vocation. The amateur is a weekend warrior. The professional is there seven days a week.
Such metaphors help to remind us of our limited ability to identify the root causes of complex problems. It’s easy to blame our failures in the game of life on just one circumstance or one person—like an emotionally distant parent, an unfair teacher, an unscrupulous boss, or an abusive spouse. Truly, such toxic relationships contribute to our misfortunes. But, as you look back upon
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.
The doctrine calls upon us to remain humble in failure as well as in success. 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. This mindset is exemplified in this stanza from Toyota’s Production System Guide:
What small step could I take today which may (in the long run) improve my situation?
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…
An ideal workday is one in which you complete all of the objectives that are under your control.
Every moment of your life is either a test or a celebration.
What I’ve learned, above all, is to keep marching forward… [Though] chance does play a role, one important factor in success is under our control: the number of “at bats,” the number of chances taken, the number of opportunities seized. For even a coin weighted toward failure will sometimes land on success.
