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July 26, 2022 - February 3, 2023
He did not have to envy those still enjoying their youth, because he had amassed a broad set of experiences that showed he had lived for something
Better living through logotherapy: A few key ideas We don’t create the meaning of our life, as Sartre claimed—we discover it. We each have a unique reason for being, which can be adjusted or transformed many times over the years. Just as worry often brings about precisely the thing that was feared, excessive attention to a desire (or “hyper-intention”) can keep that desire from being fulfilled. Humor can help break negative cycles and reduce anxiety. We all have the capacity to do noble or terrible things. The side of the equation we end up on depends on our decisions, not on the condition in
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that the prisoners with the greatest chance of survival were those who had things they wanted to accomplish outside the camp, those who felt a strong need to get out of there alive.
Many Western forms of therapy focus on controlling or modifying the patient’s emotions. In the West, we tend to believe that what we think influences how we feel, which in turn influences how we act. In contrast, Morita therapy focuses on teaching patients to accept their emotions without trying to control them, since their feelings will change as a result of their actions.
In addition to accepting the patient’s emotions, Morita therapy seeks to “create” new emotions on the basis of actions. According to Morita, these emotions are learned through experience and repetition.
Morita therapy is not meant to eliminate symptoms; instead it teaches us to accept our desires, anxieties, fear...
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The basic principles of Morita therapy
Accept your feelings
he often quoted the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who would say, “Hello, solitude. How are you today? Come, sit with me, and I will care for you.”
Do what you should be doing
Morita therapy does not offer its patients explanations, but rather allows them to learn from their actions and activities. It doesn’t tell you how to meditate, or how to keep a diary the way Western therapies do. It is up to the patient to make discoveries through experience.
Discover your life’s purpose
We can’t control our emotions, but we can take charge of our actions every day. This is why we should hav...
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In the following chapters, we’ll take a look at the basic tools you’ll need to get moving along that path: finding flow in the tasks you’ve chosen to do, eating in a balanced and mindful way, doing low-intensity exercise, and learning not to give in when difficulties arise. In order to do this, you have to accept that the world—like the people who live in it—is imperfect, but that it is still full of opportunities for growth and achievement.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. —Aristotle
This is the kind of experience Bruce Lee described with his famous “Be water, my friend.”
“Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That is relativity.”
What makes us enjoy doing something so much that we forget about whatever worries we might have while we do it? When are we happiest? These questions can help us discover our ikigai.
this state “flow,” and described it as the pleasure, delight, creativity, and process when we are completely immersed in life.
There is no magic recipe for finding happiness, for living according to your ikigai, but one key ingredient is the ability to reach this state of flow and, through this state, to have an “optimal experience.”
In order to achieve this optimal experience, we have to focus on increasing the time we spend on activities that...
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flow is “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”
When we flow, we are focused on a concrete task without any distractions. Our mind is “in order.” The opposite occurs when we try to do something while our mind is on other things.
Schaffer’s model encourages us to take on tasks that we have a chance of completing but that are slightly outside our comfort zone.
Activities that are too easy lead to apathy.
The ideal is to find a middle path, something aligned with our abilities but just a bit of a stretch, so we experience it as a challenge. This is what Ernest Hemingway meant when he said, “Sometimes I write better than I can.”2
“To be able to concentrate for a considerable amount of time is essential to difficult achievement.”
Add a little something extra, something that takes you out of your comfort zone.
Video games—played in moderation—board games, and sports are great ways to achieve flow, because the objective tends to be very clear: Beat your rival or your own record while following a set of explicitly defined rules.
What often happens, especially in big companies, is that the executives get lost in the details of obsessive planning, creating strategies to hide the fact that they don’t have a clear objective. It’s like heading out to sea with a map but no destination.
encourages us to use the principle of “compass over maps” as a tool to navigate our world of uncertainty.
“In an increasingly unpredictable world moving ever more quickly, a detailed map may lead you deep into the woods at an unnecessarily high cost. A good compass, though, will always take you where you need to go. It doesn’t mean that you should start your journey without any idea where you’re going. What it does mean is understanding that while the path to your goal may not be straight, you’ll finish faster and more efficiently than you would have if you had trudged along a preplanned route.”
it’s important to reflect on what we hope to achieve before starting to work, study, or make something. We should ask ourselves questions such as: What is my objective for today’s session in the studio? How many words am I going to write today for the article coming out next month? What is my team’s mission? How fast will I set the metronome tomorrow in order to play that sonata at an allegro tempo by the end of the week?
Albert Einstein, “a happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell on the future.”
We often think that combining tasks will save us time, but scientific evidence shows that it has the opposite effect. Even those who claim to be good at multitasking are not very productive. In fact, they are some of the least productive people.
When we say we’re multitasking, what we’re really doing is switching back and forth between tasks very quickly.
Concentrating on one thing at a time may be the single most important factor in achieving flow.
in order to focus on a task we need: To be in a distraction-free environment To have control over what we are doing at every moment
Other studies indicate that working on several things at once lowers our productivity by at least 60 percent and our IQ by more than ten points.
Don’t look at any kind of screen for the first hour you’re awake and the last hour before you go to sleep. Turn off your phone before you achieve flow. There is nothing more important than the task you have chosen to do during this time. If this seems too extreme, enable the “do not disturb” function so only the people closest to you can contact you in case of emergency. Designate one day of the week, perhaps a Saturday or Sunday, a day of technological “fasting,” making exceptions only for e-readers (without Wi-Fi) or MP3 players. Go to a café that doesn’t have Wi-Fi. Read and respond to
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Japanese people often apply themselves to even the most basic tasks with an intensity that borders on obsession.
Ever since his first trip to Japan, Jobs was fascinated and inspired by the country’s artisans, engineers (especially at Sony), philosophy (especially Zen), and cuisine (especially sushi).
What do Japanese artisans, engineers, Zen philosophy, and cuisine have in common? Simplicity and attention to detail. It is not a lazy simplicity but a sophisticated one that searches out new frontiers, always taking the object, the body and mind, or the cuisine to the next level, according to one’s ikigai
the key is always having a meaningful challenge to overcome in order to maintain flow.
They’ve learned to take pleasure in their work, to lose their sense of time.
The Japanese are skilled at bringing nature and technology together: not man versus nature, but rather a union of the two.
One of the harshest critics of this loss is another artist with a clearly defined ikigai: Hayao Miyazaki, the director of the animated films produced by Studio Ghibli.
In nearly all his films we see humans, technology, fantasy, and nature in a state of conflict—and, in the end, coming together. One of the most poignant metaphors in his film Spirited Away is an obese spirit covered in trash that represents the pollution of the rivers.
In Miyazaki’s films, forests have personalities, trees have feelings, and robots befriend birds. Considered a national treasure by the Japanese government, Miyazaki is an artist capable of becoming completely absorbed in his art. He uses a cell phone from the late 1990s, and he makes his entire team draw by hand. He “directs” his films by rendering on paper even the tiniest detail, achieving flow by drawing, not by using a computer. Thanks to this obsession on the director’s part, Studio Ghibl...
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Miyazaki is so passionate about his work that he spends many Sundays in the studio, enjoying the state of flow, putting his ikigai above all else.
