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This Japanese concept, which translates roughly as “the happiness of always being busy,”
According to scientists who have studied the five Blue Zones, the keys to longevity are diet, exercise, finding a purpose in life (an ikigai), and forming strong social ties—that is, having a broad circle of friends and good family relations.
For more than a century, we’ve managed to add an average of 0.3 years to our life expectancy every year. But what would happen if we had the technology to add a year of life expectancy every year? In theory, we would achieve biological immortality, having reached aging’s “escape velocity.”
Presented with new information, the brain creates new connections and is revitalized. This is why it is so important to expose yourself to change, even if stepping outside your comfort zone means feeling a bit of anxiety.
Dealing with new situations, learning something new every day, playing games, and interacting with other people seem to be essential antiaging strategies for the mind.
Walk to work, or just go on a walk for at least twenty minutes each day. ▪ Use your feet instead of an elevator or escalator. This is good for your posture, your muscles, and your respiratory system, among other things. ▪ Participate in social or leisure activities so that you don’t spend too much time in front of the television. ▪ Replace your junk food with fruit and you’ll have less of an urge to snack, and more nutrients in your system. ▪ Get the right amount of sleep. Seven to nine hours is good, but any more than that makes us lethargic. ▪ Play with children or pets, or join a sports
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“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl cites one of Nietzsche’s famous aphorisms: “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”
In German concentration camps, as in those that would later be built in Japan and Korea, psychiatrists confirmed 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.
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.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. —Aristotle
As Csikszentmihalyi asserts in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 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.”
The Seven Conditions for Achieving Flow According to researcher Owen Schaffer of DePaul University, the requirements for achieving flow are: 1. Knowing what to do 2. Knowing how to do it 3. Knowing how well you are doing 4. Knowing where to go (where navigation is involved) 5. Perceiving significant challenges 6. Perceiving significant skills 7. Being free from distractions1
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.”
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.
It is much more important to have a compass pointing to a concrete objective than to have a map.
Having a clear objective is important in achieving flow, but we also have to know how to leave it behind when we get down to business.
It has been scientifically shown that if we continually ask our brains to switch back and forth between tasks, we waste time, make more mistakes, and remember less of what we’ve done.
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.
If we’re not truly being challenged, we get bored and add a layer of complexity to amuse ourselves.
Even Bill Gates washes the dishes every night. He says he enjoys it—that it helps him relax and clear his mind, and that he tries to do it a little better each day, following an established order or set of rules he’s made for himself: plates first, forks second, and so on.
There are many types of meditation, but they all have the same objective: calming the mind, observing our thoughts and emotions, and centering our focus on a single object.
The Archer’s Secret The winner of the 1988 Olympic gold medal for archery was a seventeen-year-old woman from South Korea. When asked how she prepared, she replied that the most important part of her training was meditating for two hours each day.
Happiness is in the doing, not in the result.
The happiest people are not the ones who achieve the most. They are the ones who spend more time than others in a state of flow.
We realized right away that time seems to have stopped there, as though the entire town were living in an endless here and now.
“Food won’t help you live longer,” she says, bringing to her lips a bite of the diminutive confection that followed our meal. “The secret is smiling and having a good time.”
“The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.”2
“The secret to a long life is not to worry. And to keep your heart young—don’t let it grow old.
“My secret to a long life is always saying to myself, ‘Slow down,’ and ‘Relax.’ You live much longer if you’re not in a hurry.”
“Doing many different things every day. Always staying busy, but doing one thing at a time, without getting overwhelmed.”
What secrets to long life do the Japanese hold? What is it about Okinawa that makes it the best of the best in terms of life expectancy? Experts point out that, for one thing, Okinawa is the only province in Japan without trains. Its residents have to walk or cycle when not driving. It is also the only province that has managed to follow the Japanese government’s recommendation of eating less than ten grams of salt per day.
Locals eat a wide variety of foods, especially vegetables. Variety seems to be key.
This brings us back to the 80 percent rule we mentioned in the first chapter, a concept known in Japanese as hara hachi bu. It’s easy to do: When you notice you’re almost full but could have a little more … just stop eating!
If the body regularly consumes enough, or too many, calories, it gets lethargic and starts to wear down, expending significant energy on digestion alone.
In summary: Drinking green or white tea every day can help us reduce the free radicals in our bodies, keeping us young longer.
Practicing any of these Eastern disciplines on a regular basis is a great way to do so. An added benefit is that they all have well-defined steps, and as we saw in chapter IV, disciplines with clear rules are good for flow.
These two components—movement and breath—help us to bring our consciousness in line with our body, instead of allowing our mind to be carried away by the sea of daily worries. Most of the time, we are just not aware enough of our breathing.
One thing that everyone with a clearly defined ikigai has in common is that they pursue their passion no matter what.
Instead of searching for beauty in perfection, we should look for it in things that are flawed, incomplete.
This is why the Japanese place such value, for example, on an irregular or cracked teacup. Only things that are imperfect, incomplete, and ephemeral can truly be beautiful, because only those things resemble the natural world.
“This moment exists only now and won’t come again.”
Life is not a problem to be solved. Just remember to have something that keeps you busy doing what you love while being surrounded by the people who love you.
As the old saying goes, “Walk slowly and you’ll go far.” When we leave urgency behind, life and time take on new meaning.
