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)

we lack the conviction and willpower necessary to see a long-term goal to its completion. Unfortunately, we humans often find it difficult to engage

With Hansei (“honest self-reflection”), we learned why it’s so important to take a moment to critically analyze our behaviors and identify areas of our life that could be improved upon.

With Kaizen (“continuous improvement”), we mastered the art of goal setting via a commitment to daily incremental progress.

Compare yourself with who you were yesterday, not with who someone else is today.

With Ikigai (“your true calling”), we discussed how the citizens of Okinawa, Japan find their “reason to get out of bed in the morning” by discovering a personal passion project.

As the English novelist Paula Hawkins wrote: The holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mould yourself through the gaps.

With Lingchi (“death by a thousand cuts”), we learned that undesirable life outcomes do not typically originate from a single cause.

The current position in which we find ourselves is the inevitable result of the million little decisions that we made along the way. As our lifestyle choices accumulate, they formulate a trajectory that becomes increasingly difficult to alter with each passing year.

People are good at recognizing the value of a finished product. But lousy at discerning the number of steps required for its construction.