Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life

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.

activities drive you to flow? For example, are all the activities you most like doing ones that you practice alone or with other people? Do you flow more when doing things that require you to move your body or just to think?

can get burned off, slow down. And after two hours, good cholesterol drops 20 percent. Just getting up for five minutes is going to get things going again. These things are so simple they’re almost stupid,” says Gavin Bradley1 in a 2015 interview with Brigid Schulte for the Washington Post.2 Bradley is one of the preeminent experts on the subject,

Focus on enjoying your daily rituals, using them as tools to enter a state of flow. Don’t worry about the outcome—it will come naturally. Happiness is in the doing, not in the result. As a rule of thumb, remind yourself: “Rituals over goals.” The happiest people are not the ones who achieve the most. They are the ones who spend more time than other

Ichi-go ichi-e teaches us to focus on the present and enjoy each moment that life brings us. This is why it is so important to find and pursue our ikigai. Wabi-sabi teaches us to appreciate the beauty of imperfection as an opportunity for growth.

Frankl himself would live and die for his principles and ideals. His experiences as a prisoner at Auschwitz showed him that “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.”3 It was something he had to go through alone, without any

Japanese construction companies are antifragile, since they benefited enormously from the catastrophe.

We should never forget that everything we have and all the people we love will disappear at some point. This is something we should keep in mind, but without giving in to pessimism. Being aware of the impermanence of things does not have to make us sad; it should help us love the present moment and those who surround us.

As Taleb writes in Antifragile, “We need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, hear traumatic episodes, all these things that make life worth living.”

Japanese architecture, on the other hand, doesn’t try to be imposing or perfect, because it is built in the spirit of wabi-sabi. The tradition of making structures out