IKIGAI

Chapter I: The are of starting young while growing old

What is your reason for being?

Our IKIGAI is hidden deep inside each of us, and finding it requires a patient search.

Whatever you do don’t retire!

Having a clearly defined IKIGAI brings satisfaction, happiness and meaning to our lives. One surprising thing you will notice, living in Japan is how active people remain after they retire. This is because there is no word in Japanese that means retire in the sense of “leaving the workplace for good”.

The 80 percent secret

One of the most common saying in Japan is “Hara bachi bu” which is repeated before or after eating and means something like “Fill your belly to 80%”.

Moai: Connected for life

Form close bond with local communities. Being part of a Moai helps maintain emotional and financial stability.

Chapter II: Little things that add up to a Long and happy life

Anti-aging Secrets:

Active mind, youthful body

Both mind and body are important and that the health of one is connected to that of the other. Maintaining an active, adaptable mind is one of the key factors in staying young. Having a youthful mind also drives you toward a healthy lifestyle that will slow the aging process

Our neurons start to age while e we are still in our twenties. This process is slowed, however, by intellectual activity, curiosity, and a desire to learn.

Stress: Accused of killing longevity

Many people seem older than they are. Research into the cause of premature ageing has shown that stress has a lot to do with it., Because the body wears down much faster during periods of crisis. As the study revealed, the greater the stress, the greater the degenerative effect on cells.

Be mindful about reducing stress

Practising mindfulness is one of the best technique suggested by many experts. The central premise of this stress-reduction method is focusing on the self: noticing our responses, even if they are conditioned by habit, in order to be fully conscious of them.

One way to reach a state of mindfulness is through meditation, which helps filter the information that reached us from the outside world. It can also be achieved through breathing exercises, yoga and body scans. Achieving mindfulness reduces stress and helps us live longer.

A little stress is good for you.

While sustained, intense stress us a known enemy of longevity and both mental and physical health, low levels of stress have been shown to be beneficial.

Low level of stress is a positive thing when used for facing challenges and by putting your heart and soul into your work to succeed.

A lot of sitting will age you.

Spending too much time seated at work or at home not only reduces muscular and respiratory fitness but also increases appetite and curbs the desire to participate in activities. Being sedentary can lead to hypertension, imbalanced eating, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, and even certain kinds of cancer.

We can access a more active lifestyle that makes us feel better inside and out – we just have to add a few ingredients to our everyday habits:

• Walk to work or just go on a walk at least twenty minutes each day.
• Use your feet instead of an elevator or escalator.
• Participate in social or leisure activities.
• Replace your junk food with fruit.
• Get the right amount of sleep – Seven to nine hours is good, but more than that makes us lethargic.
• Play with children or pets.
• Be conscious of your daily routine.

By making these small changes, we can begin to renew our bodies and minds and increase our life expectancy.

Antiaging Attitudes

The mind has tremendous power over the body and how quickly it ages. Most doctors agree that the secret to keeping the body young is keeping the mind active – a key element of IKIGAI.

Studies have revealed that the people who live the longest have two dispositional traits in common: a positive attitude and a high degree of emotional awareness.

Chapter III: Live longer by finding your purpose

From Logotherapy to IKIGAI

The search for Meaning and Fight for yourself.

Existential frustration arises when our life is without purpose, or when that purpose is skewed. However, there is no need to see this frustration as an anomaly or a symptom of neurosis; instead, it can be a positive thing – a catalyst for change.

“He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”

Chapter IV: How to turn work and free time into spaces for growth

Find flow in everything you do

We are what we repeatedly do.

Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. – Aristotle.

The Power of Flow

The “Flow” is described as the pleasure, delight, Creativity to process where we are completely immersed in life.

7 conditions of achieving flow:

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 distractions

Strategy 1: Choose a difficult task but not too difficult

Add a little something extra, something that takes you out of your comfort zone.

Strategy 2: Have a clear concrete objective.

Keep your objective clear, just like playing games or video games: Beat your rival or your own record while happiness following a set of explicitly defined rules.

In Business, the creative profession, or education alike, 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?
• What is my team’s mission?

Having a clear object is important to achieving flow, but we also have to know how to leave it behind when we get down to business.

Strategy 3: Concentrate on a single task.

We often think that combining tasks will save us time, but scientific evidence shows that it has the opposite effect.

Concentrating on one thing at a time may be the single most important factor in achieving flow.

Technology is great if we’re in control of it. It’s not so great if it takes control of us.

Few ideas for creating a space and time free of distractions; thereby getting in touch with our IKIGAI:

• Don’t look at any of our screen for the first hour you are 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 it’s too extreme, enable the Do Not Disturb mode.
• Read and Respond to emails only one or twice per day.
• Start your work session with a ritual you enjoy and end it with a reward.
• Practise Mindfulness or another form of meditation.
• I work in a space where you will not be distracted.
• Divided each activity into a group of related tasks, and assign each group it’s own place and time.
• Bundle routine tasks

The Japanese are skilled at bringing nature abs technology together: not man vs nature, but rather a union of two.

If we want to get better at reaching a state of flow, meditation is an excellent antidote to our smartphones and their notifications continuously clamouring for it attention.

We all carry a spa with us everywhere we go. It’s just a matter of knowing how to get in – something anyone can do, with a bit of practice.

Humans are ritualistic beings:

Life is inherently ritualistic. We all follow free rituals during our entire day. Humans naturally follow rituals that keep them busy.

Can you look into your daily schedules and identify some rituals (good or bad) which you are following knowingly or unknowingly.

Chapter V: Traditions and Proverbs for Happiness & Longevity

Lessons from Japan CENTENARIANS

When asking the eldest members of the community about their life philosophy, their IKIGAI and the secrets to longevity, these were the crux of the insights they gave from their life:

• Worst Less or Don’t worry
• Cultivate good habits
• Nurture your friendship every day.
• Live an unhurried life.
• Be optimistic.

Chapter VII: What the world’s longest-living people eat and drink

The IKIGAI diet

According to the World Health Organisation, Japan has the highest life expectancy in the world: 85 years for men and 87.3 years for women.

Okinawa’s miracle diet:

• They Eat a vide variety of foods, especially vegetables.
• They Eat at least five servings of fruits and vegetables every day.
• Grains are the foundation of their diet. Like rice, noodles.
• They rarely eat sugar.

Hara bachi bu

This is called the 80% rule. It’s easy to do: when you notice you’re almost full but could have a Little more… just stop eating. This is reason why in Japan food isn’t served as appetisers, main course and desserts.

This doesn’t mean that you have to eat less calories than our body required. The key is to stay healthy while eating a high nutritional value.

Chapter VIII: Exercises from the east that promote health & Longevity.

Gentle movements, longer life

Studies suggest that the people who live longest are not the ones who do the most exercise but rather the ones who move the most.

It’s as easy as getting out of your chair. Metabolism slows down 90% after 30 minutes of sitting. Just getting up for five minutes is going to get things going again.

Yoga- Originally from India, though very popular in Japan create harmony between a person’s body and mind so they can face the world with strength, joy and serenity.

Not only health benefits exercise also acts as as great shield against stress and depression.

Other types of exercise that have been mentioned in the book are:

• Tai Chi
• Qigong
• Shiatsu
• Breathing: Breath better, live longer.

Chapter VI: How to face life challenges without letting stress and worry age you.

Resilience and WABI-SABI

What is Resilience?

Resilience means never give up. But resilience isn’t just the ability to persevere, it is also an outlook we can cultivate to stay focused on the important things in life rather than what is most urgent, and to keep ourselves from being carried away by negative emotions.

Resilience of our ability to deal with setbacks. The more resilient we are, the easier it will be to pick ourselves up and get back to what gives meaning to our lives.

Resilient people know how to stay focused on their objectives on what matters, without giving in to discouragement. Their flexibility is the source of their strength. They concentrate on the things they can control and don’t worry about this they can’t.

What’s the worst thing that can happen?

People are insatiable. Zeno of Citium find the school of Stoicism according to which the objective of the virtuous person is to reach a start of tranquility: the absence of negative feelings such as anxiety fear, shame vanity and anger, and the presence of negative feelings such as happiness, love, serenity and gratitude.

In order to keep their mind virtuous, the Stoics practise something like negative visualisation: they induced the worst things that could happen in order to be prepared if certain privileged and pleasures were taken from them.

To practise native visualisation, we have to reflect on beach events, but without worrying about them.

Meditating for healthier emotions

Another central tenet of Stoicism is knowing what we can control and what we can’t.

Worrying about things that are bring our control accomplishes nothing. We should have a clear sense of what we can change and what we can’t, which in turn will allow us to resist giving in to negative emotions.

In Zen Buddhism, meditation is a way to become aware of our desires and emotions and thereby free ourselves from them.

It is not simply a question of keeping the mind free of thoughts but instead involves observing our thoughts and emotions as they appear, without getting carried away by them. In this way, we train our minds not to get swept up in anger, jealously, or resentment.

The here and now, and the impermanence if things

Another key to cultivating resilience is knowing in which time to live. Instead of worrying about the past or the future, we should appreciate things just as they are in the moment, in the now.

All things human are short-lived and perishable.

Wabi-sabi and ichi-go ichi-e

Wabi-sabi is a Japanese concept that shows us the beauty of fleeting, changeable and imperfect nature of the world around us.

A complimentary Japanese concept is that of ichi-go ichi-e, which can be translated as “this moment exists only now and won’t come again.”

The key is to accept that there are certain things over which we have no control.

ichi-go ichi-e, teaches us to focus on the present and enjoy each moment that lis life brings us. That 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.

Beyond Resilience: Anti-fragility

We use the word fragile to describe people, things, and organisations that are weakened when harmed, and the word robust and resilient for things that are able to withstand harm without weakening, but we don’t have words for things that get stronger when harmed (up to a point). For this kind of power the proposed word is Antifragility.

There are few ways through which we can apply this concept in our daily lives:

Step 1: Create redundancies

Instead of having a single salary, try to find a way to make money from your hobbies, at other jobs or by starting your own business. If you have only one salary, you might be left with nothing should your employer run into trouble, leaving you in a position of fragility. On the other hand, if you have several options and you lose your primary job, it might just happen that you end up dedicating more time to your secondary job, and may be even make more money at it. You would have beaten that stroke of bad luck and would be, in that case, antifragile.

Step 2: Bet conservatively in certain areas and take many small risks in others

The world of finance turns out to be very useful in explaining this concept. If you have $10,000 saved up, you might put $9,000 of that into an index fund or fixed-term deposit, and invest the remaining $1,000 in ten start-ups with huge growth potential – say ,$100 in each.

One possible scenario is that three of the companies fail (you lose $300), the value of three other companies goes down (you lose another $100 or $200), the value of three goes up (you make $100 or $200), and the value of one of the start-ups increases twenty-fold (you make nearly $2,000 on maybe even more).

you still make money, even if three of the businesses goes completely belly-up. You have benefited from the damage, just like the hydra.

The key to becoming antifragile is taking on small risks that might lead to great reward, without exposing ourselves to dangers that might sink us, such as investing $10,000 in a find of questionable reputation that we saw advertised in the newspaper.

Step 3: Get rid of the things that make you fragile

Ask yourself: What makes me fragile?

Certain people, things, and habits generate losses for us and make us vulnerable. Who and what are they?

Setting “good riddance” can have bigger impact than setting goals. For example:

• Stop snacking between meals.
• Eat sweets only once a week.
• Gradually pay-off all debt.
• Avoid spending time with toxic people.
• Avoid spending time doing things we don’t enjoy, simply because we feel obligated to do them.
• Spend no more than 20 mins on Facebook per day.

To build resilience into our lives, we shouldn’t fear adversity, because each setback is an opportunity for growth.

If we adopt an antifragile attitude, we will find a way to get stronger with every blow, refining our lifestyle and staying focused on our IKIGAI.