[Republished here by permission of the authors from the blog of their “Passionate Retirees” website]
Kaizen is a Japanese word meaning improvement. It is actually a philosophy that refers to small, steady, and continuous increases in productivity.
It appears that gradual improvements are not something taken up by most people in the west, especially in the financial sector. People want the home run – the get-rich-quick schemes that will make them wealthy virtually overnight. The latest fad is Bitcoin. While a few have made fortunes, most will not and will, in fact, lose money and put their financial security at risk. Slow and steady saving with conservative investing does not sound sexy to most people. However, this has been shown to be the most valuable way to secure a sound financial future.
The principle of Kaizen can be applied in any area of life. For example, what if you wanted to become an expert in a particular field of study? If you read just 10 pages a day of a book or article in the field, after a year you would have read 3,650 pages (about ten books). After five years you would have read 50 books, and after ten years 100 books. Depending on the quality and relevance of your reading, you would have acquired a great deal of knowledge about the field – simply by reading 10 pages a day.
If you wanted to change some aspect of your health, the principle of Kaizen adequately applied would have a more profound long-term impact. For example, what if you decided that you would increase how far you walked each week and kept a careful log? If you started at 1 kilometre a week and added 100 metres each week, after 52 weeks you would have added 5200 metres, or another 5.2 kilometres a week. How beneficial would that be to you?
In many aspects of health, whether it’s weight loss, use of medication, or alleviation of a chronic symptomatic problem, we seem to go for the “quick fix.” Often this approach fails because it creates too much stress on the body, or because the underlying behaviour that contributed to the problem has not been addressed. Our bodies have to conform to the laws of nature; we have to treat them with respect.
So whether it’s your health, finances, or personal relationships, remember the idiom, “steady-as-she-goes!”
| Copyright © 2018 by Dr. Ely Lazar & Dr. Adele Thomas |
Very well said, Ely. Thanks for your simplicity.
ReplyDeleteDrs. Lazar & Thomas’s self-help advice reminds me of an important lesson I learned from Tony Robbins: every time you consult your plan to achieve or accomplish something, do something to advance the plan, take a constructive action.
ReplyDeleteI guess I do this with any work or chore. The whole thing looks like a mountain, but if you break it down into discrete parts, each part is a job one can see is easily done. I take a piece I think I can finish in a given time, and consider it a job done when accomplished. this gives me a positive feeling. My dad always said to plan for longer than you think to do a job. That way if takes less you're happy, and if it does take the longer time you're not disappointed. So, kaizen it is.
ReplyDeleteYour dad was a very wise man.
DeleteOne of the wise men I have known was Dr. William B. Ross, a psychotherapist who helped get me going again when I ground to a halt at IBM as a young technical writer who had been assigned the job to finish Book X, and to do so by Date Y. Dr. Ross diagnosed that, unconsciously, I knew very well that I could not meet both requirements – especially because I gave myself a third requirement: Book X had to be perfect. Dr. Ross’s advice was, first, lose the perfectionism (and he had advice for how to do that). Second, understand that you can work on something until a certain time or date, but the “something” might not be complete, or you can work on it until it is done, but the time or the date reached by then might be later than you thought.
To help me begin to get a handle on my perfectionism, Dr. Ross suggested that I plant a few mistakes in the book I was writing before I turned it over to my editor (Ms. Paula Givan). That was NOT an easy assignment for me! But the result was earthskaking for me. Paula simply identified or corrected the mistakes and made nothing of it. My reputation, my sense of self, my okayness – all survived my failure to be “perfect.”