Book Review: IKIGAI, The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life by Hector Garcia & Francese Miralles

Happy Sunday,

This book talks about the purpose of one's life, It has profuse reasons to motivate us.

In brief, the book has categorised four orientations, with which one can find the real cause of being happy.

1. Unveil your Passion: Passions are the activities that make time fly by and cause you to feel excited and alive. It's what you enjoy most, and, perhaps something you'd do even if you weren't paid for it.

2. Recognize your Vocation: Skills and strengths are those things that you naturally excel at that might not come as easily to others. Perhaps you’re skilled in math, writing, or creating music. Identifying your vocation is another way of tapping into your special skills that deserve recognition.

3. Discover your Mission: This element of IKIGAI helps you explore the needs of the world and where you can make a difference. Are there problems or challenges in your community or in the world you feel passionate about solving? Identify them. There’s your mission.

4. Cultivate your Profession: Your profession is where you look at how to make a living from your passion and mission. For example, if you’re a talented pianist who believes the world would be a better place if more people played music, you could begin to teach piano lessons. Turning your passion and mission into your profession can take time to develop. Trust the process.

The Japanese word “IKIGAI” means a “life purpose” IKIGAI refers to defining your personal meaning of life about your talents, passions, and profession, as well as what you can give to the posterity.

1. IKIGAI, The Art of Staying Young While Growing Old: Whatever you do, don't retire! Having a clearly defined IKIGAI brings satisfaction, happiness, and meaning to our lives. The purpose of this book is to help you find yours and to share insights from Japanese philosophy on the lasting health of body, mind, and spirit.

The Characters Behind IKIGAI

In Japanese, IKIGAI is written as ?き甲斐, combining ?き, which means “life,” with 甲斐, which means "to be worthwhile." 甲斐 can be broken down into the characters 甲, which means "armour," "number one," and

"to be the first" (to head into battle, taking initiative as a leader), and 斐, which means "beautiful" or “elegant.”

2. Antiaging Secrets, Little Things that Add up to a Long and Happy Life: Be mindful about reducing stress Whether or not the threats we perceive are real, stress is an easily identifiable condition that not only causes anxiety but is also highly psychosomatic, affecting everything from our digestive system to our skin. This is why prevention is so important in avoiding the toll that stress takes onus—and why many experts recommend practising mindfulness.

3. From Logotherapy to IKIGAI, How to Live Longer and Better by Finding Your Purpose: Logotherapy helps you find reasons to live, A study conducted by Frankl in his Vienna clinic found that among both patients and personnel, around 80 per cent believed that human beings needed a reason for living and around 60 per cent felt they had someone or something in their lives worth dying for.

The search for meaning

The search for purpose became a personal, driving force that allowed Frankl to achieve his goals. The process of logotherapy can be summarized in these five ways.

1. A person feels empty, frustrated, or anxious.

2. The therapist shows him that what he is feeling is the desire to have a meaningful life.

3. The patient discovers his life’s purpose (at that particular point in time).

4. Of his own free will, the patient decides to accept or reject that destiny.

5. This newfound passion for life helps him overcome obstacles and sorrows.

Existential frustration arises when our life is without purpose, or when that purpose is skewed.

4. Find Flow in Everything You Do and how to Turn Work and Free Time into Space for Growth: We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. — Aristotle.

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 skills7. Being free from distractions

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

According to Csikszentmihalyi, to focus on a task we need:

1. To be in a distraction-free environment

2. To have control over what we are doing at every moment

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.

5. Master of Longevity, Words of Wisdom from the Longest-Living People in the World: Never Stop Learning “You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.” —T. H. White, The Once and Future King.

Longevity in Japan:

Because of its robust civil registry, many of those verified as having lived the longest are found in the United States; however, there are many centenarians living in remote villages in other countries. Peaceful life in the countryside seems pretty common among people who have watched a century pass. Without question, the international superstar of longevity is Japan, which has the highest life expectancy of any country in the world. In addition to a healthy diet, which we will explore in detail, and an integrated healthcare system in which people go to the doctor for regular checkups to prevent disease, longevity in Japan is closely tied to its culture, as we will see later on. The sense of community, and the fact that Japanese people make an effort to stay active until the very end, are key elements of their secret to long life. If you want to stay busy even when there’s no need to work, there has to be an IKIGAI on your horizon, a purpose that guides you throughout your life and pushes you to make things of beauty and utility for the community and yourself.

6. Lessons for Japan's Centenarians, Traditions and Proverbs for Happiness and Longevity: TO GET TO Ogimi, we had to fly nearly three hours from Tokyo to Naha, the capital of Okinawa. Several months earlier we had contacted the town council of a place known as the Village of Longevity to explain the purpose of our trip and our intention to interview the oldest members of the community. After numerous conversations, we finally got the help we were looking for and were able to rent a house just outside the town. One year after starting this project, we found ourselves on the doorstep of some of the longest-living people in the world. We realized right away that time seemed to have stopped there, as though the entire town were living in an endless here-and-now.

1. Don’t worry: “The secret to a long life is not to worry. And to keep your heart young—don’t let it grow old. Open your heart to people with a nice smile on your face. If you smile and open your heart, your grandchildren and everyone else will want to see you.”

2. Cultivate good habits: “The key to staying sharp in old age is in your fingers. From your fingers to your brain, and back again. If you keep your fingers busy, you’ll live to see one hundred.”

3. Nurture your friendships every day: "Talking each day with the people you love, that’s the secret to a long life.”

4. Live an unhurried life: “Doing many different things every day. Always staying busy, but doing one thing at a time, without getting overwhelmed.”

5. Be optimistic: "There’s no secret to it. The trick is just to live.”

The secret to a long life is going to bed early, waking up early, and going for a walk. Living peacefully and enjoying the little things. Getting along with your friends. Spring, summer, fall, winter . . . enjoying each season, happily.

7. The IKIGAI Diet, What the World's Longest-Living People Eat and Drink: World Health Organization, Japan has the highest life expectancy in the world: 85 years for men and 87.3 years for women. Moreover, it has the highest ratio of centenarians in the world: more than 520 for every million people (as of September 2016). Okinawa is one of the areas in Japan that were most affected by World War II. As a result, not only of conflicts on the battlefield but also of hunger and lack of resources once the war ended, the average life expectancy was not very high during the 1940s and 1950s. As Okinawans recovered from the destruction, however, they came to be some of the country’s longest-living citizens.

Sanpin-cha: a mix of green tea and jasmine flowers—than any other kind of tea. The closest approximation in the West would be the jasmine tea that usually comes from China. A 1988 study conducted by HirokoSho at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology indicates that jasmine tea reduces blood cholesterol levels.

All the antioxidant benefits of green tea, it boasts the benefits of jasmine, which include:

1. Reducing the risk of heart attack

2. Strengthening the immune system

3. Helping relieve stress

4. Lowering cholesterol

Okinawans drink an average of three cups of Sanpin-cha every day. It might be hard to find exactly the same blend in the West, but we can drink jasmine tea, or even a high-quality green tea, instead

8. Gentle Movements, Longer Life, Exercises from the East that Promote Health and Longevity: The Eastern disciplines for bringing body, mind, and soul into balance have become quite popular in the West, but in their countries of origin they have been used for ages to promote health. Yoga—originally from India, though very popular in Japan—and China's qigong and tai chi, among other disciplines, seek to create harmony between a person’s body and mind so they can face the world with strength, joy, and serenity. You don’t need to go to the gym for an hour every day or run marathons. As Japanese centenarians show us, all you need is to add movement to your day. Practising any of these Eastern disciplines regularly 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. If you don’t like any of these disciplines, feel free to choose a practice that you love and that makes you move.

9. Resilience and Wabi-Sabi, How to Face Life's Challenges Without Letting Stress and Worry Age You: Emotional Resilience through Buddhism and Stoicism Siddhārtha Gautama (Buddha) was born a prince of Kapilavastu, Nepal, and grew up in a palace, surrounded by riches. At sixteen he married and had a child. Not satisfied by his family’s wealth, at twenty-nine he decided to try a different lifestyle and ran away from the palace to live as an ascetic. But it wasn’t asceticism that he was looking for; it didn’t offer the happiness and well-being he sought. Neither wealth nor extreme asceticism worked for him. He realized that a wise person should not ignore life’s pleasures. A wise person can live with these pleasures but should always remain conscious of how easy it is to be enslaved by them.

Conclusion: “Ikigai gently unlocks simple secrets we can all use to live long, meaningful, happy lives. Science-based studies weave beautifully into an honest, straight-talking conversation you won’t be able to put down. Warm, patient, and kind, this book pulls you gently along your own journey rather than push."

Learning:

“Wabi-sabi is a Japanese concept that shows us the beauty of the fleeting, changeable, and imperfect nature of the world around us. Instead of searching for beauty in perfection, we should look for it in things that area flawed, incomplete.”

It briefly touches on anti-fragility from the book Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder by Nicholas Taleb.

“Life is pure imperfection, as the philosophy of wabi-wabi teaches us, and the passage of time shows us that everything is fleeting, but if you have a clear sense of your IKIGAI, each moment will hold so many possibilities that it will seem almost like an eternity”

The book is a wonderful read and takes us right into the lives of Japanese people and the reasons why they live long, their attention to detail and probably why they don’t mind doing repetitive tasks which is frowned upon in the Western world.

Hector Garcia & Francesc Miralles