The system for 1% every day

Why do I recommend every body should have a dream in life?

There is plenty of research that supports this idea. For example, in a study from Johns Hopkins University, students were asked what they considered to be central in their lives. The vast majority – 78 percent – reported that finding a purpose and meaning in life was most important to them.

When we’re unable to find meaning in our lives, we’re left with what is referred to as an existential vacuum. People who are unable to live according to their values, or feel like their lives have no meaning, will find a kind of emptiness inside themselves.

Knowing how important it is to find a purpose in life, we’re left asking ourselves how we go about finding our own. Indeed, many people believe that, in order to make the right choices in life, they must first discover their life’s purpose.

Our success, and sometimes our very survival, is dependent upon our ability to find our life’s meaning. This doesn’t have to be something grand or existential – your own personal meaning depending on your immediate circumstances will do just fine.

We need a compass and a GPS to drive your life

Think about life from a bird eye view

If you ask a chess grandmaster the best move, she’ll tell you that there is no best move in general. There is, however, a best move depending on the varying situations during the game.

In a poll of US workers, two-thirds of the respondents expressed dissatisfaction with their job, some of them saying they feel trapped because their diploma is in a field they’d rather not be in.

The first step to figuring out your current situation is to assess four critical areas in your life: health, work, play and love.

• Health includes your emotional, mental and physical health.
• Work includes both paid and volunteer jobs.
• Play is any activity done simply for the fun of it.

And love applies to partners, children, friends and pets.

The goal is to find a healthy balance among all four of these areas, and the precise balance is totally up to you.

For example, maybe you’re too focused on work, and it has caused both your health and your love life to suffer? Or maybe you’ve been too immersed in play and have neglected your career aspirations?

In fact, there isn’t a single best or perfect way to live a life, period. Throughout your life, you’ll have many options to choose from, even if they aren’t always apparent.

This is why it’s important to think ahead and plan, or design, many possible lives for yourself – not just one.

To define or design career, I use mind map and ikigai to help me come up with my own career plan.

For visual guys like me, I prefer to think out loud with mind map technique.

• Make a bubble in the middle with “Life”
• Branch out from there with bubbles containing each aspect of life that you’re excited about
• Branch out from those bubbles answering the question “Why am I excited about this?” or “What specifically about this excites me?”

After the mind map section, using ikigai as a filter for you to look on this mind map again.

1. Passion

What inspires you?

Forget the worries that plague your day-to-day and cloud your vision of the world. Picture this: money is no object, the opinions of others are irrelevant, and you can spend your time and energy on whatever excites you most. Explore the depth and scope of this passion.

2. Mission

What makes you feel useful?

There is a special kind of satisfaction that comes from being able to make a difference in the world.

Making a valuable contribution to something is admirable from a social, moral, and humanitarian standpoint.

3. Vocation

The very word ‘vocation’ is derived from the Latin vocatio, meaning ‘call’ (i.e. your ‘calling’). It refers to what you feel especially suited to, given your abilities, qualifications, experience, and personality.

4. Profession

What activities do you find most productive and fruitful?

Again, as a visual thinker, we arrange the answer to the below chart to see the intersection and new insights emerge.

Using Hoshin Kanri method helps me see the clear path.

With above exercises with mind map and ikigai, now I have a kind of overwhelmed information about what I really want in my life, but somehow it is still abstract.

I found that Hoshin Kanri is a good tool to make an abstract plan become clear for execution.?

1. What: I use the x matrix template and start visioning my life status after 5 years from now.

2. How far: I define the goal lists by breaking down the my vision in section 1. I am the big fan of number three, so one break through in section one (What) I can have maximum 3 goals related in section two (How Far)

3. How: from the goal list (section 2), I continue to break it down into project list and present them in section 3. Again, I use the rule of number 3 to limit one goal would have maximum 3 related projects.

• And now, once I have the project list, I use the ikigai result to check again if the project list aligned with my ikigai or not.
• There are just many options (represent as projects) to achieve a goal so why not choosing the solutions that aligned with our ikigai.

4. How much: at this section, I define the KPIs to measure the progress towards my break thoughs (in section 1)

• If the break through is about finance, then the KPI could be the total amounts in your investment portfolio, or saving accounts
• If the break through is about health, then the KPI could e body weights or body fat composition rate.

The power of compound in life

“My wealth has come from a combination of living in America, some lucky genes, and compound interest.” – Warren Buffett

That’s the awesome power of compounding. Over time this force can turn a modest sum of money into a massive fortune.

To understand how the compound effects can apply in other aspects of our life besides financial aspect, I recommend watching this Ted talk.

Or I recommend we can read an absolutely wonderful paper from 1989 called The Mundanity of Excellence - An ethnographic report on stratification and Olympic swimmers.

The author breaks down (in a very readable but rigorous fashion) the differences in daily habits, practices and mindsets between swimmers in different fields of competition (from local club competitions all the way up to Olympic level).

There’s nothing ‘special’ about high performers. They just have a set of habits, practices and mindsets that individually aren’t particularly groundbreaking, but when added together and compounded over a long period of time, result in the phenomenon of excellence. It’s all very mundane.

The busyness of modern life

Our work lives have become increasingly demanding, presenting us with ever more complex challenges at a near-relentless pace. Add in personal or family needs, and it’s easy to feel constantly overwhelmed. In their book, Immunity to Change, Harvard professors Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey discuss how the increase in complexity associated with modern life has left many of us feeling “in over our heads.” When this is the case, the complexity of our world has surpassed our “complexity of mind” or our ability to handle that level of complexity and be effective. This has nothing to do with how smart we are, but with how we make sense of the world and how we operate in it.

We waste our time with short-term thinking and busywork. Warren Buffett spends a year deciding and a day acting. That act lasts decades.

Very often, we lose sights for our real vision with daily busyness, and thus we are feeling lost.?

The system that helps to focus 1% incremental every day

Using goals to set the direction, and then we can rely on our system to achieve the goals.

Having clear defined goals from Hoshin Kanri is very good, but nothing happens until we work.

Therefore, I recommend we should develop a system for our ourselves to stay focus and make the physical action for our dreams.

Focus on the system for your habits rather than the goals only.

Getting Results the Agile Way. This system takes some cues from the Agile software development methodology, a system based on producing results rather than activities, having boundaries and set tasks and goals you want to accomplish, and making time your best friend

The Agile way also is all about reflection and making sure that you are producing the right of results in your days, weeks, months, and years. And with the above secion about Hoshin Kanri and ikigai, we know what is right for us.

I use a simple system of review and time boxing

Basically the system revolves around the power of “3”, and it requires you to have monthly review - weekly review - daily refresh

Define 3 focus projects for your month

Define 3 outcomes for your week

Define 3 outcomes for your day

After every weekly review section, I always book my calendar ahead to ensure I set my laser focus for the 3 outcomes of the coming week.

The standard of your life is rooted from the daily habit

How do you cultivate discipline? By building habits – starting as small as you can manage, even microscopic, and gathering momentum, reinvesting it in progressively bigger changes to your routine, and building a positive feedback loop.

And now I recommend we improvise the traditional Hoshin Kanri X template: we replace "who" with "habits".

Select 5 habits that mostly support you to achieve your break throughs in section 1

Using tips and apps to start building your defined habits.

How to build a new habit?

• Step 1: make it obvious
• Step 2: make it attractive
• Step 3: make it easy
• Step 4: make it immediately satisfied

I am a huge fan of Notion app, I am learning to use the app as my life operation system.

Resources

• How to Find Your Ikigai, the Secret to Your True Life Purpose
• Hoshin Kanri
• Productivity System Overview: "Getting Results the Agile Way"
• Atomic habit
• Man’s Search for Meaning
• Design your life
• The Morning Compound Effect - THE MORNING EFFECT
• Unshakeable
• The Mundanity of Excellence