Skip to main content

What is the simplest way to achieve anything?

 


  How many of us have heard from our parents that if you want to become an expert at something, do it daily? I have heard this for a long but never really paid heed to it until I learned about Kaizen & used it in my daily life.

 

So what is Kaizen? Kaizen is a Japanese word that means "change for the better" or "continuous improvement." It is an old technique used by the Japanese to improve business productivity and efficiency by focusing on every small detail and improving how tasks are performed.

Wait what does this has to do with how I can achieve my goal of lifting a certain weight, running a marathon, getting a promotion, creating wealth from the stock market?

 

Let us hear it from the modern-day Guru(I call him that) Charlie Munger 

“Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Day by day, and at the end of the day if you live long enough-like most people, you will get out of life what you deserve.” 

Pay attention to how he simply lays it out there for us the secret of his success, going to bed each day a little wiser than we woke up. That is Kaizen in practice. 

 

We tend to overestimate what we can achieve in short term like few weeks or a year but underestimate what can be achieved in 3, 5, or 10 years. The math in the latter is nonlinear and more like compounding so our brain has a hard time contemplating it. The only condition to attain it is to do it regularly.

 

Let's boil down to practical steps: 

The first step is taking an honest note of where you're currently with regards to your goal. Brutally honest assessment because to improve you need to know where you stand. Let's consider you want to run a marathon someday, right now go out and tests how much you can run in one go. 1km or less than that? Fine but test and know your current position.

 

Next set small goals like daily routine & habit around the activity. Start from now, if you were unable to run a kilometer set a weekly target of being able to do that. Start with 400-500 meters a day and increase it gradually to reach 1km within a week. Remember small goals because you don't want your mind to feel extremely uncomfortable, if it does it will fight back and prevent the change you want to bring.

 

Hardly spending 10-15 mins a day initially would help your body to easily adjust to new activity & it won't resist much. gradual increase every week, within 4 weeks you would be able to spend more than 30-40 mins per day doing the activity. in a few months you would be running a distance you only dreamed of, and within a year you would have inculcated a new habit and a new sport. 

 

Now it won't exactly pan out as easy as it is to sit and write it up. There are going to be days when you don't feel like doing it. Take a break, breaks are good as long as they don't make you quit the activity.

This applies to almost any field you can think of. The daily grind lays a base for compounding of results you will achieve by doing something regularly. An activity did just for 20 mins a day for a year (considering 300 days only) would lead to 600hrs spent performing that activity. I haven't considered any increase in time.

Imagine what happens when you do it for 3,4 or 5 years? That is the power of small steps taken regularly to improve yourself.


Detail Read:

Kaizen: The Japanese Method for Transforming Habits, One Small Step at a Time

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

RISK

  Investopedia defines risk as “Risk is defined in financial terms as the chance that an outcome or investment's actual gains will differ from an expected outcome or return.” Different people define risk differently for some, it could be not earning on investment or a failed investment, for some it is not being able to beat a benchmark return sounds like risk. How should we look at risk? The risk would be taking permanent losses i.e. losing all your money Risk is having forced to liquidate all your stocks because you don’t have money to take care of expenses Risk is brokers calling for margins or force closing your position Risk is losing the financial security of your family & dependents Getting wiped out in business is a risk Not being able to do what you love to do due to work pressure is a risk Risk is putting yourself in situations where exists a possibility of dying even if it is 0.001 % Let’s invert & look at what risk is not? Share prices moving up & down e...
Post a Comment
Read more

Help to get Helped

Do you remember how you felt when someone out of the blue helped you without asking for anything in return? Let me share one of own experiences when I was on a job hunt in my final year of post graduation. There was a senior of mine who graduated and we were not connected. Now as far as my memory serves, I was good with him but don’t remember him helping me in any manner. He helped me connect with 3–4 companies, without me even asking for help. He reached out to me and was constantly helping me during the process of applying & interviewing. Did I land with a job he helped me apply with? Yes, I did (ended up not joining because of some other reason) The point I want to highlight here is it was very pleasing to be helped by someone in a tough process, I was shooting 5–10 mails on some days just to get an opportunity. I am grateful to him. Now, I don’t know why he helped me but I know that it taught me a big lesson in life, “help someone for no reason and without expecting ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Are you Biased?

We are all biased!! Yes, I said that out loud, we all are. It includes yours truly too because I am no exception. Let’s define what bias means before we delve into different types of biases. Wikipedia defines bias as “disproportionate weight in favor of or against an idea or thing, usually in a way that is closed-minded, prejudicial, or unfair”. Biases stem from the way our brain is structured to help us. Our brain always tries to keep past experiences in mind, remembers what gives us pain or pleasure, what worked to give us recognition or what led to failure, and tries to make sense of the present and future decisions based on them. So, the brain doesn’t recognize that it could be a bad thing for us. Biases make us irrational in our decisions and choices. Now almost none of us can eliminate biases because its difficult to recognize the bias when you’re actually being biased because your brain tricks you into believing that what you’re doing is the right thing to do. ...
Post a Comment
Read more