Why Applying a Kaizen Philosophy in your Life is the Best Decision you will Make this Year

The best way to become the best version of yourself.

Origin

It is within human nature that every time you fix a target for yourself, whether it is about Sports, your Career, or personal life, they will tend to be very ambitious. Having big goals is very positive, everyone should be always ambitious towards goal planning and try to aim as high as possible.

But if you think back to the goals you set for yourself, let’s say 5 years ago, how much of them did you complete? If your answer is 100% of them, then probably this story is not for you, as it seems that you already have excellent management skills towards accomplishing your goals.

But if you are more of the kind of person that sometimes lacks motivation and ends up surrendering before fulfilling your goal, a Kaizen approach might be the right way to re-focus your life and goals.

Kaizen was born in Japan after World War II. It introduced a way to improve business activities involving the whole company, starting from the CEO down to the assembly line workers. It means “Change for better” and is one of the most recognized constant improvement methods applied today all-around the world.

It was around 8 years ago when I first got familiarized with the concept of Kaizen and how powerful it was. Since then, I started to investigate how people applied it in their life and the possibility of incorporating it into mine.

Kaizen philosophy defends that a series of constant continuous improvement developments is much powerful than a big change.

Its plain simple: Taking small steps in the short-term to reach my goal long-term.

As a real-life example, I just started writing in Medium, this will be just my 5th published story in the platform. I cannot expect to make an income from it yet, this is a goal in the long-term. But I am ensuring that I am taking the right small steps, such as writing consistently enough to be noticed and get my articles published in a publication and curated by Medium.

As I am an engineer, I like to quantify things:

Let´s say that you want to improve your running distance and you are planning to run 3 times per week (I´m not a great runner, so for me starting running 6.5 miles or 10km on the first day is nuts). During the challenge, every day you will run 2% more of the distance than the day before.

You start on the first day of the challenge by running 2 miles (3.2km)

After 3 months applying Kaizen methodology of improving 2%, your running distance would improve by more than double: 4.6 miles ( 7.4km)

After 6 months, if you stick to your commitment, you would improve your running distance to 9.4 miles ( 15km)

And this is something you can apply to every aspect of your life, small improvements will make big differences in the long run.

1% improvement a day will make it 38x better a year.

Reasons to apply Kaizen philosophy

Satisfaction improvement

If small steps are taken your focus is on delivering short term rather than looking in the long term, the mountain will not look as steep and you will climb it easier.

Psychologically this was a game-changer for me. You will be constantly fulfilled by your small achievements and motivation will be always high towards achieving your goal.

It helps you simplify tasks

When applying Kaizen into your daily life, you need to constantly assess your tasks and break them into smaller tasks. This is a great way to improve your time management and structure yourself.

An example of well-applied Kaizen is a smoker trying to quit smoking. As you most certainly have heard, a lot of smokers just try to quit smoking from one day to another. This is a very difficult thing to do and certainly, most of them will fail. Applying Kaizen and setting up small goals such as breaking a cigarette in half before smoking and reducing the number of cigarettes you are smoking every day is a much more efficient and secure strategy to quit smoking.

Achieving your goals is more enjoyable

Kaizen helps you focus on the process of improving, instead of focussing on the goal itself. It makes you more aware of the present moment ensuring a better future by your constant small.

“Forget about perfection; focus on progression, and compound the improvements.” Sir Dave Brailsford

Sir Dave, was a former cycler who applied the following theory: if the team broke down all of the elements that go into a competing bike and improved every element by 1%, they would increase the bike performance significantly. This led Britain towards a gold medal in Olympic cycling.

So that´s basically why Kaizen works. Improving 1% every day it´s perfectly doable by everybody reading this article. It can be applied to almost everything you want to do or achieve one day. But when applied consistently, amazing results will come in the long run.