Kaizen

Kaizen is a word that took meaning in my life when I read it for the first time. The first time I read it was on a Bob Parsons poster titled 16 rules for success and number 7 highlighted Kaizen which is a Japanese word that means; small daily improvements eventually result in huge advantages.

I look back at this week and don’t feel like I have done a huge amount of work but then I started writing down all the little things that I have done and realise I am setting the foundation up for a big week. The pieces are starting to fall in place.

Implementing small changes daily is the challenge. If you read a book for just 10 minutes a night you would have that book completed within the month and if you did that for a year that is 12 books you wouldn’t have read otherwise and valuable knowledge added to your mental tool kit.

When I started to learn how to solve the rubiks cube it frustrated me for months, and in fact I put it away for years and when I got it back out again I was determined to solve it. I usually spent about 30 minutes a night on it and I finally realised when I pulled apart the cube to lube it to make it spin faster I put one of the pieces on the wrong way making it an insolvable cube. I was frustrated at myself and relieved at the same time because I finally found the barrier holding me back. I can now solve the rubiks cube in just over 2 minutes and surprisingly enough I use it to reduce any stress levels.

We can all achieve even our biggest goals but just working on it a tiny bit every single day. Imagine spending 5 minutes on something every single day at the end of the year as insignificant as that 5 minutes would have felt like those 5 minutes a day total up to 30 hours.

I wish I implemented this strategy smarter in University it would have saved me a lot of intense last minute efforts to get assignments in on time. I use to envy the people that got them finished well before the deadline because I could never bring myself to do it unless the pressure was on or unless it was something I genuinely wanted to learn about.

If you want to be a better version of yourself, work out what you want to improve at or achieve and do it every single day, even if it is only for 5 minutes.