Ikigai: Finding Your Passion in a Fast-Paced World

1. Introduction: Hi everyone. I'm Joseph Mavericks for my teenagers to around the time I was 25, I always had a ton of projects on my to-do list, which I either never started or started and dropped. A few months later, I tried a ton of different things. I built a website as a freelancer. I tried to create a t-shirt business. I got into trading algorithms. I tried selling ARDS, creating an online comic, making videos, making an app. None of these projects lasted for more than six months, but eventually I picked up blogging and I was able to build it into a side business within two years. That's the story I covered in other courses on Skillshare. In this course, I went to cover purpose and what it means to be driven by purpose. As much as a lot of the projects I've tried in my life failed. At least I always wanted to try something. I never really let us failures getting in the way of me experimenting with things, trying to make something out of nothing. I always had a drive to be an entrepreneur, to do my own thing. For me, the stability of a job I liked a good salary and nice colleagues were both too easy and too risky at the same time. Of course, I was grateful to be in the position I was in, but I also knew that if I settled in that comfort zone, I wouldn't ever do anything more with my life. I wanted to keep improving, keep learning to cross items off my bucket list. In Japanese, this concept is called your icky guy. A couple of months ago, I stumbled upon this book under Japanese concept of geeky guy. I loved reading it because it kind of answered the question for me, which was how to find your purpose in life. In fact, I was both eager to know how to find more of my own purpose in life, but also to understand why it takes so long for some people to discover what they want to do with their life. When you say it like that, finding your purpose, It sounds like a big question. That's not really easy to answer with a simple Skillshare course, but I also want to use this opportunity to brainstorm with you on what it means to have a purpose and how to potential it specifically because I don't feel like I'm someone who ever had to really look for purpose. In the next section, we will look into more details at purpose. Why I feel like I haven't really had to look for purpose in my life. And also have realized that a lot of people are not that driven and haven't found their purpose yet because they stopped experimenting in life. In this section after that, we will take a closer look at AKI in its meeting in the Eastern and Western culture. We will also take a look at Logotherapy in section four, and we will talk about experimentation and flow, two key components of EQ guy in section five. Finally, we'll close off with a section on various Japanese words and concepts around icky guy and the two very important notions of resilience, anti fragility. At the end of each section you will find some journaling and writing prompts to help you get the most out of this class and also to get in touch with your icky guy. The goal of this course is to help you find something you're interested or excited about. And that you can potentially turn into your long-term passion to give more meaning to your life. And this is done through not only experimenting, but also through a lot of self-reflection, writing down your thoughts, expressing yourself and getting what is in your brain to come out on paper or in your laptop. He preferred to type on a keyboard. With that in mind. Thanks for watching this intro and we'll see you on the other side when you're ready. 2. Purpose in a fast-paced world: Although I never had a clear idea on what I wanted to do, I just knew that I wanted in broad terms to build my own business and to always experiment with things. Because of course, I have to make money like everyone else. For me, the ultimate goal would be to be on my own, to be my own boss. But that's kind of secondary. It sounds very easy to say. And it's like, well, yeah, anybody can have that dream or that goal who doesn't want to be their own boss. Except the difference is that I actually two concrete steps in order to try and get there. It might have taken the decades to start, and it might've mentioned we take me a decade to reach that goal. But I'm finally at this stage where it can literally see I'm almost reaching my goal of being able to be on my own and to do my stuff full-time. And not only that, even more interestingly, this dramatic climbing progress have experienced over the past two years when I started my bug. That has made me realize that it might not just be all that it's cracked up to be. I don't want just a business money and a successful company. I also want a nice life with my girlfriend, with my family, my friends, and the people that matter in my life. And what I also have found in exploring and creating and failing and all of that is that most people are not that driven. And I'm not saying this in a cocky or arrogant wait, I'm seeing these because I used to think it was simple to get to work. I used to fail to understand that most people haven't even yet found what they want to work towards. And that's why they haven't even started yet. I remember I used to have this friend who was an architect. He was studying to become an architect. And he was kind of realizing towards the end of it that it was maybe not his thing, that maybe he wanted to re-evaluate his career and re-evaluate where he wanted to go in life professional. Eventually though he didn't make it through. He graduated, he got his master's in architecture without ever redoing a year, which is very honorable because it's very hard. Most people have to read, pass it to these two year when you started In lecture anyways. So he got that. And for the next two years or so after that, he didn't really get a job. He was looking for internships, but kind of not really the whole time. I was telling him, you know, you have this amazing assets. A master's in architecture which is not coming in, which is great. And granite architectures is super difficult field to start in and to make money from. It is. But I was telling him, why don't you think of ways to change your approach to it? And one of the big ideas I had for him was to brainstorm five to ten ready-made house projects that people could virtually visit to a certain extent on a website from simple renderings he could do. Maybe it could create a virtual tour in 3D. I thought it could be a fun project, but also potentially with some marketing gun rights, maybe you could actually sell one or two of those houses as projects. And this might seem like a crazy idea, but I thought you just have to try or you just won't know. At the time I kept pushing these to him and I had no idea how unmotivated he was. I didn't get it. I just didn't understand why he wouldn't try anything. I didn't realize maybe he was not that driven yet at this point in his life. And all along my journey of entrepreneurship. And also when I started working in an office, I just realized how much people are not that driven and they settled, right? I always say it's completely fine if an office job is what you truly want and you're happy with it and that fulfills you. That's perfect. But I also think, and a lot of people know that that's very rare. That there's more to life than just sitting in an office. Lot of people settle because they lose faith in the future or because they got sick of aiming for something bigger. And so that's what these courses about. This course is about what took me so long to figure out. Iike guy. Now, I understand what the first obstacle to doing is. It's finding a purpose, the reason to even start. If you just start something without being passionate about it, you'll give up sooner or later because they won't motivate you in the long term. What is purpose? How do you find purpose and how can you use it to nurture a long, healthy and happy life? Well, I'll see you in the first module of the course to start answering those questions and to really dive deeper into the concepts of Nicky guy. For the first assignment of this course, try to think of what passion and purpose mean to you and how they correlate with the lung healthy and happy life. Do you even have to be healthy to be happy in your opinion? Just brainstorm around that notion. And once you're ready with your rough definition of purpose and passion, take it with you and we'll see you in the next video. 3. Defining Ikigai: Why do some people know what they want to chase in life and what they're aiming for while others don't. As I said in the introduction, Vicki guy is a Japanese term. We're going to philosophy that tries to answer that question. It translates roughly as the happiness of always being busy. It's the eastern version of Logotherapy, which is a form of therapy created by Viktor Frankl, which aims to help people find purpose and meaning in their life. And we'll get back to that in the next section of this course is also a way of explaining the reason why part of the Japanese people live much longer than average, especially on the island of Okinawa, where there are 24.5 people over the age of 100 for every 100 thousand inhabitants, it's pretty insane. And the book spends a lot of time on what's called the Blue Zones, which are the five areas in the world that have been identified by Janet peers and Michelle polar to have a far higher percentage of people living above 100 years old then any other places on Earth. Based on the insights from that book about the Blue Zones and on their own insights from studying the Japanese people. The authors of icky guy who are Hector Garcia and friendships mirrorless, point out that the reason these people are able to live for a very long time is because they're always busy with pursuing their passionate life. For a lot of them, this means gardening, spending time with their loved ones. The authors actually, you don't really talk about the peculiarities among those people. They lean more towards the angle that they all do the same thing. They tend to their garden, they hang out with their family, and so they're happy most of their life and live longer as a consequence, I think it's great, but I don't want to spend as much time on living a long life on this course. Not that I don't want to live a long life, but I just want to focus more on icky guy within the scope of your passion in actually doing something different than what everybody else is doing. Because especially now Occidental societies, we mostly just work and we tend to miss out on friends and family times. We don't take time for ourselves. We don't garden to relax anyway, so I want to give you tips on how to garden and relax, but with your passion to build your own little passion garden, it doesn't have to be literally a garden in your backyard that you tend to. That's what icky guy is, in my opinion. It's creating your own garden and finding passion and fulfillment in it. I think as much as in Japan, gardening and drinking teas with your loved ones is kind of a contiguity. People just work and she'll all the time mostly in the countryside. And it's kind of this cycle where they don't really question it. Much like us actually, our cycle is just a lot less healthy. Not only do we not question it, we go full steam all along and we get to 50 years old and we're like, Holy crap, what's happening? If you're watching this course, you may be already questioning the viability of the Western cycle and that never ending grace for more money, more success. Sometimes you've been just erase to make an meets without the certainly wanting to be at the top. And I think that the option for people who have a job and are not satisfied with it is to first find a way to build their garden, their passion, and start working there. Start nice projects like you would play it. Nice trees, water the plants, keep the passion going, stand back up when you fail. And then next to that. And that's where the Western geeky guy differs from the full-on Eastern approach. Next to that, you're going to naturally feel more fulfilled, happier, healthier, and as a consequence, you're going to appreciate your loved ones more, your friends, your family. So I feel like our approach to eat the guy in the West would be more segmented then in the East. And in order to illustrate this approach, I want to dedicate a chapter of this course to Logotherapy. That's sort of hybrid western, eastern approach to geeky guy. I'll see you in the next part to talk about it when you're ready. For the assignment for this section, we're going with a rather easy yet introspective task. Write down a list of things you're interested in. Things that could be in this passion garden of yours, which we've talked about. It can be anything, as long as you can at least see a little bit of the future in that option. Meaning that if you experiment with it and like it, you could see yourself doing it for a long time. 4. Logotherapy: the Western Ikigai: Logo therapy is a therapeutic approach that helps people find personal meaning in their life. It's a form of psychotherapy that is focused on the future and our ability to endure hardship and suffering through a search for purpose. It was developed by Viktor Frankl after he survived Nazi concentration camps during World War II, III. He's experienced in theories are detailed in his book, Man's Search for Meaning, which I highly encourage you to read. I actually read it before reading about the concept of wiki guy. And I hadn't heard either about Logotherapy or Iike guy. It's very interesting how the two concepts intertwine. So Frankel believed that humans are motivated by something called a will to meaning, which is the desire to find meaning in life. He argued that life can have meaning even in the most miserable circumstances. And that the motivation for leaving comes from finding that meeting. What a Frankel's most famous quote is, Everything can be taken from a man. But one thing, the last of the human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. You also find this kind of approach and stoicism where you let go of what you can't control. Because if you can't control aids, then it's not worth wasting energy on worrying about it. Frankel's approaches the same, but it originates in pain rather than leaving the simple life like Stoics promote the reason that's Frenkel came to realize and acknowledge that people can never take away from you. The way you decide to react to hardship is because he had to face hunger, torture, death, horrible things in concentration camps. Franco belief that when we can no longer change the situation, we are forced to change ourselves. Think that will help to change yourself and go through the pain is your reason for being and if you can apply and eraser that reason for being in one of the most horrible environments in the history of humanity, the concentration camps, Then you'll definitely be able to raise it that energy, that purpose in a normal, ordinary life, of course, indicates a Frankl. He had to deal with trauma and the aftermath and all that. But think of this principle for yourself. If you can maintain your life purpose through hardships, it will be even easier to have a drive you in easy time in your daily life. And the things you felt were hardships will then see me relevant. And so in that sense, Logotherapy push his patients to consciously discovered the life's purpose in order to confront their neurosis, their quest to fulfill their destiny, then motivates them to press forward to break the mental changes of the past and overcoming whatever obstacles they encounter along the way. And that's a great quote from the book. Frankel believes that our health depends on that natural tension that comes from comparing what we've accomplished so far with what we'd like to achieve in the future. What we need is not necessarily a peaceful existence, but a challenge we can strive to meet by applying all the skills that are disposal. This to me is a great quote that encapsulates the meaning of the Western AKI. The authors of the book also points to the concept of existential crisis, which is very common among people who haven't found their purpose yet. It is typical of modern societies in which people do what they're told to do, or they just do what others do rather than what they wanted to do. They often try to fill the gap between what is expected of them and what they wanted to do for themselves with shallow things like economic power or physical pleasure or by numbering their senses. Sending neurosis, for example, is what happens when without the obligations and commitments of the workweek, the person realizes how empty he or she is. Insight. Imagine how crazy this is. Some people can get out of bed on the weekends when they have the most time for themselves, specifically because they realize they're nothing without their work. Now of course, it's great to have worked at sticking space in your life. But if you don't like it, It's a huge burden. And it creates this love-hate paradox where you hate it but you're nothing without it. And so the solution to that is finding what gets you out of bed in the morning without your work, maybe, as we will see all along this course, the best way to find that thing is to experiment all the time until we find it. And sometimes something negative might happen to you, which will actually trigger the realization of what your purposes. Here's an example to illustrate that taken from the book. And it's based on Franklin's experience in German concentration camps, as in those that would later be built in Japan or Korea, psychiatrists confirmed that the prisoners with the greatest chance of survival were those who had things they wanted to accomplish outside the camp. Those who felt a strong need to get out of there alive. And this was true. A Frankl who after being released and successfully developing the school of Logotherapy, realized he had been the first patient of his own practice. Franco had a goal to achieve and it made him for severe. He arrived at Auschwitz carrying a manuscript that contains all the theories and research shed compiled over the course of his career, ready for publication. When it was confiscated, he felt compelled to write it all over again. And that need drove him and gave him life meaning emit the constant horror and doubt of the concentration camp. So much so that over the years and especially when he fell ill with typhus, he would jot down fragments and keywords from the last work on any scrap of paper he found. Now, can you imagine working on a book manuscript for a long time having been stolen and finding the drive to rewrite it all over again all the while you're following seek to typhus. That was Frankel's purpose, which on top of writing a book, he turned into his own practice, which helped him become one of the world's most renowned psychotherapies. And you don't have to become the number one best at what you do by the way, or top ten or even top 100. You just have to enjoy it and to keep doing it for a long time, it has to get you out of bed in the morning. So we've defined what your purposes in broad terms through the inky guy lands and the Logotherapy lens. Still, it somehow seems too easy to say, you know, like find what drives you. But what does that truly mean when you put it into practice? Well, that's exactly what we'll be talking about in the next section of the course. So we'll see you there whenever you're ready. As we've just talked about, Logotherapy is all about choosing how you react to your environment rather than letting your environment shape you entirely. With that in mind, think of a recent situation where you could have chosen to react differently than what you did, which would've been beneficial to you. Essentially, when was the last time you had the opportunity to choose your attitude towards an unpleasant situation, what can you learn from that and what will you do differently the next time such a situation arises. 5. Finding Purpose: In order to find what you like to do in life and what is part of your purpose, your reasons for being the key word is experience. Just try things you think you may like and try to really get into it. The more you can get completely immersed in the activity you're doing, the more you'll be able to reach a state of flow, and the more likely this activity can be a part of your purpose, or at least something that makes you happy in life and that you should explore. As the author is saying the book, there is no magic recipe for finding happiness, for living according to your ego. But one key ingredient is the ability to reach this state of flow and through the state to have an optimal experience. And in order to achieve this optimal experience, we have to focus on increasing the time we spend on activities that bring us to this state of flow, rather than allowing ourselves to get caught up in activities that offer immediate pleasure. Asked me, hi, Czikszentmihalyi writes in his book Flow, the psychology of optimal experience. Flow is the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter. The experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at a great cost for the sheer sake of doing it. With that in mind, here are three strategies to help you stimulate your flow and as a consequence, identify activities that are part of your purpose. Strategy number one, choose a difficult task, but not too difficult. The idea is to find a middle ground, something where you can use your abilities, but that at the same time might get you out of your comfort zone a little bit. Maybe, for instance, try and learning new skills in a domain you already know or try something you've always wanted to try. It would have no experience in doing the book on geeky guy. The authors write that even doing something as simple as reading means following certain rules, having certain abilities and knowledge. If we set out to read a book on quantum mechanics for specialists in physics, without being specialists in physics ourselves will probably give up after a few minutes. On the other end of the spectrum, if we already know everything, book has to tell us, we'll get bored right away. Reading in general is a great way to get inspiration on what you could pick up and it will give you a ton of knowledge as a bonus, strategy number two, having a clear, concrete objective. In their book on icky guy, the authors write that video games played in moderation, board games and sports are great ways to achieve flow because the objective tends to be very clear. It's usually to beat your rival or your own record while following a set of explicitly defined rules. But in life in general, it's not that easy because the goal is not always intensities. If you work in an office, for instance, do you know what your goals are, what your company's goals are? Do you know where you and your company are going as a whole? It's really hard to have a concrete objective because so many roads can take us there. And that's why the authors of geeky guy in a very interesting point on having a compass in life rather than the maps get to your destination. Here's what they write. It is much more important to have a compass pointing to a concrete objective than to have a map. Joe Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab, encourages us to use the principle of campus over maps as a tool to navigate our world of uncertainty. In the book whiplash, how to survive are faster future. He and Jeff Howe right? In an increasingly unpredictable world moving ever more quickly, detailed map may lead to deep into the woods at an unnecessarily high cost. Good compounds though, will always take you where you need to go. It doesn't mean that you should start your journey without an idea of where you're going. But what it does mean is understanding that while the path to your goal may not be straight, you'll finish faster and more efficiently than you would have if you had trust all along under pre-planned route. Now with this example is very much in the case of a long-term vision. For instance, when you are already thinking like, okay, I want to be on my non-profit and within ten years, happy to serve that many communities raise that much money and this and that. But if you're still just working on finding the things you'd like to do. This strategy can work to, again, like with the first strategy, you have to find a balance. Don't obsess on the target while you're working on it, but just keep it in the back of your minds. Here are a few examples. If you just want to try writing, give yourself a target to write a certain number of words. If you want to try taking pictures, give yourself a target of time spent trying to take a nice picture everyday. If you want to learn coding, give yourself a target of something you want to be able to code and build like a simple app or a simple web page. Strategy number three, concentrate on a single task. This is perhaps one of the greatest obstacles we face today with so much technology and so many distractions and ampere. First one to admit it out, sometimes tell myself to start working on something. I'll open up my laptop and I will go to YouTube there and get distracted. I have my phone next to me and maybe the screen lights up with the notification and I get distracted as well, easily 30 minutes to an hour, it can pass like this where we all have these things go. And although I'm not immune to technology and the distraction is it brings into our lives. I can safely say that I tried to regulate and limit the impact it has in my working life and in my life in general, actually. I mean, otherwise I wouldn't be able to put out content like this and to write 250 articles and stuff like that. I'm working on it and trying to at least fixed the issue or what I can do about it. As the authors point out in the book, multitasking can be as simple as putting on a movie with dinner and not realizing how deletions are selling was until we're taking the last byte. The thing about combining tasks is that we often think that it saves us time, but scientific evidence shows that it does the opposite effect. Even those who claim to be good at multitasking are not very productive, except for some, most people who multitask other least productive people. Our brains can take in millions of bits of information, but they can only actually process a few dozen per second. What do we say we're multitasking, what we're really doing is we're switching back and forth between tasks very quickly, and we're not computers, so that doesn't work out web for our productivity. But anyways, in the framework of finding your purpose and living a meaningful life, it's important to understand why focused matters and not because if you don't focus, you're not productive, but because you won't be able to even try new things and find your EEG guy if you're not able to focus. To close this chapter, here are a few ideas taken from the book for creating a space and time free of distractions in order to increase your chances of reaching a state of flow and therefore getting in touch. It could gati, idea number one, don't look at any kind of screen for the first hour you're awake and the last hour before you go to sleep. I'm to turn off your phone before you achieve flow. Understand that there is nothing more important than the test you have chosen to do during this time. If it seems too extreme to turn off your phone, then enabled the Do Not Disturb functions so that only the people closest to you can contact to you in case of emergency. Idea number three, designate one day of the week, maybe a Saturday or Sunday during the weekend for technological fasting, where you barely use any technology except to maybe your e-reader or mp3 player as the author has seen the book, but I doubt anyone still uses those. But actually on that note, it's a very efficient way to be productive to go back to old school devices that were designed for only one function. Like remember the iPod, a CD player. Back in the day it was a lot less easy to get distracted because devices did one thing and only one. Why not maybe get yourself in the old MP3 player for 20 bucks? Because they still, they still sell them. And then you can only use it for music and you don't get any notifications or emails or anything like that, you're able to just listen to music. Next suggestion from the authors to go to a cafe that doesn't have Wi-Fi and just enjoy the moment. And of course, turn off your mobile network phi G for G or wherever you have just no connectivity. Just the moment, idea number five. Read and respond to email only once or twice per day, defined those times clearly and stick to them For me personally, I mean, I could use even three days a week. We'd be enough to check and respond to my e-mail. Next idea is tried to Pomodoro technique, which is something I talked about in other courses too on Skillshare. So it's very simple and get yourself a timer and commit to working on a single task as long as it's running. The Pomodoro Technique recommends 25 minutes of work and five minutes of rest for each cycle. But you can also do just 15 minutes. In ten minutes of rest, you can adjust the variables to your own taste. Find a piece that's best for you. Remember that the most important thing is to be disciplined in completing each cycle. Start your work session with a ritual you enjoy and ended with a reward. This can be really motivating to get useful stuff done. Work in a space where you will not be distracted. If you can't do this at home, go to a library or a cafe. As long as you find that your surroundings continued to distract you, keep looking until you find the right place. So I hope you found these tips useful. And now we'll move on to the next part where we're gonna be talking about Japanese words and concepts around IQ e-guide. For this assignment, try any of the ideas we just mentioned and write about what you learned from it. If you went to a cafe without Wi-Fi French, since How did it feel? If you tried to Pomodoro Technique, What did you work on? Write about how it felt if you would do it again and if you can see yourself implementing this in your life for the long term. 6. Japanese words & concepts around Ikigai: In this section, I wanted to tell you about a few Japanese words and concepts around icky guy. Some of them are taken from the book. This course is based on icky guy, the Japanese secret to a long and happy life by friendships muralists and Hector Garcia and some of the other words and concepts are taken from another book on EKG titled Iike guy and other Japanese words to live by, written by Marie Fuji moto, which I also recommend you read. I won't necessarily give examples on how to apply the advice to your life or on how to adapt the advice in our western societies, like I've done for the other parts of this course. Here, the goal is simply to give you inspiration, to show you another school of thought on what it means to live a good life and finding your passion. So let's get started. Obviously, geeky guy, this whole course is about the concepts. I'm not going to spend too much time on this section here. But Iike in Japanese means life and guide describes value or worth. Your IQ egos, your life purpose. It's what brings you joy, gets you out of bed in the morning. And it's something that requires constant work, so to speak. You have to cultivate it, to water it to tend to like a garden. It's also about finding the right balance between putting yourself first and helping others moving forward in life as well. Why? Because that's also part of being happy and living a fulfilled life. Empathy, helping people connecting with others brings joy and happiness. It's an important part of a good life. So it relates to your Iike guy. The second word I want to talk about is Robbie Sub, one of the original meanings of what we saw. But you refer to the loneliness of living in nature away from society. So it had a focus on spiritual solitude and it was mainly practiced in Buddhism. Hobbes, hobbes made up towards the first one, Wahhabi translates roughly to imperfection of an object. And Sabi refers to a flood, beauty or beauty that comes with age. So Hobbes, hobbes, essentially the beauty of imperfection. Today, at least in the West. We use it more as a reminder that everything is fleeting. We live in a very materialistic world with a lot of consumerism spending money on nice things and people who get interested in Japanese philosophy starts to maybe realize that maybe that's not all there is to it. We're also going to be talking about Wahhabi sobbing and next part of the video with resilience and anti fragility. But for now, just know that it is a continuum of wiki guy because finding your purpose at a reason to be goes through accepting that not everything is perfect including you. And that it's okay to sometimes just let things be imperfect and enjoy some of those imperfections as well. One last thing on the concept of what we saw before, it is based on seven pillars. Simplicity, 1100, beauty in the understated naturalness, subtle grace, freedom from habits, and finally tranquility. The third word I want to talk about his case and become more and more popular in the last few years. So you might have already heard about this one case and is a Japanese term meaning change for the better or continuous improvement. It is surprisingly a Japanese business philosophy that was first introduced by Toyoda in the eighties. The literal definition of case incomes from two Japanese words, meaning change and zen, meaning good. Casein is philosophy of continuously improving operations and involving all employees around the business. It sees improvements in productivity as a gradual and methodical process. As much as his concept was originally created for companies and teams of employees at groups of people within an organization. I think it's a very interesting one for your own endeavors as well. Because it once you found your purpose or once you can at least see yourself doing something for a little longer, then you're going to have to create processes and methods and techniques for you to keep going and improving. For instance, if you want to block like me, if you do things right, It's especially going to turn into a mini business of its own. And so I do set processes and time management techniques and things I talked about in other courses here on Skillshare and the casing philosophy can really help focus on what matters on being effective and shrink quality and by extent making your tasks and your achy guy more fulfilling life, always have your approach. We just talked about the case and approaches based on the few founding elements. And there's five of them. Teamwork, personal discipline, improved moral quality circles, and suggestions for improvements. However, has shi bu is a Japanese term, literally meaning eat until you're 80% full. It originated in the city of Okinawa, where people use this advice as a way to control their eating habits. As we've seen in this course, they have in this region of Japan, one of the lowest rates of illness from heart disease, cancer, stroke, and they also have very long life expectancy. That's why I included this theorem here is because for the people who the Iike guy philosophy originated from, this is a very important components of living a good life. But again, in our Western world, I believe you can follow your passion and your inky guy and be successful without necessarily being healthy. Not saying this is a good thing or bad thing. I'm just saying, I think it's less healthy is less important component in our society now where's their societies? But anyways, I thought I would include it here because I think it's interesting. It's something I personally fail to do a lot at each way too fast and they often get a feeling of being bloated after a meal. And so after I had this thing of like chewing five times before swelling food, not too successful at it so far, but hey, change takes time. Dogs versus progress in the practice of an art, whatever it may be. The same for DOE is particularly used in traditional Japanese arts. For instance, cardo is the way of flowers. So the art of flower arranging, shadow is the way of writing. So that's the art of calligraphy. Qdot is the way of the bow. So that's Japanese archery. Khenpo is the martial art using bamboo Swartz. It's the way of this award. And so every time there's this idea of the way or the path, that's because the concept is to take up the consuming art and to invest yourself in it over a lifetime. Whether it's printing flowers, writing, calligraphy, Practicing archery. The main thing here is constant improvement over a lifetime, striving for excellence all day, every day. From either way this relates to AQI is because if you went to achieve anything in life, even if you don't want achieve perfection in something, you have to push through its show up, if not every day, almost every day. The Western approach of this tends to be saying things like wake up earlier than your competition, work ten times harder than the next guy. Every day you keep going 1000 squids. That's the way we talk about motivation and showing up every day here in the Western world. But again, I really like, and that's what this course is about here with Japanese philosophy of productivity, the simple path to achievement. It is to simply dedicate time and commitment to something. And that's how you will most likely see progress in what do you do. The last word is Waukesha ICU and against, sorry for slaughtering it in the book, inky guy, in other words, to live by Mary Fuji moto describes what cashier who as the sum of it's for individual characters. It's a word that brings together a harmony, respect of purity and tranquility to create a Zen concept of serenity and depreciation. It's taking the time and taking a moment of intercolumn to leave by Waukesha CPU is still linger and to be present. In Japan, you often find this concept in the Japanese tea ceremony called sotto. It's an easy, calm, tranquil moment where you just add things flow and you don't have to worry about anything. I included in this course as a reminder that as much as it's important to work towards your goals, it's also important to take breaks, reflect, and realize how lucky you are to be where you're at in life. It's good to chase your dreams. Dreams get done when you're awake, but it's okay to also pause and appreciate how far you've come. Once in a while, make yourself a cup of tea, sit comfortably in the couch. And just to appreciate the moment, there you have it. I hope you enjoyed and I'll see you in the next section of the course where we're going to be talking about resilience and anti fragility, two very powerful concepts that can help you find your purpose in life. For this assignment, choose your favorite word from the ones we just talked about. And try to think of what it means for you. Write down how the advice it encapsulates can be applied to your life and why you think anymore of this advice in your current situation. 7. Resilience & Antifragility: Resilience is the ability to persevere, to recover quickly from difficulties and to be tough. In science, resilience defined stability of a substance or object to spring back into shape. But in my opinion, the best way to define resilience is two, Japanese one, and it holds in five words which I find a meeting full seven times rice 81 thing that everyone with a clearly defined ink guy has in common is that they pursue their passion no matter what obstacles getting their weight. They never give up, no matter how hard they have to try it. How many times they get told no, or how many times they have to fall. But as the authors point out in the book, Resilience isn't just the ability to persevere, It's also an outlook we can cultivate to stay focused on the important things in life rather than what is most urgent and to keep ourselves from being carried away by negative emotions, aka stress, as we talked about in the previous sections in this course section that we're first going to be talking about resilience. And then we're gonna be talking about an even more powerful concepts called anti fragility. I loved the concept of resilience because it is based on one of my favorite insights on letting go, which will actually usually finding stoicism and which we've talked about in the, in the course earlier on. Let go of what you can't control and focus on what you can control. As simple as this concept might seem, it took me nearly 25 years to realize because I'm an actual warrior. Worrying about things that are beyond our control accomplishes nothing. It's not to say that it's easy to stop wearing. It takes a lot of training, years, decades, whole life even. But I personally work on trying to worry list every day. And I've made a lot of progress just by when I start worrying about something, I asked myself, can I change this or the outcome of this? Is there anything I can do to make this less likely to stress me or worrying? If there is, I see what I can do about it and potentially getting into action mode. But if there's nothing I can do, I just tried to acknowledge that and to move on with my day. It's the good old thing of if it's raining outside, it can be sunny in your mind and in your heart. You choose how you react to the environment, not the other way round. In the words of hepatitis and other famous stoic, it's not what happens to you, but how you react that matters. Another famous stoic was Marcus Aurelius, who said that the things we love are like the leaves of a tree. They can fall at any moment with Augusta width. That's another important part of resilience. To remember that the things we love our temporary if February, just like you and I are Seneca, one of the richest men in ancient Roman, also famous stoic. He lived a life of luxury. He had servings palaces, the best food, the best drinks. But because he was practicing stoicism and he was highly aware that everything is fleeting, that things can go away. He practiced negative visualization every night before going to bed. And he also put it into practice by once in a while leaving a week without his fancy food servants and polices. So going back to the Japanese culture, the concept of everything is fleeting, changing, and the word is imperfect. That's embedded in the notion of Wahhabi Sabi, which you might have heard of. Instead of searching for beauty and perfection, we should look for it and things that are flawed in incomplete. This is why the Japanese play such value, for instance, on an irregular or cracked teacup. Only things that are imperfect, incomplete, and the femoral can truly be beautiful because only those things resembled the natural world and Japanese philosophy. In fact, in the book on achy guy, the authors point out to a very interesting facts about the differences between the East and the West in terms of architecture. In the West, we love symmetry, sharp lines, big facades and buildings and statues of gods that had been here for centuries. I mean, we have cathedrals that were built centuries GOP, we have churches we want to preserve as much as possible. We restore paintings to try to make them look like brand new, but as close as possible to the original state from hundreds of years ago. But it's very funny to think that in the East, things are built with the spirit of what we saw at night. Japanese architecture doesn't try to be imposing or perfect. They actually built a lot of things with wood because it will wear out, it will become imperfect and future generations will rebuild things. The Grand Shrine device, for example, has been rebuilt every 20 years for centuries. The most important thing in Japanese culture is not to keep the building standing for generations, for centuries, but to preserve customs and traditions around rebuilding and passing things onto the next generation. Just like in Stoicism, we see that the Japanese accepts that there are certain things over which they have no control and they focus on what they can control. Living a good life and finding purposing. Resilience in a nutshell is made of two big components. Number one, don't take no for an answer. Keep getting up every time you fall. Don't stop at the first obstacle on the road. Always keep going. The route to acknowledge and accept that there are some things outside of your control that you can't change and focus on what you can control. Now that we've talked about resilience. We're gonna talk about a concept of a more powerful called anti fragility. Anti fragile is a term created by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book anti fragile things that gained from disorder. In the book, taleb points out that we use the word fragile to describe people thinks in organizations that are weakened when heart. And we used towards robust and resilient for things that are able to withstand harm without weakening. But we don't have a word for thinks that gets stronger when heart. And so that's why Taleb creative, determined anti fragility. In his own words, anti fragility is beyond resilience and the robustness. The resilient resist shocks and stays the same. The anti fragile gets better. Implementing anti fragility in your life can be extremely beneficial to your own self-development because it will make you stronger from failures. Now it doesn't mean you should try to fail on purpose, but it means that when faced with adversity, you will not only be able to face the obstacle and keep going, you'd be able to leave from the battles stronger. With that in mind, here are three tips to implement anti fragility in your life. Number one, create redundancies. In this day and age. Everything in our modern world and our economy is centered around money. Having no money usually means trouble and instability. This means that if you have only one stream of income, usually a salary, you will be under pressure and become fragile if your bus fires you, you won't have a paycheck coming into the next month. So instead of having only one job, finding a way to make extra money with one of your hobbies is not only a great way to reinforce your financial situation, it's also an amazing way to develop your cookie guy. And that's where you bridge together anti fragility and Iike guy. Now as I always say, money shouldn't be your primary driver and following your passion. But if you start making something, the process, it can be an indicator that you're headed towards the right direction and it will make you keep going. And why would this make you anti fragile as well? Well, because if you lose your job, you'll have a backup plan, which again, if it enables you to find your achy guy, that will most likely become a full-time income. And so you will have benefited from a setback. You will have emerged stronger from a battle, making a full-time income from your passion while losing your job. Tip number to be good at risk management. Again, looking at the financial aspect of this, let's say you have $10 thousand saved up and you're not planning on doing anything with that money. So you could invest 90% of that money. So that's $9 thousand in a low cost and low risk index like the S&P 500, where you'll likely make five to 10% on your money every year. That's the safe part. And with the remaining 10% or $1000, you can take bigger risks without amount to still maximize your earnings potential. So you can split that $1000 in ten and place high-risk beds with a very big reward potential. For instance, ten stocks tend started to believe in something like that. And even if only 1 $1000 portfolio fails except one bit you made, you would still benefit from one of your opportunities going up 15 or 20 times the value. Being successful, you would lose 900, but you would make something like $2 thousand back if only one of your options goes up like crazy. Whereas the anti fragility here, well, good risk management enables you to still benefit from only one company going up, even if you nine other beds crashed. Of course, it would have been not very secure to go all in on that one company that went out because you didn't know it was going to go up, you just assumed. But by finding a good mix of risk and opportunity, you still benefited from a 90% failure rate. And final and third tip, to become anti fragile, get rid of the things in your life that make you for a job. We often look for ways to improve our life by adding goals, targets, and habits do it. But another way to approach improvements is to remove some of this stuff that's making us weaker. Things like snacking between meals, debt, spending time with toxic people, doing things because you have to do them, not because you want to do them social media. And so removing some of those things can drastically improve your life. So ask yourself, what makes you for certain people, things and habits generate losses for you and make you vulnerable in your own life. Who and what are they? And is there a way you can remove those things from your life in the short, medium or long term. That's it for this section on resilience and anti fragility. Two very powerful concepts that can help you find your icky guy and live a better life. In the next section of this course, we're going to go over a little summary with a ten rules of eco guy, and that will be it. So see you there. Choose one of the two notions we just talked about and write about what it means for you. What obstacles do you see in your life right now that are going to require you to be either resilient, anti fragile, or even both. Not only that, how can you at least make those obstacles temporary and surmountable? And at best, how can you make them an opportunity to become stronger in your life, becoming anti fragile in the process. 8. The 10 rules of Ikigai: In this chapter we're going to go over the ten rules of achy guy listed by the authors at the end of their book. You'll notice a few of the rules were not covered in this course. And that's the point of this course is a stepping stone into discover in your icky guy, your purpose and maybe your passion. I highly encourage you to go read the full book if you're interested in learning more about icky guy. This list of rules is both an ending to this course and maybe a stepping stone into the wonderful world of more geeky guy. With that in mind, here are the ten rules of geeky guy, as mentioned by Hector Garcia and friendships Bureau Alice in their book, the number one, stay active, don't retire. Those who give up the things they love doing and do well, lose their purpose in life. That's why it's so important to keep doing things of value, making progress, bringing beauty or utility to help others, helping out and shaping the world around you even after your official professional activity has ended. Number two, take it slow. Being in a hurry is inversely proportional to your quality of life. As the old saying goes, walk slowly and you'll go far. When we leave urgency behind life and time. Take on a new meeting. Number three, don't feel your stomach. Less is more as a sentence made famous by Steve Jobs. And it's also true when it comes to eating for a long life. We haven't covered this part at all in the course because you don't necessarily need a healthy diet to follow your purpose in life. But in the case of the Japanese that live over a 100 years old, their diet has been studied many times and it definitely correlates with a longer, happier and healthier life. According to the 80% rule, in order to stay healthier longer, we should eat a little less than our hunger demands instead of stuffing ourselves, which is not something we're used to doing in the Western the world. Remember for surround yourself with good friends. Friends are the best medicine. They're here for. Talking about yours. Have a good chat, sharing stories that brighten your day. Getting advice, having fun, dreaming, essentially living. Number five, getting shaped for your next birthday. The Japanese love to compare the human body to the natural elements. Water moves. It is at its best when it flows fresh and doesn't stagnate. The body you use to move through life, needs a bit of daily maintenance to keep it running for a long time. Plus, exercise releases hormones that make us feel happy. Number six, smile. Cheerful attitude is not only relaxing, it also helps make friends. It's good to recognize the things that aren't so great in life, but we should never forget what a privilege it is to be in the here and now in the world. So full of possibilities. So ever since I read that, I tried to smile once in awhile when I feel down and it really works. When you force yourself to smile, you can actually become happier. Number seven, reconnect with nature. Although most people live in cities these days, human beings are made to be part of the natural worlds. We should return to it often to recharge our batteries. And that's something I always do. If you're lucky enough to live in your nature or even have access to his whole park, You should really take advantage of it. Living in the CDS stressful, noisy, polluted nature, on the other hand, is relaxing, fresh and a piece. I always go for walks weren't so bike rides in nature. And frankly, I wouldn't be able to do what I do with other's activities. It helps me get ideas for my content, reflect on my progress, how far off com and also how much I still have to go. It's really helpful to go out in nature and just breathe. Number eight, give thanks to your ancestors to nature, which provides you with the air you breathe in, the food you eat, to your friends and family, to basically everything that brightens your day and makes you feel lucky to be life. Spend a moment every day giving thanks, and you watch your stockpile of happiness grow. Essentially. Be grateful for the life. Yeah, Number nine, live in the moment. Stop regretting the past and fearing the future. Today is all you have. So make the most of it, make it worth remembering. Dwelling of mistakes of the past accomplishes nothing. You can, of course choose to remember them, to learn from them and to grow from the failures that resulted in. But don't lock yourself up in constant regret and anger except the past which you don't control anymore and focus on the future, which you can control a lot more. And finally, number ten, follow your Iike guy. There's a passionate site, you a unique talent that gives meaning to your days. It drives you to share the best of yourself until the very end. If you don't know what you're geeky guy is yet, as Viktor Frankl says, your mission is to discover it. And that's done through experimenting all the time. There you have it. I hope you found this course helpful. Remember that at the end of the day, a happy and purposeful life is led through doing what you love with matters to you, and finding the right balance between helping others and putting yourself first, we all have things we need to figure out for ourselves. We all have a mind rushing through million different things. At the age of technology doesn't make it any easier to reconnect with our inner cell. So be kind to yourself. Change takes time, but if you really commit to it, it will happen overtime. Also, if you haven't found your IQ, IGA yet, it's completely fine. I know people who took 20 years to figure out where they went to, people who still didn't know when there were 30 or even more. So don't be too hard on yourself. It's not going to keep experimenting, trying new things. You'll be fine. And if you find something you love doing, remember to try it for a little longer. Don't give up. And the first obstacle, remember that even when we do something we love, there will be rainy days and setbacks. That's just part of the journey. On that note, I thank you for watching this course. I hope you enjoyed and I wish you a long, happy and purposeful life. 9. Outro: It takes a lot for watching this course. I hope you enjoyed. If you have any comments, suggestions, or ideas, feel free to leave those in the corresponding section of the video probably done below. Feel free to also post your thoughts in the discussion section of this class and don't forget to leave a review and follow my profile as we're planning on launching more of these courses. Thanks again, Have a great day and I'll see you around.