What You Love
Passion Mission
What you are good at IKIGAI What the world needs
Profession Vocation
What you can be paid for
p 10 The authors recommend, don’t retire. With clearly defined ikigai brings satisfaction, happiness and meaning to our lives. They identify the five Blue Zones with focusing on Okinawa, Japan. It is here that they identify there are local communities which include informal groups of people forming close bonds. Additionally, they cover diet which includes considerable home gardening. This helps with both movement of the body and healthy nutrition.
p 24 The aspects of stress are identified and a table comparing cave dwellers and modern humans is provided.
p 31 They state that the mind has tremendous power over the body and how quickly it ages.
p 42 The case study of Viktor Frankl demonstrates that those in concentration camps who had things they wanted to accomplish outside the camp had the greatest chance of survival from a strong need to get out of there alive.
p 46 Shoma Morita, a psychotherapist and Zen Buddhist developed Morita therapy. Patients accept their emotions without trying to control them, since their feelings will change as a result of their actions. Basic principles include: 1 accept your feelings, 2 do what you should be doing, and 3 discover your life’s purpose. There are four phases: 1 isolation and rest, 2 light occupational therapy, 3 occupational therapy and 4 return to social life and the “real” world.
p 60 Have a clear objective to develop flow. Easy ikigai results in boredom, ikigai beyond our abilities results in anxiety, but challenging ikigai develops flow.
p 63 Vague objectives result in confusion, time and energy wasted. Obsessive desire to achieve a goal while ignoring process can keep us from getting down to business. Clearly defined objective and a focus on process generate flow.
p 69 A table of the advantages of Flow versus Disadvantages of Distraction is provided. Don’t multitask.
p 80 Microflow: enjoying mundane tasks.
p 96 Never stop learning.
p 98 Japanese longevity includes a healthy diet, and integrated healthcare system for regular checkups, a peaceful life, a sense of community and effort to stay active.
p 112 There are also quotes of interviews with centenarians. One of interviews was kind of cute with Alexander Imich (111); when asked his secret he responded “I don’t know. I just haven’t died yet.”. Conclusions drawn from the interviews include: 1 don’t worry, 2 cultivate good habits, 3 nurture your friendships every day, 4 live in unhurried life, 5 be optimistic.
p 126 The authors state that few would challenge the concept of eating less to live longer, while not going to the extreme of malnutrition. The key to staying healthy while consuming fewer calories is eating foods with a high nutritional value and avoiding that that add to overall caloric intake but offer little to no nutritional value.
p 135 Blue Zone studies suggest that it is the ones who move the most rather than those who exercise the most are the ones that live longest. A quote from Gavin Bradley in an 2015 interview. “Metabolism slows down 90% after 30 minutes of sitting. The enzymes that move the bad fat from your arteries to your muscles, where it can get burned off, slow down. And after 2 hours, good cholesterol drops 20%. Just getting up for 5 minutes is going to get things going again. These things are so simple they’re almost stupid”. Also included are discussions of various exercises and diagrams for performing many of these exercises including yoga, Tai chi, and Qigong.
p 165 Resilience, ..ability to persevere, focus on the important things versus what is most urgent and try to keep from being carried away by negative emotions.
p 176 become more antifragile:
- Create redundancies.
- Bet conservatively in certain areas and take many small risks in others.
- Get rid of the things that make you fragile….such as snacking between meals, sweets only once a week, gradually pay of all debt, avoid spending time with toxic people, resist feeling obligated to do things because you feel obligated, spending time with things and people we don’t enjoy, spend less than 20 minutes per day on Facebook.