Kaizen summary

Think of the most basic activities you undertake each day, like drinking water or checking your phone. Now, imagine if you had to focus all your mental energy on each of those tasks, every single time you did them. Chances are, you’d quickly become mentally exhausted.

This reveals why we form habits in the first place. According to Ben Gardner, senior lecturer in psychology at King’s College London, our brains “lock in” repeated behaviors to preserve mental resources necessary for bigger, more important tasks.

When Sir David Brailsford became head of the British cycling team in 2002, the team was doing poorly. To improve performance, Brailsford got the team to break down every aspect of cycling into small parts – from the cyclists’ nutrition to bike maintenance – and gave them the target of improving each part by just 1 percent.

Instead of aiming for perfection from the start, Brailsford took on the kaizen approach, aiming for small gains that would add up. Over time, this accumulation began to generate a “contagious enthusiasm” among the once-struggling team, who went on to win the majority of gold medals in both the 2008 and 2012 Olympic Games.

We’ve talked about forming goals for transforming your habits. But after you’ve established your goal and “first kaizen step,” where do you go from there?

Well, once you have a long-term goal, the next kaizen step is to break it down into smaller shorter- and medium-term goals. Not only will breaking your goal down into chunks make it seem more manageable, it’ll also help you plan your actions around a clear time frame.

Hani Motoko, the woman known as Japan’s first female journalist, believed that keeping on top of one’s finances was essential to happiness. So in 1904, she invented a journaling method known as kakeibo, intended to help women at the time keep track of spending.

A practice still popular in Japan today, the purpose is to keep a register of all incoming and outgoing expenses. Motoko stressed the need to physically put pen to paper as a mindful way to process what you spend. She encouraged checking in with the ledger monthly to analyze how your spending is progressing, and to inform which goals to concentrate on the following month.

Let’s say you want to take up drawing. So you allocate an hour per week to your new activity. It goes well for a few weeks until, one day, you get some bad news: your apartment contract isn’t going to be renewed as planned. You have to move out next month. Faced with this distressing new reality, it’s likely that you’re going to have to put your sketchbook down for a while.

This is the key message: Kaizen is a personalized approach to lifelong change. Go at your own pace.