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Notes on Ikigai

A dump of my notes on the book Ikigai by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles

Key takeaways:

Focus less on the perennial problems and more on the day to day:

  • Especially focus on flow in both vocational and avocational contexts.
  • Less multitasking. It interferes with flow.
  • Also focus on microflow. Create and enjoy rituals. Find small activities with intrinsic rewards and do them frequently.
  • Optimize for having less low-key continual stress, but more short bursts of intense stress doing things like exercise.
  • Don’t ask “what’s the purpose of my life?” Ask “what’s the purpose of my life right now?”

Be with people. Smile and be friendly and people will want to be with you.

Eat a large variety of food and only to 80% full. Caloric restriction can help.

Other notes:

Some of these notes are direct concepts from the book, some of them are just what I wrote down as I read.

Ikigai – The center of a Venn diagram between what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for.

Forget the idea of retirement. It’s escape and if you’re escaping, maybe think about how to think differently about what you do or change what you do.

Active mind, youthful body. Stress shortens longevity. Frequent low doses of cortisol constantly flowing through the body cause adrenal fatigue and chronic fatigue. This opposed to our ancestors who had occasional high doses of cortisol and adrenalin in moments of actual danger which kept the body healthy.

Don’t sit all day. Find small reasons to remain active. Sleep 7-9 hours a day. Melatonin strengthens our immune system, protects against cancer promotes insulin production, slows Alzheimers, helps prevent osteoporosis and fights heart disease. Slows production after 30 years old. Balanced diet with calcium, moderate sun, sleep, avoiding stress, alcohol, tobacco, caffeine (which make it harder to sleep) can help.

Logotherapy – Viktor Frankl – “Well, in logotherapy the patient sits up straight and has to listen to things that are, on occasion, hard to hear.” (vs. in psychoanalysis: “the patient lies down on a couch and tells you things that are, on occasion, hard to say.”

The search for purpose / meaning as described by logotherapy in 5 steps:

  1. A person feels empty, frustrated, or anxious.
  2. The therapist shows him that what he is feeling is the desire to have a meaningful life.
  3. The patient discovers his life’s purpose ( at that particular point in time).
  4. Of his own free will, the patient decides to accept or reject that destiny.
  5. This new found passion for life helps him overcome obstacles and sorrows.

“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.”

Victor Frankl

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”

There’s a natural tension between what we’ve accomplished and what we’d like to achieve in the future. “What we need then is not a peaceful existence, but a challenge we can strive to meet by applying all the skills at our disposal.”

Existential crisis – trying to fill the gap between what’s expected of us and what we want for ourselves with economic power or physical pleasure, or by numbing the senses. 

Contrary to Sartre, we don’t create meaning for our lives, we discover it. This meaning can be transformed many times over the years.

Just as worry often brings about precisely the thing that was feared, excessive attention to a desire (or “hyper-intention”) can keep that desire from being fulfilled.

Seven conditions for achieving flow – Owen Schaffer

  1. Knowing what to do
  2. Knowing how to do it
  3. Knowing how well you’re doing it
  4. Knowing where to go (where navigation is involved)
  5. Perceiving significant challenges
  6. Perceiving significant skills
  7. Being free from distractions

According to Csikszentmihalyi to focus we need:

  1. to be in a distraction-free environment
  2. to have control over what we’re doing at every moment

Some studies indicate that working on several things at once lowers our productivity by 60% and our IQ by 10 points.

“All that I have produced before the age of 70 is not worth being counted. It is at the age of 73 that I have somewhat begun to understand the structure of true nature, of animals and grasses, and trees and birds, and fishes and insects; consequently at 80 years of age I shall have made still more progress; at 90 I hope to have penetrated into the mystery of things; at 100 years of age I should have reached decidedly a marvelous degree, and when I shall be 110, all that I do, every point and eery line, shall be instinct with life.”

Hokusai – artist of One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji
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Vanitas

Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May *oil on canvas *101 x 82.5 cm *signed b.r.: J.W. Waterhouse. / 1909

A list of common memento mori, literally “remember death”, short phrases to remind you that life is short & precious.

Tempus fugit – time flies.

Carpe diem – seize the day.

Dust to dust – shortened from Genesis 3:19 – “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”

Et in arcadia ego – the title of a 1637 painting by Nicolas Poussin. Literally “Even in Arcadia, there am I” where “I” is death.

Ubi sunt – where are they?

Where are those who were before us,
who led hounds and bore hawks,
And owned field and wood? 
The rich ladies in their chambers,
Who wore gold in their hair,
With their bright faces; ...

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may – the title of a 1909 painting by John William Waterhouse

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.

Sic transit gloria mundi – Thus passes worldly glory. A phrase used in papal coronation ceremonies in the 1400’s.

Memento mori – Remember death.

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Whither happiness?

For happiness, how little suffices for happiness!…the least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizards’s rustling, a breath, a wink, an eye glance—little maketh up the best happiness. Be still.

Friedrich Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra

and similarly:

The playfulness and joy of a dog, its unconditional love and readiness to celebrate life at any moment often contrast sharply with the inner state of the dog’s owner — depressed, anxious, burdened by problems, lost in thought, not present in the only place and only time there is: Here and Now. One wonders: living with this person, how does the dog manage to remain so sane, so joyous?

Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks
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Great Blue Herons

Catching a small fish
Pensive
In flight

Great Blue Herons – icons of wetlands across North America.

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Simulation & Simulacra

The convergence of literature:

For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these also are the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall.

Cormac McCarthy – The Crossing

and philosophy:

For something to be real, it needs to be implemented. So the model that you have of reality is real in as far as it is a model, it’s an appropriate description of the world to say that there are models that are being experienced. But the world that you experience is not necessarily implemented, there is a difference between a reality, a simulation and a simulacrum. The reality that we are talking about is something that fully emerges over a causally closed lowest layer. And the idea of physicalism is that we are in that layer, that basically our world emerges over that. Every alternative to physicalism is a simulation theory, which basically says that we are in some kind of simulation universe and the real world needs to be an apparent universe of that, where the actual causal structure is.

When you look at the ocean and your own mind, you are looking at a simulation that explains what you’re going to see next. [We are living in a] simulation generated by own brains. And this simulation is different from the physical reality, because the causal structure that is being produced, what you are seeing, is different from the causal structural of physics. […] Your behavior needs to work in such a way that it’s interacting with an accurately predictive model of reality. And, if your brain is unable to make your model of reality predictive, you will need help.

Joscha Bach on the Lex Fridman podcast

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Let’s talk about Tardigrades

How big are they? Not very. Slow steppers are about a half a millimeter long.

iStock

Where can they survive? Moss piglets are famously hardy and can survive in the vacuum of space. They can be completely dehydrated for 10 years, then rehydrated. They can survive in boiling water, the desert, the ocean, in permafrost and just about anywhere else you can think of (not lava).

Are they cute? Ehh. Under certain circumstances, sure. It’s not a cuteness home run though.

anigif_enhanced-21357-1402484030-9

Where does one acquire a tardigrade? They are found far and wide on every continent. Your best bet for getting your hands, or microscope as it were, on one is to collect some lichen and look at it through a microscope. For the long explanation, read this very detailed article.

How do they move? They walk, much like you might imagine an 8 legged dog might.

Credit Lisset Duran and Deborah Johnston

What’s the proper care and feeding of a tardigrade? Put some agar in a dish. Water bears, as they’re sometimes called, enjoy swimming in mineral water and dining on algae. Rotate their food and water every 3 to 6 days.

When were they discovered? According to Wik, Johann August Ephraim Goeze first described what he called kleiner Wasserbär in 1773.

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Gray Ghost Incoming

This photograph of a male Northern Harrier, aka the “Gray Ghost” is a hard one to get. Male harriers are white, females are brown. Northern Harriers aren’t uncommon in the Pacific Northwest, but the male to female ratio is 1:3 and the males seem to be somewhat more avoidant of humans.

So to get one in-focus, flying straight toward the camera, with a somewhat interesting background, well, it made my day 🙂

The Gray Ghost
For comparison, a female Northern Harrier
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Collective Collapse

Why are people how they are?

Theory of mind is hard and just when you think you’re getting okay at it, life humbles you. This is a great post by Dave Bailey on what you are really dealing with when you’re dealing with someone’s negative emotions or reactions. A couple examples:

Overreaction is often a sign that something else might be going on that you aren’t aware of. Perhaps they didn’t get enough sleep or recently had a fight with a friend. Maybe something about the situation is triggering an unresolved trauma from their childhood — a phenomenon called transference.

When you notice someone overreacting, broaden your focus and get curious about what else might be going on.

and

In Marshall Rosenberg’s book Nonviolent Communication, he explains that every negative emotion is the result of an unmet need. However, few of us actually know how to put that need into words. Rosenberg suggests that labelling the universal human need can be therapeutic, or even transformational.

Clear thinking

This Lex Fridman podcast with Joscha Bach is expansive:

Along the same lines, another of my favorite Lex Fridman guests is Daniel Schmachtenberger.

Both of them, from everything I can tell, are well furnished in the g department. You’re guaranteed to come out of the listens with lots of new ideas and ways of thinking.

China

China reduced the amount of time kids under 18 can play video games to 3 hours a week on Fri, Sat, Sun from 8-9pm. As much as I dislike authoritarianism… it does seem like their description of video games as the opium of the masses isn’t totally off. Don’t get me wrong, I like video games too, but the balance is way off.

Also on the China front, Dan Wong’s annual letter, if you haven’t read it yet, is well worth it.

Collapse

We have no real reason to write/think about collapse… not in 2021, but this article may be worth bookmarking for the future. It explores dispositions towards collapse, types of collapse, and even the aesthetics of collapse.

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Summer Glow

Summertime swimmers–starting with a Pied-billed Grebe, then Mallards for the next three. All of these backlit shots were taken at a city park here in Seattle.

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The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

The pyramid

The Five Dysfunctions is a business fable, which while it sounds cheesy (and maybe it is), the story really helps the message stick. I’ve read a few books like this and I’m starting to prefer the format to any other. Humans are hardwired to enjoy stories; it feels like a natural way to learn.

There’s a lot written about this book elsewhere, so I won’t try to do a full summary, but here are a few of my takeaways:

  • A management team should establish a common goal and a shared commitment to it. Emphasis on the shared–all departments should have buy in and be committed to it. Marketing should be committed to goals that are primarily engineering oriented. Product should commit to a goal primarily focused on the support team.
  • As a manger, the team you put first is the team of your peers. It seems counterintuitive, but it’s the only way to have unity as a whole business. When management is on the same page, the big problems can be solved as a team. The the team that works for you is obviously important, but as rough as it sounds, it has to come second.
  • Have healthy conflict. Conflict shouldn’t be avoided. When it happens, if the team trusts each other enough to have intense disagreement and still not lose sight of the fact that everyone is going towards a common goal, it’s a sign that the conflict is healthy.
  • Holding people accountable is almost never comfortable, but learning to do it anyway is a requirement for a leader.