1-Page Summary

Why do you get up in the morning? What gives your life meaning and purpose? Many people can’t answer these questions. Even worse, they’re stuck in dysfunctional lifestyles that prevent them from ever finding out what their purpose is.

In Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life, author and blogger Héctor García (author of A Geek in Japan) and novelist and self-help writer Francesc Miralles teach you to apply the Japanese concept of ikigai, or life purpose, to your own life. Drawing on lessons from the people of Okinawa, who live longer than anybody else on earth, as well as on insights from art, science, and psychology, they show you how to find and follow your own ikigai and cultivate a happy, healthy lifestyle to sustain it.

Ikigai: Your Reason for Being

The word ikigai is essentially the Japanese equivalent of the French raison d'être, meaning a person’s reason for existing, or life purpose. According to the Japanese, each of us has a different ikigai. Your ikigai could center on an art or craft, a sport, your job, or any number of things.

Furthermore, you don’t necessarily have just a single ikigai. Einstein, for example, had two: physics and playing the violin. He said that if he hadn’t been a physicist, he would have devoted his life to music.

Living Long and Well

The people of Okinawa hold the concept of ikigai at the center of their lives. They’re also the world’s longest-lived people. In fact, Okinawa is chief among the world’s five “Blue Zones,” the geographic regions where people live the longest.

Scientists who have studied these zones say the keys to their residents’ longevity are diet, exercise, strong social ties, and having a life purpose. Thus, knowledge of the Okinawans’ way of life can illuminate your search for your own ikigai and teach you to embody your ikigai in a long life of personal fulfillment.

Life in Ogimi

To learn how these Blue Zone factors play out in Japan, García and Miralles visited the rural Okinawan town of Ogimi, whose residents have the longest average life span of all Okinawans.

The authors learned that life on Ogimi is both intense and relaxed. The residents are always busy but calm, with each person pursuing their ikigai in a relaxed but passionate way. Everybody in Ogimi knows their ikigai, but they don’t obsess over it.

The people of Ogimi all grow their own vegetable gardens, celebrate frequently, and work together in community. Spirituality plays an important part in their lives. Instead of retiring when their official professional lives are over, they remain highly active. They do this especially through participation in family-like groupings called moai, which share funds, play games, provide mutual security, and perform volunteer work.

García and Miralles interviewed 100 of Ogimi’s oldest residents and came away with the following five principles or life lessons that encapsulate the town’s lifestyle of longevity:

  1. Refuse to worry.
  2. Create positive habits such as growing a garden, exercising, and cultivating spirituality.
  3. Feed and nurture your friendships each day.
  4. Live unhurried.
  5. Choose optimism.

García and Miralles also concluded that ikigai stands above and behind all five of these principles and constitutes the heart of Japanese longevity.

Finding Your Ikigai

Your own ikigai is hidden deep within, so you have to search for it. However, Okinawans say you shouldn’t become preoccupied with finding it. Instead, let your ikigai find you as you occupy yourself with doing what you love in the company of people who love and care for you.

That said, you can still benefit from working to find your ikigai in a relaxed but focused way. Two specific methods for doing this are the practice of logotherapy and Morita therapy. Even though these are both formalized systems of psychotherapy, general knowledge of their principles can be useful for finding your ikigai regardless of whether or not you receive actual treatment.

Logotherapy

Western psychology offers a significant aid to finding your ikigai in the form of logotherapy, created by Viktor Frankl, a psychologist and a survivor of Auschwitz. Following his experiences in the concentration camp, Frankl famously declared that you can take away everything from a person except their ability to choose their attitude.

Logotherapy is unique among Western forms of psychotherapy because it focuses explicitly on helping people find meaning. Like Japan’s ikigai, logotherapy says we don’t create our life’s meaning. Instead, we discover it. Each person’s meaning is unique, but it isn’t static. It evolves throughout life.

In a logotherapy session, the therapist helps the patient realize that negative feelings and neuroses are actually the desire for a meaningful life. Once the patient discovers her life purpose (ikigai), she can freely accept it and move forward to overcome her problems.

Morita Therapy

The Japanese form of life therapy known as Morita therapy is also based on the idea of life purpose. Starting from the premise that we should accept our emotions instead of controlling them, Morita therapy has the patient go on absolute bed rest and simply observe her emotions in total silence for a week. Then the protocol gradually reintroduces the patient to activities, such as gardening and chopping wood, while also having the patient keep a diary and do breathing exercises. Eventually, the patient rejoins the wider world with a new sense of purpose, having cleared out mental-emotional clutter and seen clearly what she is supposed to do.

Finding Flow

Learning to experience the state of flow can also help you discover your ikigai and build the pursuit of it into your life. This is because to experience flow, you have to ask yourself which activities you enjoy so much that they make you forget about everything else, including your worries and the passing of time. The answer to this question points toward your ikigai.

Flow occurs when you’re so immersed in an experience that you’re totally focused. You lose your sense of time and simply inhabit the moment. It’s a state of optimal experience, heightened creativity, delight, and heightened performance that everyone from chess masters to master artists to Olympic athletes inhabit when they do their work.

Achieving Flow

Achieving flow requires you to devote more time to activities that generate it for you. Here are some specific tips for achieving flow. As you practice them, pay attention to the activities where it seems most natural for you to enter flow, and consider whether your ikigai might reside in them.

Note that you can enjoy flow in any mundane task. It isn’t reserved exclusively for the moments when you’re directly practicing your larger life purpose. Microflow the state of flow that you can enter while doing such things as mowing the lawn and handling paperwork.

You can also use daily rituals to help encourage flow. For example, come up with repeatable ways of making your breakfast, washing your dishes, entering your office, or beginning work.

Living in Flow

Having learned to experience flow and use it to locate your ikigai, the next thing to do is to integrate flow ever more fully into your life and work, until you express your flow-creating ikigai in your whole life.

For a helpful illustration of this, consider the Japanese artisans called takumis, who learn to flow with their ikigai as they become masters of a highly particular craft. Various industries employ takumis, from automobile makers to entertainment companies.

Takumis protect their space and deliberately order and limit their lives to create distraction-free environments that are conducive to entering flow and fulfilling their ikigai. The novelist Haruki Murakami, for example, maintains a tiny circle of friends and only appears in public every few years.

(Shortform note: For more on the concept of flow, read our summary of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyis’ book Flow.)

Staying Young

After finding your ikigai and learning to flow with it, the next thing to do is to start building wholesome and healthful practices into all areas of life to support your ikigai. These practices will promote vitality and longevity, thus giving you plenty of energy to devote to your ikigai, along with plenty of time to pursue and fulfill it.

The Mind-Body Connection

To begin with, understand the important role that your mind plays in aging, and start working to keep your mind strong. Be especially aware of the negative effects of mental and emotional stress, which weaken your memory and contribute to such conditions as depression, insomnia, and high blood pressure. Furthermore, stress triggers your body’s immune response even when there’s no sickness present. This makes your body attack itself and damage healthy cells, causing them to age prematurely. In other words, stress literally makes you age faster.

You can counter stress by maintaining an attitude of serenity and calm self-awareness. In turn, this attitude gains momentum when you know your ikigai and pursue it in a state of flow.

Also learn to exercise your mind, which is just as important to staving off aging as exercising your body. Exercising your mind by doing such things as stepping outside your comfort zone or learning a new skill revitalizes your brain by growing new neural connections.

Moving Your Body

Along with minding your mind-body connection, avoid too much sitting and inactivity. The hyper-sedentary lifestyle of most modern societies contributes to a variety of health problems, including cardiovascular disease and cancer.

Remember, exercise is one of the longevity factors for Blue Zone residents. However, they get their exercise not necessarily by going to the gym, but just by staying active. You can easily employ this principle yourself by walking to work, taking the stairs, joining a sports team, and so on.

For a more formal approach to bringing more movement to your life, consider practicing one or more of the following Eastern mind-body disciplines. These disciplines all invoke the important mind-body connection by combining gentle physical exercise with awareness of your breath:

Radio Taiso

Radio taiso dates back to before World War II and gets its name from the fact that instructions used to be broadcast through radio. About 30 percent of Japanese people practice this morning warm-up exercise every day in group settings. In Ogimi, nearly everybody does it, even nursing home residents. A workout takes five or 10 minutes and serves to exercise your joints.

Yoga

Yoga originated in India as a way to unite and purify the mind and body while bringing people closer to both their personal nature and the divine. The most widely practiced form of yoga in the West (and also in Japan) is the body-focused style called hatha yoga. It consists of practicing different asanas—physical poses or postures—to balance your energies.

Tai Chi

Originally intended as a discipline for personal growth, self-defense, and mind-body healing, tai chi is now widely known as a general method of exercise. All tai chi styles have the same goals:

  1. Use stillness to control movement.
  2. Use finesse to overcome force.
  3. Arrive first, move second.
  4. Know both your opponent and yourself.
Qigong

The word qigong translates roughly as “working with the life force” or “cultivating life energy.” It’s a Chinese art, loosely related to tai chi, that seeks to strengthen a person’s qi or chi (inner energy) through movement, breathing, and meditation. Qigong teaches that by learning to regulate your inner energy currents, you can unify your entire being. Studies have shown that qigong is associated with many health benefits, including improved heart health, better blood flow to the brain, and better balance among the sex hormones.

The Importance of Sleep

As you’re integrating more physical movement into your life, be sure not to skimp on sleep, which is a major anti-aging tool. Sleep generates melatonin, which strengthens your immune system, smooths your skin, and has other powerful benefits.

Eating Well

To support the pursuit of your ikigai through healthy living, establishing a healthy mind-body relationship through inner calm and gentle movement is necessary, but not sufficient. You also have to eat well.

The Okinawan Diet

A variety of research has uncovered the principles that underlie the way Okinawans eat. Understanding these principles is important to anybody who’s interested in fulfilling their ikigai, because the Okinawans’ dietary principles, like every other aspect of their lives, are linked both to their pursuit of ikigai and to their longevity.

Eating Little

Okinawans eat very little overall, averaging only 1,785 calories per day. Not insignificantly, people in all five of the world’s Blue Zones likewise consume fewer calories than people in other parts of the world. Moreover, modern medical science has verified lowered caloric intake as a contributor to improved health.

You can easily follow the Okinawan example of eating less. A particularly Japanese way to practice calorie restriction is to employ Japan’s “80 percent rule” or hara hachi bu, which says you should stop eating when you feel 80 percent full. You can also get the same effects as hara hachi bu by practicing intermittent fasting. Just remember that when you practice calorie restriction, you must stay healthy by eating only foods with a high nutritional value.

Eating a Varied Diet

While Okinawans may eat very little, the food they do eat is highly varied. Their diet includes an average of 18 different foods per day. They use the metaphor of a rainbow to determine whether they’ve achieved the desired variety: Is there a multiplicity of colors on the plate?

Okinawans base their diet on grains, primarily white rice. They eat at least five servings of vegetables and fruits daily, filling more than 30 percent of their diet with vegetables. They eat sugar rarely, and when they do, it’s cane sugar. They eat very little salt—only 7 grams per day.

The Antioxidant Connection

The Okinawan diet is extremely rich in antioxidants. Okinawans eat 15 high-antioxidant foods almost every day, including tofu, miso, tuna, sea kelp, soy sprouts, and sweet potatoes. Antioxidants slow down the oxidation process in your cells by fighting free radicals, molecules that cause cellular oxidation and may contribute to cancer.

For Westerners who can’t get their hands on Japan’s antioxidant-rich foods, there are many other readily available foods that achieve the same effect, such as broccoli and chard, oily fish (such as salmon and sardines), citrus fruits, berries, oats, wheat, olive oil, and red wine.

Okinawans also drink a lot of antioxidant-rich tea, especially sanpin-cha, a mixture of jasmine flowers with green tea. Sanpin-cha relieves stress, lowers cholesterol, strengthens the immune system, and reduces heart attack risk. You can get some of the same benefits by drinking jasmine tea or green tea of very high quality. White tea, which has the highest antioxidant effect of any natural food, is also a good choice.

Becoming Resilient

Having learned how to find your ikigai, having built it into your life through flow, and having learned to stay young and healthy, now you must learn to be resilient. Resilience is the ability to handle setbacks and just keep going.

A strong attitude of resilience is associated with having a clearly defined ikigai. In fact, resilience and ikigai are mutually reinforcing. People who clearly know their ikigai tend to be resilient in their pursuit of it, while resilience is a quality that enables them to keep on pursuing their ikigai with passion even in the face of setbacks and difficulties.

Here are some specific ways you can learn to practice resilience:

Embracing Impermanence and Imperfection

The Japanese concepts of wabi-sabi and ichi-go ichi-e can help you discover resilience:

Wabi-sabi means finding beauty in imperfection, in things that are incomplete or flawed, since such things reflect the reality of an imperfect and fleeting world. A standard example is to find aesthetic and even philosophical value in a cracked teacup.

Ichi-go ichi-e is the Japanese attitude of recognizing that the current moment only exists right now and will never come again. To apply it, quit losing yourself in memories and speculations, and remain mentally present instead. You can see this attitude in play in Japanese architecture: Unlike the West’s cathedrals and skyscrapers, traditional Japanese buildings are made of wood, reflecting the spirit of valuing imperfection and recognizing impermanence.

Practicing wabi-sabi and ichi-go ichi-e can help you to remain resilient, live in the present, and enjoy each moment by finding beauty in imperfection and recognizing imperfection as an opportunity for growth. These concepts also teach that because all things vanish, you have to live your ikigai now or risk never living it at all.

Lessons From Buddhism and Stoicism

Two famous historical examples further illustrate the practice and value of resilience and illustrate the principles of wabi-sabi and ichi-go ichi-e.

First, Siddhartha Gautama, better known as the Buddha, awakened to the realization that all life is impermanent and full of suffering. Born a prince, he rejected his wealth and position and went on a quest for enlightenment that led him to sample the extremes of both indulgent pleasure and strict asceticism. In the end, he realized that it was better to follow the “middle way” of moderation, neither rejecting pleasures nor becoming enslaved to them. This attitude enabled him and his followers to remain calm and resilient in the face of life’s empty turmoil.

Second, and similarly, the ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism taught people to control their pleasures and desires in order to avoid being controlled by them. Like Buddhism, it taught people to reduce their ego and take control of negative emotions. Stoics were also careful to distinguish between what happens and how you react to it. They said true satisfaction only comes from achieving a state of resilient tranquility or apatheia characterized by freedom from passion, so that you don’t mind what happens or doesn’t happen.

Becoming Antifragile

In your quest to become resilient, you can also benefit from learning about the advanced state of resilience that Nassim Taleb has termed antifragility. When antifragile things are harmed, they don’t just survive: They get stronger. Becoming antifragile is the ultimate way to underwrite the lifelong fulfillment of your ikigai. If you’re antifragile, the many challenges you’ll inevitably face when pursuing your ikigai will only intensify your pursuit of it by giving you added strength, skills, and determination.

Here are some steps to help you become antifragile on a practical level:

Antifragility also harmonizes beautifully with wabi-sabi and ichi-go ichi-e. When you become antifragile, you learn to welcome life’s uncertainty, imperfection, and fleetingness, because these things actually serve to strengthen you.

(Shortform note: For more on antifragility, read our summary of Taleb’s book Antifragile.)

The 10 Commandments of Ikigai

To cap off this book’s exploration of ikigai and how to build your life around it, here’s a list of 10 core rules of ikigai, condensed from all of the above information. Use these rules as a map for fulfilling your life purpose in loving community with other people and the world around you.

  1. Don’t retire.
  2. Don’t hurry.
  3. Eat well, and don’t overeat.
  4. Have friends around you.
  5. Keep moving.
  6. Keep smiling.
  7. Get in touch with nature.
  8. Be thankful.
  9. Remain mentally present.
  10. Follow your unique talent and passion. If you’re still not sure what your ikigai is, follow Viktor Frankl’s advice: When you don’t know your mission, your current mission is to find it.

Part 1: Understanding Ikigai | Chapter 1: Defining Ikigai

Why do you get up in the morning? What gives your life meaning and purpose? Many people can’t answer these questions. Even worse, they’re stuck in dysfunctional lifestyles that prevent them from ever finding out what their purpose is.

In Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long a Happy Life, author and blogger Héctor García (author of A Geek in Japan) and novelist and self-help writer Francesc Miralles teach you to apply the Japanese concept of ikigai, or life purpose, to your own life. Drawing on lessons from the people of Okinawa, who live longer than anybody else on earth, as well as insights from art, philosophy, science, and psychology, they show you how to find and follow your ikigai and cultivate a happy, healthy lifestyle to sustain it.

Part 1 of this summary introduces the concept of ikigai and lays out the lifestyle principles of the Okinawan people. Part 2 teaches you to find your ikigai through learning what brings you meaning and flow (a term to be defined in Chapter 3). In Part 3, you’ll learn how to create good habits of eating, exercising, and thinking, and to forge a life of meaningful resilience as you bring value to the world by living out your purpose.

Your Reason for Being

The word ikigai is essentially the Japanese equivalent of the French raison d'être, meaning a person’s reason for existing or life purpose. According to the Japanese, each of us has a different ikigai.

You can think of your ikigai as your “existential fuel.” It’s the thing that keeps you going in life and the reason you get up in the morning. Your ikigai could involve helping people or enjoying their companionship. It could involve an art or craft, such as writing or painting. It could involve a sport or activity. It could involve business, science, or any number of other things.

You don’t necessarily have just a single ikigai. Einstein, for example, had two ikigais, physics and playing the violin. He said that if he hadn’t been a physicist, he would have devoted his life to music.

The following diagram helps to illustrate the various elements that go into your ikigai. Note that even though this book doesn’t explicitly address all of these elements, you can benefit from studying the diagram carefully to understand its “recipe” for ikigai and thereby gain a better sense of your own ikigai’s composition.

ikigai-diagram.png

The purpose of this book is to introduce you to the concept of ikigai and help you understand how it can change your life. What unites us as humans is our search for meaning, the sense that our lives are about something. When you find your ikigai, you’ll have found this meaning, and you can achieve a fulfilling state of flow every day, in everything you do.

As you read, notice the close connection between ikigai and longevity. This book is about both concepts, because living a long, happy life and discovering your life purpose are complementary. Each supports the other.

Optimal Living: Lessons From Okinawa

The relationship between life purpose and longevity is nowhere more apparent than in Japan. The Japanese are known for their extraordinary longevity, especially on the southern island of Okinawa, whose people have the longest average life expectancy in the world. In fact, Okinawa is chief among the world’s five “Blue Zones,” the geographic regions where people live longer than anywhere else. Scientists who have studied Blue Zones say the keys to longevity are diet, exercise, strong social ties, and having a life purpose.

Okinawans also hold the concept of ikigai at the center of their lives. Knowledge of the Okinawan way of life can therefore illuminate your search for your own ikigai and teach you to embody your ikigai in a long life of fulfillment.

To learn how these Blue Zone factors play out in the lives of Japanese centenarians, García and Miralles visited the rural Okinawan town of Ogimi, whose residents have the longest average life span of all Okinawans.

Life in Ogimi

In Ogimi, the authors were amazed at the vitality of the nominally elderly Okinawans they met. For example, a sprightly 89-year-old woman named Yuki and her “copilot,” a 99-year-old woman, drove the authors to lunch at a local restaurant that served “slow food” made from locally grown organic vegetables. At a triple birthday party for two women (99 and 94) and a “young” man (89), the youngest attendee was 83 years old. The authors danced, celebrated, and did karaoke with this group. They also participated in a game of the popular low-impact Japanese sport of gateball, losing to a 104-year-old woman.

García and Miralles noticed the following things about Ogimi’s lifestyle:

The Principles of Optimal Living

To uncover the principles behind Okinawan longevity, García and Miralles conducted 100 interviews with the oldest residents of Ogimi. They asked these people about their secrets to long life, their personal philosophy, and their ikigai. Then they boiled the resulting statements down to five principles or life lessons for optimal living:

  1. Refuse to worry.
  2. Create positive habits. For example, get up early. Grow a garden and tend it well. Eat a variety of good foods, preferably ones you’ve grown yourself. Keep working. Cultivate spirituality. Exercise and keep your body moving.
  3. Feed and nurture your friendships each day. Eat and drink together. Talk together. Walk together. Sing together.
  4. Live unhurried.
  5. Choose optimism. Smile. Affirm each day that you will be healthy and energetic. Enjoy your family. Do volunteer work.

The Ikigai Connection

From their observations and interaction with the residents of Ogimi, García and Miralles also concluded that ikigai stands above and behind all five of these principles and constitutes the heart of Japanese longevity. The people they met in Ogimi displayed a clear sense of purpose. Some focused intensively on their gardens. Others focused on their friends or on volunteer projects. But all had a clear reason to get up each day, and this, more than anything, appeared to keep them enthusiastic and energetic into advanced old age.

Shortform Note

We've reorganized this book’s chapter order for coherency. As a reference, here's how the summary chapters correspond to those of the book:

Part 1: Understanding Ikigai

Part 2: Finding Your Ikigai

Part 3: Living Your Ikigai

Exercise: Consider Your Ikigai

Chapter 1 introduced you to the concept of ikigai, the Japanese term for a person’s life mission or purpose. This exercise asks you to think about what your personal ikigai may be.

Exercise: Identify Your Suboptimal Areas

In Chapter 1, you also learned five principles of the Ogimi lifestyle: Refuse to worry, create positive habits, feed and nurture your friendships each day, live unhurried, and choose optimism. In this exercise, you’ll compare your current lifestyle to those principles.

Part 2: Finding Your Ikigai | Chapter 2: Finding Purpose

Having learned what ikigai is and how it factors into the lives of the people of Okinawa, you can now try to find your own ikigai. Your ikigai is hidden deep within you, so you have to search for it. However, as you’ve seen, Okinawans say you shouldn’t worry too much about your ikigai or become preoccupied with finding it. Instead, just let your ikigai find you as you occupy yourself with doing the things you love in the company of people who love and care for you.

That said, you can still benefit from working to find your ikigai in a relaxed but focused way. This chapter introduces two useful methods for doing that: logotherapy and Morita therapy. Even though these are both formalized systems of psychotherapy, general knowledge of their principles can be useful for finding your ikigai regardless of whether or not you receive actual treatment.

Logotherapy

Logotherapy is unique among Western forms of psychotherapy because it focuses explicitly on helping people find meaning. Its purpose is to break the hold of your neuroses and enable you to face challenges effectively by helping you find a reason to live.

Logotherapy’s creator, Viktor Frankl, was a prisoner under the Nazis in various German concentration camps. From this experience, he famously declared that you can take away literally everything from a person except their ability to choose their attitude. No matter what happens on the outside, he said, this primary freedom remains unassailable. Frankl also said a clear life purpose enables a person to overcome virtually any challenge and endure virtually any conditions.

Frankl’s own biography demonstrates the reality of logotherapy’s core assumptions and existential value. During his imprisonment in the Nazi concentration camps, his captors took away the manuscript he brought with him that contained all of his initial writings about life purpose and psychological health—the precursor of logotherapy, his life’s work as a psychologist. He spent the rest of his time in the camps rewriting that manuscript. His drive for a purpose helped him survive such awful conditions. When he got out of the camps, he created logotherapy.

Logotherapy offers a highly specific understanding of “meaning.” Like the Japanese concept of ikigai, logotherapy says we don’t create our life’s meaning. Instead, we discover it. Logotherapy says each person has a unique meaning, a unique reason for being. It also says your meaning evolves throughout life.

What follows is a description of how logotherapy is formally practiced, but bear in mind that you can derive many of its benefits on your own by reading Frankl’s classic book, Man’s Search for Meaning.

The formal practice of logotherapy takes place in five steps or stages:

  1. Someone feels empty or anxious.
  2. A therapist helps the person realize that her negative feelings are really the desire for a meaningful life.
  3. The patient discovers her life’s purpose, relative to that moment in time.
  4. The patient freely accepts that purpose. (It’s also possible for the patient to reject that purpose, in which case the therapist leads the patient to figure out why she feels that way.)
  5. With her newfound passion for life, the patient now overcomes her problems and sorrows.

Differences From Psychoanalysis

Logotherapy differs significantly from the more widely familiar psychotherapeutic approach of psychoanalysis. The differences show the fundamental value of logotherapy over psychotherapy for finding happiness through discovering your purpose:

Morita Therapy

Another possible aid for finding your ikigai comes from Morita therapy, a Japanese form of life therapy specifically based on finding your purpose. Created by psychotherapist and Zen Buddhist Shoma Morita, Morita therapy teaches people in psychological crisis to accept their emotions instead of trying to control them. It says your emotions will automatically change when you change your actions, and as this happens, your purpose will become clear.

The practice of Morita therapy takes place in four stages. The first stage is a week of absolute bed rest and total silence. This creates an extended space for doing nothing but watching your mind, thus clearing away the layers of manic mind activity that pollute your life and obscure your purpose.

The second and third stages take the patient through a multi-stage reintroduction to active living and working. Activities include keeping a diary, practicing breathing exercises, walking, and doing chores such as gardening and chopping wood, while still maintaining mostly silence so the patient can continue to reflect.

The fourth stage has the patient return to the world and social life as a newly inner-directed person with a clear sense of purpose. The patient now knows who they are and what they’re supposed to do.

Chapter 3: Finding Flow

Learning to experience the state of flow, as famously defined and described by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, can also help you discover your ikigai and build it into your life. (Shortform note: Be sure to read our summary of Flow.) This is because to experience flow, you have to ask yourself which activities you enjoy so much that they make you forget about everything else, including your worries and the passing of time. The answer to this question points toward your ikigai, which is likely to reside in the areas and activities where you’re most liable to experience flow.

In this chapter, we’ll:

Defining Flow

Flow, also known as the state of optimal experience, occurs when you’re so immersed in an experience that you’re totally focused. You lose your sense of time and simply inhabit the moment. It’s a state in which your consciousness, actions, and energies come together to produce high performance. Flow is involved in the amazing work of everyone from Olympic athletes and champion chess players to genius engineers and computer programmers.

The flow state is one of heightened creativity and delight. The happiest people are those who spend the most time in flow, doing something for its own sake instead of trying to rack up measurable achievements.

Since flow means focus, it’s incompatible with distraction. The table below can help to better define what flow is and is not:

BENEFITS OF FLOW DRAWBACKS OF DISTRACTION
You enjoy a focused mind. Your mind wanders.
You live in the present. You’re stuck in memory and anticipation.
You’re calm, confident, and clear-minded. You’re worried about life, people, and things.
Time flies. Time crawls.
You feel in control. You lose control and fail to complete the task.
You prepare thoroughly ahead of time. You fail to prepare, so your work suffers.
You always know what you should be doing. You’re confused and get stuck frequently.
You enjoy your work. You find your work exhausting and boring.
Your ego fades as the task leads you onward. Your ego intensifies as you feel self-critical and frustrated.

Achieving Flow

Achieving flow requires you to value flow. It requires you to devote more time to the high-value activities that generate it for you instead of the low-value activities, like overeating and drug abuse, that offer immediate but ultimately harmful gratification.

Here are some specific tips to increase your chances of achieving flow in any activity. As you practice them, pay attention to the activities where it seems most natural for you to enter flow, and consider whether your ikigai might reside in these activities.

1) Choose a task that’s difficult but still doable, something just beyond your current ability. Something too easy will leave you bored, but something too hard will cause anxiety. The “sweet spot” is something challenging yet achievable. For example, if you’re a computer programmer, learn and use a new programming language. If you’re a dancer, incorporate a challenging new move into your next routine.

2) Give yourself a clear objective. Vague objectives lead to confusion, wasted time, and squandered energy, while clear objectives contribute to flow. For example, if you’re a writer, set a goal of a daily word count. If you’re a team leader, set a clear mission for the team. But be careful not to obsess over your objective, because that can produce just as much of a mental block as having an unclear objective. Simply set your objective, then dive into your work and focus on it completely. Be like an Olympic athlete competing for the gold medal: Commit yourself wholly to your performance, and let the objective take care of itself.

3) Remove or mitigate distractions. For example, limit your non-essential technology usage. Work in distraction-free environments, preferably ones without internet access. Train yourself to return your attention to the present whenever you get distracted, using mindfulness techniques or any other helpful tool. (Shortform note: To learn more about mindfulness, read our summary of Mindfulness in Plain English.)

4) Focus on just one task. Make a point of devoting your attention to only one thing at a time. Remember, you can’t actually multitask, because what you’re really doing is switching rapidly back and forth between tasks and making the quality of each one suffer. Studies have found that multitasking interferes with learning, lowers productivity, and temporarily decreases IQ. Some of the significant differences between single-tasking and multitasking are as follows:

SINGLE-TASKING MULTITASKING
Contributes to achieving flow Prevents achieving flow
Makes you more productive Decreases productivity up to 60%
Increases your memory power Decreases your memory power
Helps you avoid mistakes Makes you prone to more mistakes
Helps you feel calm and capable Makes you feel anxious and incapable
Makes you more present and considerate for other people Makes you more distracted and hurtful toward other people
Increases your creativity Decreases your creativity

Note that you can enjoy flow in any mundane task. It isn’t reserved exclusively for the moments when you’re directly practicing your larger life purpose. You can enter “microflow” while doing such things as mowing the lawn or handling paperwork. You can also use daily rituals to help encourage the flow state. For example, come up with specific, repeatable ways of making your breakfast or starting your workday.

Living in Flow

Having learned to experience flow and use it to locate your ikigai, the next thing to do is to integrate flow ever more fully into your life, until your whole life is an expression of your flow-generating ikigai. For a helpful illustration of this way of living, consider the example of the Japanese artisans called takumis.

Japanese Takumis

In Japan, takumis are individuals who learn to flow with their ikigai as they become masters of a highly particular craft. The work of takumis displays a special kind of simplicity that combines sophistication and attention to detail in pursuit of their ikigai. Various industries employ them, from automobile makers to entertainment companies.

For example, in a Japanese town with several factories that produce makeup brushes for big-name companies, García and Miralles observed a takumi who had become an expert at choosing and sorting brush bristles. She was visibly happy and dedicated to her task, which she performed with amazing skill and grace, fully absorbed in the flow state. The company president told them that this takumi was one of the most important people in the company, because every brush bristle went through her.

Takumis protect their space and make sure to create distraction-free environments that are conducive to entering the flow state. They are often reclusive by common standards, choosing to limit many aspects of their lives in order to focus wholly on their ikigai. For instance, the novelist Haruki Murakami is so devoted to his work that he maintains just a tiny circle of friends and only appears in public every few years.

Exercise: Use Flow to Find Your Ikigai

Clarify how your personal experiences of flow can help you to identify your ikigai and live it out more fully.

Part 3: Living Your Ikigai | Chapter 4: Staying Young and Living Long

You’ve now learned what ikigai is, how to find your own ikigai, and how to build it into your life through flow. The next thing to do is to start building healthful practices into all areas of your life (the “positive habits” that Ogimi’s residents talked about) to support your pursuit of your ikigai and give you a long life for doing it.

In this chapter, you’ll learn several principles, both ancient and modern, about aging and how to slow it down. These principles all relate to the subject of ikigai through their emphasis on optimizing your mind-body connection to maintain your youthfulness. Fulfilling your ikigai goes hand in hand with having a long life full of health and vitality.

The Mind-Body Connection

To begin with, understand the important role that your mind plays in the aging process. Many studies have shown that keeping a strong and healthy mind, one that’s active and adaptable, is directly connected to staying young. To maintain a healthy mind:

Using Serenity to Counter Stress

The first way to keep your mind strong is to learn how to remain calm and positive when you’re confronted with stress. Such an attitude can actually preserve your youth, as science has found that stress makes your cells age faster and contributes to health troubles such as insomnia and high blood pressure.

One way to automatically generate serenity and counteract stress is to know and follow your ikigai by practicing it in flow. You’ll learn more in Chapter 5 about preserving your serenity in the midst of challenges.

Revitalizing Your Mind

It’s also important to avoid mental laziness. Mental exercise is just as important for health and youthfulness as physical exercise because it revitalizes your brain. One easy but effective way to give your brain a workout and help it stay young is to open yourself to change. For example:

When you take in new information, your brain creates new neural connections to process it. In this way, processing new information actually grows and shapes your brain in new ways, keeping it pliable and young.

Overcoming the Sedentary Life

Along with attending to your mind-body connection, the other main thing you should do to ward off aging and stay healthy is avoid too much sitting and inactivity. The hyper-sedentary lifestyle of most modern technological societies contributes to a variety of health problems, including cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, immune system troubles, a drop in “good cholesterol levels” (after just five minutes of sitting), and even cancer.

Moving Your Body

As you’ve learned, exercise is one of the longevity factors for people in Blue Zones. It’s not that these people go to the gym all the time. They just stay active and move their bodies. In Ogimi, people walk, dance, do karaoke, play gateball, and tend their gardens. You can easily employ this principle yourself through such simple choices as walking to work, taking the stairs, or joining a sports team.

For a more formal approach to getting more exercise, consider practicing one of the following Eastern mind-body disciplines. Not all of them are from Japan, but all can offer you simple techniques to preserve your youth and health through gentle movements. Note that these disciplines all invoke the important mind-body connection by combining gentle physical exercise with an awareness of your breathing. Aligning your breathing with your movement helps you to remain centered instead of being swept away by your thoughts and worries.

Radio Taiso

Radio taiso dates back to before World War II. It gets its name from the fact that instructions for doing it used to be broadcast through radio. Today, most people follow radio taiso instructions on television or through the Internet. In Ogimi, nearly everybody does radio taiso, even nursing home residents. A workout takes only five or 10 minutes, and the movements are designed to exercise a maximum number of joints. The most basic exercise is to raise your arms over your head from the side in a circular motion and then bring them down.

Yoga

Yoga originated in India as a way to unite and purify the mind and body while bringing people closer to both their personal nature and the divine. The most widely practiced form of yoga in the West (and also in Japan) is the body-focused style called hatha yoga. It consists of practicing different asanas—physical poses or postures—to balance your energies.

Tai Chi

Originally intended as a discipline for personal growth, self-defense, and mind-body healing, tai chi has now become widely known as a general method of exercise, largely due to the Chinese government’s promotion of it for that purpose. The best-known among many different tai chi styles are Chen, Yang, Wu, and Hao. The one most people are familiar with today is Yang-style, which has long, fluid movements. All tai chi styles have the same goals:

Qigong

The word qigong translates roughly as “working with the life force” or “cultivating life energy.” It’s a Chinese art, loosely related to tai chi, that seeks to strengthen a person’s qi or chi (inner energy) through movement, breathing, and meditation. In keeping with the tenets of traditional Chinese medicine and philosophy, qigong holds that your life energy flows through your whole body and consists of five different currents corresponding to the body, breath, mind, life force, and spirit. Qigong’s most widely known exercise seeks to balance these currents, and the discipline as a whole teaches that by learning to regulate these currents, you can unify your entire being.

Studies have shown that qigong is associated with many health benefits, including improved heart health, better circulation, reduced side effects from cancer treatments, better blood flow to the brain, better mind-body connection, lower blood pressure, better balance among the sex hormones, and more.

Getting Enough Sleep

Having considered these exercises, it’s worth mentioning that the warning against being too sedentary doesn’t extend to avoiding sleep, which provides important anti-aging benefits. The modern world suffers from a positive plague of sleep deprivation, and this is causing us to age prematurely and suffer from a variety of health problems. Sleep is a major anti-aging tool because it generates melatonin, a powerful antioxidant that strengthens your immune system, smooths your skin, and has other benefits. Combining adequate sleep with gentle exercise is a major way to preserve your health and youth.

Eating Well

To support the pursuit of your ikigai through healthy living, establishing a healthy mind-body relationship through inner calm and gentle movement is necessary, but not sufficient. You also have to eat well.

The Okinawan Diet

A variety of research has uncovered the principles of Okinawan eating for promoting health and longevity. Understanding these principles is important to anybody who’s interested in fulfilling their ikigai, because the Okinawans’ dietary principles, like every other aspect of their lives, are linked both to their pursuit of ikigai and to their longevity.

Eat Little Food

Compared to other people, even to other Japanese, Okinawans eat very little overall. The average Japanese caloric intake is about 2,068 calories per day. Okinawans consume only 1,785. Not insignificantly, people in all five of the world’s Blue Zones likewise consume fewer calories than people in other parts of the world. Moreover, modern medical science has verified the health benefits of eating less. Calorie restriction frees up energy that would otherwise go into digestion. It reduces the amount of insulin-like growth factor 1, which plays an important role in aging/ It protects against negative health conditions such as obesity, type-2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. The key to practicing calorie restriction effectively is to eat only foods with a high nutritional value while avoiding empty junk food.

One easy way to practice calorie restriction is to employ Japan’s “80 percent rule,” or hara hachi bu. This rule says you should stop eating when you feel 80 percent full. There are various ways to use this rule in your own eating. For instance, reduce your portion sizes or skip dessert. You can also get the same effects of the 80 percent rule by practicing intermittent fasting. Pick two days a week to eat nothing. Alternatively, use the 5:2 diet, in which you eat regularly on five days of the week and limit yourself to fewer than 500 calories on the other two days.

Eat a Varied Diet

While Okinawans may eat very little, the food they do eat is highly varied. Their diet includes an average of 18 different foods per day and 206 different foods in all. They use the metaphor of a rainbow to determine whether they’ve achieved the desired variety: Is there a multiplicity of colors on the plate?

Okinawans base their diet on grains, eating rice as their primary food, sometimes adding noodles. They also eat at least five servings of vegetables and fruits—and at least seven different types—every day. In fact, they fill more than 30 percent of their diet with vegetables, of which legumes, soy, potatoes, and vegetables are staples.

Okinawans eat sugar only rarely (one-third the amount consumed in the rest of Japan). When they do, it’s cane sugar, which has anticarcinogenic benefits. They also eat very little salt—only 7 grams per day, far below the Japanese average of 12 (which is already low compared to other countries). Okinawa is the only Japanese province that succeeds in following the government-recommended limit of less than 10 grams of salt per day.

The Antioxidant Connection

You’ve already learned about the health benefits of sleep, which involve your body’s production of melatonin, a powerful antioxidant. The Okinawan diet amplifies this effect by including many antioxidant-rich foods. Antioxidants slow down the oxidation process in your cells by fighting free radicals, molecules that cause cellular oxidation and may contribute to cancer.

Okinawans eat 14 high-antioxidant foods almost every day:

For Westerners who may not be able to get their hands on these Japanese foods, there are many other antioxidant foods readily available. These include:

A Bit About Beverages

Okinawans also drink a huge amount of antioxidant-rich tea, including sanpin-cha, a mixture of jasmine flowers with green tea. This tea relieves stress, lowers cholesterol, strengthens the immune system, and reduces heart attack risk. If you can’t get your hands on sanpin-cha, you can still get some of the same benefits by drinking jasmine tea or green tea of very high quality. Scientific studies have confirmed the age-old belief in green tea’s healthful effects, linking it to bone health, improved circulation, lowered blood sugar levels, lowered cholesterol, and protection of skin from UV damage.

White tea is also a valuable source of antioxidants. In fact, it has the highest antioxidant effect of any natural food, making it potentially even more powerful than green tea.

Another antioxidant-rich Japanese beverage is shikuwasa, made in the city of Ogimi from the citrus fruit of the same name and drunk diluted with water. All citrus fruits contain nobiletin, which is rich in antioxidants, and shikuwasa is particularly nobiletin-rich: It contains 40 times more nobiletin than oranges.

Exercise: Identify Where You’re Aging

In Chapter 4, you learned principles and practices of youth and longevity. This exercise leads you to identify which of these areas you most need to focus on.

Chapter 5: Becoming Resilient

You’ve learned how to find your ikigai. You’ve learned to build it into your life by experiencing flow. And you’ve learned how to stay young and healthy so that you can fill a long life with your ikigai. The final lesson of this book builds on the others and adds a new dimension: You must learn to be resilient. Resilience is the ability to handle setbacks and just keep going.

A strong attitude of resilience is connected to a clearly defined ikigai. In fact, resilience and ikigai are mutually reinforcing. People who clearly know their ikigai tend to be resilient in their pursuit of it, while resilience is a quality that enables them to keep on pursuing their ikigai with passion even in the face of setbacks and difficulties.

To strengthen your pursuit of your ikigai through resilience, do two things: Learn to embrace life’s flawed and fleeting nature, and then go beyond mere resilience by becoming antifragile. We’ll discuss both of these approaches in this chapter.

Embracing Impermanence and Imperfection

The Japanese concepts of wabi-sabi and ichi-go ichi-e can help you discover resilience in your own life:

Wabi-Sabi

Wabi-sabi means finding beauty in imperfection and loveliness in things that are incomplete or flawed. The basic idea of the concept is that only flawed and imperfect things reflect the reality of an imperfect, incomplete, and fleeting world. A standard example of wabi-sabi in action is to find great value in a teacup that’s cracked or irregular.

To apply this principle in your own life, look around. You can find plenty of imperfect things in your daily life—objects, situations—where you can fruitfully apply this attitude.

Ichi-go Ichi-e

Ichi-go ichi-e is the Japanese attitude of recognizing that the current moment only exists right now and will never come again. Its practical application is to quit losing yourself in memories of the past and thoughts about the future. Instead, choose to fully inhabit the present.

Japanese culture embraces the fleeting, vanishing nature of what we are and what we create. You can see this attitude in play in Japanese architecture. Unlike the West’s imposing and permanent-feeling cathedrals, temples, and skyscrapers, traditional Japanese buildings are made of wood, reflecting the spirit of valuing imperfection and recognizing impermanence.

Practicing wabi-sabi and ichi-go ichi-e in tandem can help you to remain resilient, live in the present, and enjoy each moment by finding beauty in imperfection and recognizing imperfection as an opportunity for growth. These concepts teach that because all things vanish, you have to live your ikigai now or risk never living it at all. When you clearly know your ikigai, and when you embrace imperfection and impermanence, you’ll find that each moment seems to offer almost unlimited possibilities.

Learning From Buddhism and Stoicism

Two famous historical examples, one from ancient Eastern philosophy and one from ancient Western philosophy, can help to further illustrate the principles of wabi-sabi and ichi-go ichi-e.

First, Siddhartha Gautama, better known as the Buddha, awakened to the realization that all life is impermanent and full of suffering. Born a prince, he rejected his wealth and position and went on a quest for enlightenment that led him to sample the extremes of both indulgent pleasure and strict asceticism. In the end, he realized that it was better to follow the “middle way” of moderation, neither rejecting pleasures nor becoming enslaved to them. This attitude enabled him and his followers to remain calm and resilient in the face of life’s empty turmoil.

Second, and similarly, the ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism taught people to control their pleasures and desires in order to avoid being controlled by them. Like Buddhism, it taught people to reduce their ego and take control of negative emotions. Stoics were also careful to distinguish between what happens and how you react to it. They said true satisfaction only comes from achieving a state of resilient tranquility or apatheia characterized by freedom from passion, so that you don’t mind what happens or doesn’t happen. They said this liberates you from both your “negative” feelings (such as anxiety and shame) and your “positive” ones (such as happiness and love).

Becoming Antifragile

In your quest to become resilient, you can also benefit from learning about the advanced state of resilience that Nassim Taleb has termed antifragility. When antifragile things are harmed, they don’t just survive, they get stronger. Becoming antifragile is the ultimate way to underwrite the lifelong fulfillment of your ikigai. If you’re antifragile, the many challenges you’ll inevitably face when pursuing your ikigai will only intensify your pursuit of it by giving you added strength, skills, and determination.

There are several concrete steps that you can take to become antifragile:

Create redundancies. Act on the old advice to avoid putting all your eggs in one basket. For example, create multiple streams of income. That way, if something bad happens to one thing—for instance, if one of your income streams dries up— you aren’t totally bereft.

Combine a conservative approach in some areas of your life with multiple small risks in others that may produce a valuable payoff. In other words, wisely “diversify your portfolio” in all areas of life. Maintain a core of safe stability while taking some calculated risks that could really pay off. This can apply to your finances, your career, your relationships, or anything else.

Remove from your life whatever makes you fragile. First, take an inventory of your fragile areas. Do you eat poorly? Do you build your life around a job you hate or waste your time on social media? Next, drop those vulnerabilities. Eject those down-dragging things from your life.

Follow your ikigai. Antifragility and ikigai are complementary. Knowing and living out your ikigai actually makes you antifragile because it gives you something to keep living and striving for, while taking deliberate steps to become antifragile, like the sample steps listed above, strengthens the clarity of your ikigai and the fulfillment you experience in pursuing it.

Antifragility also harmonizes beautifully with wabi-sabi and ichi-go ichi-e. When you become antifragile, you learn to welcome life’s uncertainty, imperfection, and fleetingness. You know you can bounce back from life’s challenges all the more strengthened and devoted to your ikigai.

(Shortform note: For more information on antifragility, see our summary of Taleb’s Antifragile.)

Epilogue: The 10 Commandments of Ikigai

You’ve learned many things in this book. You’ve learned what ikigai is and how to find and follow yours. You’ve learned how the longest-lived people in the world build their lives around pursuing ikigai. You’ve learned principles and practices of diet, exercise, and lifestyle for remaining young and living long. You’ve learned to become resilient and antifragile so that you can fulfill your ikigai over the course of a long and fruitful life.

Drawing on all these things, we can assemble a condensed list of 10 core rules of ikigai. Use these rules as a map for fulfilling your life purpose in loving community with other people and the world around you.

  1. Don’t retire. Remain active throughout your life. Keep helping others and bringing beauty into their lives even after your professional career has ended.
  2. Don’t hurry. Stay slow, gentle, and full of ease.
  3. Eat well, and don’t overeat. Practice the 80 percent rule: Eat only until you feel 80 percent full. Or, practice intermittent fasting.
  4. Have friends around you. Enjoy the company of the people you love, and who love you back.
  5. Keep moving. Practice gentle movement of some kind.
  6. Keep smiling. Maintain a cheerful attitude.
  7. Get in touch with nature. Take time to get away from cities and recharge your spiritual batteries in communion with the natural world.
  8. Be thankful. Take some time every day to direct a grateful attitude toward everything in your life. Find beauty in everything by applying the attitude of wabi-sabi.
  9. Remain mentally present. Give up regrets and fearful anticipation. Live in the now. Practice ichi-go ichi-e.
  10. Follow your unique talent and passion. Follow your ikigai, which motivates you to spend your life sharing the best of yourself with the world. If you’re still not sure what your ikigai is, bear in mind the advice of Viktor Frankl: If you don’t know your mission, then currently, your mission is to find it.

Exercise: Live Your Ikigai

The final chapter presented a list of 10 rules or commandments of ikigai. This exercise helps you to focus on the most important items on that list for your own life.