If you’re looking to improve and grow in your personal and professional life, the Kaizen method might be just what you need. Originating in Japan, Kaizen is a continuous improvement philosophy that focuses on making small, incremental changes in order to achieve long-term success.
Whether you’re looking to improve your physical health, your mental well-being, or your career prospects, the Kaizen method can help you achieve your goals. In this blog post, we’ll dive into what the Kaizen method is, how it works, and how you can apply it to your own personal development journey.
So if you’re ready to take control of your life and make positive changes, keep reading!
What is the Kaizen meaning?
The concept of kaizen teaches us that making small, tiny changes to our routine and lifestyle can add up to overwhelming differences in your overall productivity, happiness, and performance.
An example of this might be to write a page of a novel every day. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but if you consider that an average novel might have 300 pages. Well, then you could easily write the whole thing in a year as a result!
Or what if you were to save just $10 a day? Again, it seems perfectly doable. But by the end of the year, you’ll have put away $3,600! Enough for a nice vacation.
But kaizen is also about the way in which a single small deviation can have huge repercussions when it is amplified by time. What do I mean by that?
Well, consider throwing a ball to a target. When we do this, our brains actually perform incredibly complex math first. When you throw that ball, you need to get the angle and the force precisely right. If your angle is 5 degrees off, then that might not seem like a lot, but as the ball travels, it will deviate from the intended course more and more.
The further it goes, the bigger the gap becomes.
Life is somewhat like this. You might do something only very slightly different every day, but over time, that will add up to a greater and greater effect. This is particularly true in scenarios where there is a cumulative effect.
But it gets even simpler than that. When we consider the “butterfly effect,” we realize that even the smallest thing can add up to having huge repercussions.
Take, for example, shaving in the morning. You might decide one morning not to shave – because you’re in a hurry – or you might decide that you are going to after all.
Small difference, right? But what if on that day, you happen to bump into someone in the street, an old colleague perhaps? You start chatting, and they think you look good – like you have your act together you know. They ask you some questions, and as a result, end up offering you to come and interview for a new job.
What if you hadn’t shaved? What if you were looking tired and miserable? You may not have been given this opportunity right?
It’s possible. And while this isn’t exactly what we mean by kaizen, it does highlight one very important truth: tiny differences add up to huge results. So don’t discard the minutiae! Because sometimes small changes, small things can make the biggest difference.
If you’d like to learn about how the kaizen continual improvement process can help you in your life check this pdf guide available here.
