Kaizen – The Science Of Improving Your Life 1% A Day

Introduction

How do you go about changing your life?

Do you do it overnight?

The answer, hopefully, is obviously a resounding “no!”

Changing even a single aspect of your life takes time, dedication, and effort.

Humans are creatures of habit, and those habits become deeply ingrained into our psyche. This is a physical phenomenon that can actually be witnessed within the brain, and I’ll get to that later in this report.

And yet despite many of us knowing all this intuitively, we still seem to think that we can make huge changes to our lives on a whim.

If you’ve ever told yourself that you are going to “start a new training program tomorrow” that involves going to the gym four times a week and eating half your current caloric intake – well then, you’re guilty.

There is a better solution, and it’s called Kaizen.

This is the Sino-Japanese word for “improvement” and it has adapted to represent a specific approach to improvement – one where you make tiny improvements, take tiny steps, toward the goal that you are working towards.

In other words, continuous improvement, becoming 1% better every day.

As the old saying goes: even the longest journey starts with a single step.

And what is a thousand mile hike other than lots of single steps?

When you look at challenges this way, anything becomes achievable.

In this report, you will learn how to take this concept and squeeze it for everything it is worth.

Whether it’s your relationships, your fitness, your health, your business, or anything else you are looking to improve; Kaizen will help you to get there.

Get ready to change your life for the better – starting with just a single step.

Chapter 1: Why We Need Kaizen

Before we get into the nitty gritty of what Kaizen is and why it works, let’s first consider the alternative and why it’s so important.

As mentioned in the brief introduction above, the approach many of us impulsively make toward self-betterment is to try to change everything all at once.

That example of starting a new training program where you train four times a week and cut your caloric intake is one that a lot of people can relate to. Perhaps you have done something similar yourself?

The only problem is that this kind of approach completely misunderstands human psychology, and the reality of our lifestyles.

Think about it. If you are currently out of shape, then it’s probably because you aren’t working out enough, and because you aren’t eating right.

But why is that the case? Chances are, it’s because you’re currently too tired and too unmotivated to do those things.

Probably you come home in the evening and you feel absolutely exhausted. You just don’t have the energy or the willpower to exercise, and that’s completely understandable.

And so you expect to now, all of a sudden, pull this kind of energy out of nowhere? You think you can go from being too tired to work out at all and to being able to work out four times a week?

And let’s break down what that actually means for a moment. You’ll need to:

• Come home from work.
• Get changed into your gym clothes.
• Get to the gym (e.g. walk, cycle, drive), maybe in the cold.
• Exercise.
• Shower after your work-out.
• Get changed.
• Return home.
• Get your stuff ready for the next work-out.

So that one work-out actually takes more like two hours, which means you’re dedicating a whole new eight hours to your new regime.

You realise that’s an entire working day? Including lunch?

You’re going from NOTHING to 8 HOURS?

Can you see the problem here?

Meanwhile, you’re also expecting yourself to go out in the cold. You’re expecting yourself to be organized the night before. You’re expecting yourself to run and sweat in front of strangers, and to miss out on your favorite TV shows.

You’re not trying to learn one new habit here, but rather learn a whole bunch of new habits – while at the same time unlearning a bunch of other habits.

And that’s not all.

Now that you’re burning eight hours of extra energy, you are also planning on eating 500 fewer calories? You’re going to work twice as hard, while taking in half the amount of energy.

This is looking like a great plan.

The Neuroscience

As though this wasn’t already enough of a challenge, what you probably don’t realize is just how much your neuroscience is working against you in a situation like this.

Our brains are highly plastic, which means they are adaptable to change and can physically restructure themselves according to our behaviours.

You might think that would be good news when trying to form new habits or lose old ones.

But the truth is, it also works against us, and that’s because the brain adapts hard to repeated stimuli.

The brain adapts and changes shape according to a very simple rule: neurons that fire together, wire together.

So if you repeatedly do one thing followed by another, then those two experiences become linked in the brain over time.

And each time you do those things together subsequently, you further reinforce and strengthen that link. The connections become myelinated, meaning that the tendrils are insulated and signals travel faster down them. They grow more nodes at the connection points.

Eventually, it gets to the point where you no longer have to think about the association – doing A automatically triggers B.

And changing this takes a huge amount of work, and in some cases is nigh on impossible.

So to attempt to make this kind of wholesale change across multiple different habits all in one go, well, it’s somewhat futile.

That’s where Kaizen comes in, and it’s why this is such a powerful and transformative tool.

In the next chapter, you’ll learn more about it and how to put it to maximum use.

How it Happens

At this point, you might now be wondering how this happens.

When you lay it all out like that, it appears obvious that making gigantic changes to your routine would never be effective.

If that’s true then, why do we still spend our time determining that we’re going to “change our lives starting tomorrow”.

There are a few reasons.

The first is that it’s simply that much more appealing. Nobody likes the prospect of hard work, or of something taking a huge amount of time.

On the other hand, the idea that “everything can change” in a single day is immensely gratifying – so it should come as no huge surprise that we can get caught up in this notion.

The other issue facing us is the media, because, of course, it makes a whole lot of sense for advertising agencies to want us to take a more one-and-done approach to our self-transformation.

Gyms want to sell gym memberships, and they do that by telling us that we need to go all in or go home. They tell us that we should buy all the work-out equipment, the expensive protein shake, the year-long membership.

Then of course what comes next is that we feel guilty watching the money come out of our accounts every month – all while we get no fitter or stronger.

Chapter 2: Kaizen In Its Original Context: Business

Kaizen is a term that has very much been adopted by the self-improvement crowd and that is popular among everybody who hopes to become happier, fitter, wealthier, and wiser.

But it began life as a business term, and understanding its roots in this way can go a long way to helping us grasp the concept and better apply it to our own lives.

And if you happen to run a business, then of course you’ll find all of this useful for its own merits.

The Origin Of Kaizen

The word kaizen means “improvement” or “change for the better” in Japanese.

However, the term is used more specifically to refer to continuous improvement, or small changes. Again, making 1% improvements.

The term Kaizen first adopted this meaning in the world of business. At first, this especially pertained to the methodologies of car manufacturer Toyota.

The strategy has been successfully adapted to business for many organizations, and later to the self-improvement field.

The book The Toyota Way explains the use of Kaizen in detail and has canonized its usage to some extent.

That said, the self-improvement crowd has also somewhat applied a little artistic license to the way it uses Kaizen.

In many ways, self-help books tend to oversimplify Kaizen, while others misinterpret some of its core concepts.

Kaizen is all about focussing on the minutiae, on making small changes that add up to big differences.

However, many self-help books tell you that this translates to “flossing your teeth” a little every day to ingrain new habits, but that is not actually anything to do with the original meaning of the word.

That isn’t to say that this advice doesn’t have merit, and I’ll be discussing all types of Kaizen in this book, but by addressing the strictest business interpretation first, we’ll also understand the “official” version – which just so happens to also be extremely powerful and often overlooked.

Types Of Kaizen

In business, in its original context, Kaizen has been generally broken down into two separate terms:

1. Flow Kaizen
2. Process Kaizen

In Flow Kaizen, the approach looks at a “value stream”, which might be a whole workflow, in which the organization can look for different opportunities to improve the process.

Imagine a large production line that involves several stages: while making a tiny change at each step of the way won’t seem to have a big impact on its own, when taken as a whole, all those tiny improvements can potentially have a huge result.

Process Kaizen on the other hand is the “concentrated improvement of a single process”.

That means looking at one step and making constant small improvements to get it to the point where it is the best it can be.

Kaizen is often described as being “bottom up,” meaning that you start by looking at the most fundamental levels and making small changes there.

For example, you can potentially improve every aspect of your business by cleaning the floors.

Why?

Because:

• Cleaner floors mean fewer accidents and happier staff, which leads to…
• More efficient storage and retrieval, which leads to…
• More funds left over, and happier customers, which leads to…
• Better morale and more R&D, which leads to…
• Better products and a better brand image.

Simplify And Eliminate Waste

Moreover, Kaizen is also about looking to eliminate waste.

In any given process, there is almost always “waste” that can be eliminated, and by getting rid of these errors, you can significantly increase the speed of a process, and this can have huge and transformational changes for a business.

Let’s imagine for a moment that you are somebody who writes articles for a big blog and uploads them to WordPress every day (WordPress being an online publishing platform).

When you upload the article, you need to add images and formatting like bolding and headers etc.

So your current workflow looks like this:

1. You write your article.
2. You read through your work and check for typos, etc.
3. You upload the article to WordPress.
4. You read through your work and upload images and add formatting.

What’s wrong with this? Well nothing on the face of it, except that by taking this approach, you’re not working in the most efficient way possible.

That’s because you’re currently reading through everything you wrote twice. That’s once to make sure that it is spelled correctly, and once to add images.

So why not:

1. Write the article.
2. Upload it to WordPress.
3. Read through it and fix typos while formatting.

This has effectively combined two steps into one step that will take slightly longer than either on its own, but will be much quicker than doing both.

And that in turn can potentially save you a large amount of time and effort in the long run.

Let’s say this saves you 10 minutes per article, and that you upload 10 articles per day.

That’s 100 minutes back and perhaps this now means you can afford to upload an additional article? If so, you might now be able to earn an extra $30 a day.

As a sole trader, you might use Kaizen therefore to earn an extra $30 every single day without increasing your rates, working harder, or otherwise changing anything about your business!

And Kaizen is always relentless – because there’s still probably waste here.

What if you could remove the time spent uploading by writing directly into WordPress?

And what if you batched all of your proofing and formatting together? Could that save you more time?

Kaizen is constantly looking for waste like this and opportunities to streamline and improve flows and processes.

Here are a few examples of types of “waste” that a Kaizen practitioner might look for in a typical business:

• Defects – Poor copies, errors, mistakes
• Excess processing – Repairs
• Inventory – Waiting on materials, stock, supplies
• Moving – Excessive movement of machines or people
• Non-utilized talent – Utilizing skilled workers in a non-skilled capacity
• Overproduction – Overestimating demand
• Transportation – Time spent transporting goods or people
• Waiting – Waiting for the next step in the chain to become ready

While this type of Kaizen might seem less obviously applicable to your personal life, the truth is that it can be immensely powerful if you look at your own processes.

Chapter 3: Kaizen Concepts To Consider

Kaizen gets even more powerful when you consider the power of some additional concepts in business – force multipliers and automation.

And these can also apply to our personal lives, as we will see going forward.

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