PDF Summary:Ikigai, by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles

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.

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(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:

• Create redundancies in your life, such as multiple streams of income or multiple friends. Then, you won’t be totally destroyed if something happens to one of them.
• Adopt a safe and conservative approach in some life areas while taking small risks in others. “Diversify your portfolio” in everything from finances to friends to career. Maintain a core of safe stability while taking some calculated risks that could really pay off.
• Remove from your life whatever makes you fragile, such as poor eating habits.

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.