Book Review: Ikigai by By Héctor García and Francesc Miralles

Héctor García, the lead author of the bestselling book, Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life, worked at CERN (the world’s largest particle physics laboratory) in Switzerland before moving to Japan. This book has been translated into 57 languages, including several Indian languages. It has the strange honor of being the most translated book originally written in the Spanish language.

I read this book to keep myself, family, and team motivated during the first wave of Covid-19 lockdown. This book helped me learn a lot about:

1) Importance of eating right quantity of food: saying “Hara hachi bu” before or after eating, which means, “Fill your belly to 80 percent.”

2) Importance of forming close bond within local communities: Moai is an informal group of people with common interests who look out for another. Members of a Moai contribute money to the group, which is used for community activities. The left over money is given to a member who needs it so that emotional and financial stability of the community is preserved.

3) Dealing with sedentary life: Useful tips from this book are walk to work, or just go on a walk for at least 20 min each day and participate in social or leisure activities so that you don’t spend too much time in front of computer. Most importantly, be conscious of your daily routine in order to detect harmful habits and replace them with more positive ones.

4) Finding the purpose of life: Interestingly, Shoma Morita created Morita therapy a few years earlier to logotheraphy by Viktor Frankl (author of In Search of Meaning). Morita therapy teaches patients to accept their emotions without trying to control them. In this approach, symptoms are not eliminated, but teaches to accept our desires, anxieties, fears and worries, and let them go. We can discover the purpose of life asking two questions — What do we need to be doing right now? What action should we be taking?

5) To persevere: In Japanese, Ganbaru is to stay firm by doing one’s best or achieve the state of flow. It is interesting to learn that Japanese people have unique talent for creating new technologies while preserving artisanal (takumi) traditions and techniques.

Though there are many simple yet powerful lessons, I would like to end the review by this message from Ikigai book — ”Focus on enjoying your daily rituals, using them as tools to enter a state of flow. Don’t worry about the outcome — it will come naturally. Happiness is in the doing, not in the result.”

Gopal