age is really just a number

How One Tiny Thing Can Change Your Day and Your Life

Kaizen is the Japanese concept of incremental improvement. When you make small daily changes, they add up over time to represent considerable differences in your life. The idea comes from manufacturing, where a little improvement can result in tremendous changes that can hugely impact profits in a good way.

In our lives, kaizen’s concept teaches us that if you make small, tiny changes to your routine and lifestyle, they can add up to significant differences in your overall productivity, happiness, and performance. You can apply this same strategy to weight loss, exercise, productivity, and finance.

An example of this might be to write a page of a book every day. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but if you consider that an average book 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 entirely doable. But by the end of the year, you’ll have saved $3,600! Enough for an unforgettable vacation.

But kaizen is also about how a single small deviation can have huge repercussions when amplified by time. What do I mean by that?

Well, consider throwing a ball at a target. When you throw a ball, our brains perform incredibly complex math first. It would help if you got the angle and the force precisely right. If your angle is slightly off, then as the ball travels towards the target, it will increasingly deviate from the intended course. The further it goes, the bigger the gap becomes.

Life is like this. You might be do something only very slightly different every day, but over time that will add up to a greater and more significant effect. This effect 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. A small difference, right? But what if on that day, you happen to bump into someone in the street, an old colleague perhaps? You get to chatting, and they think you look good – like you have your act together. 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 unshaven? Might they not have given you that opportunity? 

It’s possible. And while this isn’t exactly what we mean by kaizen, it does highlight one essential truth: tiny differences add up to tremendous results. So focus on the minutiae!