Ikigai & Kaizen: The Japanese Strategy to Achieve Personal Happiness and Professional Success (How to set goals, stop procrastinating, be more productive, build good habits, focus, & thrive)

The Dunning-Kruger effect (as coined by social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger) is an oft-cited cognitive bias in which people with a low skill level in a given task tend to overestimate their abilities.

Johnathan Lockwood Huie wrote: Forgive others, not because they deserve forgiveness, but because you deserve peace.

“Naive practice” is what we do when we merely “show up” to work.

The Germans have a proverb which advises “Selbsterkenntnis ist der erste Schritt zur Besserung,” or “Self-awareness is the first step to improvement.”

The ancient Greeks espoused the value of reflective contemplation with the phrase “temet nosce” or “know thyself.”

Finding your Ikigai often entails simultaneously discovering the domicile of your muse as well as the arena in which your toughest battles will be waged.

Kaizen Principle 2: Use a “Continuous Improvement Process” (CIP)

A thousand little problems come together to form a big problem, and your life goals are subject to Lingchi—a death by a thousand cuts.

In pondering your circumstances, it’s important to focus on the way in which your own actions contributed to the predicament (no matter how minute).