How One Tiny Thing Can Change Your Day and Your Life

L

ife can be overwhelming sometimes, even more so when we are at work or doing something that we love and enjoy. I recently came across a life resource and life lessons that I have started to implement into my daily workload and life that I've seen is making a great impact in my results and I would like to share it with you. It's called Kaizen. The concept of kaizen teaches us that making small, tiny changes to our routine and lifestyle can add up to overwhelming differences in our overall productivity, happiness, and performance.

Kaizen is a Japanese philosophy and business approach focused on continuous, incremental improvement involving all employees to increase quality, efficiency, and eliminate waste.

Kaizen is a Japanese philosophy and business approach focused on continuous, incremental improvement involving all employees to increase quality, efficiency, and eliminate waste. The word “kaizen” translates to “change for the better” or “continuous improvement”. A core principle of the Toyota Production System, kaizen involves a cyclic process of planning, implementing, checking, and acting on small, ongoing improvements.

An example of this might be to write a page of a novel every day. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but if you consider that an average novel 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 perfectly doable. But imagine by the end of the year you’ll have put away £3,600! Enough for an impressive holiday, or towards buying your first home.

Kaizen is also about the way in which a single small deviation can have huge repercussions when it is amplified by time.

What do I mean by that?

Well, consider throwing a ball to a target. When we do this, our brains actually perform incredibly complex math first. When you throw that ball, you need to get the angle and the force precisely right. If your angle is 5 degrees off, then that might not seem like a lot, but as the ball travels it will deviate from the intended course more and more.

The further it goes, the bigger the gap becomes, get it?

Isn’t life like this sometimes, or many times for some?

You might be do something only very slightly differently every day, but over time that will add up to a greater and greater effect. This 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 realise that even the smallest thing can add up to having huge repercussions.

Take for example brushing our hair in the morning. You might decide one morning not to brush or comb your hair because you’re in a hurry or you might decide that you are going to.

Small difference right? But what if on that day, you happen 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 done your hair? What if you were looking tired and not put together? Might they not have given you that opportunity?

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