Suppose that if you’re working to solve your problems you make a few mistakes. Maybe you missed a day in your diet, perhaps you lost the funding that you needed to refinance your credit or maybe you just simply didn’t work to solve your problem. What is the typical reaction to when we make mistakes? We often feel as if we blew it and we can’t come back from it. Sometimes we grow despondent or frustrated to the point where we might even give up.
With Kaizen, keeping the mindset of progressive, slow changes will naturally offset your own mistakes with each passing day. The tide will essentially wash over your mistakes. This means that the amount of progress that you do over the course of a year will easily erase a single day’s worth of failings. If you can’t stick to your diet plan one day out of seven, you still have six days of success.
Kaizen is meant to allow for you to progressively grow each day rather than focus on big gains at a time. If you are working to fix your house and you end up doing a little bit of damage or break something of value, you can always keep focusing on the thing that needs repairs, keeping with the Kaizen philosophy. Rather than allow for your mistakes to hold you hostage, you can instead focus on continuing forward, improving each day just by a little bit. Eventually you will find that those mistakes won’t compare to the sheer amount accomplished by a progressive, daily increase.
Kaizen isn’t based on immediacy, which means that even once you reach your goals if you continue to practice the goal of adding small improvements each day, you will go above and beyond what you were setting out to do.
Don’t let mistakes slow you down as you work to progressively improve yourself and work through your problems. Keep to it and each day that you succeed you will find that you are closer and closer to your goals. This philosophy is meant for those who want to develop more than just a simple system for problem solving. This philosophy is for those who want to live a life as a problem solver.
Kaizen is certainly one of the most effective techniques you can learn when it comes to problem solving because when you learn it, you can live it out for the rest of your life. Taking all aspects of improvement, whether it’s solving a money problem, working on a health issue or focusing on improving your relationships, the slow 1% increase approach will greatly lead to change and prosperity in your life.
