Be Transformed with The Catalyst: Improve your Life By Making Little Changes Every Day

Life is a journey of self improvement, and one principle that makes this journey easier is the principle of 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.

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 has about 300 pages, well then, you could easily write the whole thing in a year. You could also commit to save just $10 daily. Again, it seems perfectly doable. But by the end of the year, you would have saved $3,600, enough for an impressive holiday.

Kaizen is also about the way in which a single small deviation can have huge repercussions when it is amplified by time. In my book, Good2Better, I explain the principle of kaizen and how small daily shifts over time, can lead to a greater effect.

Most people think that by doing a lot in a short period of time, they will get their desired results faster. But the truth is that doing a lot of things can lead to being overwhelmed all the time. The body will attempt to avoid this overwhelming feeling by not doing the required task, and this leads to lack of commitment and inconsistency.

Small repetitive actions will help you build capacity gradually. 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, it 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.

Life is like this. You might do something only slightly differently every day, but over time, that will add up to a greater effect. This is particularly true in scenarios where there is a cumulative effect. When we consider the butterfly effect, we realise that even the smallest thing we do can have ripple effects and lead to huge repercussions.

Take, for example, shaving in the morning. You may decide one morning not to shave, because you’re in a hurry, or you may decide that you are going to. Small difference, right? But what if on that day, you happen to bump into someone on the street, an old colleague perhaps? You get to chatting and they think you look good and well put together, like you have your act together. They ask you some questions, and as a result, end up offering you an interview for a new job.

What if you hadn’t shaved? What if you were looking tired, unshaven and scruffy? Would they have given you that opportunity? And while this isn’t exactly what we mean by kaizen, it does highlight one very important truth: tiny differences add up to huge results.

So, identify and focus on the small things in your life that you know can make the huge shifts.