Kaizan Blog

When people hear about this website, often the first thing they ask is what does the name Kaizan mean? To some it sounds very familiar. Perhaps because we chose a name that derives from the Japanese word kaizen, which means continuous improvement.

In this post, I thought I’d explain the concept of kaizen and how you can apply it to your life.

Kaizen is most often associated with a workplace setting. It is a management philosophy that has been applied at many companies including Toyota.

The essence of kaizen is that individual workers look for small ways in which they can do their job better. One worker improving their job efficiency on a particular day may not seem like much. But if that worker makes small improvements every day, and every other worker does the same, then over time you can get huge positive changes taking place in a company.

This same principle of kaizen can be applied to self-development.

Consider this example:

Two people want to learn a new language. One person decides to learn 100 words a day for a week. The other person decides to only learn two words a day, but continue for a year.

The first person, may look at the second person’s goal and probably think that it is too little and too slow. However, the first person’s goal of learning 100 words a day is too much for most people. More than likely after a couple of days the task will seem overwhelming and the first person will have given up.

The second person on the other hand, is just plodding away slowly. While the daily task of learning two words a day seems easy (and therefore more enjoyable) they can see definite progress over time. In fact, by the end of the year they know over 700 words. In contrast, the first person, who gave up long ago, will be lucky if they remember anything.

Kaizen is another way of saying that slow and steady wins the race (think: Tortoise and Hare).

People dismiss the slow approach and instead make over-ambitious goals that very often will overwhelm them and cause them to quit. I see this most often in dieting. Someone will decide to lose insane amounts of weight in one month when they would have been much better off aiming for slower progress. Losing a small amount of weight each month just requires making small lifestyle changes that are easy to stick to.

At the end of a year the people that opt for a slow and steady kaizen approach to weight loss will be considerably lighter and healthier. On the other hand, the yo-yo dieter who went for the “shock and awe” approach will often be even heavier than when they started.

Action Step

Apply kaizen to your life. Take a goal you want to achieve and decide to use the incremental approach.  Sure it would be nice to do it quicker, but quicker often doesn’t work out. Break it down and spread it out over months. Then make small steps every day towards accomplishing it.

See also: The Key to Starting a New Habit