Book SummaryIkigai, by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Ikigai

Why do you get up in the morning? What gives your life meaning and purpose? Many people can’t answer these questions. Even worse, they’re stuck in dysfunctional lifestyles that prevent them from ever finding out what their purpose is.

In Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life, author and blogger Héctor García (author of A Geek in Japan) and novelist and self-help writer Francesc Miralles teach you to apply the Japanese concept of ikigai, or life purpose, to your own life. Drawing on lessons from the people of Okinawa, who live longer than anybody else on earth, as well as on insights from art, science, and psychology, they show you how to find and follow your own ikigai and cultivate a happy, healthy lifestyle to sustain it.

Ikigai: Your Reason for Being

The word ikigai is essentially the Japanese equivalent of the French raison d'être, meaning a person’s reason for existing, or life purpose. According to the Japanese, each of us has a different ikigai. Your ikigai could center on an art or craft, a sport, your job, or any number of things.

Furthermore, you don’t necessarily have just a single ikigai. Einstein, for example, had two: physics and playing the violin. He said that if he hadn’t been a physicist, he would have devoted his life to music.

Living Long and Well

The people of Okinawa hold the concept of ikigai at the center of their lives. They’re also the world’s longest-lived people. In fact, Okinawa is chief among the world’s five “Blue Zones,” the geographic regions where people live the longest.

Scientists who have studied these zones say the keys to their residents’ longevity are diet, exercise, strong social ties, and having a life purpose. Thus, knowledge of the Okinawans’ way of life can illuminate your search for your own ikigai and teach you to embody your ikigai in a long life of personal fulfillment.

Life in Ogimi

To learn how these Blue Zone factors play out in Japan, García and Miralles visited the rural Okinawan town of Ogimi, whose residents have the longest average life span of all Okinawans.

The authors learned that life on Ogimi is both intense and relaxed. The residents are always busy but calm, with each person pursuing their ikigai in a relaxed but passionate way. Everybody in Ogimi knows their ikigai, but they don’t obsess over it.

The people of Ogimi all grow their own vegetable gardens, celebrate frequently, and work together in community. Spirituality plays an important part in their lives. Instead of retiring when their official professional lives are over, they remain highly active. They do this especially through participation in family-like groupings called moai, which share funds, play games, provide mutual security, and perform volunteer work.

García and Miralles interviewed 100 of Ogimi’s oldest residents and came away with the following five principles or life lessons that encapsulate the town’s lifestyle of longevity:

1. Refuse to worry.
2. Create positive habits such as growing a garden, exercising, and cultivating spirituality.
3. Feed and nurture your friendships each day.
4. Live unhurried.
5. Choose optimism.

García and Miralles also concluded that ikigai stands above and behind all five of these principles and constitutes the heart of Japanese longevity.

Finding Your Ikigai

Your own ikigai is hidden deep within, so you have to search for it. However, Okinawans say you shouldn’t become preoccupied with finding it. Instead, let your ikigai find you as you occupy yourself with doing what you love in the company of people who love and care for you.

That said, you can still benefit from working to find your ikigai in a relaxed but focused way. Two specific methods for doing this are the practice of logotherapy and Morita therapy. Even though these are both formalized systems of psychotherapy, general knowledge of their principles can be useful for finding your ikigai regardless of whether or not you receive actual treatment.

Logotherapy

Western psychology offers a significant aid to finding your ikigai in the form of logotherapy, created by Viktor Frankl, a psychologist and a survivor of Auschwitz. Following his experiences in the concentration camp, Frankl famously declared that you can take away everything from a person except their ability to choose their attitude.

Logotherapy is unique among Western forms of psychotherapy because it focuses explicitly on helping people find meaning. Like Japan’s ikigai, logotherapy says we don’t create our life’s meaning. Instead, we discover it. Each person’s meaning is unique, but it isn’t static. It evolves throughout life.

In a logotherapy session, the therapist helps the patient realize that negative feelings and neuroses are actually the desire for a meaningful life. Once the patient discovers her life purpose (ikigai), she can freely accept it and move forward to overcome her problems.

Morita Therapy

The Japanese form of life therapy known as Morita therapy is also based on the idea of life purpose. Starting from the premise that we should accept our emotions instead of controlling them, Morita therapy has the patient go on absolute bed rest and simply observe her emotions in total silence for a week. Then the protocol gradually reintroduces the patient to activities, such as gardening and chopping wood, while also having the patient keep a diary and do breathing exercises. Eventually, the patient rejoins the wider world with a new sense of purpose, having cleared out mental-emotional clutter and seen clearly what she is supposed to do.

Finding Flow

Learning to experience the state of flow can also help you discover your ikigai and build the pursuit of it into your life. This is because to experience flow, you have to ask yourself which activities you enjoy so much that they make you forget about everything else, including your worries and the passing of time....

Ikigai Summary Part 1: Understanding Ikigai | Chapter 1: Defining Ikigai

Why do you get up in the morning? What gives your life meaning and purpose? Many people can’t answer these questions. Even worse, they’re stuck in dysfunctional lifestyles that prevent them from ever finding out what their purpose is.

In Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long a Happy Life, author and blogger Héctor García (author of A Geek in Japan) and novelist and self-help writer Francesc Miralles teach you to apply the Japanese concept of ikigai, or life purpose, to your own life. Drawing on lessons from the people of Okinawa, who live longer than anybody else on earth, as well as insights from art, philosophy, science, and psychology, they show you how to find and follow your ikigai and cultivate a happy, healthy lifestyle to sustain it.

Part 1 of this summary introduces the concept of ikigai and lays out the lifestyle principles of the Okinawan people. Part 2 teaches you to find your ikigai through learning what brings you meaning and flow (a term to be defined in Chapter 3). In Part 3, you’ll learn how to create good habits of eating, exercising, and thinking, and to forge a life of meaningful resilience as you bring value to the world by living out your...

Shortform Exercise: Consider Your Ikigai

Chapter 1 introduced you to the concept of ikigai, the Japanese term for a person’s life mission or purpose. This exercise asks you to think about what your personal ikigai may be.

How does the very concept of ikigai make you feel? Does it feel “right”? Does it make sense to you? Why or why not?

Shortform Exercise: Identify Your Suboptimal Areas

In Chapter 1, you also learned five principles of the Ogimi lifestyle: Refuse to worry, create positive habits, feed and nurture your friendships each day, live unhurried, and choose optimism. In this exercise, you’ll compare your current lifestyle to those principles.

Which of the five principles above do you most follow or fulfill in your own life? How do you implement this principle? Why is it important to you?

Ikigai Summary Part 2: Finding Your Ikigai | Chapter 2: Finding Purpose

Having learned what ikigai is and how it factors into the lives of the people of Okinawa, you can now try to find your own ikigai. Your ikigai is hidden deep within you, so you have to search for it. However, as you’ve seen, Okinawans say you shouldn’t worry too much about your ikigai or become preoccupied with finding it. Instead, just let your ikigai find you as you occupy yourself with doing the things you love in the company of people who love and care for you.

That said, you can still benefit from working to find your ikigai in a relaxed but focused way. This chapter introduces two useful methods for doing that: logotherapy and Morita therapy. Even though these are both formalized systems of psychotherapy, general knowledge of their principles can be useful for finding your ikigai regardless of whether or not you receive actual treatment.

Logotherapy

Logotherapy is unique among Western forms of psychotherapy because it focuses explicitly on helping people find meaning. Its purpose is to break the hold of your neuroses and enable you to face challenges effectively by helping you find a reason to live.

Logotherapy’s creator, Viktor Frankl, was a...

Ikigai Summary Chapter 3: Finding Flow

Learning to experience the state of flow, as famously defined and described by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, can also help you discover your ikigai and build it into your life. (Shortform note: Be sure to read our summary of Flow.) This is because to experience flow, you have to ask yourself which activities you enjoy so much that they make you forget about everything else, including your worries and the passing of time. The answer to this question points toward your ikigai, which is likely to reside in the areas and activities where you’re most liable to experience flow.

In this chapter, we’ll:

• Define flow
• Explore methods for achieving flow
• Discuss how to incorporate flow into your life

Defining Flow

Flow, also known as the state of optimal experience, occurs when you’re so immersed in an experience that you’re totally focused. You lose your sense of time and simply inhabit the moment. It’s a state in which your consciousness, actions, and energies come together to produce high performance. Flow is involved in the amazing work of everyone from Olympic athletes and champion chess players to...

Shortform Exercise: Use Flow to Find Your Ikigai

Clarify how your personal experiences of flow can help you to identify your ikigai and live it out more fully.

Write down the activities that bring you into the flow state. (These are activities that engage you so deeply that time flies and you feel pleasurably focused, creative, and capable. They might be related to your job, hobbies, talents, interpersonal relationships, or any other factors.)

Ikigai Summary Part 3: Living Your Ikigai | Chapter 4: Staying Young and Living Long

You’ve now learned what ikigai is, how to find your own ikigai, and how to build it into your life through flow. The next thing to do is to start building healthful practices into all areas of your life (the “positive habits” that Ogimi’s residents talked about) to support your pursuit of your ikigai and give you a long life for doing it.

In this chapter, you’ll learn several principles, both ancient and modern, about aging and how to slow it down. These principles all relate to the subject of ikigai through their emphasis on optimizing your mind-body connection to maintain your youthfulness. Fulfilling your ikigai goes hand in hand with having a long life full of health and vitality.

The Mind-Body Connection

To begin with, understand the important role that your mind plays in the aging process. Many studies have shown that keeping a strong and healthy mind, one that’s active and adaptable, is directly connected to staying young. To maintain a healthy mind:

• Learn how to mitigate the effects of stress through serenity
• Practice keeping your mind busy

Using Serenity to Counter Stress

The first way to keep your mind strong is to learn how to...

Shortform Exercise: Identify Where You’re Aging

In Chapter 4, you learned principles and practices of youth and longevity. This exercise leads you to identify which of these areas you most need to focus on.

Which of the principles in this chapter—handling stress, revitalizing your mind, keeping active, getting enough sleep, and eating well—are you already doing a good job of following? (For example, are you eating a lot of antioxidant-rich food?)

Ikigai Summary Chapter 5: Becoming Resilient

You’ve learned how to find your ikigai. You’ve learned to build it into your life by experiencing flow. And you’ve learned how to stay young and healthy so that you can fill a long life with your ikigai. The final lesson of this book builds on the others and adds a new dimension: You must learn to be resilient. Resilience is the ability to handle setbacks and just keep going.

A strong attitude of resilience is connected to a clearly defined ikigai. In fact, resilience and ikigai are mutually reinforcing. People who clearly know their ikigai tend to be resilient in their pursuit of it, while resilience is a quality that enables them to keep on pursuing their ikigai with passion even in the face of setbacks and difficulties.

To strengthen your pursuit of your ikigai through resilience, do two things: Learn to embrace life’s flawed and fleeting nature, and then go beyond mere resilience by becoming antifragile. We’ll discuss both of these approaches in this chapter.

Embracing Impermanence and Imperfection

The Japanese concepts of wabi-sabi and ichi-go ichi-e can help you discover resilience in your own life:

Wabi-Sabi

**Wabi-sabi means finding beauty in...

Ikigai Summary Epilogue: The 10 Commandments of Ikigai

You’ve learned many things in this book. You’ve learned what ikigai is and how to find and follow yours. You’ve learned how the longest-lived people in the world build their lives around pursuing ikigai. You’ve learned principles and practices of diet, exercise, and lifestyle for remaining young and living long. You’ve learned to become resilient and antifragile so that you can fulfill your ikigai over the course of a long and fruitful life.

Drawing on all these things, we can assemble a condensed list of 10 core rules of ikigai. Use these rules as a map for fulfilling your life purpose in loving community with other people and the world...

Shortform Exercise: Live Your Ikigai

The final chapter presented a list of 10 rules or commandments of ikigai. This exercise helps you to focus on the most important items on that list for your own life.

Which of the “10 Commandments of Ikigai” identify things that you most need to focus on to improve your life and fulfill your ikigai? Name two or three.