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IKIGAI — The Japanese Secret to a Long Happy Life — Book Review

A Reason To Jump Out Of Bed Every Morning

Tanmay Deshpande
4 min readJun 28, 2018
Photo by Victoriano Izquierdo on Unsplash

I recently completed reading a very inspiring book — IKIGAI — The Japanese Secret to a Long Happy Life. The book is authored by Hector Garcia and Francesc Miralles. In this article, I am going to talk about my learning from the book.

The book touches the various aspects of life which can help us achieve a long happy life. It is based on ancient, well practised Japanese technique called — IKIGAI.

IKIGAI

If you google the word, you will get various meanings like

A reason for being, encompassing joy, a sense of purpose and meaning and a feeling of well-being

Or

The word derives from iki, meaning life and kai, meaning the realisation of hopes and expectations.

But the one I liked the most is —

A reason to jump out of bed each morning!

This book draws a lot of references from an island in Japan called — Okinawa where there 24.5 inhabitants of age more 100 for every 1,00,000 people.

Source — Google Maps

Blue Zones

Once you understand the meaning of the word Ikigai, the book tries to explain the deep art of staying young while growing old. It gives the references of 5 Blue Zones in the world where residents of these places live longer than average and secrets of their long life.

Blue Zone — https://singularityhub.com/2009/07/20/blue-zones-places-in-the-world-where-people-live-to-100-and-stay-healthy/

Little Stress is good for you

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Tanmay Deshpande
Tanmay Deshpande

Written by Tanmay Deshpande

I write about technology in simple words!

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