Who are you? 

Are you passionate about everything you do ?

Are you training your mind and body enough to be resilient in every scenario ?

Have you found your Ikigai ? or still searching for it? Or not searching for it?

These are some of the questions that I believe everyone should ask themselves and introspect. If not you then who ???

Ikigai can be your passion, mission, profession, or anything that gives you the reason to be happy and satisfied. Travelling, cooking, listening ,reading, writing, meditating and so on can be the greatest source of one's happiness varying from person to person. This subjectivity makes an ikigai to be a mysterious word , highly dynamic in nature.

Washington Burnap stated two hundred years ago :" The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for". That something can be anything and is an ikigai.

In "Man’s Search for Meaning", Frankl cites one of Nietzche's famous aphorisms: “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how”.

I came to know about ikigai through the book “Ikigai” by Hector Garcia and Francesc Miralles. It's an amazing book, everyone should read it atleast once in their entire life. 

I would like to highlight my major takeaways from Ikigai. 

Presented with new information, the brain creates new connections and is revitalized.

Dealing with new situations, learning, something new everyday, playing games, and interacting with other seem to be essential antiaging strategies for the mind.

The study revealed  that the greater the stress, the greater the degenerative effect on cells.

Get the right amount of sleep. Seven to nine hours is good, but any more than that makes us lethargic.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms- to choose one's attitude on any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

Proper training for our mind, body, and emotional resilience is essential for confronting life's ups and downs.

When confronted with a big goal, try to break it down into parts and then attack each part one by one.

Happiness is in the doing, not in the result. “Rituals over goals ”.

Meditation generates alpha and theta waves brain waves. They are relaxing brain waves, activated right before we fall asleep.

Try the Pomodoro Technique. This technique recommends 25 minutes of work and 5 minutes of rest for each cycle or you can also do 50 minutes of work and 10 minutes of rest.

That working on several things at once lowers our productivity by at least 60 percent and our IQ by more than 10 points.

What are the advantages of concentrating on a single task? Garcia and Miralles have given the following reasons :

That it increases productivity.

That it increases power of retention.

That it makes us less likely to make mistakes.

 That it helps feel calm and in control of the task at hand.

That it causes us to become more considerate as we pay full attention to those around us.

That it increases creativity.

At the end in every situation what matters is you. But do remember that there are certain things over which one has no control like the passage of time and the ephemeral nature of the world around us.

The most important thing is to enjoy the process. You are the CEO of your life and you can always choose how to respond or react in a given situation. You can choose to be serene or impassive or gruesome or so on. And whatever choice you made, be ready to face the consequences. You can't run away and put blame on someone else. It's always you who has to fix the things up.

I would like to end with a line “No matter what happens, never loose your confidence” and yes “ you ” are the factor that matters to yourself the most and always

-Firdaus Jabin