Book Review: One Small Step Can Change Your Life
Review Written By Casey Douglass
Change can be a pain in
the backside. The changes we really want to make can elude us like a
magical unicorn that farts doughnuts, yet stuff that we don’t seek
finds us with all the accuracy of a tactical strike. Robert Maurer’s
One Small Step Can Change Your Life introduces the reader to
the concept of Kaizen, a concept that when used well, can almost
effortlessly create the change we want.
Kaizen is rooted in the
ancient Tao Te Ching line: “The journey of a thousand miles begins
with a single step.” Anyone who has any experience with trying to
create change or think up goals for themselves will likely have come
across the idea of breaking things down into small, manageable
chunks. It seems less scary that way. Kaizen goes one step smaller,
and encourages the person to make tiny steps, steps so small that
they almost feel like nothing.
So what do tiny steps
look like? Well, an example that comes up a few times in the book is
of someone wanting to lose weight or eat more healthily. Many people
will plump for a restricted diet of some kind, anything from cutting
out whole heaps of food, to lower extremes, such as avoiding sugary
drinks. These changes are fine if they work and stick, but often they
won’t last very long. The Kaizen way might be to begin by throwing
away one fry from each meal.
Yes. One fry. That
sounds so inconsequential, even though logically, we might think
“Hmm, it’s certainly trimming a calorie or two!” The trick is
to throw away this solitary fry for a period of time, to get the mind
used to doing it. Then you might want to escalate things and throw
away two fries each time you eat. This seems to be the essence of
Kaizen, that making tiny changes gets past anything that might get
our mind resisting something. The change needs to be small enough to
require as close to zero effort as possible. Over time, this tiny
effort each day primes the mind for thinking in different ways, and
with patience, you might one day find yourself preferring not to eat
fries at all. Don’t begin this process by throwing away other
people’s fries though, as that is usually frowned upon.
One Small Step Can
Change Your Life does go into other areas of life besides diets,
such as relationships, work and creativity, so there are plenty of
examples that let you get your head around the book’s elegant
message. Myths about change are debunked, such as it being hard and
that big changes are more effective than small ones, and exercises
are given that help the reader practice different ways to utilize
Kaizen in their lives. It’s also a really interesting book.
I didn’t know that
the notion of Kaizen was first used in 1940’s America. Due to wartime
pressures, the U.S government created management courses called
Training Within Industries and offered them to various corporations.
One course held the idea of striving for continual improvement,
getting people to look for the tiny things that could be changed
rather than trying to reshape the big things. This opened up the
avenues for staff at any level being able to offer ideas for
improvement, such as by using Suggestion Boxes. The small steps that
this process improved ended up contributing to America’s increased
manufacturing capacity and quality, something that helped the Allies
win the war. This same concept was taught to Japanese industry after
the war to help the Japanese economy, and after it was embraced, the
Japanese called it Kaizen. It then came back to the West under this
name.
One Small Step Can
Change Your Life is a pacey
read, managing to give just enough examples and tips without
lingering too long on any one thing. I very much like the notion of
making tiny changes and the way that this can bypass a lot of the
strife our own resistance to things can cause. With my own mental
health issues, tiny, non-threatening change is probably all I
can aim for anyway, so reading a book that actually says “This is
okay!” is actually quite heartening. So a big thumbs up from me! It's a book well worth picking up if you find yourself stalling with the things
you’d like to change.
Book Title: One Small Step Can Change Your Life
Author: Robert
Maurer
Publisher:
Workman Publishing
ISBN:
9780761181347
