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Marcel Krčah

The spirit of kaizen

Published on , in

There is a section in the interview with John Danaher that I've been thinking about a lot.

I'm a huge believer in the idea of small progressive movements towards goals. The vast majority of our days are unexceptional mundane days. There's a chance you can drift through your life when only 1-5% of your days have any real meaning and that 95% of your life was a waste of time. And that's a tragedy.

If we make a concerted effort to build one day upon another, even if it's only a very small thing (and in most cases, it will be a very small thing, it's rare when we have a day where something monumental happens, most days are not monumental, they are mundane), and we do this over a period of ten years, something remarkable can happen. You get this compounding interest effect where at the end of five or ten years you may literally have reinvented yourself.

— John Danaher, from an interview

Relates to Gradatim Ferociter ("Step by Step, ferociously") and the important non-urgent quadrant.

This blog is written by Marcel Krcah, an independent consultant for product-oriented software engineering. If you like what you read, sign up for my newsletter