Kaizen
Sarah Harvey
Small, unglamorous, and constant. A whole way of living packed into one Japanese word.
Kaizen is a Japanese word that roughly means continuous improvement. It became famous through Toyota's factories, where any worker could suggest a small change to how things were done, and the small changes kept coming for decades until the whole company ran differently.
Sarah Harvey's book takes that idea out of the factory and into ordinary life. Health, money, work, home and relationships each get a chapter, with the same advice every time: don't try to change everything at once. Pick the smallest step you'd actually do, do it until it's normal, then pick the next one. It's a short, friendly book and it doesn't pretend to be more than that.
The exercises are small on purpose, the kind you could start today without planning anything. A lot of the book is about noticing where you are before trying to change it, which fits the original factory idea: you can't improve a process you haven't looked at properly.
The appeal of the idea is how unexciting it is. Nobody gets a dramatic before and after photo out of kaizen. It works because it's small enough that you don't quit.
It sits on this shelf next to the Stoics because it asks for the same kind of patience.
