The Kaizen Cycle, SRSing and You (Patreon)

When people say that kaizen (改善) means “constant and never-ending improvement”, it can set off alarm bells, because we young and/or Western and/or Westernized people do not like things that aren’t parties or alcohol that never end. 

Even the dashingly handsome young man who starred in “The NeverEnding Story II”, rather abruptly ended his own story in his late 20s by killing himself. And that’s about as funny as his unfortunate death is ever going to get. His was a classic example of the rounding problem. In essence, he rounded his life down to zero, first mentally and then physically. He allowed his value, his self-worth, to be determined by things outside of his control.

Returning to the topic at hand...

What kaizen actually means, more accurately, is that you run an unbounded series of bounded cycles of improvement. Strictly speaking, unbounded doesn't mean infinite (that would be rounding up), but it does mean indefinite. Bounded means finite. Defined. Very finite. Very limited.

In each loop, each run through the kaizen cycle, you:

1. Pick (look for and find) one small, easy (and hopefully, but not necessarily, significant) thing to improve.

2. Improve it slightly. And then,

3. Go back to (1)

A loop can be as short as a few minutes or seconds. We don’t stand on ceremony. Finding words we don’t know well and improving our knowledge of them is basically how the SRSing process works. SRSing is a kaizen cycle that we loop through in order to progressively chip away at our own suck(age).

This all came to me in a dream involving a giant turtle with the face of Karl Marx at a Sony corporate daycare centre, that ended in me jumping off a building (backwards!) and onto a helicopter with two coffins in tow in order to somehow save the day. So...you can thank that insane experience for all this sanity and clarity you’re experiencing now ;) .