Dr. Kentaro Fujita

So, you know, if I were to give advice to anyone about how best to cultivate self-control and to cultivate this ability to do hard things, it would first be, make sure the thing that you were trying to do that so hard is something that you love doing.

Because if you don't love it,

All of the external rewards are negative.

They're all punishments, and that's not going to sustain you.

So unless there's something about the process itself that you enjoy the pain, and that sounds masochistic, but I think most people who do hard things, they enjoy something about the process.

That's what keeps us going, and that's what gives us the consistent motivation to pursue things over time.

I don't either.

I don't know that I have a good answer for you.

I can give you a sort of a scientific perspective, but I can also give you a philosophical perspective that comes from my own Japanese background.

So I'll start with the philosophical one.

In Japanese culture, I've been really interested about this concept of ikigai, which means you're doing...

a mundane task, but you are finding purpose in it.

So your job might be to sweep the steps of a temple and you could ask like, wow, that's like about as mundane and as trivial a task as I could actually find.

But the idea of Ikigai is to sort of think about if that is your purpose, if that's your piece of the pie, like you're part of this giant system and this is the important cog that you fill,

it actually enhances well-being.

They'll do it until they're like 90 years old, they'll still be doing it, and they won't give it up because they find so much meaning in the simple task.

This infusion of simple tasks, I think, is also related to the notion of rituals.

A lot of traditions have rituals that people engage in, and they engage it in a perfunctory manner.

But if you engage it in a meaningful way,

it has this power to connect us to everyone else who has ever done the ritual and anyone who might in the future.