Ikigai : the Japanese secret to a long and happy life pdfdrive com

Step 1: Create redundancies

Instead of having a single salary, try to find a way to make money from your hobbies, at other jobs, or by starting your own business. If you have only one salary, you might be left with nothing should your employer run into trouble, leaving you in a position of fragility. On the other hand, if you have several options and you lose your primary job, it might just happen that you end up dedicating more time to your secondary job, and maybe even make more money at it. Y ou would have beaten that stroke of bad luck and would be, in that case, antifragile.
One hundred percent of the seniors we interviewed in Ogimi had a primary and a secondary occupation. Most of them kept a vegetable garden as a secondary job, and sold their produce at the local market.
The same idea goes for friendships and personal interests. It’s just a matter, as the saying goes, of not putting all your eggs in one basket.
In the sphere of romantic relationships, there are those who focus all their energy on their partner and make him or her their whole world. Those people lose everything if the relationship doesn’t work out, whereas if they’ve cultivated strong friendships and a full life along the way, they’ll be in a better position to move on at the end of a relationship. They’ll be antifragile.
Right now you might be thinking, “I don’t need more than one salary, and I’m happy with the friends I’ve always had. Why should I add anything new?” It might seem like a waste of time to add variation to our lives, because extraordinary things don’t ordinarily happen. We slip into a comfort zone. But the unexpected always happens, sooner or later.

Step 2: Bet conservatively in certain areas and take many small risks in others

The world of finance turns out to be very useful in explaining this concept. If you have $10,000 saved up, you might put $9,000 of that into an index fund or fixedterm deposit, and invest the remaining $1,000 in ten start-ups with huge growth potential—say, $100 in each.
One possible scenario is that three of the companies fail (you lose $300), the value of three other companies goes down (you lose another $100 or $200), the value of three goes up (you make $100 or $200), and the value of one of the startups increases twenty-fold (you make nearly $2,000, or maybe even more).
Y ou still make money, even if three of the businesses go completely belly-up.
Y ou’ve benefited from the damage, just like the Hydra.
Y ou’ve benefited from the damage, just like the Hydra.
The key to becoming antifragile is taking on small risks that might lead to great reward, without exposing ourselves to dangers that might sink us, such as investing $10,000 in a fund of questionable reputation that we saw advertised in the newspaper.