Rating: 1/10
What’s the answer to $X, Y, Z$? Find your Ikigai! That’s it, that’s the book. If you have something better to do, you should stop reading beyond this point and attend to that. Everything that the book has to say can be distilled down to a page or two. Reading just the last few pages of the book will do you more good than reading through the boring text. But, I read through the book. I guess I took one for the team.
But what is it, exactly? How do you get it? Keep looking for it!
Eating healthy foods, finding a purpose to live (That’s the ikigai), and socializing can help you live longer.
Stressing too much about things accelerates cell degeneration, and you’ll age faster. This is mostly true.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms– to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Apparently, excellence is a habit and not an act. Standard textbook philosophy, and guess who said that? Aristotle. We are what we repeatedly do, I’ve been mostly eating a day thrice, and here I’m lean, thin, and nothing like someone who eats rice thrice a day. Jokes on the book!
We must learn to focus on a single task at hand instead of dividing energy between several things and achieve what’s called a flow state.
The happiest people are not the ones who achieve the most. They are the ones who spend more time than others in a state of flow.
While there is truth in the quote above, try living on < $2 per day. If you don’t achieve financial freedom, good luck with “flowing.”
The book says that what happens to us does not matter as much as our reaction to the events. How are we supposed to react appropriately if we cannot gauge the gravity of events?
Everything we have and own and the people we love will all disappear at some point. “Toh kya karoon? Job chhod doon?”
All things human are short-lived and perishable.
The trick apparently is to surround ourselves with people who love us. The sad thing is not many people love me. 
Anyway, I’d suggest that you read better books, and skip this.
You can think of them as extended book reviews by me.
My book notes differ from traditional book reviews in the sense that I (mostly) do not make recommendations about whether you should read a book.
In addition, where possible, I try to provide anecdotes from my own life to convey why a certain snippet of a book resonated with me.
You can find other book notes here.
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