Ganbatte: The Japanese Way of Finding Luck & Happiness

I had a really rough long Labor Day weekend. After a pretty awesome summer with the family where there seemed to be progress, everything just broke again. WTF. I was so enraged. Literally enraged. Cursing the world and my luck. Rage is the first place I go to. Old habits die hard. I don’t deal well with setbacks and messed up plans, even though they happen all the time. I ended up at Kinokuniya Bookstore. There is just something about a bookstore that calms me. 

I stumbled upon an interesting book called “Maneki Neko: The Japanese Secret to Good Luck & Happiness” by Nobuo Suzuki. I found some passages that really helped me. Acted as a valuable reminder in fact. 

“Ganbatte.” “This Japanese expression translates as “Do your best” and is used to encourage someone who is carrying out a complicated task, or to raise the spirits of someone who is going through a tough time. It is an exhortation to keep on making an effort instead of trusting everything to chance. Far from leaving the result in the hands of fate, as other languages do when wishing “Good Luck!” this expression is an invitation to put our all into what we’re doing so it turns out as well as possible.”

It’s exactly as Thomas Jefferson was reported to have said in a more pithy way: "I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have."

So assuming we all believe this, I return back to the book and what the book says are the 3 essentials of Japanese culture.

“1. Effort: Coming back to someone who is carrying out a greater fortune through an effort than we are — the famous Japanese kaizen, making continuous improvement the basic tune that we do put into our results — the progressing effort for achieving good results. 

2. Wisdom: Knowing what makes success — what the Japanese second keys to success are — is included in knowing what luck is. To help you with that, I have included a list of good books and authors that we believe help you lose sight of the second key, the Japanese keystone — the rapid recovery — and what you believe that creates a clear picture of fortune. 

3. Confidence: If you have the third ingredient — the conviction that you can achieve it, saving goes as a popular pick — the third that we believe is nothing more than aspiration. There is nothing feasible in this world that we haven’t first visualized mentally and that we achieve it. You also have to aspire to create fortune.

With these three ingredients, we are all set to influence our luck and shape the universe to a small part of its possibility.”

That weekend showed me I have plenty of work on myself that I need to do. But the universe eventually delivers, if you actually do the work. It starts with a strong and good mindset. So go fix your mindset.