Ishi: The Discipline of Determined Intent (Ishi Kaizen)

Ishi is Japanese for determined intent. This book is about what happens when you have plenty but fail to govern it.After 18 years of trying to qualify for the Ironman World Championship, I made it to the start line at Kona, Hawai'i. 11 hours in I collapsed: 3.8 kilometres of swimming and 180 kilometres of cycling behind me, 35 kilometres into the marathon. After 30 minutes on the floor, with medics and athletes around me, I got up and finished, but this is not a story of heroism. What I had been calling determination was persistence with no governor applied to it.The same pattern had already cost me a business I spent 6 years refusing to let die.Once I saw it, the pattern was everywhere. In back-to-back Ironmans raced on consecutive days, in New Zealand's Coast to Coast, in 30 years of engineering and coaching: capability was rarely what failed. Governance was.Ishi sets out what I built in answer, a discipline of self-governance in 4 phases. Decide, Forge, Persist, Reflect.Decide names the commitment, its horizon and the conditions under which it ends. Forge turns intent into capability through corrected, repeated practice. Persist holds the line with 3 responses agreed in advance, Adjust, Hold and Abort, so fatigue does not get to renegotiate them. Reflect separates the quality of the decision from the quality of the outcome and settles on a verdict: recommit, pivot or release. The whole discipline lives on a single handwritten card.It draws on Kaizen, Shugyo, Gaman and Hansei, Japanese terms that carry weight earned through practice rather than abstraction.I wrote it for people who are capable and dissatisfied. Not with effort itself, with its yield. Founders, coaches, athletes and anyone who carries consequence under pressure. It does not trade in motivation and it promises no outcomes. The discipline is offered as it was built, tested under load: keep it, adapt it or discard it on the evidence of your own life.Foreword by L. David Marquet, author of Turn the Ship Around!, Leadership Is Language and Distancing.Ishi: The Discipline of Determined Intent is the first of 5 books in the Ishi Kaizen Series. Kaizen of the Day, the companion book to Ishi, will follow in quick succession. Read more