Bhāvanā vs Misogi: Why Your Annual Personal Goals Should Be Continuous, Not Calendar-Driven

The new kitchen torch arrives tomorrow, just in time for Friday's Malaysian dinner. I'll use it to char the fish for Ikan Bakar Sambal, which translates roughly to "burned fish with chili sauce.". This is week four of my 2026 bhavana, which I actually started in December as I'll explain later, and we've already hosted friends for traditional dishes from Ecuador, Portugal, and Turkey. The goal is to cook a full traditional meal from thirty countries by year's end. You can see the progress and recipes here.

I've been setting these annual goals for over thirty years now, and I've called them "bhāvanā" after stumbling across the Buddhist term nearly two decades ago. Something about it resonated, though I'll admit I never dug too deeply into whether I was using it correctly. Recently I've noticed the self-improvement crowd throwing around another term for annual challenges: misogi. It comes from Japanese Shinto purification rituals, and it sounds undeniably cool. Which got me wondering whether I'd been using the wrong word all along.

Turns out I wasn't. But understanding why reveals something important about how we think about personal development and the tyranny of the calendar year.

The Misogi Problem

In its traditional context, misogi is a Shinto purification practice, often involving cold water immersion to cleanse yourself spiritually. It's sacred, ritualistic, and tied to specific religious meaning. What the Western fitness and self-improvement world has done is strip away all that context and turn it into extreme challenge theater. Do something brutally difficult once a year. Suffer through it. Survive it. Prove something to yourself. Then return to your normal life.

Marcus Filly, Jesse Itzler, and others have popularized this interpretation, where misogi means your annual epic challenge. Run fifty miles with a weighted pack. Do a thousand burpees. Swim across a freezing lake. The emphasis is always on the extreme, the one-off, the survive-and-tell-the-story nature of the event. There's value in that, don't get me wrong. Testing your limits can be transformative. But it's fundamentally discontinuous. You do the thing, check the box, and usually reset to baseline.

That's not what I've been doing for three decades. And I suspect it's not what most people actually want when they set ambitious annual goals.

What Bhāvanā Actually Means

Bhāvanā comes from Pali and Sanskrit, meaning "development" or "cultivation." In Buddhist practice, it refers to the continuous mental and spiritual development that happens through meditation and mindfulness. But here's what caught my attention years ago: there are three types of bhāvanā, covering mental or intellectual development, physical or bodily cultivation, and spiritual or emotional growth.

That framework immediately made sense for the variety of goals I'd been setting. Some years were primarily physical, like running a marathon in 2011 or learning to windsurf in 1995. Others were intellectual deep dives, like studying the history of the Bible in 2014 or learning to code HTML in 1997. Some were more experiential or spiritual like my deep dive into Buddhism in 2013 that included a trip to Bhutan.

But the critical distinction is that bhāvanā is about continuous cultivation toward a future desired state, even if you haven't fully articulated what that state looks like. You know the direction you want to develop, even if you can't see the destination clearly. If that sounds familiar to anyone who knows Toyota kata, it's the same concept. You're identifying a target condition and working toward it, making the path clear as you go.

The annual frame is just pragmatic. Humans need focus, deadlines, and containers for ambition. But the actual cultivation doesn't stop when December rolls around.

The Pattern of Lasting Change

Looking back at my bhavanas since 1988, the pattern becomes obvious. These aren't challenges I survived. They're thresholds I crossed.

In 2006, my bhavana was to lose thirty pounds safely and consistently. The weight has stayed off for nearly twenty years, and was the catalyst for getting in the best shape of my life, which is creating a healthy, active retirement. In 2016, I read a novel from an author from a different country every month. I haven't kept up that exact pace, but I've continued to seek out diverse voices and perspectives in my reading ever since. When I learned HTML in 1997, it led to learning how to sell digital products online in 2003, which gave me the foundation to help start Gemba Academy in 2009.

These goals build on each other. They layer. They compound. The 2026 cooking bhavana echoes the 2016 reading goal, both centered on cultural engagement and curiosity. But it also builds on last year's renewed embrace of cooking, taking it to a whole new level by forcing me to research traditional cuisines, learn new techniques, and acquire new capabilities. The kitchen torch is just the latest in a series of tools that expand what I can do.

Three weeks in this has already also become the foundation for a social practice. We invite a different couple or a couple of single friends over each week. It's renewing and deepening relationships that had gone dormant. The cooking is the excuse, but the connection is the point. Will I stop doing this when week thirty arrives? I seriously doubt it.

Continuous Doesn't Mean December

This connects directly to something I wrote about recently regarding continuous improvement in organizations. We've somehow convinced ourselves that "annual" means the work happens once a year, tied to the calendar. Annual goals. Annual reviews. Annual planning cycles. But continuous improvement, real kaizen, doesn't take December off. It doesn't wait for January 1st to kick into gear.

The same is true for personal development. The annual bhavana isn't about creating a calendar-driven challenge that starts January 1st and ends December 31st. It's about using a twelve-month container to intensively develop a new dimension of yourself, knowing that the cultivation will continue beyond that frame. The year is when you establish the new baseline, integrate the new capability, make the shift stick.

That's why I started the cooking bhavana in late December. The calendar is arbitrary. The development is continuous.

Misogi, in its Western interpretation, is theater. Bhavana is transformation. Misogi is survive and reset. Bhavana is cultivate and integrate. Misogi asks what you can endure once. Bhavana asks who you want to become permanently.

Moving Forward

I'll keep using bhavana, not just because I've been using it for years, but because it's actually the right word for what I'm doing. It honors the Buddhist concept of continuous cultivation across mental, physical, and spiritual dimensions. It acknowledges that I'm moving toward a future state that isn't fully defined yet. And it reminds me that the annual frame is a tool for focus, not a boundary for development.

Tomorrow the torch arrives. Friday I'll char fish for Malaysian night. By week thirty, I'll have cooked traditional dishes from some countries I've never visited, learned techniques I've never attempted, and deepened relationships with people I care about. And on January 1st, 2027? I'll still be cooking. I'll still be learning. I'll still be cultivating.

Because bhavana doesn't stop when the calendar flips. That's the whole point.