This book is the first to gather vivid, down-to-earth examples showing that inconvenience often brings real benefits. There is a common belief that faster, easier, and more efficient is always better, but this is not necessarily true. Unlike heavy, abstract philosophical works questioning that belief, this book takes a very different approach, presenting concrete, relatable stories from everyday life and a wide range of disciplines. The reader then sees how inconvenience can lead to sharper thinking, deeper understanding, and unexpected insights.

From small frictions that spark creativity to deliberate inefficiencies that produce richer experiences, the book makes a strong case for the fact that some of the most meaningful gains appear only when things are not perfectly smooth. Stretching the mind, creating something new, or seeing the world from a fresh angle thus offers the powerful insight that some benefits cannot be achieved without inconvenience. 

The latter half of the book features a unique reverse index, organizing examples by academic field. Whether the reader’s interests lean toward science, engineering, design, education, or the humanities, a quick look at the contents may reveal surprising connections to a particular discipline or answer a question that simply arises out of curiosity.

Hiroshi Kawakami is a professor at Kyoto University of Advanced Science, in Japan. He received his Bachelor, Master, and Dr. Eng. degrees from Kyoto University. He started his career at Okayama University as an assistant professor. He joined Kyoto University, where he was an associate professor of Graduate School of Informatics and a program-specific professor of Design Unit. His research interests include systems design, where he has proposed FUBEN-EKI that stands for designing systems based on appreciating "benefits of inconvenience." He received best paper awards of Transactions of the Society of Instrument and Control Engineering (1990, 2001, 2013), the Transactions of Human Interface Society (2009, 2018), and Journal of Society of Automotive Engineers of Japan (2014).