How to discover your Ikigai

The Japanese concept of Ikigai gets thrown around a lot, but rarely one spends the time and effort to discover it for themselves.

Questions like "what is my passion", "what am I good at" can be heavy-handed and difficult to answer like that. But when broken down into what exactly 'passion' means, it becomes simpler to articulate the things you might be passionate about.

So, lets get started. I will take some example from my life where relevant.

Step 1: List down the things you love doing.
Things which dont feel like work to you and time flies by when you are at it. Example: learning, reading, writing, thinking, creating, planning, organising, recreation, travel

Step 2: What are the things which you are good at?
Write down what skills - genetic or acquired you possess which you are able to apply when needed to achieve a desired outcome. Example: product design, creating something from scratch, talking to customers for research purposes, teaching what you know, formulating strategy for a new project.

PASSION = what you love doing + what you are good at!

Step 3: What you can be paid for?
You can be paid for your skills (things you are good at). You can be paid for things you are not great at but can do to get paid. You can also get paid for a job you hate but still do to get paid. Write down the things which you think you can get paid for. Examples: product development, sales, strategy, operations.

PROFESSION = what you are good at + what you can be paid for

Step 4: What does the world need?
Think about the world's biggest problems from your perspective and write down what would help this planet to be a better place to live. Examples: deteriorating health, climate change, energy crisis.

MISSION = what you love to do + what the world needs

VOCATION = what the world needs + what you can be paid for

Now, put together the newly discovered and above articulated passion, mission, profession and vocation on a venn diagram and deeply think on the intersection of these.

It will take a few iterations of this exercise for things to make sense. Reworking the above steps a few times will add clarity. My wish for you is that you are able to bring more meaning and joy to your every day by articulating your Ikigai. Big shout out to you to take this step towards discovering your true self and create a better life for yourself and people around you.

Happy to share what my Venn diagram currently looks like. I'm also in an iterative process of figuring this out fully. This is 3rd iteration I believe. Its still hard for me to clearly articulate the middle-most section (Ikigai) but its very comforting to have my passion, mission, ideal profession and my responsibility towards the world identified. I now know how to orient my days, weeks, months and years.

I will soon share templates/worksheets to copy which you can use to get started. If you sit with full focus without the distraction of external world, you should be able to have your first draft in 2 hours. Reach out to me if you need help.