How to discover your Ikigai
The Japanese concept of Ikigai gets thrown around a lot, but rarely does anyone spend the time and effort to discover it for themselves. “What is my passion?” is heavy-handed and hard to answer directly — but broken into steps it becomes workable.
Step 1 — list what you love doing. Things that don’t feel like work, where time flies. Mine: learning, reading, writing, thinking, creating, planning, organising, travel.
Step 2 — what are you good at? Skills, genetic or acquired, that you can reliably apply. Mine: product design, creating from scratch, customer research, teaching, strategy.
Passion = what you love + what you’re good at.
Step 3 — what can you be paid for? Mine: product development, sales, strategy, operations.
Profession = what you’re good at + what you can be paid for.
Step 4 — what does the world need? From your perspective: deteriorating health, climate change, the energy crisis.
Mission = what you love + what the world needs. Vocation = what the world needs + what you can be paid for.
Put the four together on a venn diagram and think deeply about the intersections. It takes a few iterations for things to make sense — I’m on my third. The centre is still hard to articulate, but having my passion, mission, profession and responsibility identified is deeply comforting. I now know how to orient my days, weeks and years.
Sit with full focus, away from distraction, and you can have your first draft in two hours. Reach out if you need help.