How I found my Ikigai by helping one friend and talking to another
I’ve had the feeling I’m at a crossroads in my career for the last few years now. I was already aware of the concept of ikigai. But I didn’t know how it applied to me until yesterday after two interactions I had with friends.
What is Ikigai?
You’re probably already familiar with Ikigai. It’s a Japanese concept that means your reason for being.
I like to think of Ikigai as my personal purpose.
Ikigai has 4 components
The keys to ikigai are:
- Things you love
- Things you’re good at
- Things the world needs
- Things you can get paid for
Ikigai is at the heart of these components!
Why Ikigai matters…
Ikigai is how we achieve our best work.
It’s more than just a passion. It’s more than a profession, mission or vocation.
Ikigai is the work we’re good at that the world needs and we get paid for. Most importantly we love this work!
It brings joy and purpose. And we can spend our lives focusing on it.
And here’s where my personal Ikigai story begins…
It all started by helping a friend
Last week I helped a friend track expenses and put together a budget.
I started off by building my own prototype in Google Sheets.
I spent an hour importing data from my online bank, categorizing expenses and building visual dashboards. By the end, I had a better understanding of my own monthly expenses.
I then helped my friend build his own budget dashboard. It was mainly a copy and paste job at that point.
I felt so much joy running my friend through the dashboard that I showed it to another friend.
She noticed how excited I got when I talked about all my visualizations, custom metrics and complex formulas.
And she helped me realize that I should work with spreadsheets!
Because this is my IKIGAI… 🤣
By helping a friend I realized a few things…
- The world needs more spreadsheets to organize their information.
- I’m good at creating spreadsheets.
- People would probably pay me to build spreadsheets for them.
- Most importantly, I love creating spreadsheets!
That’s how I found my Ikigai.
Most people hate working with spreadsheets.
But it brings me a special kind of joy to harness and visualize data.
There’s so much information out there.
I feel like most of us just aren’t using it.
Need help with a spreadsheet?
Whether you need help fixing an existing spreadsheet — or you want help creating a new dashboard from scratch — I bet I can help!
I’m open to new projects, so get in touch with me or find me on UpWork.
That’s just my personal interpretation and application of ikigai.
Feel free to follow me if you enjoyed this story!
Not a Medium member yet? For only $5 per month, you’ll get complete access to all the great content on Medium.
You can even support my writing by joining Medium with my referral code.
And I will be forever grateful ❤❤❤
