My Journey of Finding ‘Ikigai’
It changed my life entirely.
Ikigai can be defined as ‘a sense of being alive now, an individual’s consciousness as a motive to live.’ — Aikihiro Hasegawa
I always knew I was in the wrong place.
It was a void deep inside me that was too afraid to speak out because it didn’t have a solution. Or so I thought.
You know, when you walk into a dark street at night and something doesn’t feel right? Like your intuition telling you you’re not safe and you should be on a different route.
And later on, you’re grateful you pivoted.
But with life decisions, you cannot hop off to another road. At least when you don’t have a destination in mind.
So when I read Ikigai, which explained that the secret of a long and happy life is being in the middle of the Venn Diagram you see above, it felt too good to be true.
Until three years later when life changed.
By now, I’d forgotten about Ikigai.
I became comfortable with my destiny. And not just mine, but everybody around me who was more on less in the same boat.
How dare I dream of making more money than I do when people don’t even earn that much?
How dare I feel entitled to want at least double my salary? It’s unrealistic.
You have to climb up the ladder no matter how sick the climb makes you feel.
I was telling my newsletter audience a few weeks ago that I don’t talk about quitting my job because of money or vanity metrics, it’s because of the freedom that came with it. It’s because I finally felt alive.
And recently, I realised I may have finally found my ikigai.
I now feel driven to get to work and feel more content than I ever have.
If you can make the process of making the effort your primary source of happiness, then you have succeeded in the most important challenge of your life. — Ken Mogi
I started this by doing what I love.
For nothing in return.
Only because it lit my soul on fire.
I started by writing online. Not every day, not to build an audience (that was a byproduct), and not to make money.
But just because my 8-year-old self found joy in writing.
My teenage self loved to write her journal in a code language she made so nobody else can read it (talk about insecurity).
For the most part of my life, it’s been the only constant, but I never realised it.
Because that's how natural it felt.
Then, I overdosed on some Tony Robbins.
I know the dude gets a lot of hate, but I’ll forever be grateful to him for introducing me to concepts that made me notice the flaws in my system and work towards them.
These concepts were:
- Negative belief systems
- Abundance mindset
- A full-proof goal-setting system
I knew about the law of attraction since I was 16, but I didn’t know any concrete steps to ace it.
By studying and implementing these concepts, a shift occurred.
Suddenly, what seemed ‘too good to be true’ was only so far away because I made it to be that way.
Ikigai gives your life a purpose while giving you the grit to carry on. — Ken Mogi
And most of us do.
Because I genuinely loved writing and it came easy to me, I was hungry to learn more. I was eager to grow my skill and see what that takes me.
YouTube, spending money on courses, reading — I did it all.
And man, it took me places.
To evaluate my ikigai, let’s answer a few questions that the book has to help you get closer to your ikigai (also mentioned in the diagram above):
- What you love: writing
- What the world needs: knowledge, value, positive content that doesn’t make people feel inadequate and helps them grow
- What you can be paid for: freelancing and later on creating products
- Your strengths: curious, driven, puts in the work
This all started to make sense.
To dig into the second part of the diagram:
- Passion: to write
- Mission: to help others live healthier & happier; improve writers and creators
- Profession: creative entrepreneurship
- Vocation: a desire to add value to people’s lives
This got me closer to the only part left in the diagram — ikigai.
Our ikigai is different for all of us, but one thing we have in common is that we are all searching for meaning. When we spend our days feeling connected to what is meaningful to us, we live more fully; when we lose the connection, we feel despair. — Hector Garcia Puigcerver
I truly believe that we all deserve to live a happy life, but society mixes wanting to feel happy with entitlement.
If you take responsibility for your own happiness and work to make it happen, it isn’t entitlement.
You deserve better.
And if you feel like a misfit like I did, do everything in your capacity to analyse the situation and move away from it.
It doesn’t always need to be a radical step like changing your career trajectory, it could simply be enrolling in Zen Meditation class and being a part of a community.
Work to know yourself, understand where you can contribute, and learn a skill that takes you there.
It won’t be easy, but it makes living worth it.
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