Ikigai

Ilustration: Carmen Pérez

“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.” ―Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Fortunately – or unfortunately – there are many things I love doing in my professional and personal life, what makes me a good generalist, but definitely not a specialist. So, most of the topics I write about will be rather a general overview of ideas and experiences related to what I enjoy doing for living or for fun.

I’ll start this series of posts with a subject I got lucky to navigate through on a course I did not so long ago in a business school here in Switzerland. Without knowing it, it came just at the right moment, after a difficult end-of-year at work, like many of you probably had this atypical year.

I’d like to talk about “passion” and “purpose” and specifically how the first one meets the second one.

There’re many motivational theories that have been developed since the early forties, starting with the Maslow’s pyramid of needs. I don’t plan to explain it again as probably it’s one of the most well-explained theories in psychology. But it’s not the only one. McClelland’s Need Theory, developed in the sixties, classifies human needs into three dominant groups: need for power, need for achievement, and need for affiliation. Herzberg’s two-factor theory focuses primarily on motivational factors that affect work. He says that there are some elements in a business environment that would directly motivate employees to give their best – motivators. However, there are also factors that are de-motivating if they’re not present, but they’re not motivators by themselves as they don’t make people work harder. He called them hygiene factors. Finally, another well-known classification of motivational factors divides them into intrinsic and extrinsic. The first ones have to do with what we do for pleasure or for the sake of self-achievement. The second ones are those things we do for the external reward they come with, like recognition, money, power, etc. While both – intrinsic and extrinsic – are important, too much focus on extrinsic motivators could be a source of frustration and a de-motivating factor as they’re out of our control. Achieving them depends not only on our skills and abilities.

Quite a new way – at least for us but not for the inhabitants of Okinawa, in Japan – is to explain what moves us to achieve great goals is “purpose”, “the meaning of life”, or ikigai in Japanese.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, my idea isn’t to get into the details of this concept. If you are interested, you can read the authors who have brought the concept to the western world – Héctor García and Francesc Miralles.

Ikigai has to do with how we find what moves us and how we align it with something that has a positive impact on us and what is around us. It‘s made up of four elements that overlap with each other. These elements are:

• What we love doing: these are all kind of things we are passionate about. We enjoy doing them and no one needs to pay us to motivate us to do them.

• What’s needed in the world: these are the things that are required in our community. The ones that can help to improve other people’s lives and that are somehow linked to our own aspirations.

• What we are paid for: these are the things we know how to do and that have a commercial value, therefore help us pay for our subsistence and provide us wealth.

• What we are great at: these are the things we excel at. These things make us feel proud of our capabilities and what we can achieve thanks to them.

The places where they overlap would be our mission – when we love what we do helping to improve our world; our vocation – when we get paid for improving some aspects of our world; our profession – when we get paid for what we’re great at; and our passion – when we love doing what we’re great at.

The place where all of them intersect is our purpose – what gives meaning to our lives – or ikigai.

I started this post with the idea to talk about how passion meets purpose. The truth is passion alone is not enough – more elements are involved. Our purpose is much more complex and not so easy to discover as in our day-to-day whirlwind of life we rarely stop to reflect about it. Finally, it’s not static, it can change over time, but it does not mean we shouldn’t try to find it.

If you’ve read this far, I need to apologise to you for not offering a simple answer. Each one of us will have to find it.