Ikigai is a 4-circle venn diagram that successfully encapsulates through imagery how to approach your direction in your career.
Family, social pressures, scholarships, debt, your degree, are only a few examples of some of the influences that can push you into pursuing a career that you may not actually be IN TO when you actually get IN TO your field of study. A linear career fails to acknowledge the multi-faceted human being that you are yet it is often the propaganda I was used to hearing growing up.
This is why I connected so well with Ikigai and believe its outline can help broaden your understanding of what your career will look like. Like all models, Ikigai isnât perfect but it offers a unique structure to thinking about your career.
So how does it work? The main goal is to encapsulate as many facets of who you are to make you the most fulfilled at what you are doing. From my perspective Ikigai also provides greater confidence in where you are heading in your career when you may not necessarily know for a 100% fact what you want to do in life. That seems reasonable enough to me especially when your fresh out of college with little to none of proper work & life experience.
As mentioned Ikigai is 4 circles and your goal is to see how each of the circles relates to one another. That is the part where the circles overlap (aka the intersection point) The best way to go over Ikigai is to go over each individual circle.
What You Love This circle you will write down everything that you love to do in your life.
What You are Good At This circle you will write down everything that your are good at.
What You Can Be Paid For This circle you will write down what skills or trades your are currently or can be getting paid for.
What the World Needs This circle you will write down the jobs that the world needs. This could be a surplus in the job market, a job that you feel isnât being done right, or a job that serves a greater cause that it impacting a percentage of the world.
Now that you know the four circles it is now time to see how they relate to one another.
What You Love & What You are Good At This is known as a passion. Here you can write down hobbies. These are activities that you do but canât make money from them or at the very least would be very difficult to make money from them in the near term.
What You Love & What the World Needs This is known as your mission. Here you can write down volunteering, acts of kindness, ministry, etc. These are activities that you do that also canât make money from but offer some deeper meaning and fulfillment in your life.
What You Can Be Paid For & What You are Good At This is known as your profession. Here you can write down your current job or your expected job based on what you study in school.
This is known as your vocation. This is essentially your profession with a bit more sauce. From my perspective I would say this is an occupation that satisfies a greater purpose within you and impacts others around you. Another way to look at it is doing a job without feelings vs doing a job with feelings. If your job does not stir any emotions and feelings within you then you can put it as a profession. If your job stirs up emotions and feelings within you and potentially others as well then you can put it as a vocation.
At this point here is the magic of Ikigai. The goal of this exercise is to now compare all the circles and see how they relate. This is where you play pretend and come up with the most ideal job for you. Be sure to get creative with it!
For instance if you love going to the zoo, you are studying programming, you are good at communicating with others, and the polar bears are endangered your job could be
A front end programmer that designs the website for a nonprofit helping endangered arctic animals.
Get crazy with it and have fun! The more crazy the better as the goals is to broaden your horizons.
Overall you should look at these circles as buckets of your interests. The more you pursue your interests the more you will start to see how they all get connected with each other until it turns into your ideal job and lifestyle.
For me after college I knew I wanted to work remote, I knew I wanted to learn a second language, I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I did not know my ideal job but by following my interests while being mindful that I need to make money I was able to get a job working remotely for a SAAS startup in Argentina with coworkers that speak Spanish.
So keep your mind creative, keep your mind open, and realize that a linear career path is not necessarily what you should consider the norm anymore and that is not a bad thing. Good luck.
No fluff. Just real projects, real value, and the path from code to cash — one useful build at a time.