How to use ‘ikigai’ in your career planning

Step 1: Your half ikigai

A starting point towards finding your ikigai is to find your passion, which is the overlap between your loves and talents. This was called a ‘half ikigai’ by Tamashiro in his book – ‘How to ikigai.’ 

It can be helpful to first consider the contents of the What we love circle, i.e. things you do for pleasure and enjoyment. There is an almost infinite variety of things to include here, but common examples include playing sports, video games, making music, art and design. Here’s the ikigai diagram again, as a reminder:

Next it’s important to consider which of these activities are also things that you are good at, meeting the ikigai definition of a passion. It’s not always easy to know what you’re good at, for a multitude of reasons:

• These might be activities pursued purely for joy, such that competence has never crossed one’s mind – and quite rightly! After all, “Comparison is the thief of joy” (Theodore Roosevelt).
• It might be difficult to assess competence in certain activities, such as art. ‘One man’s trash is another man’s treasure’.
• Like many highly capable and qualified individuals, your perception of competence might be impaired by self-doubt and the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Making an assessment of your competence

Nevertheless, making an assessment, no matter how informal or rudimentary, of your competence at these activities is an essential step towards finding your ikigai. Here are some potential ideas for how to make this assessment:

• Objective or quantitative evidence: some activities can be measured in a way that ‘proves’ how good you are at them, e.g. serve speed in tennis, win:loss ratio in chess. Just be sure to choose an appropriate metric.
• Subjective or qualitative evidence: other activities lend themselves better to measurement in other ways, e.g. friends’ opinions of your video game skills, or positive feedback from a place where you volunteer.
• Flow: psychologist Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi described flow as ‘the state of pleasure, delight, creativity and process when we are completely immersed in life’. When pursuing a passion, it’s easier to enter a state of flow, even if the task would be challenging for someone else. For example, somebody who enjoys planning trips might find that time flies as they make itineraries, shopping lists and budgets, while for someone else that would be an enormous chore. If you enter flow when doing an activity and you notice you are enjoying yourself, it’s likely to be one of your half ikigais.

It’s a fact of life that not everything we enjoy is something we excel at, hence so few people can be professional athletes or artists. However, these activities remain important as hobbies that make us well-rounded individuals and help us achieve work-life balance. “In between goals is a thing called life that has to be lived and enjoyed.” (Sid Caesar).

What does this mean for your career path?

Having established what your half ikigais are, the next step is to consider what this means for your career path. As mentioned above, most people don’t simply get to do their hobby as a job, so you have to be more insightful about what your half ikigai might mean for your career transition. Many passions have shared or transferrable skills with areas of employment, examples of which can be seen in the table below:

Passion or Half Ikigai	Transferrable Skills and Potential Careers
Art and design	Marketing, product design
Team sports	Leadership, crisis management
Video games	Problem-solving, decision-making
Chess, puzzles, etc.	Business strategy, negotiation

You may begin to see now how, unknowingly, you and many of your colleagues may have used the fundamentals of ikigai to choose a specialty, or even to choose medicine in the first place.

Armed with the knowledge of your half ikigai and its potential implications for your employability and career options, the next step is to enhance and develop these skills. For example, the amateur artist may begin to practise producing works in a corporate art style, doing mock redesigns of brand logos, following the work of designers working in their target field. The good news is, this process (exploring and developing your half ikigai) can sometimes take place within your existing role. For example, you could speak to your manager about adjusting your responsibilities to cover more of the work you find enjoyable.

The ‘ikigap year’ concept

In his 2019 book on ikigai, Tim Tamashiro takes this concept of exploring your ikigai a step further with the concept of the ‘ikigap year’, a clever portmanteau of ikigai and gap year. Essentially, Tamashiro advocates devoting some time exclusively to discover and pursue your ikigai. While this might classically have involved a gap year or sabbatical, such endeavours are challenging for those who have financial or family commitments. Instead, a more realistic ‘ikigap year’ might consist of several months’ weekends’ worth of pursuing these new ideas, plus an occasional use of an annual leave day. The goal is to learn more about your half ikigai (for example, the arty individual may learn that they specifically like digital 3D art), and to progress towards your full ikigai.

Step 2: Your full ikigai

The good news is that, according to the original philosophy everyone has a full ikigai. The bad news is that it’s increasingly harder to find activities that meet all four of the ikigai domains (what we are good at, what we love, what we can be paid for, and what the world needs), i.e. the full ikigai.

Remember that ikigai means ‘life’s purpose’? This is crucial to making the leap from half ikigai to full ikigai. Even once you discover an enjoyable activity that you’re good at (and that you think you can be paid for and make a difference to the world, discussed later), you must consider whether it fits with your personal definition(s) and aspiration(s) of your life’s purpose. To help answer this philosophical question, Tamashiro offers a list of verbs that act as starting points for defining one’s purpose, which itself is the key to living a fulfilling life.

Tamashiro’s Purpose Verbs
To serve To create To delight  To nourish To provide To include To offer To wait	To teach To heal To build To bond To connect To continue To remember	To communicate To make To begin To help To believe To speak To reach

As mentioned above, to find your full ikigai, the passion that you’ve been nurturing and developing (i.e. the half ikigai) must also be something that you can be adequately renumerated for and something that the world actually needs. Frustratingly, this is where things can get very tricky. What is ‘enough’ to be paid varies greatly between people based on their circumstances, but some activities are inevitably poorly paid, even if they are of great use to the world. Care work is a classic example of this. This can be infuriating for people who manage to satisfy the other three ikigai domains, only for their purpose to fail as a victim of economics.

Finding medicine not to be your ikigai

Another issue that can be deeply frustrating for some of my clients, is that they thought medicine was their ikigai! They found something that they were good at, enjoyed, could get paid sufficiently for, and that the world needs! Sadly, life as a doctor in the UK has changed dramatically over the last few years, and what was once an ikigai for many is no longer. As a careers coach, I’ve helped many doctors find their ‘second ikigai’ after medicine. Helping doctors in their career, it turns out, is my full ikigai!

While Tamashiro makes ikigai seem like an elegant, foolproof framework, reaching one’s full ikigai is a long, challenging journey, that can be made easier with experienced help.

I think that focusing on your half ikigai, and changing up some areas of your life, can be something to which you can aspire. Then it could be possible to move towards implementing your full ikigai. At least you should have a bit of a clearer idea of what your life’s purpose is, if you follow the steps. 

Coaching using the concepts of ikigai is something I can offer, so if you are interested in this, let me know.

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References used in this article:

Tamashiro, T. (2019). How to Ikigai: lessons for finding happiness and living your life’s purpose. London: Hutchinson

Csíkszentmihályi, M. (1997). Finding flow: The psychology of engagement with everyday life. New York: Basic Books