The pinnacle of fulfillment
Even if our work is so amazing that it makes us feel like this, it will only be for a few minutes at a time anyway. (Image by Mariana Anatoneag)
Are you trying to find the intersection between your passion, mission, skills, and what the market wants?
Are you seeking the one thing you were born to do that satisfies your passion, makes the world a better place, and earns you a great living?
Well, stop it!
I’m kidding, sort of. But the idea that we have to satisfy all of these things at once to find fulfillment is silly, and wholly manufactured by our fellow humans.
For instance, have a look at this diagram:
The basic design was created by a British guy named Marc Winn. He put Ikigai in the center, which is a Japanese word that apparently means, “reason for being” and has nothing to do with this.
If you find this concept useful, fine. But I think it’s a load of crap.
Your life is not a puzzle to figure out, and these are not the puzzle pieces. You can do what you want, the way you want, in any combination.
It’s perfectly acceptable to have a job whose sole purpose is to pay the bills. It can be deeply fulfilling to make art that will never be for sale.
You can enjoy doing things you’re bad at, or you can start out being bad at something and find that you come to love it once you’re good at it.
Finding something to do at the intersection of all of these circles is not the standard for a happy life. It is not the pinnacle of fulfillment. You can find happiness and satisfaction in any one sector of this diagram.
And any of the sectors in the diagram can have unhelpful, and perhaps even dangerous, stories associated with them.
For instance, it’s a myth there is some perfect profession out there for each of us that is an exact match for our talent and temperament. A fellow entrepreneur took a test to determine her ideal job, and it turned out to be vending machine repair. We’ll never know whether that career would have been a perfect fit because as of yet she has been unwilling give up her very successful business to give it a try.
And the idea that we’re meant to design our own profession out of an infinite array of options is even more ludicrous. Even if we do go in that direction, there is no cosmic committee handing out prizes if we successfully find our true destiny. We make choices and find our way based on a much broader picture of what it means to be a human being — one that leaves lots of room for us to try a variety of things and have a wide range of experiences. One in which our profession does not define us, and neither does our so-called mission, passion, or vocation. A life that has many right answers, not just one.
A lot of misery comes from feeling like we have to live according to someone else’s values. This diagram is a perfect example of this. It might as well be “get a good stable job and work there for 40 years.” It’s just substituting an outdated norm for a new and perhaps even more problematic one.
On the other hand, joy comes from making your own choices based on what you value and what you want. And that may look like this diagram, but it doesn’t have to.
