Ikigai : What is the purpose of our waking up today?

I love writing. It is something that I discovered about a decade ago. I worked on it for years to the point where I am now good at it. Voila!, I have discovered my passion. I also have other skills that I am really good at — crunching numbers, analyzing data, creating novel solutions. And I utilize them at my job. I am good at what I do and I get paid for it, so I have my profession too and I get immense pleasure when I write my posts on LinkedIn everyday

"Your ikigai is at the intersection of what you are good at and what you love doing," says Hector Garcia, the co-author of Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life. Of course,there’s no simple, direct translation into English for the Japanese word ikigai. It roughly means the “thing that you live for” or “the reason for which you get up in the morning.” In a nutshell, it encompasses the idea that happiness in life is about more than money or a fancy job title.

In Japan, millions of people have ikigai (pronounced Ick-ee-guy)— a reason to jump out of bed each morning and run for their business is their ikigai ..reason for being alive! ikigai is seen as the convergence of four primary elements:

What you love (your passion)

What the world needs (your mission)

What you are good at (your vocation)

What you can get paid for (your profession)

Discovering your own ikigai is said to bring fulfilment, happiness and make you live longer

Well of course you don’t have to force yourself to come up with answers in one sitting. In fact, it’s more productive to take your time. Over the course of a few days or weeks, take notes as ideas and insights come to you. Most importantly, be radically honest with yourself. Don’t be afraid to jot down whatever comes to mind, no matter how crazy or irrational it might seem right now.

Let your ikigai be your guide. An ikigai, in some ways, is like a compass. Aligning your actions with the “thing that you live for” helps you navigate life ups-and-downs. As your career evolves and you’re presented with more opportunities, you can rely on your ikigai to steer you in the right direction. Now, What is the one simple thing you could do or be today that would be an expression of your ikigai?

Find it and pursue it with all you have, anything less is not worth your limited time on planet earth. So,in this way ikigai is best and can help you in finding happiness. Stay Calm!! As a kid, you start off by finding “what you love”. These are your hobbies and dreams, you enjoy doing them. Slowly, you drop some of them off. “You are no good at XYZ”, you are told. And you believe it and try and find things you are good at. After all, most people’s childhood is just a never-ending comparison with others who are “better at this” and “excellent at that”. Your hobbies get stowed in a corner and you try and discover “what you are good at”, aka your talents.

Later, when you are about to graduate, you realize that a lot of your skills aren’t marketable. You might be good at painting, but you realize that it is a very idiosyncratic market where the chances of success are infinitesimally small. So you once more filter your skills and try and find something that will help you earn a living wage, something “you can be paid for”, or skills.

As you grow older, you read news about people who are changing the world. The teenager who just received a Nobel Peace Prize, or the billionaire building floating extraterrestrial cities. You feel unfulfilled, not knowing what your true calling is. You can’t provide anything “the world needs”. But in all of this, you never realize that you can have it all.

Yes, it will take a long time. And unwavering persistence. Lots of failures and dejection. And periods of utter misery. But you can have it all. But honestly, I have no idea how to combine the two of them as of yet. I have a few thoughts but there isn’t much progress there. Despite what I preach to others here, I too fall in the trap of lethargy frequently, making excuses for not working to convert my passion into a full-time profession.

Once (hopefully) when I have that, I will try and find my true calling. To see how I can take the intersection of these three things and use it to make the world a better place. The pursuit of my Ikigai will be a long one, but I am going to persist. And I believe that all of us should do the same (see, more preaching!). Take the example of Bill Watterson, one of the most famous cartoonists on the planet. Bill had found his passion at a young age. He loved drawing and aspired to be a cartoonist, much like the people he idolized, foremost of them being the creator of Peanuts, Charles Schulz.

He pursued his passion and created his own profession. After a couple of other stints, he finally struck gold when he created his magnum opus, Calvin and Hobbes. He could now make a living utilizing what he was good at and what he loved to do. And then slowly, he developed his calling too. Watterson’s stubborn denial to merchandize CnH was a testament to his beliefs against diluting something good just for more money.

Some very good strips have been cheapened by licensing. Licensed products, of course, are incapable of capturing the subtleties of the original strip, and the merchandise can alter the public perception of the strip, especially when the merchandise is aimed at a younger audience than the strip is. The deeper concerns of some strips are ignored or condensed to fit the simple gag requirements of mugs and T-shirts. In addition, no one cartoonist has the time to write and draw a daily strip and do all the work of a licensing program. Inevitably, extra assistants and business people are required, and having so many cooks in the kitchen usually encourages a blandness to suit all tastes.

Cartoon Strips that once had integrity and heart become simply cute as the business moguls cash in. Once a lot of money and jobs are riding on the status quo, it gets harder to push the experiments and new directions that keep a strip vital. Characters lose their believability as they start endorsing major companies and lend their faces to bedsheets and boxer shorts. The appealing innocence and sincerity of cartoon characters is corrupted when they use those qualities to peddle products.

One starts to question whether characters say things because they mean it or because their sentiments sell T-shirts and greeting cards. Licensing has made some cartoonists extremely wealthy, but at a considerable loss to the precious little world they created. I don't buy the argument that licensing can go at full throttle without affecting the strip. Licensing has become a monster. Cartoonists have not been very good at recognizing it, and the syndicates don't care.

And more than two and a half decades after the comic ceased to be published, its legacy lives on. It is one of the most beloved comic strips of all time, packed with precious life lessons — The Impact of Calvin and Hobbes. Watterson would often load his comic strips with some subtle satire or critique about the educational system, public polls, or just life in general. The comic captivated children, but for the adults reading them, they would have their perspective changed. Upon re-reading them you’d learn something new every time making this series truly everlasting. Often times the true beauty of Calvin and Hobbes would be the conversations Calvin would have with his stuffed tiger. Ethically baffling questions were proposed, with the answers and meanings to others discerned through the dialogue they would have.

Often times this would be had while they traversed the woods on their way to the Yukon, camping out in their backyard, simply trying to go to sleep at night while thinking about friendship (perhaps as a distraction to ward away the terrors of the night). It’s these things that go on in a young child’s mind that often goes unsaid because it never really needed to be brought up by a six year old. Watterson expertly crafted such short little stories that chronicled hundreds of memories in the life of one fictional boy and his tiger; which then impacted tens of thousands of readers across the entire world. All because Watterson was willing to ask meaningful questions through an art form. It is then no surprise that Mr. Watterson had a fulfilling life. And that is something we all can, and should, aspire for. Cheers!