Ikigai

Between Netflix docos and self-help books, you might have come across the word Ikigai several times already… Or never.

As a quick summary, Okinawa in Japan identifies as one of five “blue zones” around the planet—places where people live longer than average—and “Ikigai” is one of the factors identified as playing a role in living a long life.

Like many beautiful words adopted from Japanese, the word “Ikigai” has many layers of meaning.

One description I heard for it was something that felt relevant enough to want to share it here (and queue up two audiobooks about Ikigai aswell 😬).

It says that Ikigai is everything the great marketing minds tell you to figure out – your “Why”, your mission, your purpose in life. Stuff we’ve all heard a million times before…

Here’s what’s different though: an essential component of Ikigai is that you also find the thing that people need from you… not in a product-market-fit way, but in a human connection way.

That’s very open to interpretation, and comes down to how you interact with your people. For me, it asks if you’re someone’s trusted ear when they need to vent, or if you’re a good person to visit if they need a laugh.

So when you’re listening to all those folks telling you to “find your why”, your fuel for that might just be what you bring to the table for your people… and that flows both ways.