HAVE YOU FOUND YOUR IKIGAI?

EVERYTHING IN the muchadmired Japanese culture has a reason for being. The French call it raison d’être, but don’t quite mean it as deeply as ikigai – also a reason for being, but more happily.

Here are some people who have found their ikigai:

A seasoned journalist, who happens to practically be a celebrity in his own right, dropped everything and partners with his girlfriend to set up a dance instruction video store. A young girl, just out of college, turned down offers to work at some of the biggest corporates and built an app to get people with disabilities to meet one another. A young man who studied philosophy for many years finally found a good use for it – he formed a company to go about teaching critical thinking skills to school students.

You can achieve ikigai when you find out what you are really good at, what you absolutely love doing, discover whether the world needs it, and configure it so someone pays you for it. But the ikigai could change at different points of life; so one should sit down every so often and find their sweet spot in life.