“You’ve Found Your Ikigai”
Someone said it to me before I could see it myself. Not that I had arrived — the opposite. The road is still long, but at least I know why I’m walking it.
A while ago, someone said to me,
“You’ve found your ikigai.”
Ikigai — いきがい.
A Japanese word close to “what makes life worth living,” “a reason for being.”
At first I didn’t know what they meant.
There is still far more I haven’t achieved than I have,
the business is only just starting to generate revenue,
and the list of things ahead of me looked endless.
But when I sat with it for a moment,
I realized they weren’t saying I had accomplished everything.
If anything, the opposite.
The road is still long,
but at least I know why I’m walking it.
I love to build.
When I find a problem, I want to fix it,
and when I see a structure that makes people's lives harder, I want to build a better one.
When people struggle with the same painful task over and over,
I think about whether technology could shrink it,
and when someone’s business could do better,
I think about what system would have to exist.
Along the way I earn money,
grow the business,
and dream of bigger things.
But strangely enough,
it’s also true that if it had only been about money, I could never have gone this far.
I keep building even when no one tells me to,
fix things again after they fail,
and when I find a new problem, I dig into it all over again.
Work and life don’t separate.
It isn’t that work invades my life —
it’s that what I believe matters
and what I do overlap almost entirely.
So after hearing those words, I thought about them for a long time.
“You’ve found your ikigai.”
Until now,
I had thought plenty about needing to succeed,
but the question “have you found your reason for living?”
was one I had rarely asked.
And maybe ikigai
isn’t some grand calling you discover suddenly one day,
but the direction you keep returning to.
The thing you come back to even when it’s hard.
The thing you want to do more of when it goes well,
and end up doing again even when it doesn’t.
The thing that draws the most out of what I can do
while also being of use to someone else.
I still don’t know how far I’ll go.
But one thing has become a little clearer.
The destination is still far away,
yet why I’m walking is more distinct than it used to be.
And the experience of someone recognizing that before I did —
saying those words to me — is one I think I’ll remember for a very long time.