Career and meaning

Ever since we met all our basic survival needs, all of us have embarked on a desperate search for meaning in our lives. We’re constantly asking why we were put on this planet and what our purpose is. A good majority of folks are content with that purpose being to produce offsprings in order to keep the human species going. After all, this was the purpose for millions of years for all multicellular organisms on Earth. The fun irony here is that those offsprings then end up asking the same questions and repeating the cycle forever.

Others though, look for that meaning elsewhere. Since people end up spending most of their waking days working to keep a roof over their heads, it’s no wonder that careers are the thing that they try to find this purpose in. The twenty-first century worker is determined to find their passion and somehow find a way to get paid for it. There’s more to this than meets the eye at first, though.

Picture a venn diagram with four circles intersecting in the center. These four circles are: What you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. This intersection point of all four circles is called ikigai, a reason for being. I find this way of visualizing it extremely compelling. Try to see if you can place your current career and what your role is into one of the intersection points.

There’s a pretty solid intersection point that everyone tells you to strive towards with just some generic fluff advice: the “Vocation”, what pays well and what the world needs. They tell you that this is what you should strive towards, because you’ll be financially secure and will have a profession that the world respects, like a doctor or a lawyer. They’ll tell you that if you work hard enough, you’ll eventually get good at it (or at least good enough relative to others who are also pursuing it). This is solid advice, but there’s a lot that is missed in the details here. There’s also no mention of ever trying to even think about the “what you love” circle.

One important thing to highlight here is the differentiation between what you love and what you’re good at. Often, people mix these two up. Even parents and academic counselors encourage students to pursue the things they’re good at, without ever bothering to ask them whether or not they actually enjoy it. They automatically assume that you like it simply because you excel at it. They assume the “enjoyment” comes from performing well academically in things you’re good at or winning trophies for outperforming your peers in it, which may not actually be the case. I had this issue personally. Math and physics were two of my strongest subjects, so I was constantly pushed into studying engineering, despite my interests being in art and design. I was drawn towards and was extremely passionate about photography, sculpture, and graphic design. Yet I was repeatedly told to focus on careers in the engineering fields. The other stuff, they said, was just a thing you do on the side.

I knew I wouldn’t enjoy engineering, but yet I went for it because I couldn’t fathom how so many adults with careers could possibly be giving me the wrong advice. I did fine in the classes and graduated with a Bachelors degree in Industrial & Systems Engineering. Then I started working in the industry and knew within six weeks that I wouldn’t last more than two years in this field. The work was boring. It was dry. It lacked any sort of imaginative creativity and was extremely technical all the time. I just put in my 40 hrs every week and couldn’t wait to get back home every day to do what I actually enjoyed doing: illustration, art, design, and making interfaces. It felt like I was wasting my time at work.

This is when I slowly started to transition where I was on the venn diagram. I started moving closer to the center but had to make some short-term sacrifices for it. For instance, I took a pretty large pay cut when going from an engineering role to a junior designer role. So I had to say goodbye to the “what pays well” circle, but I knew this would be temporary. I’d be able to work my way back up to where I was with the engineering role. Same goes for the “what the world needs” circle. I knew the stuff I would be making in the first 6-10 years of my career wouldn’t be what the world needs. It just wouldn’t be good enough. But as I get better at it, I’d be able to make some meaningful contributions to a field that needs it. A similar argument applied to the “what you’re good at” circle, where I knew I’d get better at it over time.

You can see where this is going. I actively started focusing on the “what you love” circle, and told myself that the other three would naturally fall into place with time and experience. This is a way of approaching careers that doesn’t get talked about often, and I wish it did. You won’t have a great starting salary. Your initial work is going to suck. You’ll feel useless all the time. But this doesn’t last long and it quickly starts pivoting to the state of “ikigai” after enough perseverance and patience. If you had approached it the other way, you would never ever prioritize the “what you love” circle and you’ll constantly be left wondering what your purpose is, despite making good money and being respected for what you do well. I guess you could convince yourself that doing that work is indeed your purpose, if that works for you. But for many, there’s that constant itch in the back of their head telling them “this can’t be it, there’s gotta be more”.

So I’m saying that we should start from the “what you love” circle, instead of first finding the need, your interests, and trying to match everything desperately in order to find a fit. I’ve also found that focusing on this circle has had huge positive impacts on my emotional and mental health. Feeling a connection to the work you do is extremely essential to me (but it may not be for others).

The most difficult concept to grasp here is that you won’t get all of these circles instantaneously. You start with one, and slowly work your way into the others over time until you eventually hit the state of ikigai. The “Do What You Love” mentality tries to promise that you’ll get all of it immediately if you chase your passions, and that kind of thinking is actually counterproductive to this framework. People who do so are often left disillusioned and wonder if it was worth leaving behind what they had. If you’re able to stretch out the timeline for this and tell yourself that it’s okay for this to take time, the results are wondrous.