There is a Japanese concept called Ikigai. It roughly translates to “reason for being.”
It maps your life across four questions:
- What do you love?
- What are you good at?
- What does the world need?
- What can you be paid for?
If you want to map your own circles, I put together a simple tool for that: Find Your Ikigai.
Where all four overlap, that is your Ikigai. Not just a career. A reason to get up in the morning.
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Simple on paper. But when you look at the people around you, and honestly at yourself, most of us are living inside two or three of those circles at best. And that gap is not a small thing. It shows up as a feeling you cannot quite name.
- The teacher who loves what they do and genuinely shapes lives, but cannot make ends meet. Missing the payment circle. The impact is real, the fulfillment is real, but the financial pressure makes it unsustainable.
- The freelancer who is highly skilled and earns well, but jumps between projects that feel hollow. Missing love and meaning. The bank account looks fine. The Monday morning does not.
- The NGO worker who cares deeply about the cause and knows the world needs it, but has never invested in getting genuinely good at the craft. Missing the skill circle. Passion without competence has a ceiling.
- The passionate founder who wants to solve a real problem but cannot get the market to pay for it. Two circles. Missing sustainability and skill validation.
- The artist, the writer, the creator who loves the work and has built real craft, but has not found the intersection where the world is willing to pay for it. Not a lack of talent. A gap between what they make and what the market sees as needed.
I have seen this pattern often. People who by every external measure are doing well, but carry a low-level dissatisfaction they cannot explain. When you walk them through these four questions, the missing circle becomes obvious quickly.
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Ikigai is not a career framework in the traditional sense. It is a reflection tool. It does not tell you what to do. It shows you what is incomplete. And that is exactly where most people stop. They see the gap. They sit with the discomfort. Then life continues and the reflection fades.
The more useful move is to stay with the question a little longer. Which circle have you been neglecting, and what would it actually take to close that gap?
Not a five-year plan. Just an honest look at what is missing.
Which of the four circles do you feel is missing in your life right now, and did you even realize it before reading this?
Tahir Shahzad
Tahir Shahzad is a Product Manager, Product Owner, and technology consultant with over a decade of experience helping startups and organizations build products people actually use. If you are working on a product problem worth solving, reach him at tahirshahzad.com/contact/
