Ikigai -7 Best Ways to Live a Meaningful Life

What is Ikigai?

Ikigai is an Okinawan philosophy on how to live a passionate and purposeful life. Loosely translated it means a reason for being.

For the majority of us, life is about the tedious routines of making a living. We all got mouths to feed, bills to pay, and never enough time to do what we really want.

What if there was a way out of this dismal way of living? The Okinawans are among the proud members of the world-famous “ blue zones.” These places have the most amount of centenarians per capita, in the world.

Ikigai is their way of perfecting what it is to live a long and meaningful life. So let’s take a deep dive into this fascinating philosophy to enrich our own lives. Ikigai has four main areas of focus. They are:

What you love + what you’re good = your passion.

What you’re good + what you can be paid for = your profession.

What you can be paid for + what the world needs = your vocation.

What the world needs + what you love = your mission.

To follow your Ikigai is to find a way to reach the pinnacle of all four aspects of passion, career, vocation aka your calling, and mission.

Following your Ikigai is when you can combine all those elements as a way of life. In order to do this, you have to take stock of what all your passions and natural talents are.

Use these to figure out which one(s) you can utilize to change the world with.

Then consciously and systematically take the time to develop and master them. Eventually, you can make a living doing what you love to do!

However, it does take a lot of work and a ton of courage to follow your Ikigai. To make things easier, I have compiled a list of the best tips I learned on my own journey to help you discover your own Ikigai.

1. Identify Your Passions

Make a list and write down all your passions and talents. Here are some questions to help identify them.

• What do you find yourself doing on your days off?

• What would you do if money was no object?

• What makes you go into flow state when you lose track of time?

• What would your friends/family say that you are a natural at?

Write them all down. Now just choose your top 2 or 3 passions from that list. It’s good to just focus on a few at a time. You want to avoid being a “jack of all trades and a master of none.”

For example, I have a ton of interests and hobbies but my top 3 passions are cooking, traveling, and personal growth in mind, body, and spirit.

Now you want to integrate those passions with the other three aspects of Ikigai. Which are career, vocation, and mission. So in other words, it can be summarized in the form of these 2 questions:

• What are your best talents you can utilize to be of service to the world?

• How can you develop those passions enough in order to make it your profession?

Now brainstorm and write down your best-case scenarios to follow your Ikigai with your best talents.

For example, my top 3 passions are cooking, personal growth, and traveling. I want to find the best ways I can incorporate all 3 of these elements into a career path.

I love to cook but I hate doing it commercially because it’s a thankless job. Holidays and weekends are the busiest times so you have to work them. The pay is low and you don’t even have time to enjoy the food you eat.

A personal chef, on the other hand, is a very rewarding career and it’s more pay with less work. So that’s my best-case scenario and that’s what I am pursuing at the moment to follow my Ikigai.

My other idea is starting this blog to share all the things I’ve learned on my journey in personal growth. I can also incorporate traveling into it because I can work from anywhere in the world with my laptop.

2. Identify the Skills You Need

Now that you really honed in on what path you want to pursue, you will probably notice that you are lacking a heck of a lot of skills to accomplish this. There is a huge gap from where you are, to where you want to be.

It’s a good idea to start doing research on the exact skills and courses you need in order to follow your Ikigai. Youtube, podcasts, books, audiobooks, and pinterest are great ways to do this.

Don’t be discouraged about the mountain load of work that lies ahead of you. There’s a magical productivity hack called Kaizen you can utilize to help you tackle your own Everest.

It’s the art of breaking down seemingly insurmountable odds into bite-sized doable chunks. More about that in my article here.

In my case, there’s a ton of things I have to learn to have a successful blog. It’s not as simple as just writing articles. I have to master word press, email marketing, social media, pinterest, keyword search, SEO optimization…. the list goes on and on.

So instead of concentrating on everything at once, I just work on one thing at a time. Starting with the basics and blocking out everything else until I’m ready.

The first thing I needed was a logo so I just worked on that. Then I worked on a domain name and so on and so forth.

If you try to concentrate on too many things at once, it’s really easy to feel overwhelmed. Just concentrate on one little step at a time.

“Little by little, a little becomes a lot”. Jim Kwik – brain/memory expert

3. Make the Time to Follow Your Ikigai.

The next obstacle is finding the time to pursue your Ikigai. It seems like we already don’t have enough hours in a day to do everything that we want.

However, upon closer examination, you know this is not true. How many hours do you waste watching cute cat videos, Netflix and chillin, and endless scrolling on social media?

If you’re completely honest, those little distractions really add up to hours. That’s all valuable time that can be redirected towards following your Ikigai.

Another great idea is to start getting up at 5 am or 1-2 hours earlier than your usual time if you’re a night owl. This is another great way to find extra time you thought you never had.

A normal healthy person needs 6-8 hours of sleep max to function properly. If you need more than 8 hours, something is not right with your diet or health so you should address that first.

Another good trick is to harness all the times you are stuck in line ups, traffic jams, or time spent commuting. These are great opportunities for growth and learning.

You can use that time more effectively to do research, listen to podcasts, read ebooks or watch educational videos, etc. Before you know it, all this reclaimed time starts adding up. This results in exponential towards your Ikigai.

4. Change Your Beliefs and Mindset

Fun fact of the day. What you know as your reality is actually data received and processed through your five senses and the meaning you decide to give to that information.

This along with your experiences in life becomes your reality and beliefs. Your brain is actually encased in total darkness. What you know as reality is only a mere perception. Furthermore, what you know to be real is also influenced by these factors:

• The heritage and culture you belong to

• The beliefs and teachings instilled into you from your parents and ancestors

• The religion that was passed on to you from birth

Your reality and beliefs may be completely different from the reality of another person that grew up halfway around the world. What is true for you may not be true for another person and that’s okay.

Since your beliefs are only from what you interpret through your 5 senses, you can use this to your advantage. Your beliefs are completely malleable.

Why not choose to think and believe in whatever empowers you, and discard the rest? This is the difference between having a fixed mindset or a growth mindset.

You don’t have to accept any particular beliefs that impede you on your journey. Especially the self-limiting ones.

Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re absolutely right!”

Henry Ford.

The key to unlocking your potential is learning to let go of all your limiting stories and adapting empowering ones.

For example, no one thought you can run a mile in under 4 minutes. It was considered impossible until Robert Bannister proved it could be done in 1954. Then 15 more athletes broke the 4-minute mile that same year because it was proven it could be done.

It’s all a matter of perspective and you can change it to however you want. Jason silva said it best when he said, “collect ideas not beliefs.”

Beliefs can limit you but ideas can expand your mind to the possibilities. So choose empowering ideas and beliefs that will inspire you to follow you Ikigai.

For example, instead of thinking how much work is involved, focus on all the benefits instead. Think about all the things you are learning about yourself and all the personal growth that is happening.

This will make a world of a difference on your journey. Simple mind shifts like this will make you feel more energized instead of burnt out in the process. So learn to develop a positive growth mindset.

5. Don’t Forget About Self-Care

When you find your flow, you will want to hit the ground running. This is great! Just be careful not to burn yourself out. Listen to your body and be sure not to sacrifice self-care for the sake of productivity.

Be sure to do things to replenish your body, mind, and, spirit daily. Don’t skip the gym, meditations, or any other self-care routines for the sake of productivity.

Also, don’t forget to spend time with family and friends. It’s not a race and doing these things will actually help not hinder you on your path.

Take micro-breaks when needed to restore energy and relieve stress. My favorite method is called the Pomodoro technique.

You work for 25 minutes straight then take a short 3-5 minute break and repeat. After you do 4 rounds, you take a longer 30-60minute break. You can download free apps for this on your smartphone.

I like to alternate between standing and sitting down when I’m working on my laptop. This helps improve blood flow and prevent back issues from sitting all day.

It’s also a good idea to incorporate min work-outs or yoga sessions on breaks. It really helps to boost your energy and creativity. I highly recommend it.

6. Overcoming the Fear of Failure

Fear of failure is the number one destroyer of dreams. Most of us work in passionless careers as a result of this fear. This gives us the security of a steady paycheck to afford the things that really make us come alive.

You probably tried a few times to monetize passion projects without much success. It seems like no one cares or no one’s interested. So you double down on your efforts and start taking courses to hone your skills.

You try again and put it out to the world only to hear the sound of crickets chirping. This feels like your soul’s been crushed and you just give up and continue with your passionless job.

You start to believe that no one will pay you for your passions and the people who get paid for what they love to do are just special. Sounds familiar?

The truth is that they are no more special or talented than you or I. They just learned to change their mindset to an empowering one that helped them stay the course until they succeed.

If you must… walk, crawl or drag yourself forward. Just don’t give up! The road to success takes more time and effort than you realize.

However, you can find comfort in knowing that everyone starts off totally clueless in the beginning. They just learned to “fail their way to success. The more mistakes you make, the more you learn what doesn’t work.

That’s how you discover all the tricks, shortcuts, and skills it takes in the process. Learn to embrace failure and to enjoy the journey.

Look at it as a challenge instead of a chore and try to find flow in the workload. Appreciate all the wonderful lessons you are learning and how you are growing on the inside.

“When you change the way you look at things, the way you look at things change” Wayne Dyer.

Pretty soon, instead of getting tired or stressed out, you become energized and invigorated by the process. Slowly but surely you will accomplish your Ikigai by applying this winning strategy!

                               Don’t quit, keep going and you will get there eventually!

7. Find a Mentor

Finding an amazing mentor will help you fast track your efforts through learning from their mistakes. They can also inspire you to grow into the person you were meant to be.

No matter what you’re into, someone’s already been there, done that, and bought the T-shirt. Finding an amazing Mentor is a great way to ” stand on the shoulder of giants.”

It can shave off years of mistakes and pitfalls that you may encounter on your journey. If you have a few mentors already, congratulations, you’re on the right path!

If not, I’ve written a great article to help you find an awesome mentor here

So in closing, I wish everyone the best of luck in realizing their Ikigai. I hope that you can utilize some of the tips I’ve learned on my own journey.

How else do you like to follow your Ikigai? If you have some inspirations or tips of your own to share, please feel free to leave them in the comments below!