What Is Ikigai? A Reason to Get Up, Not a Career Formula

Ikigai is a Japanese word for a reason for being, whatever makes getting up in the morning worthwhile. It joins iki (life) and kai (effect or worth), and is written 生き甲斐 in kanji, the Chinese-derived characters Japanese uses (Wikipedia). The psychiatrist Mieko Kamiya's 1966 book Ikigai ni tsuite (On the Meaning of Life) helped bring it into wide use in Japan (Wikipedia).

Marc Winn, the blogger behind the diagram, defined it himself as "essentially 'a reason to get up in the morning'. A reason to enjoy life" (The View Inside Me, 14 May 2014). Neither definition mentions money, skill or what the world needs.

Examples that fit: a slow cup of tea before the house wakes, teaching a niece to ride a bicycle, a weekly football game, a half-built website you keep returning to, a job you would do for free. In our view, size does not matter, and you can hold more than one ikigai at a time. It changes as your life does.

Run two passes. First spend seven days noticing what you would miss, with money kept out of the question. Then put whatever repeats through four pass-or-fail checks. Copy the card into a notebook. It is our own design, built on the four questions in the 2014 diagram. It is not a validated psychological test.

Pass 1: seven evenings, one line each, no money allowed.

Each evening, write one line answering: "What did I do today that I would miss if it disappeared?" Tag it S (a small daily thing), P (a person) or W (work). On day 7, count.

• Pass: the same activity or person appears on 3 or more of the 7 days. That is a candidate ikigai.
• Fail: nothing repeats three times. Run another week with the same question. Do not edit lines to make them sound more useful.

For a wider seven-day look at how you react and work, see How to Build Self-Awareness: A 7-Day Test.

Pass 2: only for a candidate, and only if you want income from it.

The thresholds are our recommendation, not a published standard. A failed pass 2 tells you the thing is not ready or not suited to earn. It does not tell you it is not ikigai.

The diagram defines ikigai as the one spot where four things overlap, which quietly says anything outside that spot is not ikigai. That is not how the Japanese word works, and it is not how the diagram started. Winn took a purpose chart by the Spanish astrologer Andrés Zuzunaga and added one word (marcwinn.com). In his own words: "The diagram is his [Zuzunaga's]" (The View Inside Me).

JapanGov, the Government of Japan's own site, credits the four-category diagram to Winn (JapanGov).

Knowing the diagram is not authentic leaves you without a way to find what you have.

The stall most people hit follows from the design. The overlap of "what the world needs" and "what you can be paid for" is thin for many callings, so a reader who loves teaching, caring or making things can find the middle empty. Our recommendation is to treat "paid for" as a second question, as the card does, not as a condition for having an ikigai.

In one large Japanese study, adults without a sense of ikigai died at a higher rate than those with one. That is an association, not proof of cause. The Ohsaki Study followed 43,391 Japanese adults for seven years, during which 3,048 died, which we worked out as 3,048 ÷ 43,391, or about 7.0% (Sone et al., Psychosomatic Medicine, 2008, via Fujita Health University).

The study compares groups using a hazard ratio, which measures how fast one group dies relative to another over the same period. A hazard ratio of 1.5 means a 50% higher rate. For people without ikigai, the all-cause hazard ratio was 1.5 (95% confidence interval 1.3 to 1.7, meaning the true figure plausibly sits in that range). For cardiovascular deaths it was 1.6 (1.3 to 2.0). For cancer deaths it was 1.3 (1.0 to 1.6), which is not statistically significant (Fujita Health University record).

The 2008 result predates the 2014 diagram by six years. It is about having a sense of ikigai at all. It says nothing about matching four circles. That is our inference from the dates, and it supports the card's approach: look first for what gives your days a reason, and only then ask whether it can earn.

If your candidate is coaching, speaking or training and passes three or four checks, the next step is a small, dated test, not quitting a job. Most people who join us are working professionals looking for a secondary income, and the question they ask is the one on pass 2: could this earn?

We run a three-day Xtraordinary Speakers Academy workshop on launching a coaching business; the current dates and fee are on the registration page. It is a business-launch workshop, not an ikigai course: bring a candidate that has already passed the card.

To keep the experiment honest, set one number you can test, as in Goal Setting for Entrepreneurs: Pick a Number You Can Test. If the side income starts to squeeze your week, run the audit in Work-Life Balance for Entrepreneurs: Run a One-Week Audit First before you add hours.

To ask us anything first, use the enquiry form with your name, email, phone number and current situation.