Ikigai and Lucky Guys
Writing fiction is tough!
My story last week, Down With AQI, got mistaken by many as a real-life experience. Which, given the state of the Delhi air, it could well be.
This morning, I was tortured by a blank screen for several hours, flirted with a few feeble ideas, and finally ended up thinking and writing about Ikigai - below.
But, this doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned fiction. I will labour away, and hope my imagination can build lots of daylight between itself and our smoggy reality.
IKIGAI
I have been talking to a friend, Apeksha Nair, about her plans for an ideation workshop with people thinking about their own start-ups. She thinks the Ikigai framework can be a useful way for participants to view their plans for entrepreneurship.
I agree: a business needs to make money, for which you have to be good at your work; you need to be passionate about it, else the rigors of running a business will exhaust you.
Does the world need it? This is a big question - I’m sure Thomas Matthew Crook, whose bullet took a slice of Donald Trump’s ear this July, thought the world needed to be rid of him. Even with more mundane businesses like tobacco, or gambling, ethical positions will vary. I would prefer to label this circle, “What is legal.”
Even while Apeksha put up her first notice of this retreat in Goa on LinkedIn, I was thinking of young people in Kumaon. How alien this framework would seem to most of them, how privileged. Both passion and ability are hugely enabled by opportunity. We give our children so many experiences by which to explore themselves - from jazz drumming to improv theater, scuba diving to creative writing, coding to public speaking.
“Find purpose!”, we can tell them, and the money will follow. For most boys and girls in Satoli, there is only one way to approach life, “Find a job!” Any job.
Be warned, Apeksha! If you allow me to comment on Ikigai at your workshop, I’ll crack a bad joke -
“Anyone who has the luxury of looking at Ikigai is a Lucky-gai.”
I’ve been extremely lucky, and while that famous Venn Diagram only began to circulate early last decade, it now helps me understand my own somewhat erratic career path in my twenties and thirties. I was a reasonably good manager, was well paid at my job, the work I did was legal (even if packaged snacks are not exactly what the world needed most), but I was not passionate about it. I took the exit route the diagram would prescribe, and followed my passion - passions, actually.
I tried my hand at a whole lot of stuff - advertising and script-writing, travel photography, documentary films, theater, promoting music, working with street kids… Much of this was never intended to make money, and the lines between vocation and profession were thin, but across the raft, monetary rewards were slim. After several years, my work in film and television began to gain traction; the film production company I formed with Sanjoy Roy could actually pay us a (somewhat) regular salary, and by the mid-1990s, we had close to 40 colleagues. Except, I was now back to being a manager. Which was definitely not my passion.
Life is complicated. I sorted it out by putting passion first. I’ll do anything I enjoy. Some of it makes money, much of it doesn’t. I’m good at some things - picking stocks for example; horrible at others - writing fiction, as the most recent exhibit. And it’s all legal, even if telling bad jokes is not really good for the world.
Like the one I’ll tell the young people at Apeksha’s workshop, if she hasn’t already told me to take a hike on the beach:
“Ikigai doesn’t work for people like me, for Messy-gais.”
As I read more about Ikigai, I learned that the famous Venn diagram is probably not an accurate representation of the Japanese concept. One commentator, Nicholas Kemp*, describes it as a Purpose Venn Diagram, which “creates the illusion that Ikigai is a lofty and formidable goal to achieve. In many ways, Ikigai is the opposite of this - embracing the joy of little things, being in the here and now, reflecting on past happy memories and having a frame of mind that one can build a happy and active life. It's not about professional success or entrepreneurship.”
The diagram at the head of this piece is credited to Mark Winn, who propagated and proselytised it, but I learned that it was created - in Spanish - by author and psychological astrologer, Andres Zuzunaga, in 2011.
If this diagram has acquired currency, it is because thousands of workshops and millions of readers have found it a useful framework, an “accurate visual representation of entrepreneurship.”
The diagram does not reflect the quiet abstraction of Ikigai, which Kemp illustrates by way of this quote:
“The word ‘ikigai’ is usually used to indicate the source of value in one’s life or the things that make one’s life worthwhile. Ikigai gives individuals a sense of a life worth living. It is not necessarily related to economic status.” Noriyuki Nakanishi
At its core, Ikigai is about finding happiness. Ikigai makes lots of room for messy guys like me, allowing that you can find meaning in more than one source, and that these sources change with you, with your journey of discovery, your path of self-reflection.
We all have Ikigai. Some of us are lucky that we have the time and space to keep unearthing its treasures.
If that's any consolation, you're not the only one. My sister and brother-in-law had an argument about whether it was fact or fiction.
Big Mi thanks for being upfront about fiction..hard to qualify fluid writing like my last experience 😂