IKIGAI will not help you find your vocation
But it is a useful tool at an earlier stage of identity formation
Welcome entrepreneurs! I’m so glad you’re here.
I’ve been working at the level of identity quite a bit over the past few years, as I’ve transitioned to a life of deeper meaning, and gotten closer to living my vocation.
During this transition I found it really tempting to try to define myself at various points. If I’m not Ryan-the-unicorn-CEO, well, then maybe I’m a coach. Or maybe a writer. Or maybe, simply, a good, useful person.
Each of these identities felt right at the time – super useful, and closer to home – but ultimately each proved as artificial as the last.
Today I want to explore this impulse to define ourselves, and uncover how it hinders our ability to unfold into who we really are.
IKIGAI will not help you find your vocation.
You’ve probably heard of IKIGAI. Maybe you’ve also heard of the Hedgehog method. These are two of the most popular methods used today to help people find their vocation.
They seem useful. But if you’re really interested in finding your vocation, they’re distractions.
IKIGAI is to vocation what the Church is to God. That is to say, useful for some, in providing structure and an external sense of validation that you’re doing the Right Thing. But ultimately a concept and structure that has very little to do with the real thing.
If you follow Church teachings, it becomes an external authority that gives you some sense that things will turn out ok, that you’ll be happy. The Church is an understandable thing, an icon if you will, representing (but failing to really capture) something much bigger. And if you follow what the church says, for the most part you’ll be happyish. At least you’ll have someone telling you you’re doing it right.
This is IKIGAI. It’s a well thought through model, logical, that if you complete it will spit out a form that says what you should do. And it uses Science (and has an exotic Japanese sounding name), so it’s easy to assume it’s legit. And if you do the work, and then follow its instructions, you’ll probably end up doing something that you don’t hate. Maybe you even love it some days.
But you won’t find your Vocation.
Vocation, like God, is way bigger than your logical mind can possibly capture on paper.
As an AC/DC roadie aptly put it, “God is the name of the blanket we throw over the mystery to give it shape.” God is beyond our ability to comprehend, because our tool for comprehension (language) isn’t up to the task. We can get close, sometimes, primarily using metaphors, but ultimately words all fall short of the real thing.
God, you have to experience. God, you have to connect with using a part of yourself, deep inside, that is beyond words. Both infinitesimally small, and also as big as the Universe. You can’t understand God, but you can feel it (him?/her?/pronouns are complex). Some of you may not have felt this yet, so you’ll have to take my word for it. Or not. You could also choose to believe that because you haven’t felt something, it can’t possibly be real for the millions who have.
And it’s the same with Vocation. You can’t understand vocation, because vocation is bigger than your comprehension. Vocation is bigger than words, so any amount of words attempting to explain vocation, or exercises and concepts helping to clarify vocation, will ultimately fall short of the real thing. They can provide direction, sure. But they’ll never show you your calling.
Actually, as far as words go, “Calling” is a good one as it relates to vocation. It doesn’t capture it, but it at least gestures in the right direction for what the process is actually like.
You don’t discover your vocation. You don’t find it. You experience it. And the experience is not exactly like being called, but that’s about as close as words can get to it. You are called, in a way that can’t be accurately described to another person but is nevertheless 100% clear to you (even if it scares the shit out of you and even if you want to deny it), and within that calling is where you’ll find your vocation.
The calling doesn’t come with a fun and useful-seeming model. More likely it comes vague and incomplete. A word (because that’s the only tool our limited brains have to work with), coupled with a feeling of Rightness. You find your vocation by listening to that vague and incomplete calling, and following it.
For me, it started with a simple word, “write.” And that word means nothing really, certainly not something that guaranteed me the mountains of success and money and happiness I’d hoped for. When I first had the sense that what there was to do was write, it actually seemed overwhelming. A pain in the ass, and something terribly impractical. And yet, undoubtedly (if I was honest with myself), True. For me.
That’s what it was like for me to be called. That’s what it feels like to experience vocation, as far as words will take me. It didn’t get any clearer for a while, either. For a while I was just all writing every day, and wondering what the hell I was doing that for. But then, in all sorts of weird serendipitous ways, my writing touched people and made its way around the Internet and before you knew it I had a coaching practice and employees and all sorts of crazy shit that I didn’t plan.
That’s what it feels like to be living your vocation. It feels like following what the deepest part of you knows to be true (again, words fail, but Intuition, Divine Guidance, Inner Self can all work), without any ability to know where it’s all going, or whether you following it will lead you to be a billionaire or living in a van by the river. Vocation doesn’t really care about what the market thinks (although I’m making more money living my vocation than I ever did with a concrete career strategy).
Vocation is a long, winding road, with switchbacks such that you can never see beyond what’s right in front of you. And following it is all sorts of frustrating because you just want to know WHERE THE HELL IT’S GOING and WILL I BE OK AT THE END (or at least I did. Do). But if you follow your vocation, that thing that you know to be capital-T true about yourself and what you have to contribute to this world, that thing you might already know, reading these words, if you follow that thing you get to live your life. And if you don’t, you get to live someone else’s.
And once you’ve been called, any other life will not satisfy you.
“Consciousness is always only a part of the psyche and therefore never capable of psychic wholeness: for that the indefinite extension of the unconscious is needed. But the unconscious can neither be caught with clever formulas nor exorcised by means of scientific dogmas, for something of destiny clings to it—indeed, it is sometimes destiny itself.” – Carl Jung
Valiant an effort as IKIGAI is, you’re not going to be called to your vocation by running a process that someone in Japan figured out (or America, or wherever).
But then, how do you find your vocation?
The answer is that you don’t do anything. Like falling asleep or sneezing or experiencing God, the conditions simply have to be right, and then vocation happens to you. You can’t effort your way to being called. The call comes to you.
Some of you already have been. Some of you know, deep down, what there is for you to do. You might not understand it totally, but when you’re quiet, when you’re by yourself and there’s no TV or phone, you have your own words. “Write.” “Solve climate change.” Whatever. You’re probably really good at tuning that calling out because it’s quieter than the hubbub of regular life.
But it isn’t going away. Your choice is only whether to answer it now, or wait a bit. No foul either way. It’s your life. Some never answer the call, and that’s not wrong. Just keep in mind that you only get one life. One chance to answer the call. To follow that vague summons emerging from within you, and discover what life you’re meant to lead.
And then, some of you have no idea. And that’s ok, too. That just means the conditions aren’t yet ripe. You haven’t experienced enough. You haven’t expressed yourself enough. You’ve disconnected from yourself, and you need to do the work to reconnect. To learn to respect, appreciate, and love yourself enough to look for what you actually want out of life. Not for what you think will fix your brokenness.
Some of you have work yet to do. And that’s ok, too. Part of the journey.
Maybe some of that work even involves doing work on your own IKIGAI. Or, heck, going to Church. It’s all valuable stuff. It all has the opportunity to point you in a generally useful direction.
Just don’t mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself.
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I'm glad your vocation included writing because I/we get to benefit from your thoughts and insights. I have been wrestling with meaning vs. making. The tension comes in the need to "make" an income. Ideally the two align, but what happens when they don't?
It's funny, I often credit a particular purpose discovery work (a workbook that I'll not mention) as the source of what led me to the vocation of coaching. But, as I read this piece a moment of honesty bubbled up. That's not true. It never was true. What's really true is that all of the formulaic elements of that workbook kept landing me in the wrong place.
At the time, I had pages of purpose descriptions that fit like wetsuits on a flock of unshorn sheep. I was ready to abandon the project as a fail, but then something popped.
Pushing aside the noise of the process, I blurted out what felt more like an accurate statement. It was accurate, that's for sure. It was true about me, even though I had no idea what it meant for what work I was called to do. That took a little longer to connect the dots.
The point is that it took about 47 years of life, a workbook, and something I'll never understand to tease this thing out. I'm still teasing it.
Cheers for the read, Ryan.