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Ikigai, or “reason for being” in Japanese, refers to the intersection of what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. This inner quest can become a powerful driver of entrepreneurship, especially at a stage in life when one seeks to reconcile meaning, impact, and freedom. Finding your ikigai involves a degree of introspection, but also the right kind of support to help you move into action. Through the creation of an innovative venture, it then becomes possible to live your dream instead of merely dreaming your life.
For many women and men, the search for ikigai feels as aporetic as the quest for the great love. Since this article focuses on entrepreneurship, I’ll concentrate on the former. Let’s begin by defining ikigai, before exploring a few ways to find it through the creation and development of an innovative venture, be it a startup, an SME, or an intrapreneurial initiative.
The Japanese word ikigai means “reason for being.” It represents the intersection between what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. Finding your ikigai means synthesizing your passion, mission, profession, and vocation. If you succeed, you may no longer even feel like you’re working because you’ll be fully aligned with yourself, free from the burdensome connotation of labor that the Latin etymology of the word implies.
It takes a healthy dose of introspection and often several mentoring sessions to discover who you truly are and what you genuinely want. There are even personality tests that can help guide you toward complementary training, enabling you to develop new skills and broaden your horizons.
Key Questions to Help Define Your Ikigai
To begin with, you can try answering a few simple questions to identify a set of activities or career paths that might clarify your ikigai:
- What activities are most fulfilling for you? These could include moments when you support creative individuals, engage in dialogue with inspiring people, or explore new ideas.
- What skills are you recognized for? Perhaps you combine sharp analytical thinking with deep empathy, enabling you to tackle complex problems while remaining attuned to human uniqueness.
- Which societal challenges inspire you to take action? Some feel called by environmental issues, others by the need to bring more humanism back into professional life.
- How could you make a living from your talents? Perhaps by applying them to socially or environmentally impactful activities, at the intersection of your competencies and the world’s needs.
Answering that last question may point you toward entrepreneurship, a path that offers considerable freedom but also comes with significantly greater risk than traditional employment. As Henry de Montherlant once said, “Freedom exists: you just have to be willing to pay the price.”
Entrepreneurship: A Cocktail of Adrenaline and Oxytocin
If boredom is one of the greatest pitfalls in a life dulled by routine, you may be drawn to the unique mix of adrenaline and oxytocin sparked by launching and growing an innovative business. Multiple studies confirm that money is not the primary motivation for most entrepreneurs. What drives them is a desire for freedom and personal fulfillment.
On average, the founder of an innovative company is 38 years old, a stage that coincides with the infamous “midlife crisis,” a pivotal moment when many people feel the urge to reinvent their lives. This need for change becomes particularly strong when your current existence no longer reflects your deeper aspirations, and you begin to feel that your impact on the world is too limited.
After fifteen or so years spent establishing oneself professionally, many discover how stifling it can be to operate in environments where your initiatives are constantly constrained, often for supposedly “very good reasons.” Such a situation can lead to discouragement, or even inaction, which, although shaped by your environment, might still be held against you. Learning to swallow bitter pills and navigate contradictory expectations becomes a true survival skill in the salaried world.
The Risk of Taking None
For many, the dream of alignment clashes with the demands of daily life, where risk feels more threatening than liberating. Even though opportunities to create new ventures have never been more abundant, a mid-career professional must weigh dozens of factors before diving into entrepreneurship. Financial responsibilities such as family expenses and mortgage payments make the equation more complex than it was at twenty.
Starting your own business remains a risky venture, but it’s worth reminding those paralyzed by the idea that people who never take risks often end up working for those who did. Great entrepreneurs aren’t necessarily geniuses; they are visionaries who take calculated risks and who understand that entrepreneurship is their ikigai.
Get Support!
There are numerous training and support programs available to help you build skills and gather the resources needed to succeed in an entrepreneurial journey.
Incubators, accelerators, mentoring programs, seed funds, digital tools, collaborative platforms, and networking opportunities, all of these are valuable resources for identifying, structuring, and growing your business ideas.
At the crossroads of self-discovery and the desire to act, ikigai can become a powerful lever for embracing entrepreneurship in a new light. In any case, it is worth asking yourself the ikigai question, so you can live your dream rather than just dream your life. Reflecting on your ikigai is already a step toward crafting a more meaningful life, where the verb to work rhymes with freedom.
