Things I want to change
Find your Ikigai
Steve Jobs used to say that the only way to do great work is to love what you do.
Whenever I have a conversation with friends or entrepreneurs I ask them what is it that makes their heart beat. What is it that lights up a fire in their belly. What is your true north ?
Increasingly however I realized that finding a passion is not enough if that passion doesn’t creates value for the world. I firmly believe in this concept and convinced that is key to the evolution to civilization 2.0 (where social currency is more important than $).
This — to make passion meet value — is perfectly explained by the concept of Ikigai:
Ikigai (生き甲斐]) is a Japanese concept meaning “a reason for being”. Everyone, according to the Japanese, has an ikigai. Finding it requires a deep and often lengthy search of self. — Wikipedia
My wife has taught me to find the beautiful in the little things, everyday. I hope I am doing a much better job at that today than I used to a few years ago — and still improving.
About being a Nexus
A few years ago, reflecting on what I wanted to do I came to the realization that as an individual I don’t scale. I can only make so much difference by being part of a larger network.
Companies have a much larger reach than lone individuals. Building a company — or working for one that has large reach — can make a big difference for many people.
The rise of the Social Startup
To me the global startup revolution is so much more about the ability to create mini-universes with the power to create positive tsunamis than it is about making money. I don’t advocate that profit should not be made or that investors shouldn’t get ROI but rather that companies can be deployed to solve large problems and make a big difference that can be measured in positive impact to the world — while still generating a profit.
This line of thinking is quite aligned with the one from Muhammad Yunus — Nobel Peace Price Winner.
Unprecedented technological capabilities combined with unlimited human creativity have given us tremendous power to take on intractable problems like poverty, unemployment, disease, and environmental degradation. Our challenge is to translate this extraordinary potential into meaningful change.
Muhammad’s story is remarkable in that as a professor in Economics he realized that theories found very little applications to lift people from poverty or solve real life issues.
When thinking about being a Nexus I came to realize that there are a number of ways of acting upon this concept — I went off to search for an answer.
I landed on the idea that Accelerators & Incubators act as an important launch platform to empower startup ecosystems and build them up to promote entrepreneurship locally.
I recently joined Startupbootcamp as an MD to further expand on this.
Helping others shoot for the moon and do something meaningful is as close as it can get to build something you find worth working on — I thought.
My journey has only just become and there are many other passions that I pinned down. I’ll keep on focusing and ‘staying aware’ to ensure I am always playing to my Ikigai.
About a year ago I wrote down a list of things I wanted to get involved with by supporting entrepreneurs or build directly.
It reads a little rough but publishing as it gives a good feel for what I am passionate about.
Looking back at it now I know i am far away by exhausting even a fraction of it yet I know it will keep me honest and forces me to live a life of intention.
- Make life sustainable everywhere on the planet (Plat-based Food + Water)
- Jobs: as robots free up humans time from jobs that don’t require creativity or skill, refocus human work on things we can do well
- Energy: Transform the ‘energy’ industry from *fossil fuel based* to technology-based where variable costs of fuel is ‘free’.
- Health: Improve quality of life for all humans around the world (prevention, behavioral changes, gene-medicine, nanobots)
- Inequality & Governance: spread the world’s wealth in a more equitable way
- Pollution: reduce pollution to a sustainable level
- Internet: Democratize access to resources and knowledge via the Internet /enabling p2p exchange of work/ digital and physical products everywhere (p2p trading, banking etc..)
- Education: Inspire and nurture a new generation of Humans
- Security: Make the world a more secure place everywhere
- Reaching for the Sky: promote space travel and set up colonies around the solar system
