Find a Sword to Sharpen
On finding purpose & balance during the age of quarantine
There’s an old Japanese concept called Ikigai. It stands for ‘reason for being’, and it’s a lifestyle framework that has helped the Japanese find balance in life for centuries.
Ikigai says, at the core of meaning and peace are four principles: doing what you love, doing what you’re good at, doing what you can be paid for, and doing what benefits the world.
At the intersection of all four is a sense of fullness, balance, and belonging. The long sought-after state of purpose. The light at the end of the tunnel.
Well.
If your current occupation meets these criteria, I salute you — you’ve done what the majority of us have not.
And truthfully, I don’t blame us. As simple as it sounds, it’s absurdly hard to satisfy all four categories with a single occupation in the era that we live in.
A job that makes you money may not necessarily be contributive to the world, leaving you with an empty feeling. A role that you’re passionate about may be too financially risky for you to pursue full time. A job that truly benefits the world may make you miserable. The list goes on.
While it is rare to find the one golden occupation that will unlock our purpose, I believe our awareness of these four principles of Ikigai will open doors. With them in mind, we can still strive for a balance of the four with multiple activities.
It all begins with a shift in our mindset.
The thing that I notice about myself and the American Gen Z is that we’re obsessed with only half of the matrix — what you’re good at and what you can be paid for.
To determine whether something is worth pursuing or not, we perform a simple, one question analysis — “Is it useful?”
I remember during all of my breaks at school, I would always urge myself to ‘do something useful’, such as getting ahead on my classes or picking up Excel.
In constantly looking to ‘get ahead’, we start evaluating opportunities based on how much professional benefit it contains and ignoring the personal benefits. In that sense, one would rather spend their free time learning to run Facebook ads than picking up calligraphy, as one option has clear monetary gains and the other has no end result. As a result, the decision-maker would then miss out on the benefits of learning calligraphy, such as a deeper appreciation for language and a higher affinity towards the beautiful and elegant.
We are racing against ourselves at optimizing our own utility in the world, often at the expense of our enjoyment and appreciation of it. If you ever feel a sense of emptiness or a drifting quality in your life, perhaps it is because your lifestyle is unbalanced and you are putting too much weight on one side of your Ikigai.
Instead of spending ALL of your time on making yourself more useful to others (a la learning Excel) and earning money, consider dedicating a sliver of your time to yourself. There’s a lot of strength in doing something for yourself and only for yourself.
Hence, “Do what you love.”
Find a sword to sharpen, even if that sword isn’t conventionally useful or appreciated. As long as it speaks to you. The process of getting better at a hobby is in itself one of the luxuries of life. It takes only 20 hours for you to get competent at something. It takes 10,000 for you to master it. That journey in between 20 and 10,000 hours is something to be savored.
Alternatively, go do something that directly helps our community, and at scale, our world.
‘Do what benefits the world’
Perhaps your job doesn’t qualify as a saintly occupation, that’s okay. Volunteering at an animal shelter or scoping out a community project is a massively rewarding practice. Connecting with and more importantly, giving back to a group of people activates that warm fuzzy feeling inside of us that is unique to community work.
I think there’s a lot of merit to pushing yourself, investing in yourself, and living a ‘work hard, play hard’ lifestyle. Definitely not knocking that.
However, I think there is a difference between living a lifestyle that makes you happy and forcing yourself to conform to an ideal set by a culture or society.
Hopefully, the concept of Ikigai can bring a fresh perspective to what you’re actually doing with your time and help you find a unique balance that works for you.
That is all.
