A lot of us have likely seen the Ikigai Venn diagram — the one that promises a life of purpose if you can just find the sweet spot between what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. The four elements overlap at a word that feels like a north star: purpose.
It’s compelling. It suggests there’s a single intersection where fulfillment, success, and service all meet. And it looks like ancient wisdom — the kind of knowledge weathered and worn by centuries of use.
Except… it’s not. Well, not quite.
Often referred to as “the ikigai model,” the diagram initially created by Andrés Zuzunaga, a Spanish astrologer, and later repurposed by Marc Winn in a blog post around 2014, became a kind of western career planning tool. It was something to help people navigate personal branding, startup culture, and self-optimization in a western capitalist landscape. But to understand its power — and its limits — we need to be clear: it’s a transposition of the ikigai concept, not a translation.
Traditional ikigai doesn’t point you toward your next job title, nor is it about your market value. It’s about the small, often invisible threads that make life feel worth living every day. In the Japanese context, ikigai is a quiet force: the feeling of tending your garden, sharing tea with an old friend, waking to see the sunlight stretch across your room. It is a felt experience of life versus a singular sense of purpose — a daily resonance with meaning, however small.
While helpful, the Venn diagram isn’t ikigai in that traditional sense. I like to think of it as more of a western ikigai that provides a useful frame for us to consider career alignment. And for me, it opened a path toward something more useful than a path to the perfect career. It led me to questions that opened the door to a more personal inquiry — not just about purpose, but about the difference between what I’m paid to do and what I’m here to do.
From Job to Work
Initially, I was looking for answers on purpose because I was questioning where I was spending my time with my career. Even though my initial thought on ikigai was misguided, the subsequent understanding of the western ikigai sparked reflection that led me to looking back to the path that had brought me to the present. I began tracing the outlines of past roles, not just by responsibilities, but by how they made me feel. When did I feel deeply engaged? When did I feel drained? What made look forward to Monday mornings instead of the dread that Sunday nights can sometimes bring?
Patterns started to appear. I noticed recurring moments of energy and meaning that weren’t tied to job titles or industries. And from those moments, I began to abstract a deeper thread — a sense of my work, independent from any particular job.
What I landed on as themes in that thread were:
Reducing friction for people to get things done.
Creating equitable access to enable fairer distributions of power.
Giving people the opportunity and space to engage with the world in meaningful ways.
In short, creating better experiences for people in whatever they were doing or being a part of. This has shown up in my 30+ years in UX research and change management as I work with the web of connections in a situation to understand how people navigate pathways to achieving objectives; whether completing a purchase on a website or trying to situate a change to help them with adoption and compliance to expectations from employers.
These weren’t performative contributions. I didn’t consciously decide to give them. They were emergent — the parts of me that naturally surfaced when I was in alignment. The work that felt like mine, even when no one asked for it. The work that energizes me from within.
That’s when I realized: Your job is what you do for others. Your work is what you do for yourself.
A job is something you’re given — complete with compensation, expectations, and performance metrics. Your work is what you bring. It’s what feeds you. It’s what makes the job feel meaningful — and what remains when the job changes.
I found a lot of power in that because it gave me a sense of agency about my future. It made me more aware of my career choices and a way to engage with what I can control and influence while at the same time acknowledging what I must accept so that I can then find ways to bring things into alignment with my own sense of being in a way that resonated.
As an exercise, this not a quick thing, but one that I would encourage you to think about if you are feeling like you are not where you feel you should be or if you are asking yourself whether there are better ways to be spending your time. The concept of the western ikigai is a great place to start asking some really good questions to help you get there.
A Practice That Keeps Me Aligned
Once I had landed on my themes for what makes up my work, I turned to an exercise from Adam Grant’s Think Again to stay connected to that work and evolve it as I do with these three questions:
When did you form the aspirations you’re currently pursuing?
How have you changed since then?
Have you reached a learning plateau — and is it time to consider a pivot?
These questions help me become a better challenge function to myself and to check whether I’m acting out of momentum or intention — and whether my current path is still aligned with who I am today.
What I Gained from Western Ikigai
Western ikigai didn’t hand me a purpose statement. Instead, it gave me something quieter but more powerful: a framework and language way to evaluate my roles, decisions, and direction based on my persistent work versus more transient jobs.
The Venn diagram, as imperfect as it is, helped me start asking better questions:
Where does this job align with who I am?
Where is there friction between what I do and what matters to me?
Does this role allow me to live out the things I now know are central to my sense of work?
It helped me move from chasing the perfect job to looking for ways to align my career to my values in a much more sustainable way. Not so I can optimize my way into happiness, but so I can make career choices with clarity.
These days, I don’t think of western ikigai as a destination. It’s more like a compass. Not one that always points north — but one that always points home to me and my sense of purpose
Log in or sign up to continue the conversation