Is Ikigai accurate?

It’s cool to care.
It’s cool to be ambitious.
It’s cool to live in the details.
It’s cool to have high standards.
It’s cool to want more than what is.

Document everything. Your highs, your lows, the 1 a.m. conversations with your best friends, the stupid ideas, the grand ambitions, and the painful rejections. Save it all, whether you share it or not.

Life zooms by faster than you think. One day you’ll look back and grin. It wasn’t always pretty. Most of it was confusing and overwhelming in the moment, but damn, you lived. You tried things, you failed, and you got back up. You trusted the wrong people, and found the right ones.

Documentation isn't just for nostalgia. It's proof that you've always been stronger than you remember.

No one talks about how peaceful life can feel when you’re obsessed.

12-hour days feel effortless.
Weekdays & weekends blend together.
You wake up. Log on.
And by the time you check the clock, it’s time to sleep again.

Runners call it the high.
Athletes call it the zone.
Writers call it flow.

Whatever it is, it’s beautiful.

This quote from Sun Tzu goes so hard:

"Be calm enough to avoid war, and prepared enough to finish it."

This hits…

When I was a junior in high school, I landed a role helping grow the social media for Z Fellows, a startup venture fund. One week, they flew me out to San Francisco for a startup incubator event they were hosting.

The cohort was filled with some of the most ambitious people I’d ever met. One person was building an AI personal shopper. Another was working on a robot chef. Someone else was somehow both a magician and a crypto savant.

When I joined their conversations, it felt like they were running mental circles around me. I spent the whole week thinking: I will never be as smart as these people, and I have absolutely no interest in competing with them.

That trip reinforced an idea that I haven't forgotten since. You can't beat people at their own game. If you want to win, you have to play yours. Warren Buffett once said, "How do you beat Bobby Fischer? You play him in any game, but chess."

For me, that meant doubling down on writing and content. The signs had been there for a while, I just hadn't connected them yet. 

I realized that my superpower was synthesizing ideas through the written word, taking complex concepts and making them clear and compelling.

Since that trip to San Francisco, I've grown my social media following to over half a million people and worked with many of my business heroes. It wasn’t because I was the smartest person in any of those rooms, I just found the game I could win.

So how do you find your game?

Most people will tell you to "follow your passion." I think that's incomplete. On the other end, others will tell you to follow the money and pick the career with the highest earning potential. I think that's equally bad advice.

If you chase passion first, you might pour years into something you love but have no natural aptitude for, and you'll get outworked by people who are both passionate and naturally gifted at it.

I loved basketball. I was obsessed with it. But passion alone doesn't make you an NBA player when you're an undersized, scrawny Asian kid (Jeremy Lin is the exception). Passion without ability is a hobby. Don't confuse it with your competitive advantage.

If you chase money first, you might land a high-paying job that you're not naturally wired for, and you'll spend your days grinding through work that drains you while getting outperformed by people who actually enjoy it. You'll be mediocre at something you don't even like, which is a trap, because the reward for good work is more work.

So if passion and money are both incomplete answers, what's the right way to think about it?

In recent years, a Japanese concept has become popular in the West called ikigai. Ikigai roughly translates to “a reason for being.” In the Western version of the idea, it’s usually illustrated as four overlapping circles:

Where all four overlap is supposed to be your life’s purpose. It’s an appealing idea. Who wouldn’t want to find the one thing that satisfies passion, skill, impact, and income all at once?

The problem is that the diagram makes the process look much cleaner than it really is. Most people don't know what they love yet. They haven't had enough time to become great at anything. And the world changes too quickly to predict what it will need ten years from now.

Trying to optimize for all four circles at the same time can lead to endless overthinking. People sit around asking themselves questions like:

And instead of moving forward, they stay stuck. In reality, most people don’t start with all four circles. They start with one.

The better path is to begin with what you’re naturally good at.

When you’re naturally good at something, you learn faster.
When you learn faster, you see progress sooner.
When you see progress, you enjoy it more.
When you enjoy it, you stick with it longer.
And when you stick with it long enough, you compound into someone who is hard to compete with.

Said differently:

Skill produces enjoyment.
Enjoyment produces consistency.
Consistency produces mastery.
And mastery eventually produces both money and fulfillment. Ta da!

Passion isn’t the starting point. It’s the byproduct. You don’t find passion first and then get good. You get good first, and then passion finds you.

Until next week,

Author of You Can Just Do Things

Ps. For those who are new, my story

Pps. My 2nd book will be available for pre-order July 22nd 😁😁

Ppps. New podcast.

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