Where are you on the Ikigai chart?

Where do you want to be?

What effort and sacrifices is needed?

Do you know what your Ikigai is? 

How do you get there?

Once you get there – is there another Ikigai that you need to achieve? 

Many people aspire to be more than they are, but most don’t.

To achieve change requires sacrifice and effort, and as the inertia of our default settings grows ever heavier with age, it is more and more difficult to change that status quo!

Everything requires effort and sacrifice to maintain: houses, yards, relationships, friendships, organizations, enterprises, roadways, social contracts, your body –everything. 

If effort flags, things fall apart.

As we get older – the weight of our default settings seem to  rise as our ability to generate the motivation , effort and desire to make sacrifices and change seems to decrease.

A human tends to have 4 stages of a work life 

Stage 1  – exploration 

When we’re young and just out of high school or college, we have very little baggage (unless we married and had children at a tender age), and so the effort to change–to move, change jobs, etc.–is significant but modest compared to future costs.

This is when we pursue our dreams, and rightly so: 

start a business, travel, break into the arts, film, music or move to Silicon Valley  to seek one’s fortune.

Few gain the success they hoped for and so most move on to some place and career that can sustain a livelihood, marriage, family, career or enterprise. 

Stage 2 – status quo 

Then a decade or so hence, the inertia has piled up and we sense our ability to make a radical course change is fading as the costs of change–the effort and sacrifice necessary to throw aside the inertia and gamble on a different path–is steepening.

Responsibilities, relationships, children, parents, employees, fear etc .

We feel that’s it’s ok that we are somewhere in the Ikigai chart

Stage 3 –  mid life crisis 

We sense it’s now or never, and this can manifest as a mid-life/mid-career crisis.

The experience of this crisis varies with each individual, but in some way, the individual discovers they cannot continue doing what they’re doing–they run out of the ability to keep making the sacrifices and effort required to keep their current life from falling apart.

In this crisis, there is no choice but to chance a major course change and risk the storms of the unknown.

Stage 4 – Retirement 

In an astonishingly brief blur, we reach the age of retirement – where we have no choice but to reappraise our inertia/default settings and our ability to turn the ship of our life onto a new course.

This re-appraisal can be a chance to have a more fulfilling life or pursue a long-suppressed dream. 

It’s little wonder than the retirement of one spouse can trigger a divorce, as one or the other partner decides this is their last chance to jettison an unsatisfactory relationship and seek another way of living, despite the risks and the losses such wrenching changes incur.

If one has ideas–for inventions, music, fiction, art, enterprise, organizations, way of life, sea change — the question in one’s retirement becomes: If not now, when?

Can we muster up the effort to make whatever sacrifices are needed to get our ideas out into the world before we die? 

You must not allow your ability to conjure up effort and willpower to fade – as when that happen – so things fall apart.

It is very difficult to maintain effort and willpower and motivation to achieve and change without the support of a partner, mentor, coach or group of people that you know like and trust! 

I have found that people and teams that succeed have the support of people around them. 

Who are your people ? 

One tool that will help you maintain that effort and willpower and motivation is to hone your ability to learn. 

Make it a habit to continually learn and explore .

Learn how to learn 

Find a group of people that you feel comfortable with to share this journey of learning and collaboration. 

Be the teacher  as well as the student .