Somewhere around 2017, a graphic started appearing in every LinkedIn post about purpose. Four overlapping circles. What you love. What you’re good at. What the world needs. What you can be paid for. Find the center, the caption promised, and you’ve found your Ikigai — your reason for being.
I’ve used that diagram myself. It’s clean, it’s actionable, it photographs well in a deck.
It’s also, as far as I can tell, not ancient Japanese.
I went looking for the original concept recently, and the actual scholarship on Ikigai — the word has been in use since at least the 14th century — doesn’t mention four circles anywhere. No Venn diagram. No overlap to find. The concept is older and considerably less tidy than the version we exported.
What Ikigai actually means
In the original literature, Ikigai carries two meanings at once. The first is concrete: the specific things that make life worth living — a garden, a grandchild, a painting, a long walk, an instrument you still play badly after thirty years. The second is a feeling: the sense of having already arrived at that aliveness — closer to the French joie de vivre than to any productivity framework.
Notice what’s missing from both: a column for income. A box for market demand. The four-circle version isn’t wrong exactly — it’s a career-positioning tool wearing a philosophy’s clothes. Useful for a twenty-five-year-old deciding what to build. Not built for what comes after you’ve already built it.
The trap inside the trap
Here’s the detail from the research that stopped me: one of the most cited Japanese psychiatrists on this topic, Tsukasa Kobayashi, draws a sharp line between Ikigai and what he calls Asobigai — pastimes. Gateball. Flower arranging. Writing haiku in retirement. Pleasant ways to spend time, he argues, but not Ikigai. Not the same thing as a genuine sense that your life, as a whole, has weight.
That distinction is one I keep coming back to. I’ve spent years informally helping founders and managers think through exactly this kind of reinvention — never as a formal coaching practice, just because people ask, and because I went through some versions of it myself. After a defining chapter ends, the standard advice is: take up golf, learn the guitar, finally read those books. All Asobigai. None of it touches the actual question, which Kobayashi frames almost violently: corporate employees, he says, often mistake their job for Ikigai — until the day they’re “replaced without difficulty” and discover they never had a real life of their own running underneath it.
So what do you actually do with this
Not collect hobbies. Not chase only the four-circle exercise again, now with different inputs. The original concept points also somewhere more uncomfortable: toward presence, toward the things — and the people — that made you feel the weight of being alive, before any of it had to justify itself by being useful, profitable, or impressive on a CV.
That’s a harder thing to design a framework around. It’s also, I think, a big part of the actual work of this chapter.
A quick correction, while I’m at it
Some of you replied to my last note here — the one announcing this newsletter’s new name — with thoughts on a transition retreat in Cape Town versus the Winelands, and on dates in early 2027. Thank you, genuinely, for that input.
Here’s the update: Cape Town is still happening, but later than I first suggested — most likely late 2027 or early 2028. In the meantime, a different option appeared faster than expected, somewhere I didn’t fully see coming: Bavarian mountains, in January 2027. More on that very soon.
Love the “replaced without difficulty” point. So the direction to find is one where you can't be replaced, even with great difficulty, I suppose?