For a successful career, find your Ikigai

You can find a job that you love, are good at and pays well.

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You can find a job that you love, are good at and pays well.

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Your job is one of the two¹ external factors that heavily influence your life. Therefore it is worthwhile to put a lot of effort into finding the perfect one. One of the facts that continue to surprise me is the variety of jobs available in the job market. If I look at 60 of my friends who were in my undergraduate class, after 10 years almost all of them are working in different roles, in different geographies, in different industries, that pay very differently, requires different skills, and provide varying levels of job satisfaction.

The perfect role for you exists out there and you have all the reasons to look for it. Ikigai refers to something that brings fulfillment, and a fulfilling career is worth working for. Below is a guide to help you find your Ikigai role.

Income - Pays well

Familiarize yourself with the multitude of roles available in the job market. You can start off by identifying a sector, say technology, and talk to 2 people with a couple of years of experience to develop your list². In terms of pay, you can use salary comparison websites(PayScale, levels.fyi) to develop a sense of the salary range. The other side of this is looking at the number of openings for the said role. You can plug the role into a job board(Indeed, LinkedIn) and see how many openings are currently available. You now have a list of the jobs out there and their pay range.

Skill - Are good at

This is probably the trickiest of the three because it is relative.

You are good at a task if you can do it better and easier than the majority of your peers. You can look out for any pattern where people congratulate you for work well done, on multiple occasions. This could be something specific like debugging code or something generic like leadership skills. Trying out different things is a good strategy to unearth what you are good at³.

Try out programming(LeetCode, HackerRank, Kaggle), sales(refer HubSpot), writing marketing copy(you can use websites like Hemingway App to refine), leading a group project, or interning as a product manager. Now no one is going to be good at something at the get-go, but you can feel and see the difference at the rate at which you are getting good. External validation is a prerequisite for you to objectively evaluate this subjective matter⁴. You now have a reasonable list of tasks at which you are good at.

Passion - Love

Have you ever done something where you felt energized after doing it? Then it is probably something that you love doing. This is what typically gets referred to as your passion.

Now, what do you feel about doing some necessary tedious tasks associated with the activity that you love? If you are excited about those necessary tedious tasks, your activity makes the cut. I for one, love presenting to a crowd(an activity that I love) and will happily put in the time required to refine a deck for it(a tedious task).

Trying out different things is a recipe for success here too. You now have a list of things that you love.

Once you have the three lists, you are in a good place to start your journey to find your Ikigai role. And it is okay to take your time finding it⁵. 

1. The other one is who you marry

2. Technology being the sector that I am most familiar with, let me help you with a starter list - Software Developer, DevOps Engineer, Product Manager, Project Manager, Solution Architect, Data Analyst

3. In his book ‘The startup of You’, Reid Hastings encourages you to ‘Plan to Adapt’

4. I enjoyed writing this sentence

5. I remember reading how it was okay to spend the first 10 years of your career exploring your options. I expanded this in another post.