Ikigai

The Japanese concept was shared with me by another user on here. I'd heard of "ikigai" before but had completely forgotten about it; back then it hadn't made nearly as significant an impression on me as it did recently.

In English it's basically "finding your purpose". Purpose is a lot more than just figuring out what it is that you want to do. It's bringing value to the world through doing what you love *and* what you're good at, and making a living while you're at it.

It's the balance of four elements.

I wrote a free post on Medium about it that you can check out here:

I think it's a shame that the English language is still lacking in some respects. We only have one word for love, and we don't have such a clear concept for finding our purpose.

I mean yeah, we can figure out how love is being used from context, but I think we'd benefit from actually defining different words and meanings, because words don't just impact how we communicate. They also fundamentally change the way in which we view and understand the world. That's why ideas are so powerful. And words represent ideas.