How to Find Your Purpose
and create a sustainable business on top of it
Happy Monday everyone!
You have been born one of a kind. That is your source of power. You already know what makes you unique. This is what you should use to create a career path.
And if you don’t know what makes you unique, this newsletter might help.
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Most people in life either are unable to find their purpose, or knowingly settle for something that is less. Here are few framework to help you figure things out.
Finding Your Ikigai
Ikigai is a Japanese concept where “Iki” means “to live,” and “gai” means “reason,”which translates to “a reason to live.”
Ikigai emphasises finding a balance between:
what you love
what you are good at
what the world needs
what you can get paid for.
You need to know where you lie in these 4 territories before settling on a career path.
This is similar to building startups. You never start by an idea → you always start with a problem.
Here, you don’t start with the reason your career might become fulfilling → you start with what you love doing.
To achieve a sustainable business model for your startup you need everything checked on this list, but the love for the field. However to not end up miserable, you need all 4 aspects.
This is a short exercise I created to help you reflect:
What do you love? List 5 activities or subjects that genuinely excite and fulfil you.
What are you good at? Identify your strengths, skills, and areas of expertise.
What does the world need? Are there any future trends you foresee?
What can you be paid for? Think about how you can monetise your passions and skills.
List 2–3 broad areas or industries that align with the intersection of your Ikigai.
This should give you a general idea what industries you might end up either working in or disrupting with your new startup (of course this is just a simple starting exercise, you must do a more thorough research).
Remember, most of the things you take for granted did not exist 25 years ago.
Forms of Intelligence
Most people think about intelligence as mostly intellectual. When a friend asks you “Do you think John is intelligent?” you immediately start judging John based on whether he performs well at school/his job.
This is not how intelligence is measured..
.. ,there are many forms of intelligence:
The idea is that your brain naturally veers towards one of these forms of intelligence. It can veer towards two of them, but generally one of the kind dominates.
This is like a grain in your brain that’s going in a certain direction. You want to go toward that grain because that’s where your power will lie.
If you back in time and remember when you were 5 or 6 years old, you can maybe try to get a picture direction or voice inside you that was compelling you towards something.
For me it was always the abstract intelligence with pattern recognition and logic. I remember when I was 6, I was obsessed with trying to find patterns everywhere.
Albert Einstein for instance, got gifted a compass when he was 4 years old and got mesmerised. The idea that there are invisible forces out there in the cosmos moving that needle did not let him sleep.
Steve Jobs was captivated by the design of technological devices ever since he was a child. This led him to play for his passions and strengths and led to him becoming one of the most influential people on this planet.
What captivated you as a child?
Problem with this is when you become older, you stop hearing this little voice inside your head and you start hearing voices of other people.
Voices of your parents trying to nudge you to becoming a doctor, voices of teachers telling you are not good at math and you should focus on that, instead of on your passions.
When you become a teenager, it’s all about what your peers are doing. All of this noise hides your primal strength you once had as a child deep within yourself. You can’t hear it anymore, you don’t know who you are.
The most default outcome from this, is choosing a career path according to how much money you can make in the long run. This often leads to an emotional disconnection between you, and the work you are doing for the rest of your life.
When you are emotionally engaged with the work you do, your brain learns up to 5 times faster than if you are emotionally detached. You have more energy to stay disciplined, to go through the boring tasks, to learn.
Understanding this about yourself gives you a very important sense of direction, a compass what to do in life.
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