“We all have an Ikigai. It's the Japanese word for 'a reason to live' or 'a reason to jump out of bed in the morning'. It's the place where your needs, desires, ambitions, and satisfaction meet. A place of balance.”
In this course, we will explore what it means to have a life purpose, how to find it, and what steps to take to nurture it. We will look at it mostly through the lens of Japanese culture. It’s never too late to find and/or nurture your life’s purpose, and although it can be a scary thing to think about, it is one of the first defining steps in pursuing what you love in life, living happier, and healthier.
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Purpose in a fast-paced world
Why do some people find their passion in life, and others don’t? A big part of the answer is because we live in a world where work and money get prioritized before a lot of things, and nobody has time for anything anymore. In this section, we look at ways to deal with those issues.
Defining Ikigai
This video introduces the concept of Ikigai and lays the foundation for the rest of the course. We take a quick look at how the Japanese people on the rural island of Okinawa live long, happy and healthy lives, and we then introduce how to adapt this lifestyle for people who have fast-paced lives and don’t necessarily have time to “tend to a garden and drink tea every day”.
Logotherapy: the Western Ikigai
We look at Victor Frankl’s Logotherapy, which is a very interesting take on living a purposeful life and taking control of your environment. “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Experimentation & Flow
In order to find what you like to do in life and what is part of your purpose, your reason for being, the keyword is “experience”. In order to achieve this optimal experience, we have to focus on increasing the time we spend on activities that bring us to a state of “Flow” rather than allowing ourselves to get caught up in activities that don’t provide much value to our lives.
Japanese Words & Concepts Around Ikigai
This section is mostly here to give you inspiration and ideas on principles you can follow in life. The goal is to dig a little deeper into the Japanese school of thought on what it means to live a good life and find your passion.
Resilience & Antifragility
Here we look at 2 of the key components of Ikigai. Resilience is the ability to persevere, to recover quickly from difficulties, to be tough. The Japanese definition of resilience holds in 5 words: Fall seven times, rise eight. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.
The 10 Rules of Ikigai
We close the course with a summary of everything we learned through the 10 rules of Ikigai as listed by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles in their book Ikigai: The Japanese secret to a long and happy life. We take one last look at some of the core concepts of Ikigai and Logotherapy, and we also remind ourselves that it’s completely fine to take a long time to find our Ikigai. What matters is to keep improving and learning in the process.
