My Ikigai Didn't Die.
It Grew Up With Me.

There's a Japanese concept called Ikigai.

You may have seen the diagram. Four overlapping circles.

• What you love.
• What you're good at.
• What the world needs.
• What you can be paid for.

In the center, where they all overlap: your purpose. Your reason for getting up in the morning.

The diagram looks like a target.

Find the center. Hit the bullseye. You're done.

For years, that's how I understood it.

The Target I Thought I Hit

I found my Ikigai at nine years old.

I was in the hospital with a type of arthritis. I remember the other kids on the ward. Some were going through chemotherapy, facing something much bigger than what I was facing. Yet they were going about their games and arts and crafts as if we were all one and the same.

No illness to define us. Perhaps only to unite us.

My rheumatologist was a middle-aged man with a gray beard and a warm smile. He examined my joints, tracked my progress, asked me questions.

And then there was the time he took my socks off to examine my ankles, and threw them back at me, calling them stinky.

I remember laughing with him. In that tiny moment of playfulness, I felt connected to him in a way that had nothing to do with his medical expertise.

That's when I decided: I want to do that. I want to be the person who helps scared kids understand what's happening to their bodies.

I had found my center. I had hit the bullseye.

I was the physician with the answers.

Done.

The Failure I Thought I'd Experienced

So when everything shifted, when I left clinic, when I became a medical educator, when I had to learn something completely new, I thought I had failed.

I thought I had lost my Ikigai.

I thought I was starting over from nothing.

All those years of training. All those patients. All those relationships built. Was it all for nothing?

If I wasn't practicing medicine full-time anymore, was I still a physician?

If I changed my purpose, did that mean my original purpose was wrong?

What I Learned at Harvard

I learned something at the Harvard Macy Institute that reframed everything:

We cannot find our Ikigai by looking for our Ikigai.

Read that again.

We cannot find our Ikigai by looking for our Ikigai.

It emerges when we ask the right questions. When we stop chasing the destination and pay attention to the journey.

The Ikigai diagram isn't a target. It's a living system.

Each of those four circles moves. What you love evolves as you have new experiences. What you're good at expands, and sometimes intentionally contracts as you deprioritize certain skills. What the world needs shifts with context and time. What you can be paid for changes with markets, life stage, and opportunity.

So the intersection, the Ikigai, isn't a fixed point.

It's more like the center of gravity in a mobile that's always rebalancing.

The Thread That Never Broke

Here's what I finally understood:

I didn't abandon my old Ikigai. I completed it.

That chapter was finished. A new one began.

The nine-year-old who wanted to help scared kids understand what was happening to their bodies? She's still here.

I'm still working on how we explain things to patients. I'm improving health literacy levels of patient-facing materials. I'm practicing communication with students in class. They receive feedback from standardized patients, reflect on what went well and what didn't, and then do it again.

One of my students recently taught herself to code using an AI platform. She built a research tool that could assess hundreds of patient materials for readability, something that would have taken months to do manually. She did it in weeks. She's won an award for that work.

I watched her and thought: Why can't I?

So I tried. I'm now building interactive learning tools for students. Things I never imagined I could create. Learning alongside them. Still asking questions. Still becoming.

The thread never broke.

The Questions, Not the Answers

Here's what took me years to learn:

When I was chasing answers, I could only see one path.

When I started asking questions, the paths multiplied.

What fills me up? What am I becoming? What would I regret not trying?

Those questions opened doors I didn't know existed.

In my work now, I take the same approach. I present problems not as failures but as puzzles, challenges we can work on together. My team and I ask questions, debate suggested answers, and ask more questions. We don't always find the final answer in those meetings. That's okay. That was never the point.

We're exploring paths. Weighing options. Knowing we can turn back and try a different road together.

With my students, I do the same. We don't always give them the final answer to a case. That's not the point. The point is teaching them how to ask the right questions.

Because creativity and innovation isn't about finding the right answer.

It's about asking the right questions.

The answer is something that comes to you. Not something you chase after.

The Permission

If I change, does it mean everything before was a mistake?

That's the question that haunts people standing at the edge of transformation.

Here's my answer: No.

Your Ikigai is alive. It's supposed to move.

You don't abandon your old Ikigai when you change. You complete it. You carry forward everything you learned, everyone you helped, every skill you built. It all becomes part of who you're becoming.

Permission to change doesn't mean you failed.

It means you're still growing.

You don't need permission to become someone new.

You need permission to recognize you've already been becoming all along.

If your Ikigai is shifting, and you're not sure how to answer what's calling, that's the work I do as an ikigai coach and career transition coach. Book a free discovery call if you'd like to explore what's emerging.

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