After selling his business in 2020, the speaker stopped chasing a single purpose and instead identified three things that make him happy: working with people, doing future-focused work, and getting direct feedback. He argues that obsessing over one perfect ikigai wastes your life.
Chapters
So really quickly, there's this concept called ikigai. It's this Japanese concept of finding like what is your purpose, your meaning, what you're good at. Context, 2020, I sold this business. What happened was I just kind of became lost and I spent a couple years sort of looking for this ikigai. Then I had a conversation with someone that changed everything for me. They told me to stop looking for my purpose and to use a framework to find 3 things that made me happy. Number 1 for me was that I wanna work with people. I love being around people. I sit at home alone in this home office in Beverly Hills all day. I find it very, very depressing. So I wanted to work on that. Number 2 was I wanted to work on things that were enabled by the future, not disabled by the future. So that doesn't mean that I have to build an AI, but I don't want to have a traditional bookstore, right? I think that that's like the way of the past. All ships rise on high tide. And number 3, what was super important to me, I love feedback from the work that I put in. Ask yourself, what are the 3 things that are important to you that you can find in anything? And go find those things. Stop trying to find your perfect purpose, your Japanese icky guy, because to be honest with you, you can spend the entire rest of your life looking for that one thing and never find it.
