Finding Your Ikigai

What is Ikigai?

Ikigai (生き甲斐) is a Japanese concept that roughly translates to “a reason for being.” It’s the thing that makes you want to wake up in the morning, the thing that keeps you going even when things get tough.

The popular framework describes ikigai as the intersection of four things:

1. What you love - what genuinely excites you
2. What you’re good at - your natural strengths and developed skills
3. What the world needs - how you can contribute
4. What you can be paid for - how it sustains your life

When all four overlap, that’s your ikigai.

But honestly, I think the Western interpretation of ikigai is a bit too neat. In Japan, ikigai doesn’t have to be this grand life purpose. It can be something small: your morning coffee, a walk in the park, the satisfaction of finishing a task well. The point is not to find one big answer to life, but to have something, anything, that gives your days meaning.

That said, the four-circle framework is still useful as a thinking tool, especially when you’re trying to figure out your career direction. It forces you to ask questions most people skip.

Most People Start from the Wrong Direction

I think most people approach their career by asking “what pays well?” or “what field has good prospects?” first. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s practical. But the problem is when you build your whole career around money or prestige without ever asking yourself what you actually enjoy doing.

You end up in a job that looks great on paper but feels empty. You start counting the hours until weekend. You get the salary but lose the energy. And after a few years, you wonder why you feel stuck even though everything seems fine from the outside.

I’ve seen this happen to friends. Smart people who chose a field because their parents told them to, or because the salary was high, or because it was the “safe” choice. Some of them are fine. But some of them clearly aren’t happy and don’t know why, because on paper they’ve “made it.”

The opposite extreme is also a trap. People who only chase passion without developing real skills or thinking about sustainability. “Follow your passion” sounds inspiring, but passion alone doesn’t pay rent. And passion without competence leads to frustration, not fulfillment.

Ikigai is the balance. It’s not just about what you love. It’s about finding the overlap between love, skill, need, and livelihood. That’s what makes it powerful and also what makes it hard to find.

My Experience: Finding Ikigai in Robotics

I didn’t plan to end up in robotics. During college, I studied electronics engineering and got exposed to many different fields: embedded systems, IoT, power electronics, telecommunications. I tried a lot of things and didn’t have a clear direction for a while.

But when I joined the marine robot team and started building actual robots, something clicked. It wasn’t immediate. The first few months were mostly confusion and frustration, trying to understand code I didn’t write, breaking things I didn’t know how to fix. But I kept showing up. Not because I had to, but because I wanted to.

It was the combination of everything I enjoyed: programming, building hardware, solving real physical problems, seeing something you made actually move and do things in the real world. There’s something uniquely satisfying about robotics that you don’t get from pure software or pure hardware. You write code, and a physical thing moves. You design a circuit, and it controls something real. The feedback loop between digital and physical is addictive.

It was frustrating, messy, and full of failures. I burned components, wrote terrible code, made robots that didn’t work at competition. But I kept coming back to it. That was the signal. When you keep coming back to something despite the failures, that’s worth paying attention to.

When I started working professionally, the feeling only got stronger. I work on robotics and embedded systems, and honestly, I don’t think much about the salary. Of course money matters, I need to live. But it’s not the primary driver. I don’t wake up on Monday dreading the week. I don’t constantly compare my salary with people in other fields. I don’t fantasize about quitting every other month.

I genuinely enjoy the work itself. Debugging a control system at midnight doesn’t feel like overtime when you’re actually curious about why it’s not working. Learning a new sensor or protocol doesn’t feel like a chore when you actually want to understand it. Reading datasheets on a weekend doesn’t feel like sacrifice when the project excites you.

That’s what ikigai feels like. You stop calculating whether the effort is “worth it” because the work itself is the reward. The money, the career growth, the recognition, those become side effects of doing what you love, not the goal itself.

The Trap of External Validation

One thing I had to unlearn is measuring my career by other people’s standards. In Indonesia, there’s a lot of pressure to have a “good” job, which usually means high salary, big company name, or a title that sounds impressive. If you’re in engineering, people expect you to go into oil and gas, or tech companies, or at least something that pays really well.

When you choose a path like robotics, which is still a niche field here, people don’t always understand it. You get questions like “can you actually make money from that?” or “why don’t you just go into software engineering, the salary is higher?”

At first, these questions bothered me. But over time, I realized that the people asking those questions are often the same people who are unhappy with their own careers. They optimized for salary and stability but forgot to optimize for fulfillment.

I’m not saying money doesn’t matter. It does. But there’s a difference between earning enough and earning the most. Once your basic needs are covered and you have some financial security, the marginal happiness from more money decreases fast. What doesn’t decrease is the misery of spending 8+ hours a day doing something you don’t care about.

How to Find Yours

I don’t think there’s a formula for finding your ikigai. But there are some things that helped me.

Pay attention to what you do without being told. What do you read, watch, or tinker with in your free time? What problems do you voluntarily solve? What YouTube rabbit holes do you fall into at 2 AM? That’s a clue. For me, it was always robotics videos, embedded systems tutorials, and taking apart electronic devices. I just didn’t realize it was pointing somewhere.

Try many things early on. You can’t find your ikigai by just thinking about it. You need to actually try different things and see what resonates. Join projects, take on side work, experiment. I tried web development, mobile apps, IoT, even a bit of data science. They were all fine, but none of them made me feel the way robotics did. You need contrast to know what fits.

Notice when time disappears. When you’re in flow and hours pass without you noticing, pay attention to what you were doing. That’s probably close to your ikigai. For me, it happens when I’m integrating a new sensor, getting a motor controller to work, or solving a tricky embedded systems bug. Time just vanishes.

Talk to people who love their work. Not people who are successful by conventional metrics, but people who genuinely enjoy what they do every day. Watch how they talk about their work. There’s an energy that’s hard to fake. Find people like that and learn from their path, not to copy it, but to understand how they found their way.

Don’t force it. Ikigai is not something you manufacture. It’s something you discover by living, trying, failing, and reflecting. It might take years, and that’s okay. I was well into my college years before I started to see the pattern. Some people figure it out earlier, some later. There’s no deadline.

Be honest about what you don’t like. This is just as important as knowing what you like. I learned that I don’t enjoy pure theoretical work. I don’t enjoy jobs where I never see the physical result of my work. I don’t enjoy environments where the goal is just to ship features without understanding the problem. Knowing what drains you helps you navigate toward what energizes you.

When You Find It, Everything Else Follows

The interesting thing about ikigai is that when you find it, the other elements tend to fall into place. When you love what you do, you naturally get better at it because you practice more, learn more, and care more about quality. When you’re good at something you love, people start paying you for it. And when you’re doing meaningful work with real skills, you’re contributing to what the world needs.

You stop worrying about whether you’re on the “right” career path because you already know. Not because someone told you, but because you feel it every day when you sit down to work.

I’m not saying it’s always easy. There are bad days, boring tasks, and frustrating setbacks. Sometimes you have to do things that aren’t your ikigai, like paperwork, meetings, or tasks outside your specialty. That’s part of any job. But the baseline is different. You have a foundation of purpose that carries you through the hard parts. The bad days don’t make you question everything because the good days remind you why you’re here.

There’s also a compounding effect. When you’re genuinely interested in your field, you learn faster than people who are just going through the motions. Over years, that compounds into deep expertise. And deep expertise in something you love is rare and valuable. That’s where real career security comes from, not from chasing the highest-paying trend, but from becoming genuinely excellent at something that matters.

It’s Not a Destination

Ikigai is not a goal you achieve once and then you’re done. It evolves as you grow. What excited you at 20 might be different at 30. The core might stay the same, but the expression changes.

For me, robotics is the current expression of my ikigai. The core is probably something deeper: the joy of building things that interact with the real world, the satisfaction of bridging hardware and software, the drive to solve problems that matter. Five years ago, that expression was building marine robots for competition. Now it’s building industrial systems for real applications. Ten years from now, it might be something else entirely. But the core will probably still be there.

The important thing is to stay connected to that core. Don’t get so caught up in job titles, salary negotiations, or career ladders that you lose touch with why you started in the first place. Regularly check in with yourself. Are you still excited about your work? Are you still learning? Are you still making things that matter to you?

If the answer is yes, you’re on the right track. If not, it might be time to adjust, not necessarily to change everything, but to find your way back to what gives you energy.

Find your ikigai. Or better yet, let it find you by staying curious, trying things, and being honest with yourself about what makes you come alive.