Ikigai is not a four-circle diagram: where the idea really comes from, and why the original is smaller and easier to reach

Search for ikigai and you will meet a diagram of four circles straight away: what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. Where all four overlap is labelled ikigai, your reason for being. It is attractive, memorable, and appears in thousands of career talks. It is also not Japanese.

Where the diagram came from

The original four circles were drawn in the early 2010s by a Spaniard, Andrés Zuzunaga, to illustrate the idea of purpose. There is no word ikigai anywhere in his diagram.

In 2014 a British entrepreneur, Marc Winn, wrote a blog post that took the diagram, replaced the word in the middle with ikigai, and told a story about long-lived Okinawans. The post spread fast. Winn later acknowledged that he had simply combined the two and had not studied the Japanese concept in any depth.

In Japanese, ikigai joins iki, to live, and gai, worth or value. The nearest meaning is "what makes life worth living", or more simply, a reason to get up in the morning. Nothing in the original meaning ties it to a career or to money.

A doctor and the patients on an isolated island

The deepest writer on ikigai was the psychiatrist Kamiya Mieko. She worked for years at Nagashima Aiseien, a sanatorium for leprosy patients on a small island in the Seto Inland Sea, where patients were separated from their families, many of them for life.

She noticed that under the same harsh conditions some people withered while others lived with real spirit. The difference was not who had a career, since nobody on the island did. It was who still had something to wait for, to tend, or to do for someone else: a garden patch, a half-written poem, a roommate who needed help. In 1966 she published On Ikigai, still regarded in Japan as the classic work on the subject.

Over forty thousand people in Ohsaki

In 2008 a Japanese research team published the results of following more than forty-three thousand adults in the Ohsaki area of Miyagi prefecture for about seven years. At the start each person was asked one simple question: do you have ikigai?

After accounting for age, health, smoking and many other factors, those who answered "no" had a clearly higher death rate than those who answered "yes". The question did not ask about job, income or mission. It only asked whether people had something that made their lives worth living, and they answered with whatever they had.

Everyday ikigai is much smaller

Asked what their ikigai is, Japanese people often name very small things: tending pots on the balcony, the morning coffee before the house wakes, a monthly meal with old friends, watching a grandchild grow. The neuroscientist Mogi Ken, in his book on ikigai, gives many such examples and stresses that a person can have several ikigai at once.

The four-circle diagram says you must find one perfect thing. The original says you can have many, and they can be very small.

The four-circle version sets a target almost nobody reaches, then makes people feel they have failed for not finding it. If your work is not in the exact overlap, the diagram quietly says you are living wrong. Yet none of Dr Kamiya's patients had a job or a salary, and many of them still had ikigai.

A five-minute exercise

• Write down three moments from the past week you would like more of, however small.
• For each, note exactly which part made it feel that way: the people, the activity itself, or the sense of being useful to someone.
• Pick one part and find a way for it to happen once more next week.

That is the whole method. It will not produce a poster for the wall, but it can change next week, which the four circles rarely manage.