Another task I did to think about what I wanted to do in the future was an Ikigai. Ikigai (生き甲斐) is a Japanese concept that loosely translates to “a reason for being.” or for getting out of bed in the morning. It is simply a Venn diagram with 4 connecting circles that ask questions about your self to workout what could be placed at the centre.

I have tried to loosely relate the sections together whilst keeping an open mind and not dismissing ideas. I can see now that my Ikigai most likely relates to the changing world and the issues it faces – climate change activism, connecting people in a non-disruptive way and trying to help people less fortunate than me, maybe in a lesser developed country.

The Ikigai is an interesting concept to me and one that I hadn’t come across before, it really helped me to focus on what I wanted to do but also relating that to how I could make a living. The Sub-divisions are truly relevant and have helped me to pin down what it is that I might want to invest into in the future.

One of the first tasks we had to do was to write a job description outlining what our perfect job would entail. This meant imagining that we had already been hired by a firm and were applying for a promotion. This was a useful exercise to me because it was really the first time I had considered what a job application might look like, envisioning my perfect job. I had previously thought about where I might want to go into and areas I might want to explore but never in this type of detail.

I learned that I would like to keep some sort of creativity in the work that I do and that I would also like a varied work load. Thinking about the sort of jobs I would like to do, I couldn’t imagine just doing the same thing every day and not having a creative outlet.