If you enter a great church, you immediately sense a distinct difference between the “world” you’ve just left, and the “world” you’ve just entered. This is not by accident. Great thought and care is invested in the design of those buildings to mark a difference between “the world” and “the Kingdom of God.”

The services themselves are quite grandiose with the incense, the chanting, the prayers, the ornate vestments worn by the priests. 

Perhaps there’s a giant pipe organ with a professional organist playing one of Bach’s great pieces written to make mankind aware of a higher Power than what we interact with ordinarily on this earth.

It’s all a bit intimidating if you’re not accustomed to it. Maybe a better word to use is “exotic” if you’re experiencing it for the first time, or don’t experience it regularly.

But it’s all quite down to earth when you look beyond the superficial elements, essential as they may be. Those priests are just regular people beneath their robes, and they’re the first to say so. They deal with the same issues we lay people deal with.

This is kind of how I think of the term Ikigai. It sounds exotic to us Westerners who have been fed a steady diet of fast food and the NFL from childhood, but it’s quite practical and down to earth once we ask real questions to determine our own Ikigai. 

I will share a bit of how I view my own Ikigai. There was a time in my life when performing music was my Ikigai, or at least what I thought it was at the time. But I realized there are other interests, passions deep within that went beyond blowing air through a trumpet. Interviewing people, narrating audiobooks, writing emails and sales letters.

I realized my Ikigai is to tell stories, be it through a song played on my trumpet, sung from my voice, or an interview published on a podcast.

It’s a more well-rounded and comprehensive worldview that is far more fulfilling than playing Haydn’s trumpet concerto. 

Of course I still play Haydn’s concerto, but not just for the sake of doing it. It’s all part of sharing a more grandiose story - my story. And making grandma happy is a pretty good reason to play it too :)

Others within my world, i.e. my list of email subscribers have similar stories. 

The modalities are different. For me, it’s a microphone, a trumpet and an internet connection. For you it’s most likely something else entirely. 

But the goal is the same: to live a life of purpose and meaning that transcends “The Plan” foisted on us by the media and Big establishments in our culture. 

Those people have their own agenda, and it has nothing to do with you living out your Ikigai.

If there’s one thing I’d want you to take away from this whole discussion on Ikigai is to never limit yourself because of age, experience (or lack thereof), or any other reason.

You were put on this earth for a reason. All the experiences you’ve had to this point, trivial as they may seem in hindsight, could very well have been the prep work for your Ikigai to come into focus and get to work!