A Japanese concept usually translated as a reason for being. The version most widely shared in the West is a diagram overlapping what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs and what you can be paid for. The original idea is broader and less career-focused than the diagram suggests.

How do I find my purpose?

Start with a question rather than a framework. Would you be proud of how you have spent your time so far. The answer usually points at a gap, and the gap is more useful as a starting point than any diagram, which is better at organising an answer than producing one.

Do I need a dramatic experience to find purpose?

No, and it is worth saying clearly. Mine came from an illness, but the actual mechanism was sitting with an uncomfortable question, and you can do that on an ordinary Tuesday. The crisis only forced the question earlier.

What if I do not know what I care about yet?

That is normal at any age and especially early. Purpose tends to be found by doing things and noticing which ones you resent less, rather than by deciding in advance. Movement produces the information that reflection alone cannot.

Is the ikigai diagram accurate to the Japanese concept?

Not entirely. The four-circle version is a Western adaptation that fuses ikigai with a separate business framework. It is still useful as a prompt, but it is worth knowing it is not what the word means in Japan, where it often refers to small daily sources of meaning.

How I found my purpose after three weeks I cannot remember

Ziyaan Virji · February 12, 2024

This one is more personal than what I usually write, and less immediately useful. I am including it because it is the honest answer to why I do any of this.

A note before I start: it involves a period of serious illness. If that is not what you want to read today, how to get started on an idea is the practical piece this one eventually leads to.

June 2017

It was the last day of my first year at boarding school. I woke up excited to fly home to Tanzania, and relieved that I had avoided the dengue outbreak that had been going through the school.

I had not avoided it.

During assembly I started feeling weak. My head hurt, I was feverish, I could not keep my eyes open. I slept through most of the day, missed the nurse, and was woken at midnight by a friend telling me I had not packed and the bus left in five hours.

I slept the entire twelve hour bus journey. My parents took me straight from the bus to a hospital.

Nobody could work out what it was. We went from one hospital to another for four days. On the morning of Eid we went to the mosque and I could barely stand.

Then the results came back. My platelet count had dropped dangerously low and there was a risk of internal bleeding, so they admitted me. I spent the following days drinking an extract of crushed papaya leaves, which remains the worst thing I have ever tasted, and slowly got better. A week later I was discharged.

I wish that were the end of it.

The part I do not have

From the day I left hospital, I have no memory of the next three weeks.

I know what happened only because I was told afterwards. I behaved in ways that were completely unlike me. I sang and danced in the mosque. I filmed videos of myself as though I were a celebrity addressing fans, which is a detail I find funnier now than I did then.

Then one morning I woke up, looked at my phone, and thought the date was wrong. I tried to correct it. Then I opened my social media and found things I had posted that I had no memory of posting.

I called my parents. They came home and explained the previous three weeks to me. I did not believe it. For a few of the stories I had something like a visual fragment, the way you half-remember a dream, but there was nothing solid to hold on to.

Nobody agreed on what it was

Everyone had a theory, and no two matched.

The doctors thought the medication might have affected my brain. A psychologist suggested a manic episode and diagnosed bipolar disorder, which was later set aside as not fitting. Religious figures said I had been possessed. A Reiki practitioner said an entity had passed through me and my chakras were misaligned.

I did not know what to believe and I still do not. It took weeks to stop trying.

That is genuinely where the useful part starts, because at some point the question changed. I stopped asking why it happened, which had no available answer, and started asking something I could actually do something about.

The question that changed things

The thought that would not leave was this. If I had not come back from that, I would not have been proud of the first fifteen years of my life.

Not ashamed. Just not proud. I had done the things that were expected and very little that was mine.

Around then I came across a line that stuck: the energy is in the purpose, not the plan. Which was useful and immediately raised the obvious problem, because I had no idea how you find a purpose. It is not a thing anybody teaches you to look for.

Searching led me to ikigai, a Japanese concept usually translated as a reason for being. The version that circulates online is a diagram of four overlapping circles: what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. Ali Abdaal explains it in under a minute if you want the short version.

One caveat worth knowing, because I did not at the time. The four-circle diagram is a Western adaptation and not really what the word means in Japan, where ikigai is often something much smaller and more daily than a career. The diagram is still a useful prompt. It is just not ancient wisdom, and treating it as a formula will disappoint you.

What it gave me was a structure for a question I could not otherwise hold in my head. Working through it is what led to starting For the Menstruator, and everything in the seven years since has come out of that.

Why I am telling you

Two reasons.

The first is that if you have never sat with the question, it is worth an hour. Not the diagram, the question underneath it. Would you be proud of how you have spent your time so far. It is uncomfortable and that is what makes it useful.

The second is more important. I did not need the illness. The illness forced the question earlier than I would have asked it, and that is the only thing it did. You can ask it on an ordinary week, without anything going wrong, and get to the same place with considerably less papaya leaf extract.

And if you are currently in the middle of something hard and cannot see what it is for, I am not going to tell you it will make sense later. Sometimes it does and sometimes it does not. What I would say is that the meaning is not sitting inside the event waiting to be discovered. It gets made afterwards, by you, out of what you decide to do next.

If you have a rough version of what you care about but have not acted on it, how to get started on an idea is the next step. If you have been holding a setback and cannot tell yet what it meant, maybe so, maybe not.

I still do not know what happened to me in 2017. I know exactly what it changed.

Frequently asked questions

What is ikigai?: A Japanese concept usually translated as a reason for being. The version most widely shared in the West is a diagram overlapping what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs and what you can be paid for. The original idea is broader and less career-focused than the diagram suggests.
How do I find my purpose?: Start with a question rather than a framework. Would you be proud of how you have spent your time so far. The answer usually points at a gap, and the gap is more useful as a starting point than any diagram, which is better at organising an answer than producing one.
Do I need a dramatic experience to find purpose?: No, and it is worth saying clearly. Mine came from an illness, but the actual mechanism was sitting with an uncomfortable question, and you can do that on an ordinary Tuesday. The crisis only forced the question earlier.
What if I do not know what I care about yet?: That is normal at any age and especially early. Purpose tends to be found by doing things and noticing which ones you resent less, rather than by deciding in advance. Movement produces the information that reflection alone cannot.
Is the ikigai diagram accurate to the Japanese concept?: Not entirely. The four-circle version is a Western adaptation that fuses ikigai with a separate business framework. It is still useful as a prompt, but it is worth knowing it is not what the word means in Japan, where it often refers to small daily sources of meaning.