I started to notice that a trend had begun: I was doing what I loved, and I was doing what I was good at. Focusing on those two inspiring aspects of my life made every day more fulfilling than the days on the survey crew. Every time I was ready for something new, all I needed to do was to find something that I loved to do and that I was good at. Music was my red-and-white-striped traffic pylon. It signaled me to follow in a meaningful direction. I focused on it. Each new experience in music felt worthwhile.
If you experience life as a meandering, drunken stumble that leads you forward, left and right, then backward, remain vigilant and keep a lookout for the signals in your life. They will provide you with direction.
They are easier to see if you know these two things: what do you love to do and what you are good at? Your answers are the first steps you’ll need to take to find your Ikigai.
Everybody Has Gifts
Everyone has special gifts. Your gifts are the actions that feel easiest for you to do. For some, that might be mathematics and problem solving. To others, it could mean arts and crafts. Are you good at sports but not at cooking? Focus on sports. Cooking is probably not your thing.
Your gifts are innate talents unique to you, but they might also seem irrational to explore. After all, if something is easy for you to do, then why would you choose to do it all the time? Society tells us that it’s better to fix our weaknesses instead of focusing on our strengths. Society is wrong.
According to studies conducted by Gallup through their CliftonStrengths service, your strengths can be amplified. When you put energy into developing your strengths, your growth is exponential. When you focus on trying to fix your weaknesses, your growth is slow, uninspired, and only modestly incremental. In other words, when you work on your strengths, you kick ass. When you focus on your weaknesses, you kick rocks.
The Clifton in CliftonStrengths is Don Clifton. When Don was a young man, he fought in the Second World War as a pilot. Don earned a Distinguished Flying Cross for heroism in the face of the enemy. In addition to being a brave hero, Don had heart. After the war, he focused on the unexplored psychology of “what is right with people.” Up to then, psychology had been primarily focused on dealing with psychological problems, or what is wrong with people. Don saw the potential for psychology to be a more positive science, one that could be applicable to the general public.
Don began to study what people did to become successful in life. His goal was to learn whether successful people shared similarities in their approaches to life. Don and his colleagues developed rigorous studies to interview people and study the new science of success. Over time, Don saw patterns start to emerge. He arranged the patterns into themes and referred to them as strengths. In all, Don found that people have thirty-four strengths. Each person has a specific order in which the strengths fall. Your top strengths are the ones you will kick ass with.
Don Clifton is known today as a pioneer in helping others see the best in themselves. His strengths helped us see ours. The benefit of his groundbreaking research is that, when it’s applied, people have the ability to wake up each morning and live life with a focus on their strengths. Imagine doing what you’re good at every day.
When it comes to kicking ass, CliftonStrengths is in a category of its own. The CliftonStrengths StrengthsFinder 2.0 book is one of the best-selling nonfiction books in history. It’s helped over nineteen million people find and focus on their strengths. It’s helped millions discover one part of the Ikigai map: do what are good at.
While it’s true that your strengths can lead you to amplified success, where does your happiness in life enter the equation? One of the directions of Ikigai is to do what you’re good at (your strengths). Happiness comes from another of the four Ikigai directions: do what you love.
How much of each day do you spend focusing on your happiness? What percentage of each twenty-four hours do you concentrate on doing what you love? When you were a child, a hundred percent of your day was dedicated to doing what you love. When you became an adult, your priority of experiencing a joyful day vanished. Being an adult means a focus on finances becomes more important. But does being an adult mean you have to become an asshole?
When John Kitchin was fifty-five years old, he believed he was an asshole. He was a successful, extremely well-paid doctor who lived in a mansion and drove expensive sports cars. He even collected exotic animals as a hobby. He thought he had it made. Then he started to go blind.
He began to notice that his vision was blurred in the center. It became so bad that if he looked at medical documents or X-rays, he couldn’t read them. Faces he had known for years were blurred too. He could look at a colleague dead in the eye and not recognize them at all without hearing their voice. John knew it was time to make a decision about the rest of his life. He chose to stop being an asshole.
What made John decide to stop being an asshole? It was a short, benign conversation he had at the hospital one day. He recalled a cheeky chat with an elderly gentleman he had met one time in a cafeteria. John stood patiently in line behind the old man as he piled more and more food items on his plate. John smiled and asked the old man how old he was. “Ninety-three,” the old fella answered. John took one more deep step into the conversation.
He quipped, “How does a strapping young man like me get to be an old codger like you?” The old man’s answer stuck in John’s mind like a red-and-white-striped pylon at a fork in the road.
“Do what you want to!” he snorted.
As John stood at the sudden fork in the road ahead of him, he saw himself taking one of two paths. One path was suicide. The other path was to take the old man’s advice to “Do what you want!” John chose to do what he wanted to do. Of all things, he chose roller skating.
Despite the financial success he had found throughout his medical career, he wasn’t really happy. He spent each day focused on nothing but financial success, and no time at all focused on his spiritual happiness. He realized that when he was a kid, spiritual joy had been his only focus. He wanted to be like a kid again.
John strapped on a pair of rollerblades and started gently gliding up and down the sidewalks along the beaches of San Diego. It was pure bliss. He felt joyful like a kid again. There was something about the push of one foot and the glide of the other that put him into a perpetual meditative feeling of ecstasy. It was as if he were skating in slow motion. The grin on his face had a certain wonder about it. He skated day and night.
As the year passed, John’s presence did not go unnoticed. The locals along the beach started to recognize the man who would skate with an always present look of surprise on his face. The locals started to call John Kitchin Slomo. Who is this man? What’s his story? Why does he do what he does? They appreciated him.
John’s new life as Slomo allows him to live