Comparison is the thief of joy
When did 'your thing' stop being fun?
The Japanese concept of Ikigai tells us that our "reason for being" sits at the heart of four core drivers; each individual to us:
What you are good at
What you love doing
What you can be paid for
What the world needs
How much time have you ever spent contemplating your "reason for being" (let alone holding it to account against these four drivers)?
More significantly though, how have other people's opinions shaped these drivers for you?
We were told at school what we were good at (by teachers and measures and exams that aren't necessarily aligned with what makes you happy or what the world ACTUALLY needs).
What you can be paid for – well that is dictated by the marketplace. And the market is currently telling us that technology is replacing all the obvious routes to making money and making various professions and/or vocations obsolete.
What the world needs? Now there is an existential question. The echo chambers of social media reinforce a certain world view in order to gather clicks and impressions, but there is a wider, more nuanced world beyond the infinite scroll and the less time we spend outside, the more distant we become from what the honest answer to that question.
Do what you love or love what you do?
I skipped past "what you love doing" because, in theory, that should be the unwavering constant.
You know what lights you up, you know what makes you sparkle. The things that shifts you into 'flow' – that subconscious, effortless state of doing that, from an energy point of view, nourishes just as much as it borrows.
In theory.
And yet the nagging voices of the world, of the market, of society, carving their own interpretation of an answer on your behalf and luring you to fit in...
We'll pay you for what we think the world needs, and if you're good at it... bonus!
As for it being something you love... well that might be the sacrifice you need to make.
Three out of four isn't bad, right? Oh, and please don't look sideways. You might see someone doing what you love and wonder why it's not you.
Comparison is the thief of joy
It reminds you of where you are falling short in your Ikigai. It is the greener grass, the lure away from the safety and relative comfort of 'three out of four'.
What if we've got it backwards?
What if the teachers are wrong? Because they're working from a curriculum that was never built to measure joy, only to measure what could be graded.
What if the market is wrong too? Because it rewards what's currently in demand, not what's actually meaningful. Those two things overlap sometimes. But not often.
And what if those two 'mis-directions' are pulling against (and creating tension around) what the world actually needs?
What if the world simply needs more joy? More people doing the thing that lights them up, doing it well, and letting that be enough of a starting point. What if we started there instead?
Congruence, not compliance
In my recent podcast Master Coach Angela Cox, Angela talked of finding congruence between your actions and your values. Only when you are truly aligned with who you really are (letting go of the societal, schematic and cultural narratives that shape our perspective of what purpose should look like – someone else's narrative, remember) will we begin to find joy.
Because you can hit three out of four on your Ikigai and still feel a persistent, low-level hum of dissatisfaction, and not quite understand why. Congruence explains it. When your actions are shaped by someone else's schema, someone else's cultural narrative of an ideal purpose, you can tick every box on paper and still feel like you're performing your life rather than living it.
Letting go of that borrowed narrative is uncomfortable. It usually means admitting that a version of success you've been chasing was never at the heart of your Ikigai.
Start with what you love
What if you started with what you love, got properly good at it, and put it into the world in a way so honest and irresistible that people couldn't help but notice, and ask you for more of it?
Comparison is the thief of joy. So, protect your joy accordingly. Lead with it in your work. Make deliberate time for it. Learn from the moments it shows up and the moments it goes quiet. Build the story of your business around it, rather than bolting it on as an afterthought once the "sensible" three out of four are handled.
You might argue the market won't bend to meet you there. That the world doesn't owe you an audience just because you've found your joy.
Fair. It probably won't, not all at once, and not for everyone.
But it doesn't need to. You need a promise you can keep, kept consistently, for the smallest number of people who genuinely need to hear it (remember the Seth Godin conversation around what great marketing is – I referred to in a recent blog?). Start there. Let it ripple outward from that one honest thing, rather than trying to convince an entire market to want you before you've even worked out what you're offering.
Some will bend towards you. Some won't. That's fine. That was never the metric that mattered.
Stick with what you love, and build the skill, the story, and the offer around it. The rest is far more likely to follow from that than the other way round.
Mark Franklin is The Four Fears® Guy: a transformational mindset coach, speaker and author working with creative professionals and small business owners who are ready to close the gap between the business they have and the one they actually deserve.
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