3 Discovering Your Ikigai: Finding Purpose in College and Career
Joel Gladd
Finding your purpose can feel maddeningly elusive.
You’re taking college courses and trying to figure out what comes next. Maybe you’re a first-year student at CWI weighing nursing against business. Or perhaps you’re still in high school and dual enrolled, already feeling the strange pressure to pick a direction before you’ve had much time to test one. In any case, the decision carries weight. What you choose shapes the next few years of your life, affects how much debt you take on, and influences which opportunities open up. No wonder the whole thing can feel paralyzing.
Purpose often gets framed as something you’re supposed to find, as if it’s sitting out there fully formed, waiting for you to stumble onto it. That framing usually makes people feel worse. The Japanese concept of Ikigai gives us a more useful way to think about the problem. The term translates roughly as “a reason for being,” and what makes it helpful is the structure underneath it.
What is Ikigai?
Ikigai gives you a way to think about purpose by holding four questions together:
- Doing What You’re Good At: Your innate and developed capabilities
- Doing What You Love: Activities that trigger flow states
- Doing What the World Needs: Societal pain points you can address
- Doing What You Can Get Paid For: Economic sustainability of your solution
When these line up, they create the kind of deeper satisfaction psychologists call “eudaimonic well-being.” That phrase sounds abstract, but the basic idea is simple. You feel like your life is pointed somewhere, and your daily work makes sense within that larger picture.
1. Doing What You Are Good At
The first dimension of Ikigai is figuring out what you’re actually good at. We all have strengths, whether we picked them up over time or they came more naturally. Think about a mechanic who can hear an engine for ten seconds and already has a hunch about what’s wrong. The work here is to notice your own version of that.
So how do you figure this out if you haven’t spent years tinkering with engines, or if your strengths feel less obvious? Start gathering evidence. A personality or skills assessment can help, even if it doesn’t tell the whole story. Then ask people who know you well what they notice. Friends and instructors often see patterns you miss. Maybe you’re the person who can explain a confusing idea clearly, or the one people trust when something goes sideways. Ask your instructors what they think you do especially well.
You can also look back at moments when something clicked. Maybe you explained a tough concept to classmates, organized an event, or solved a problem at work faster than everyone expected. Those moments matter. They give you clues about the kinds of abilities you bring into a room. Once you start noticing those patterns, you can make better decisions about majors and possible careers.
Identifying your strengths helps you understand your particular edge in the workforce. It gives you a clearer sense of the value you bring.
Maria discovers her talent
Maria’s working toward her Associate’s degree in Education at the College of Western Idaho. Like many students, she wasn’t always sure what made her stand out. Through a skills assessment, Maria discovered that she has a gift for taking complicated ideas and making them clear to other people. She can translate technical language into everyday language without losing the point.
That discovery pushed her to look at teaching roles in a more concrete way. She learned that instructional designers, the people who build training materials and online courses for schools and businesses, often start in the same place she is now. They rely on the same abilities she’s building. She has to break down complex information and write clear explanations. She also has to design materials and help other people learn. She also found that instructional designers in Idaho often earn the kind of salary she’s hoping for, with plenty of opportunities for remote work.
Instead of trying to become good at everything in education, Maria decided to lean into the thing she already does well. She started volunteering as a peer tutor in the college’s learning center, where she helps other students understand difficult material in subjects like biology and psychology. She’s also taking an elective in digital media so she can learn how to build stronger visual presentations, which matters quite a bit in contemporary educational work.
2. Doing What You Love
“Doing what you love” has to do with the kinds of activities that hold your attention so fully that you lose track of time. Psychologists often describe this as “flow.” You’ve probably felt it before. Maybe you were fixing something, writing something, building something, or helping someone through a problem, and for a while everything else dropped into the background.
Those moments are useful. They suggest what kinds of work feel energizing rather than draining. Maybe you’re the person who can’t stop tinkering with computers. Maybe you love helping your cousin figure out why their car is making that weird sound. Maybe you enjoy organizing people and keeping a project moving. These tendencies can point toward careers that will feel satisfying over time.
Say you’re fascinated by motors and machines. That interest could lead toward diesel technology, industrial robotics, or several other fields with solid job prospects in our region. But you still have to think clearly about how your interests translate into actual work. Loving video games, for instance, does not automatically point toward becoming a professional gamer. It may mean you’re drawn to design, systems, storytelling, or team coordination. The task is to interpret the interest well.
When you combine what you’re good at with what you love, you find your passion. Maria loves explaining complex ideas, and she’s also good at it. That overlap gives her a sense of passion around designing learning experiences that help other people understand difficult subjects. Passion matters because it helps sustain motivation. But passion by itself doesn’t carry enough weight. If you focus on passion alone and ignore the other dimensions, you can end up feeling isolated or directionless.
3. Doing What the World Needs
The third dimension of Ikigai asks how you might contribute to society. In practical terms, that means paying attention to where your skills and interests connect with actual needs in the world around you. This is different from simply following a passion. It asks whether what you care about can also help solve a problem, meet a need, or improve life for other people.
For example, maybe you care deeply about art. That interest could move in several directions. You might create educational murals, support community arts programs, or help people process difficult experiences through creative workshops. There are many ways to do this. The Treasure Valley needs all kinds of people. It needs teachers and healthcare workers. It also needs skilled tradespeople and many others. Look around your community. What problems do you notice? Where do people need help? Those questions matter.
When you combine what you love with what the world needs, you create a mission. A mission grows out of that overlap between your interests and other people’s needs. Maria loves teaching and helping others, and she also notices that the community needs more accessible education. That overlap gives her a mission around making learning more engaging and available. But a mission alone usually isn’t enough. Some pursuits feel deeply meaningful and still don’t provide enough income to support a flourishing life.
4. Doing What You Can Be Paid For
Passion won’t keep your refrigerator stocked or your car running. A mission can feel noble and still be hard to sustain if it doesn’t provide enough income. So this dimension matters. Work has to support your life.
The goal is to find work that pays the bills without draining you dry. Take Jordan, a former CWI student who loved being outdoors. Instead of chasing a low-paying job as a hiking guide, he turned that interest toward land surveying. Now he spends his days outside while earning solid money helping construction projects and property developers.
The Treasure Valley job market includes some surprisingly strong options that students often overlook. People hear about software jobs in Boise, and that matters. But skilled welders in our area can out-earn many college graduates. Medical lab technicians can make a decent salary with a two-year degree. You need a clear sense of where the money actually flows in the local economy, not just where you wish it flowed.
This is less about chasing the biggest paycheck and more about finding sustainable work that can support the life you want to build.
When you explore career options, get concrete about the numbers. Look at actual starting salaries in this region, not national averages. Factor in the cost of training or education. Pay attention to long-term growth. The Idaho Department of Labor’s website lists median wages for hundreds of occupations right here in our area. Use it. Our Work-Based Learning Center can also offer more personalized guidance.
When you combine what you can be paid for with what the world needs, you create a vocation. A vocation is work that meets a genuine social need while also providing financial stability. Maria noticed that her skills in teaching and communication are in demand, and she also realized that those skills can support her economically through a career in education. Unlike passion or mission by themselves, vocation centers on contributions that are both useful and sustainable.
When you combine what you’re good at with what you can be paid for, you create a profession. A profession is where your abilities line up with work the market values. Think of someone who is especially good at untangling technical problems and finds stable work in IT support. Their skill has a clear economic use.
That’s part of Maria’s story too. She has a natural gift for breaking difficult ideas into smaller, clearer pieces. Instead of leaving that talent undeveloped, she’s moving toward educational work where schools and organizations actively hire for exactly that kind of skill.
But professions don’t always come with passion or a strong sense of purpose. Sometimes they function more like a reliable exchange. You’re good at something. People need it. They pay you for it. That can still be valuable. At the same time, if the other dimensions are missing, the work may start to feel hollow.
Having a vocation and a profession helps make your path sustainable over time. But if that path isn’t also connected to what you love and what feels meaningful, you may still end up feeling uncertain or empty.
Finding Your Ikigai
Let’s return to Maria’s story and see how the pieces come together. She started by noticing something fairly simple. She was good at making complex ideas easier for other people to understand.
As she moved through her time at CWI, she saw that this strength lined up with something she genuinely enjoyed: helping other people learn. That gave her a sense of passion. Then she noticed a broader need. Local businesses often struggle to train employees well, especially as more instruction moves online. Her interest in teaching connected with a real need in the community. That gave her a mission.
The last piece fell into place when she learned that instructional designers can earn competitive salaries in the Treasure Valley. By combining her teaching ability with digital design skills from her electives, Maria found a path where all four dimensions of Ikigai could plausibly intersect.
What makes Maria’s story useful is that she prototyped. She volunteered at the learning center, took a digital media elective, and created training materials for a local nonprofit. Each experience gave her more information. Some parts confirmed the path she was on. Other parts helped her adjust. When she realized she preferred creating online courses to traditional classroom teaching, she shifted accordingly.
That’s a good way to think about your own process. You do not have to figure everything out in the abstract and then make one perfect decision. You can test possibilities. Class projects, clubs, internships, part-time jobs, and volunteer work all give you data about what fits.
Your path will probably look different from Maria’s. But the process is similar. Identify your strengths. Pay attention to what excites you. Look for actual needs in your community. Then figure out how to make a living meeting those needs. Use your time at CWI to experiment. Each experience gets you closer to the place where those dimensions start to meet.
Video: IKIGAI. A Japanese Philosophy for Finding Purpose
https://youtube.com/watch?v=4LE5bel_GvU%3Ffeature%3Doembed%26rel%3D0
