I recently wanted a documentary called Nose which is about the perfumer for Christian Dior, Francois Demachy.
He is interesting on several levels, but the quality I found most remarkable was his sense of curiosity.
Despite being at the top of his field, he is curious about every aspect of the perfume creation process, from the planting of flowers in fields to their complex combinations in the lab. He lives, breathes, and smells scents.
Yet there is one scene where he is in Japan carefully observing a master swordsmith, in which we see him sniffing the blood. “Iron,” says the master swordsmith. “Blood, says Demachy. (Iron is the principal metal element in the blood.).
Demachy isn’t just intensely curious about perfumes; he is intensely curious about the pursuit of excellence.
And here we come to the crux of it: If you have the ikigai of an artist, then to be successful you must have an intense curiosity about the craft.
For a physician, that means being curious about medicine. For a physicist, that means a curiosity about the universe, and for a writer, that means a curiosity about words, grammar, language and story.
If you don’t have this curiosity—if the nuances of your given field no longer excite you and don’t make you get up in the morning, brimming with excitement—then you may no longer be working from a place of ikigai.