My first ikigai misfire was the selection of my undergraduate major: Mechanical Engineering.
I was the youngest of three children. All of us were exceptionally good students, all with 4.0 GPAs. My sister, four years my senior, went on to law schools in both England and The US, earning two separate law degrees. And my brother, two years my senior, went on to attend one of the most competitive higher education institutions in the world, the Air Force Academy. (They both had their academic strengths. My sister had the strongest academic work ethic, whereas my brother had the deepest raw intelligence. I was probably the strongest in the subjects of mathematics and science.)
My parents, highly intelligent in their own right, hadn’t had much formal higher education. Both grew up in Europe during World War II (my father in Germany, and my mother in England). Also, both had experienced things that many Americans haven’t, including the combination of bombings, inflation, food shortages, and rationing. My father, as a teenager with limited English skills at the time, boldly enlisted in the United States Air Force. He was eventually stationed in England, and it was there he met and married my mother. The rest, as they say, is history.
For the next twenty-plus years, with the three of us children in tow, we subsequently moved throughout the US and England (except for my father who served in Vietnam for time, his second face-to-face exposure to war), never staying in one place longer than 2-3 years. However, despite this geographic instability, we were a very tight family, and I had a secure, loving, childhood filled with memories of woods and dogs and snow and swimming.
One other thing. Despite all of this moving around, and despite limited financial means, my parents did have one driving goal for all three of us: college.
But go to college for what?
Ah, here’s the rub. My parents, deeply understanding the value of higher education—knew this was our ticket to a better life. But they had also had grown up in an environment with the economic instability that only comes from living in a country during a war fought on its shores, leading to a naturally conservative view about financial security.
Unfortunately, they didn’t have the hands-on experience of understanding the nuances of the relationship between higher education and career—particularly regarding undergraduate degree selection and its relationship to graduate study. For example, it’s unlikely they would known at that time about the career options open to a PhD-level mathematician or physicist, both in academia and industry, and certainly, the relationship between these degrees and computer science wasn’t recognized by the general public.
For example, I was especially gifted in both mathematics and physics, so, from their perspective—the perspective of financial security—and from my perspective—the limited perspective of a typical 17-year old high school student with no exposure to high-level academia and industry—becoming an engineer was an obvious choice. Heck, I would certainly have a job in four years.
Now though, looking back, I recognize I made a mistake—an ikigai mistake.
For example, throughout my childhood and teenage years. I was obsessed with astronomy, teaching myself both calculus and trigonometry in 8th grade so I could better understand the equations I was reading in advanced astronomy texts. I also remember my first encounter with physics as a sophomore in high school, asking my teacher which law was more fundamental: the conservation of energy or the law of entropy? And I remember late one night, in a summer-school calculus course, after working through hundreds of problems, finally understanding the relationship between differential equations and integrals. That was like discovering magic!
The ikigai clues were all there. I didn’t have the ikigai of someone who wants to create things (which I believe is the essence of an engineering ikigai); rather I had the ikigai of someone who wants to understand things (which I believe is the ikigai of a physicist, or mathematician, or philosopher).
Retrospectively, I should have pursued an advanced degree in either Mathematics or Physics, and my career focus should have been to pursue a job in academia in one of those fields.
But instead, I pursued a degree in Mechanical Engineering, landing a solid job after graduation at Texas Instruments in their Defense Division.
I went from dreaming about the fundamental building blocks of the universe to designing missile guidance systems: a clear ikigai target miss for a 21-year old.