I’ve changed my ikigai once before, when I was 28 years old.
I was working as an engineer and program manager in the defense industry. It was a high-pressure job, with real money at stake, filled with tense meetings with corporate vice-presidents and “customers”.
I traveled frequently, had to deal with security clearances, and had management responsibilities ( in fact, it was in this latter capacity when I discovered I usually worked best by working alone).
But then, after getting a Master’s Degree in Physics, taking lots of biology courses, and studying for the MCAT on weekends, I found myself as a medical student, in a class filled with mostly 21 year olds.
It was a difficult transition. Not the classroom stuff or the studying or the tests. For me, all of that was a nice mental break.
Nope. What was hard was going from the confidence and the associated self-definition which comes from a thriving career to a student. An established person to someone who was suddenly floating free.
I think that’s the key difficulty in changing ikigai. It’s not the practical stuff—the external stuff—the money, the downsizing, the daily habit changes.
Rather, it’s the necessity of changing internally, of letting go of one’s internal identity to allow another one to grow.