The ikigai framework, and how I used it when I couldn't pick just one thing
For years I had a version of the same conversation with myself. If I leaned into design, the analytical side of my brain felt wasted. If I leaned into the systems and strategy work, the creative side started agitating for attention again. I'd watch other people settle into one clean job title and wonder what was wrong with me that I couldn't do the same.
It turns out there's a name for that pattern, and a framework that helped me stop treating it as a flaw to fix. It's called ikigai, and this is how I actually used it, not the tidy four circle version you usually see online, but the messier process underneath it.
What does ikigai actually mean?
Ikigai is a Japanese concept that doesn't translate cleanly into English. The closest versions are "a reason for being" or "a reason to get up in the morning." It's one of those words that describes a feeling more precisely than any single English word manages to.
Most people in the West encountered the term through the book Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life, written by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles. It's worth reading if you haven't, partly for the concept itself and partly for the context. The original idea, as it's lived in places like Okinawa, is less about careers and income and more about the small, specific things that make a day feel worth living. The career framework most of us have seen is a Western simplification built on top of that, useful, but worth knowing isn't quite the same thing.
The four circles, and where I kept getting stuck
The popular version looks like a Venn diagram with four overlapping circles: what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. Find the middle, where all four overlap, and that's supposedly your ikigai.
As an example, someone who loves writing, is good at structuring complicated information, lives somewhere people are crying out for clearer explanations, and can get paid for exactly that, might land on something like technical writing or content strategy. Clean diagram, clean answer.
Mine never worked like that. Every time I sat with the diagram honestly, I didn't get one circle, I got two. Design and creative work pulled at me from one side. Systems thinking and analytics pulled from the other. I didn't have a messy circle with one fuzzy answer in the middle, I had two distinct, fully formed answers that refused to merge.
I'm not bad at choosing, I'm a multipotentialite
There's a word for this that I wish someone had handed me a decade earlier: multipotentialite. It describes someone with multiple, often quite different, areas of real ability and interest, none of which is willing to be quietly dropped so the others can win.
I spent years trying to resolve this by forcing myself into a single box. Just be a designer. Just do the SEO and analytics work. Just take client briefs and execute them well. Each time, something specific went missing, and I'd quietly start drifting back toward whichever side I'd just suppressed. Coming from an architecture background, with a long-running habit of reading psychology, I'd always assumed that pull in two directions was a contradiction I needed to sort out before I could move forward properly. It wasn't a contradiction. It was just accurate information about how I actually work.
What I actually found in the overlap
When I actually sat down and filled mine in properly, the same handful of things kept repeating across the overlaps. Designing physical products. Building the systems and workflows that let something small actually run properly. Branding and storytelling that ties a product back to why it exists in the first place. None of those is a job title on its own. Put them together though, and they pointed at one sentence sitting in the middle of the diagram, the same one that's now the actual mission behind Studio Hardeep. I help people who are burned out and misaligned in their work rebuild a life around their values, through a community, physical products, and practical knowledge that make intentional living real and achievable.
A simple way to find your own, without the test
A lot of people land on this page looking for an ikigai test, something that spits out a definitive answer. I understand the appeal, but if you genuinely have more than one strong pull, a single test tends to flatten that down to whichever answer sounds most employable, which defeats the point.
What actually helped me was simpler and slower:
Write down everything that currently has a real grip on your attention, with no editing and no ranking yet. Then circle whichever of those you're also genuinely skilled at, not just interested in. Then look at which of those overlaps with something people already pay for, even loosely or adjacently. Whatever's left isn't necessarily a job title you can put on a CV. It might be the early shape of something you end up building, the way mine turned into a brand that wouldn't exist if I'd picked just one of the circles.
I still don't have a single word for what I do. Design, systems, and a fairly relentless interest in why people get stuck, sitting in the same place. I've stopped waiting for that to resolve into something simpler. It's not a problem to solve, it's just where my reason for getting up in the morning happens to live.
Hardeep is the founder of Studio Hardeep, a brand built around physical tools and practical knowledge for people redesigning their working lives. If this resonated, the About Hardeep page has more of the story.