What's My Ikigai

Ikigai (生き甲斐, roughly "a reason for being") is a Japanese concept for the quiet sense that your life is worth living. In Japan it is studied as a form of eudaimonic well-being — the psychiatrist Mieko Kamiya described it in 1966, and the large Ohsaki cohort study (Sone et al., 2008) later linked a strong sense of ikigai to lower mortality. In the original sense it is closer to "what makes your everyday life feel worth living" than to a career-optimisation formula.

The four-circle diagram most people picture — what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for — is a Western popularisation: Andrés Zuzunaga drew it as a "purpose" Venn in 2011, and Marc Winn relabelled it "ikigai" in 2014. Its four overlaps each name a recognisable life stance: Passion (love + skill), Mission (love + world-need), Profession (skill + pay), and Vocation (world-need + pay). The idealised centre — where all four meet — is your ikigai.

JobCannon's ikigai test asks 12 quick questions and maps your answers onto those four overlap zones to show where your current centre of gravity sits, plus the growth direction hidden in the two circles you are under-weighting. It is a light, for-fun self-reflection lens, not a validated psychometric test or career-counselling instrument — it estimates which zone you lean toward; it does not measure your purpose or predict your career outcomes.