When Alice Ferris (BA ’91, MBA ’94) began paging through an airline magazine years ago, she didn’t expect to stumble upon a concept that would change how she looks at her career—and her life.
That concept is ikigai: a Japanese philosophy for discovering your purpose.
Ferris is the founding partner of GoalBusters Consulting, which coaches and supports fundraising teams. She recently shared how ikigai can help pave the way for a purposeful career with MBA students, faculty, staff, and alumni as part of the M. Keith Weikel MBA Leadership Speaker Series at the Wisconsin School of Business.
What is ikigai?
In ikigai, there are four main areas that make up your life purpose:
1) What you’re good at: These are your talents and skills. Maybe you’re aware of them, and maybe you’re not.
2) What you love: This area is about the things that make you excited, that give you energy. You may or may not be good at these things.
3) What the world needs: How can you contribute to society? What problems can you help solve? You may or may not be good at them, and you may or may not enjoy them.
4) What you can be rewarded for: What can you get paid for? What can you benefit from in other ways, even outside of money? You may or may not be good at these things, you may or may not enjoy them, and they may or may not be what the world needs.
Ikigai, and a person’s life purpose, lies where all four of these areas intersect.
Pursuing ikigai
While the philosophy may appear simple, Ferris admitted that actually achieving ikigai can be more complicated.
“Is that a straight line to get from where you are now to where that is?” she asked her audience. “Absolutely not.”
So how should you set out to find your ikigai? Ferris offered three strategies.
Do something
Starting this journey can feel daunting and nebulous, so Ferris urged her audience to take the pressure off themselves.
“Just do something. Anything. Whatever you want to do,” said Ferris. “Just do something. Sometimes it just takes some experimentation, because there will be those things that you don’t know you’re good at yet until you try to do it.”
Fundraising was one of those things for Ferris. In college, she studied radio, TV, and film. Hoping to work in television production, she volunteered for PBS Wisconsin—but instead of the production role she expected, she found herself fundraising, including blowing bubbles onto the set during pledge breaks for The Lawrence Welk Show.
Through her volunteer experiences, Ferris found she enjoyed working in fundraising, so she decided to stick around. While Ferris admitted the decision to start a fundraising career was mostly pragmatic—she recognized securing a fundraising job would be easier than a TV job—as time went on, she found it was becoming a passion. Like most people in the industry, Ferris said, she is an “accidental fundraiser.”
“Just do something. Sometimes it just takes some experimentation, because there will be those things that you don’t know you’re good at yet until you try to do it.”
Alice Ferris (BA ’91, MBA ’94)
She is a self-proclaimed “accidental entrepreneur” too. After leaving her job to become a stay-at-home mom, she became bored and knew she needed to do something. That something? Fundraising consulting.
“It was back to the ‘Just do something,’” Ferris said. “Did I expect that 23 years later I would have a consulting firm with nine people in it doing work internationally as well as across the U.S.? No, that was not my plan. But I love it. I can’t see doing anything else. But it all started with, ‘Let’s just try something and see if it sticks.’”
Embrace failures as lessons
When you are just “doing something,” failure is inevitable.
“It’s the ‘you’ experiment. And there will be a lot of things that go wrong,” said Ferris. “If you just take it into that vein of ‘What can I learn from this to help me narrow what my life’s purpose is and the direction I want to go?’ it’ll probably help out.”
Ferris acknowledged that having the humility to learn from mistakes can be challenging; it’s something she is just finally mastering in the last few years. But trying to use your past mistakes to guide your future steps can help you gain clarity to find the right path.
Don’t worry about passion (yet)
Being passionate about what you do is important. But, Ferris argued, it shouldn’t be your primary focus as you search for your purpose.
“Passion isn’t enough,” she said. “I would love it to be. I would love it to be like, if you’re good at this and you love to do it, that’s enough. If it sparks joy, it’s enough. But I’m sorry, Marie Kondo, that’s not enough. What we need to do is think about what are those other elements?”
Without the complementary elements of ikigai, a job you’re passionate about simply may not be sustainable. If you’re not compensated well, for instance, or if you’re doing something the world doesn’t need, problems will arise.
That’s why Ferris teaches the circle of ikigai in the opposite order of most other resources.
“I think you should be going counterclockwise and say, ‘Pick something you’re good at first, and see if you can get paid for it.’ And if you can do that, then say, ‘Is this something that’s going to contribute to society? Awesome. Then we’re going to keep going down this path.’ But what you love to do comes last, because you may discover something that you’re good at that you learn to love.”