Awakening Your Ikigai summary

How can you awaken your ikigai? Simple. Wake up to something that gives you pleasure and fulfillment every morning. Don’t complicate things – find something small that brightens your morning. It might be standing at your window for a few moments and admiring the early sun. It might be stretching and enjoying the feeling of your body waking up after a night’s rest. It could be savoring the ritual of preparing and sipping your morning coffee.

Not only is this a rewarding way to start the day but also making time for pleasure in the morning primes your brain to notice and experience more pleasure as the day goes on. Rewarding yourself with your favorite things upon waking up releases dopamine in the brain, making the morning routine more enjoyable and creating a good mood for the day.

Intimately connected with ikigai is the Japanese concept of kodawari, which is challenging to translate precisely into English but is often interpreted as “commitment” or “insistence.” These translations fail to capture the depth of the term, though. Kodawari represents a personal standard that individuals wholeheartedly adhere to, often in pursuit of exceptional quality or professionalism. It's an attitude deeply ingrained in one's life and a fundamental element of ikigai.

Kodawari revolves around an unwavering dedication to meticulously tending to even the minutest of details, reflecting an individual's pride in their work. It emphasizes starting small, without the need to justify the effort for grandiose schemes.

Hayao Miyazaki is a name well-known to fans of film animation across the world. Miyazaki is the founder of the legendary animation studio, Studio Ghibli, and the creative genius behind films like My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away. Miyazaki certainly has ikigai: he labors painstakingly over the smallest details in each of his films and, despite having announced his retirement several times now, he continues to create feature-length films.

But it’s not just Miyazaki who has ikigai. It’s safe to say that every animator working at Ghibli has it, too. Japanese animation is known and loved the world over. Yet it’s common knowledge in Japan that working at an animation studio is demanding, sometimes repetitive, and compared to other jobs, poorly paid. Nevertheless, aspiring animators flock to be hired by studios like Ghibli. They’re not driven by money but by devotion to their craft.

You might have heard of the novelist Haruki Murakami, one of Japan’s most successful literary exports. His novels have sold millions of copies and been translated into over 50 languages. As a writer, he’s famously disciplined, waking at 4:00 a.m. to begin work. He’s also a jazz aficionado – he even ran a famous jazz bar for a time.

Your ikigai might connect to the thing you’re most successful at and do professionally. It might connect to something you do outside of work that brings you great joy. You might derive ikigai from a combination of professional and personal pursuits, like Murakami, the jazz-aficionado novelist.