The Beginning

Welcome to the beginning of my journey of pursuit of Ikigai

Jul 02, 2023

Intro

“NO ONE IS GOING TO READ THIS.”

—is how I’m going to pretend and write this newsletter. I’ve always felt insecure about writing publicly because English is not my first language. I knew it’d take an extra amount of time, effort, and courage for me to start something like this. Then one day, I realized that maybe I’m more insecure about the fact that I never gave it a try. It’s July 2023, and so much has happened and is happening around the world. I figured, why not? I can give writing a try.

The last three years have been a whirlwind. We entered and exited the COVID-19 pandemic. I moved back to Los Angeles from Seattle and started a new job at Empower after 4.5 years at Facebook. I’ve learned to become a patient dog dad, Johnny Harris super fan, and old millennial who’s entered his 30 with a lot of opinions about everything. I guess this is what happens as you get older.

This year also marks my 3rd year of remote work—and I must admit that I miss working with people in person. One of the human interactions I miss the most is the stochastic conversation I’d have over lunch, dinner, and drinks with my friends and colleagues. I didn’t realize how much decompressing effect it had on a random stream of thoughts we have in our lives. I’ll never forget the day I learned about Crystal Pepsi at work. It was so random, yet profound. My YouTube recommendation algo has never been the same ever since that day. Yes, I get to spend my full weekdays with our two lovely Shibas, but my head is now full of pressurized thoughts that I don’t get to share much. So, I figured writing could be an answer to this. So please bear with me as I start my humble beginning of sharing a stream of my thoughts with the world—through the lens of Ikigai.

What is Ikigai?

This is not the first time I thought about writing a newsletter, nor Ikigai. The first time I thought about it was right after the COVID-19 lockdown started. Substack became one of the hottest places to hang out on the Internet—and like the early days of Medium, I wanted to join the cool club. What I wanted to write about then was also Ikigai—a Japanese philosophy I discovered on Twitter. In Japanese, Ikigai means a reason for living or a purpose in life. It’s an acknowledgment that there are things that bring meaning to one’s life, and there are things that bring value to the world—and if you can find something in the middle, you may find yourself with a little bit more purpose and fulfillment in life. Uninspiringly, it has taken me 2+ years to write the first issue.

Why Ikigai?

During the COVID-19 lockdown, like many others, I started to look at my life much more retrospectively. Reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari as my first pandemic book did not help either. I suppose you call this “soul-searching.” I knew my life would never be the same when I first saw the popularized chart of Ikigai. After having a small epiphany about the purpose of my life, I wanted to maximize my time for these four circles—how I spend time with my family, work, hobbies, and learning. All had to fit in these four circles. Suddenly, everything became so clear in my life.

How am I pursuing Ikigai?

Ikigai has four circles—what you love, what the world needs, what you can get paid for, and what you’re good at. Among them, you’ll find constructs like passion, mission, vocation, and profession. In the center of it all—there is the purpose of your life, distilled to its essence form. For this newsletter, I’m going to go around the circles and tell you a story of my life or current event in each theme. For example:

What you love

In this segment, I’ll talk about what I love about the world—seeing and experiencing different parts of the world. As someone who lived in three different countries, I think traveling is the highest form of empathy-building exercise one can take. When we travel, we try to understand different languages, cultures, history, food, religion, or politics by using all of our five senses. Our ability to comprehend and execute this alone is what makes us humans so amazing. So please join me as I galivant through the mountains and seas to find another reason why we should pick up our passports.

What the world needs

In this segment, I’ll talk about what the world needs. It’ll be about dry, functional, yet essential topics such as the economy, personal finance, and the tech industry. This particular segment is not like the others. We have less control over what the world needs, making us much more vulnerable to extreme optimism and pessimism. How is AI going to replace jobs in the knowledge working industry? Is homeownership overrated? How are VCs going to operate in 2024, let alone H2 2023? What I know for sure is that I’ll have more questions than answers to share in this segment.

What you can get paid for

In this segment, I’ll talk about my design-y thoughts on everything design—product design, interface design, experience design, design system, design career, and more. I’m so lucky to find my passion and mission in this field of work when I was at the age of high school and college. The past 6-7 years have been a blast, and I hope the future has much more to offer. So let’s talk about software design, hardware design, and even business design—everything design. A glass of Napa/Sonoma Cabernet Sauvignon will be recommended to pair with—optionally, of course.

What you’re good at

This segment made me think the longest—in a bad way. What the hell am I good at? This is such an embarrassing, self-inflicting question. I’ve always considered myself a jack of all trades, a master of none. I would never call myself a specialist, but perhaps there are things that I might have a deeper knowledge of than most—that might be movies. This is how I met my partner nine years ago and how we spend every weekend. This is how I’d like to spend the rest of my life if I have to live the rest of my life alone in this world—to see, hear and feel what the storytellers’ got to share through the magical silver screen. From Rear Window to La La Land, from Terminator 2 to Parasite—I love all movies. So let’s talk about movies, cinema, and motion pictures.

Outro

That’s a wrap for my unofficial issue 0. Hopefully, my writing gets better and interesting topics come up as I continue writing. This will be a weekly publication on Saturdays, and I plan not to miss one Saturday. For issue 1, I’ll share the story of Disneyland and Walt Disney World and their influence on me as an immigrant, designer, and dog father in the spirit of the Love segment. See you next week!