Ikigai's Hidden Truth: Why "How" Matters More Than "What" in Finding Purpose
What I'm learning about how to cultivate deeper devotion to and trust in my own creative energy, rather than manage it.
I sit here today, in the rawness of a revelation that feels both liberating and challenging. For so long, I've understood ikigai—my reason for being—as finding that perfect sweet spot: the intersection of what I love, what I'm good at, what the world needs, and what I can be paid for. This elegant Venn diagram promised fulfillment. And intellectually, I know my purpose lies in teaching about the sacred path of partnership, fatherhood, and intimacy.
Yet my lived reality has been far messier than any diagram could capture.
Some days, creativity flows through me effortlessly. Words pour onto the page with an aliveness that feels both magical and deeply true. When I'm designing and facilitating experiences—like the cohort I led on mastering desire—ideas emerge organically, exercises unfold with perfect timing, and the room fills with a palpable energy that carries us all. In these moments, I am both the creator and the witness to something greater moving through me.
But then come the other days—the ones that have become painfully familiar. I sit at my computer during my designated "creative time," feeling the mounting pressure to produce. I hop from task to task. Minutes stretch into hours of strained effort, resulting in work that feels forced, disconnected, and devoid of joy. I question if I'm truly aligned with my purpose after all.
Today, something clicked. A realization that leaves me both humbled and excited: it's not ikigai that I've misunderstood—it's how we in the West have reimagined it that misses its essence.
Beyond the What: The Forgotten How of Ikigai
This morning's insight feels so obvious now, yet it has eluded me for years: The Westernized version of ikigai obsesses over what we do—our role, our impact, our output. The Venn diagram framework isn’t actually native to ikigai, but instead was something a blogger named Marc Winn adapted for a culture fixated on productivity and measurable results. The actual Japanese concept holds a deeper wisdom that I'm only beginning to grasp: ikigai isn't just about what we do—it's about how we show up.
I've been approaching my creative practice with an energetic rigidity that betrays my purpose. I've tried to schedule inspiration, to manage my creative flow, to force output when my spirit is calling for rest or integration. I've mistaken discipline for devotion.
I'm finally facing a hard truth that I've refused to believe for so long: creativity on a fixed schedule doesn't work. My discipline at working on a schedule doesn't lead to a way of working that I love, nor does it create the results that I want. The more attuned I become to my body and my truth, the less available forcing my creativity to fit into a fixed schedule becomes possible.
Even though I've identified work that theoretically fits all four circles of the ikigai diagram, I've been missing something fundamental: the internal conditions that allow creativity to move through me rather than be extracted from me.
When I reflect on periods of creativity where it felt like effortless flow, and asked what I felt internally during those times, I uncovered four necessary internal conditions. These four core feeling states that allow me to approach my work from a place of devotion, rather than pressure or obligation:
Purpose – A connection to a greater why, something that deeply matters to me.
Play – A spirit of experimentation and open receptivity to wonder, rather than rigidity or perfectionism.
Pride – A sense of self-respect and craftsmanship in what I create.
Passion – The energy and aliveness that fuels my work, turns me on, and makes what I create magnetic.
When I work from these states, I feel a deep sense of devotion and flow. My work is no longer just something to complete, but something I am offering—to the world, to life, to myself.
Devotion: The Heart of Authentic Ikigai
What I'm beginning to understand is that devotion is the missing piece in our Western ikigai puzzle. Not devotion as martyrdom or grueling discipline, but devotion as sacred attendance to what matters most.
Devotion whispers: Trust the process. Honor the mystery. Surrender to the intelligence of creation itself.
For too long, I've attempted to manage my creativity like a demanding boss—scheduling it, optimizing it, measuring its output. Each time I did, I committed a subtle act of mistrust against my own creative intelligence. I treated creativity as a burden I had to shoulder rather than a force that carries me.
This created a pattern I'm only now recognizing: I'd ride waves of inspiration, feeling deeply aligned. But when the natural ebb began—as it always must—a subtle panic would set in. Not dramatic or obvious, but insidious in its quietness.
I wouldn't allow myself to simply rest in enjoyment during my work hours. Instead, I'd fill that creative void with doing—answering emails, organizing files, checking off minor tasks—anything to avoid the discomfort of unproductive rest. "If I'm not creatively motivated right now," I'd tell myself, "I should at least be productive until inspiration returns."
And there's another dimension to my management of creativity that I'm only now seeing clearly: When inspiration strikes outside my designated work hours—perhaps on a weekend evening or during family time—I immediately cage it. "I'll work on that during my scheduled creative block on Tuesday," I tell myself, proud of my boundaries. I've been so determined not to become like my father, who would often be distracted with work at family time, that I've created rigid walls between work and home.
But creativity doesn't honor these artificial boundaries. By the time Tuesday arrives, that spark has often dimmed or disappeared entirely. In my attempt to be a present husband and father—an identity I deeply value—I've ironically suppressed some of my most alive creative impulses.
What might emerge if I allowed creativity itself to sometimes drive my schedule? If I gave myself permission to follow inspiration when it arrived, even if that meant working on a Sunday afternoon? And equally, what if I allowed myself to take a spontaneous afternoon with my wife or play with my daughter during designated "work hours" when I'm in a period of creative rest?
This constant management created noise that drowned out the very whispers of inspiration I was waiting for. In refusing to honor the ebb and flow, I was missing both the seeds of the next creative surge and the preciousness of true presence with my loved ones.
The hard truth I'm facing today is that my avoidance of creative rest and rigidity around schedules come from multiple layers of fear. There's the fear that if I don't keep producing during work hours, I'll somehow fall behind in creating the purpose and legacy I desire. There's the fear that if I allow creativity to sometimes guide my schedule, I'll lose presence with my family like my dad. There's a rejection of an earlier chapter in my life—when I worked 60-80 hour weeks with little balance—that left such a mark that I now cling to rigid schedules as a form of protection, a shield against returning to that all-consuming pattern.
And perhaps most revealing of all, there's a deep fear of creativity itself—fear that if I fully surrender to its call, it might consume me entirely, pulling me away from the relationships and connections I cherish most.
Yet when I honestly reflect on those periods of forced productivity, I realize something profound: nothing I created during those times has lasted in my memory or heart. Those outputs, born of internal bullying rather than authentic inspiration, never carried the resonance of my truest work.
Meanwhile, I sacrificed precious moments—walks in nature, fully present time with my wife, delighting in my baby daughter's smile—on the altar of constant productivity. I missed opportunities to simply embrace life, to fill my well with experiences that might later fuel genuine creativity.
The invitation I'm embracing now feels both terrifying and liberating: Creativity is not mine to control—it's a natural force flowing through me.
I don't have to fight for it.
I don't have to force it.
I don't have to manage it into a rigid system.
I simply have to trust that when I am in contraction—when inspiration slows, when the wave settles—it is not because I am failing. It is because I am being held in rest, in stillness, in renewal. And when the time is right, the next expansion will come.
The Rhythm of Creative Life
Consider how we breathe:
Inhalation: The gathering of energy, the filling with possibility, the moment of inspiration.
Exhalation: The release, the pause, the essential rest before the next breath comes.
We don't panic in that brief pause between breaths. We don't rush to fill it with unnecessary actions. We trust that the next inhalation will come naturally, in its own perfect timing.
Yet when it comes to creativity, I've been treating even the shortest natural pauses as something to fix. A single day of creative contraction feels threatening. A morning without inspired work triggers a need and pressure to be productive.
What happens when I fill these brief creative rests with frantic activity? How might my experience shift if I allowed more moments and days of receptive stillness? What possibilities might open if, instead of avoiding these momentary pauses, I entered them fully, with trust that the next creative breath is already on its way?
I'm beginning to see that my resistance runs deeper than I thought. It's not just about trusting seasonal cycles of months or weeks—it's about trusting even the daily rhythm of creative expansion and contraction. This resistance may well come from a place of wounding, a deeply ingrained fear rooted in a sense of time scarcity. With our nanny only here from 12-4 pm each day, there's a part of me desperate to maximize every minute of that precious window for uninterrupted creative work. How could I possibly "waste" even an hour of that limited time?
I'm starting to recognize that in those quiet spaces—a morning walk with my daughter, an unhurried lunch with my wife, even ten minutes watching clouds drift overhead—lies the fertile ground for my next creative breath. These aren't "unproductive" moments but essential parts of the creative pulse that runs through all living things.
My creativity has felt like a stuttering engine moving in fits and spurts. I've been in the question, "What is it I'm here to create?" believing that if I had the answer, then my engine of creativity would finally move smoothly and consistently. And so I'd sit at my desk every work day, trying to figure out what that thing was that would create smooth forward movement. What if I've been asking the wrong question all along? What if the more useful question is, "How do I create from a place that I actually love?"
The most painful irony I'm discovering is that my fear of honoring even these brief pauses has kept me from my most meaningful work. The forced productions I've created under pressure not only rarely touch hearts—including my own—but they actively drain the very energy and aliveness that could have been directed toward my family, my health, or simply my joy in being. They deplete rather than fulfill, leaving me emptier than before I began. They don't form the legacy I hope to build. It's the work that flows from genuine inspiration, after periods of rest—even brief ones—that carries true impact and nurtures rather than depletes my life force.
Cultivating Secure Attachment to Creativity
As I sit with these realizations, I'm beginning to see my relationship with creativity through a new lens: that of attachment theory. It's a lens that I'm becoming intimately familiar with, as I'm raising my now 4-month-old daughter.
As I learn about how security develops in children, I'm seeing parallels in my creative life. When a child has secure attachment to a parent, they feel safe to be with and explore the world. They trust that if they venture out and encounter something frightening, they can return to their secure base. Most importantly, they trust that when the parent leaves, they will return.
I'm realizing that my relationship with creativity has been one of anxious attachment. I cling to it when it's present, afraid it will leave. And when it naturally recedes, I panic—filling the void with busywork, forcing production, or rigidly scheduling when it's "allowed" to return.
What would it mean to develop secure attachment to my own creative force?
It would mean trusting that in moments of rest, the next wave of inspiration will come. Not because I've scheduled it, managed it, or forced it, but because creativity is not a finite resource that needs to be hoarded. It's a living relationship, a natural rhythm, a partnership.
When we develop secure attachment to our creativity, we stop treating it as an unreliable visitor who might abandon us. We begin to trust the relationship itself—to know that even when we can't see or feel it directly, the connection remains.
This security doesn't come from controlling creativity. It comes from consistent, attentive listening—from showing up for the relationship day after day, not with demands, but with openness. It comes from honoring both presence and absence as sacred parts of the same whole.
I'm beginning to understand that the pauses in my creative flow aren't abandonment—they're invitations to rest, integrate, and receive. Just as the soil needs periods of fallowness to maintain its fertility, our creative capacity requires cycles of receptivity.
Perhaps true creative trust isn't about producing constantly. Perhaps it's about surrendering to the natural rhythm of inspiration and rest, knowing that both are essential to the whole.
The True Essence of Ikigai
The way Ikigai is often presented in the West makes it seem like a destination—something we find, something we arrive at. But what I'm discovering is that ikigai is a practice. It's not just about identifying external purpose; it's about cultivating an internal way of being that allows us to engage with that purpose in a fulfilling way. And at the core of that practice is devotion.
By shifting from just focusing on the what to also embodying the how, we create a life that isn't just productive—but deeply alive, flowing, and free. For me, this shift from finding ikigai to practicing it has already begun to transform how I show up to my work and my life.
What would change if you trusted your creativity to hold you, rather than trying to hold it up?
What would become possible if you honored both the expansion and contraction of your creative life with equal reverence?
What might blossom if you approached your purpose not just with discipline, but with devotion?