Real Ikigai Examples: How 5 People Found Their Reason for Being

For each story, we’ll map the four ikigai circles:

Sarah spent nine years as a management accountant at a mid-sized firm. She was good at it — meticulous, fast, reliable. Her managers loved her. Her clients trusted her. Her salary was comfortable. And every single morning, she sat in traffic thinking: Is this really it?

On weekends, she baked. Not casually — obsessively. She’d been perfecting sourdough for three years, experimenting with fermentation times, flour ratios, crust temperatures. She photographed every loaf. She gave them to neighbours. She read books about bread the way some people read novels. But she never once considered it “serious.”

The ikigai shift happened when a friend offhandedly said: “You know more about food science than most food scientists.” Sarah started looking differently at what she’d been dismissing as a hobby. She mapped her four circles:

Sarah didn’t quit her job immediately. She ran weekend baking workshops first — ten people, a village hall, a £40 ticket. Sold out in two days. She repeated it six times. By month eight, her online course waitlist was longer than her accounting client list. By month fourteen, she’d made the switch.

“The strangest thing was realising my accounting brain was one of my biggest advantages as a food educator. I could systematise recipes and explain fermentation ratios in ways that actually made sense to people. My ‘boring’ skill made the passion work.”

The lesson: Your ikigai rarely requires you to abandon your past. More often, it invites you to combine what you’ve always been with what you’ve always loved — in a way you never thought to try.

After 24 years in the army, Marcus retired with a chest of medals, a structured pension, and a complete loss of identity. The military had given him purpose, community, structure, and meaning — all in one package. Civilian life offered none of those things automatically. He tried corporate security consulting. He tried executive coaching. Nothing fit.

What Marcus didn’t initially count as a skill was the thing he’d been doing his whole career: keeping young men and women alive in impossible situations. Not through aggression, but through calm, through planning, through making other people feel capable under pressure. He was, at his core, a teacher of resilience.

His ikigai emerged through a conversation with his teenage son’s school, who asked if he’d speak to students struggling with anxiety. He stood in front of forty teenagers and found, for the first time in two years, that he felt completely at home.

“I’d spent 24 years thinking my purpose was the mission. It turned out my purpose was always the people. The mission was just the context.”

The lesson: Ikigai doesn’t always look like what you expect. Sometimes your reason for being has been hiding inside every role you’ve ever had — you just needed to strip away the uniform to see it clearly.

Priya was, by every external measure, thriving. At 28 she had a senior designer role at a well-regarded agency, a portfolio she was proud of, and a salary most of her university friends envied. She was also quietly unravelling.

The work was technically satisfying but felt hollow. She was designing for brands she didn’t believe in, spending her creativity on campaigns that made companies richer and contributed nothing she cared about. She started to dread her portfolio — it showed exactly who she was professionally, but nothing about who she was.

The turning point came when she volunteered to design materials for a local mental health charity — for free, in her own time. She worked harder on those materials than anything she’d done in months. That’s when she understood the difference between using your skills and living your ikigai.

“I didn’t change what I do. I changed who I do it for — and that changed everything about how it feels.”

The lesson: Sometimes the skill set is right and the cause is wrong. Ikigai isn’t always about finding a new career — sometimes it’s about redirecting an existing one toward work that actually matters to you.

David had been a stay-at-home parent for six years — a choice he and his partner made deliberately, and one he didn’t regret. But as his youngest started school, he found himself at a crossroads he hadn’t anticipated. The role he’d built his identity around was changing. And he had absolutely no idea what came next.

He’d been a secondary school teacher before becoming a full-time parent. He’d also spent the last six years inadvertently building an enormous amount of knowledge about childhood development, sensory processing, and supporting neurodivergent children — because his own son had ADHD and he’d gone deep researching how to help him thrive.

What felt to David like “just parenting” was, to other parents walking the same road, an extraordinarily valuable resource. He started writing about it — first in a private journal, then in a blog, then in a small community he built for parents of neurodivergent children. Within a year, 4,000 people were reading his posts every week.

“I kept waiting to find my purpose as if it were something separate from my life. It turned out my purpose had been happening to me for six years. I just hadn’t recognised it as valid.”

The lesson: Ikigai doesn’t require a career or a job title. Lived experience — especially hard-won experience — is one of the most powerful foundations for a meaningful second act. What you’ve lived through is often exactly what someone else desperately needs.

Eleanor retired from 35 years of nursing at 61 — exhausted, proud, and completely uncertain about who she was outside of her profession. Nursing had been her identity, her community, her daily structure, and her source of meaning all at once. Retirement felt like bereavement.

For the first year she read, walked, and waited to feel settled. She didn’t. What she discovered instead was a slow-burning fury at how poorly older patients were treated in the system she’d left — specifically, how their own medical literacy was so low that they couldn’t advocate for themselves or their families during critical moments.

That fury, a colleague pointed out, was not frustration. It was direction. Eleanor began running free workshops at her local library — informal sessions where older adults could ask medical questions, understand their diagnoses, and learn how to speak to their doctors more effectively. The room was full every single week.

“I thought I was retiring from my purpose. I was actually just retiring from the exhausting parts — and finally finding room to do the part that actually mattered most.”

The lesson: Ikigai has no expiry date. If anything, the clarity that comes with age — the hard-won knowledge of what you truly value — makes the later chapters of life the most fertile ground for discovering your real reason for being.

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