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There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that doesn’t show up on a sick day form.
It’s not burnout from overwork. It’s burnout from under-purpose. You’re hitting targets, managing your team, attending the right meetings – and feeling quietly hollow about all of it.
That’s not a performance problem. It’s an alignment problem.
Ikigai is the point where 4 elements converge
what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for.
According to researchers at Tohoku University, people with a clearly identified ikigai demonstrate significantly lower mortality rates, higher resilience, and stronger daily motivation than those without one.
This isn’t a wellness trend. It’s one of the most practically useful frameworks a marketing leader can apply to their career — and to the teams they build.
What Is Ikigai?
In professional terms, it is the point where 4 elements converge: what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for.
That intersection – not the individual elements – is where ikigai lives.
Miss one element and you get an incomplete picture. Passion without skill is enthusiasm with no traction. Skill without mission is competence without consequence. Mission without income is volunteering with a LinkedIn profile.
The framework originated in Okinawa, Japan, which has one of the highest concentrations of centenarians in the world. According to a longitudinal study published in Psychosomatic Medicine by Sone et al. (2008), 95% of men who reported a strong sense of ikigai were still alive 7 years into the study, compared to 83% of those who did not — a statistically significant gap that held even after controlling for lifestyle factors.
ikigai is not
Passion without skill is enthusiasm with no traction
Skill without mission is competence with no consequence
Mission without income is volunteering with a LinkedIn profile
Why Marketing Leaders Are Especially Vulnerable to Underpurpose
Here’s the uncomfortable version: most marketing professionals optimise their careers the same way they optimise a campaign. Click-through rate over lifetime value. Short-term performance over sustainable direction.
You take the role with the bigger budget. The brand with more name recognition. The title that moves the needle on your CV.
All rational. All tactically sound. All potentially leading you further from the work that actually matters to you.
According to the Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace Report [2023], only 23% of employees worldwide are actively engaged at work. The figure barely improves among knowledge workers – marketers, strategists, analysts and CMOs. Gallup estimates the economic cost of this disengagement to be $8.8 trillion annually, representing approximately 9% of global GDP.
That’s not a talent shortage. That’s a meaning shortage.
And marketing, specifically, is a discipline where your personal values don’t just matter — they actively shape output quality. A strategist who believes in what they’re building thinks differently than one who’s just executing a brief. The work shows.
The 4 Ikigai Questions Every Marketing Professional Should Answer
You don’t need a retreat. You need 20 honest minutes and the following four questions.
01 What do you love?
Not what you’re proud of being good at. What genuinely pulls your attention when no one’s measuring it. The brief that makes you lean forward. The problem you keep volunteering to solve.
According to Professor Ken Mogi, neuroscientist and author of The Little Book of Ikigai (2017), this element is the emotional engine – the starting point, not the destination.
02 What does the world need?
Where is there a gap your work could address?
This is market awareness applied inward. Your most purposeful contribution sits where your curiosity meets an underserved need – in your industry, your organisation, or the audiences you serve.
03 What are you good at?
Not just technically. Where do you consistently outperform expectations without exhausting yourself? What do colleagues come to you for that they can’t get elsewhere?
That asymmetry — where your effort cost is low and your output quality is high — is a signal worth following.
04 What can you be paid for?
The grounding question. Ikigai does not require financial sacrifice. If it can’t sustain your life, it remains a Sunday hobby.
The model is deliberately practical — purpose is not opposed to income. It depends on it.
Take Steve Jobs as a case study. Most people read him as a tech visionary. He was, more precisely, a craftsman obsessed with precision, materiality and beauty. According to Walter Isaacson’s biography Steve Jobs (2011), Jobs described his father’s habit of finishing the backs of cabinets – even the parts no one would ever see – as the formative lesson of his life.
Technology was the medium. Fine craftsmanship was the ikigai. Apple was the expression.
How to Match Your Ikigai to Your Organisation’s Purpose
This is where the framework becomes strategically useful – and where most career conversations stop too early.
According to a 2020 McKinsey & Company report, How Purpose Shapes Business Strategy, purpose-driven companies achieve 10% higher long-term growth than sector peers, and their employees are 1.4x more likely to report high levels of engagement. The link between individual purpose alignment and organizational performance is not incidental. It compounds.
The most instructive case study remains CVS Health. In 2014, CVS removed cigarette sales from all 7,600 of its US stores – walking away from $2 billion in annual revenue. The decision was made because selling tobacco products was irreconcilable with the company’s stated purpose as a healthcare provider. According to CVS Health’s 2020 Annual Report, the short-term revenue loss was followed by sustained growth across its healthcare services division, positioning it as one of the largest integrated health companies in the United States.
That was an ikigai decision at an organisational level. They asked: what does the world need from us, and are we actually delivering it?
Your version of that question is this: does my current role let me work toward the overlap between my personal purpose and my organization’s mission – or further away from it?
If the answer is further away, that’s not a reason to panic. It’s a reason to act.
The Practical Ikigai Audit 4-Step Process
You don’t need perfect alignment immediately. You need directional alignment – a sense that where you’re heading and why you’re heading there are pointing at the same thing.
Step 1
Write down your four ikigai answers without editing them. First instinct, not final draft.
Step 2
Pull up your company’s stated purpose or values – not the mission statement copy. The real version. The one that drives actual decisions and survives a difficult board meeting.
Step 3
Find the overlap. Even one genuine point of intersection is a foothold. Start there.
Step 4
Ask whether your current role is structured to let you work toward that overlap. If it isn’t, identify one specific change – a project, a conversation, a responsibility shift – that moves the dial.
According to research by Professor Amy Wrzesniewski at Yale School of Management, employees who engage in what she calls “job crafting” – proactively reshaping their roles toward greater meaning – report higher satisfaction, stronger performance ratings, and lower turnover intention than those who don’t, regardless of seniority or sector (Journal of Organizational Behavior, 2010).
You don’t have to change your job to change your relationship to it. Start with the audit.
Ikigai + Team Leadership
If you lead a team, your ikigai conversation has a multiplier effect.
According to Gallup’s Manager Impact Report 2022, managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement scores. That means how purposeful you feel – and how clearly you communicate purpose to your team – is the single biggest lever you have on their performance.
A team of people who understand their individual contribution to something meaningful outperforms a team of people executing tasks.
According to a 2019 study by BetterUp Labs, employees who report a high sense of meaning at work deliver 33% higher productivity, take 75% fewer sick days + are 49% less likely to leave within a year.
That’s not a culture initiative. That’s a revenue line.
FAQ About Ikigai at Work
Ikigai is a Japanese concept meaning “reason for being.” In a professional context, it’s the intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. It’s your personal purpose, made practical.
Your core ikigai tends to be singular — it’s an intersection, not a list. But the expression of it can evolve across different roles, industries or life stages. Your passion for systemic thinking might show up differently at 30 than at 50.
Ikigai at work is the professional application of a Japanese concept meaning “reason for being.” It describes the intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. When these four elements align in your role, work becomes a source of motivation rather than obligation.
Finding your ikigai starts with answering four questions honestly: What do I love? What am I good at? What does the world need? What can I be paid for? The overlap between all four answers is your ikigai. According to Professor Ken Mogi, the process requires reflection over time — initial clarity often comes quickly, but depth develops over weeks of deliberate thought.
Passion alone is only one quarter of the equation. Ikigai requires all four elements. You can love something, be terrible at it, and find no one will pay for it — that’s not ikigai, that’s a Sunday hobby. The model is deliberately grounding.
Especially relevant. Marketing sits at the intersection of human psychology, commercial strategy and creative expression. It’s one of the few disciplines where your personal values actively improve your professional output – if you’ve done the work to identify them.
The four questions take 20 minutes. The honest answers take longer. Most people find their first real clarity within a few weeks of deliberate reflection — and refine it over years.
Yes. Your core ikigai – the underlying values and strengths – tends to remain consistent. But its expression evolves across roles, industries and life stages. A passion for systems thinking might show up differently at 30 than at 50, and in a startup differently than in an enterprise. The framework adapts; the foundation holds.
According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace Report 2023, only 23% of employees globally are actively engaged at work. Research on ikigai suggests that individuals with a clearly defined sense of purpose – the core of ikigai – show significantly higher engagement, resilience and job satisfaction. Purpose alignment is increasingly recognized as a structural driver of engagement, not a soft benefit.
Organisations that actively connect individual purpose to company mission see measurable reductions in voluntary turnover. According to BetterUp Labs (2019), employees with a strong sense of meaning at work are 49% less likely to leave within a year. Structured ikigai conversations during onboarding, performance reviews and career development planning are a practical entry point for any people strategy.
About the Author
Nicola Ziady is Chief Marketing Officer at a leading US research university and an experienced digital marketing leader in healthcare and higher education.
Over two decades, she has built consumer engagement strategies for the nation’s most recognized academic and healthcare institutions. At Cleveland Clinic, she launched the first consumer health platform in the sector — growing it into the most visited healthcare blog in the US. She grew Cleveland Clinic’s Facebook presence by 2,000%, making it the most followed healthcare page in the country.
At St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, she launched the institution’s physician referral program. Under her tenure, Harris Poll named St. Jude the most trusted brand on social media — across every category, not just healthcare.
She has delivered eight consecutive years of growth in her current CMO role.
A published author, national conference speaker, and industry awards judge, Nicola writes about the strategic shifts that separate good marketing leaders from great ones – purpose, systems, team performance, and the discipline of thinking beyond the next campaign.
Originally from Ireland. Now she now leads from the inside.
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Published: April 3, 2026
