082. The Ikigai Lie & the Maslow Myth
082. The Ikigai Lie & the Maslow Myth
The truth behind two pop-psych memes
I remember coming across the ikigai Venn diagram a few years ago.
It seemed reasonable enough and felt like a blueprint for figuring out what I should work on to feel fulfilled.
Turns out that although the word ikigai is real, the version we Westerners have been exposed to is not from the island of Japan but a little island off the coast of Normandy called Guernsey.
In 2014, business coach from Guernsey called Mark Winn took an existing Venn diagram from a Spanish blog and slapped the word “ikigai” in the middle. And it turns out that Spanish Venn diagram was possibly based off a model proposed in a 2001 book on business management.
…I didn’t really think much about it. It was only 45 minutes of my life and it still grows exponentially and people write books on it.
– Mark Winn
On a similar note, although Abraham Maslow did indeed propose a hierarchy of needs, he never documented it as a pyramid. Rather, Maslow’s research was co-opted by some business professors and management consultants to generate the pyramid imagery.
It turns out that Maslow moved past his initial hierarchy theory towards concepts known as D-realms and B-realms, yet the pyramid still endures. I even used it myself recently!
Takeaways
That these memes have endured for long says something about their perceived utility, and useful models can be better than correct models. Still, it can be helpful to question why these memes propagated and where they diverge from their original source.
Whereas the 4-circle Venn diagram implies that getting paid should be part of your reason for being, in Japan, ikigai often has nothing to do with income.
In a survey of 2,000 Japanese men and women conducted by Central Research Services in 2010, just 31% of recipients considered work as their ikigai.
Looking back, I should have been suspicious when I came across exoticized headlines like this:
Ikigai — A Japanese Philosophy for Finding Purpose
Ikigai Is The New Japanese Life Philosophy We Should All Be Following
Ikigai is The Japanese Secret To A Long and Happy Life
Similarly, the takeaway of Maslow’s research in published business papers was that you could meet employees’ needs through means other than money, i.e. you can pay your employees less!
That these two memes are referenced so often speaks to our modern craving for meaning. We are looking for structure and guidelines to become our best selves, and it kinda sucks that both original concepts got boosted by injecting a little capitalism into them.
After learning about these two misconceptions this week, I’ve been wondering what else I’ve taken at face value just because it’s been rehashed enough times.
I’ve written about confounding variables of the Stanford marshmallow experiment before, and I still remember when my elementary school teacher telling us that we only used 10% of our brains – and she was our science teacher!
What other memes do you know about that we just take as fact?