How To Find Your Niche & Turn Passion Into Profit — Ikigai Workshop
Chris Do guides you through a workshop using the Ikigai framework to find your niche and turn passion into profit.
Chris Do
Founder, The Futur™ · December 11, 2020
The Price of Misalignment
There is a profound disconnect at the heart of modern professional life. It is the gap between what you think, what you say, and what you do. Most people live with this gap every day, a quiet dissonance between their internal world and their external reality. This is the source of deep unhappiness.
In a workshop on finding purpose, The Futur’s Chris Do lays down a foundational truth. “If you really want to be happy what you have to do is to align what you think say and do,” he states. “When those three things have no separation, I think you're going to be really happy and healthier, wealthier, and more successful in life.”
This isn't just philosophy. It’s a direct link to the pinnacle of human potential as described by psychologist Abraham Maslow. At the top of his famous hierarchy of needs sits self-actualization: the drive to realize one’s true potential. Yet, for most, the question, “Am I living that life yet today?” is met with a quiet, certain “no.”
That is not a cause for despair. It is a call to action. Do insists this is not about age, education, or income. It is about self-awareness and the courage to act. It’s about getting the right information and applying a little creativity to engineer a life of purpose.
The Anatomy of Success
The journey toward alignment begins with understanding what truly drives successful people. Do points to research from analyst Richard St. John, who spent seven years interviewing over 400 highly influential people, mostly from the TED conference circuit. He analyzed millions of words to distill the common traits that defined their success.
What he found were eight core pillars.
- Passion: It must start with something you love to do. Without it, the rest is unsustainable.
- Hard Work: Passion without work is a fantasy. Execution is everything.
- Focus: You must focus on one thing, not everything.
- Push: Continuously push yourself beyond your comfort zone.
- Ideas: Generate a high volume of ideas and learn to spot the innovative ones.
- Improve: Relentlessly refine and get good at what you do. This is about mastery.
- Serve: You must serve a community beyond yourself. Selfish pursuits have a low ceiling.
- Persist: You must have the fortitude to play the long game. Success is not an overnight event.
While all eight are critical, one stands out as the necessary prerequisite. The starting block. Do highlights it with intention: you must begin with something you love. He invokes motivational speaker Tony Robbins, who said, “Passion is the genesis of genius.”
This is the beginning. To live a fulfilled life, you must first reconnect with what you are truly passionate about.
Ikigai: A Reason for Being
To provide a structure for this exploration, Do turns to a powerful Japanese concept: **Ikigai**. The word translates roughly to “a reason for being.” It’s about finding purpose, meaning, and direction in your life. It’s the state where work feels like play, where you achieve a flow state and lose track of time.
While traditional interpretations of Ikigai are often complex, Do synthesizes the idea into a simple, actionable framework. It is not a mystical quest but a practical exercise built on three fundamental questions:
- What do you love?
- What are you good at?
- What does the world need?
This is the Ikigai Framework as presented by Do. It’s a tool designed to remove the fear and pressure from the monumental task of finding your life’s purpose. By systematically generating answers to these three prompts, you create a pool of raw material. The magic happens at the intersection of these inputs.
The process is designed to be interactive and tangible. You don’t just think about it. you write it down. Using three different colored index cards or a simple sheet of paper folded into thirds, you will build three distinct lists. This physical act of creation is the first step toward making your purpose real.
Column One: What You Love
The first and most intuitive category is what you love. This is the realm of passion, the fire that fuels everything else. Do color-codes this red, representing the heart. The goal here is to generate a diverse list of at least a dozen items, pushing past the obvious answers.
To get started, Do offers a series of prompts designed to unlock a deeper level of self-awareness.
- “What do you do that feels like play?” Think about the activities where you are fully engaged and joyful, not just going through the motions.
- “Where do you lose track of time?” We’ve all had moments where hours disappear. What were you doing?
- “If money weren't a concern, what would you do with your time?” If you won the lottery, how would your daily life change after the initial vacation?
- “What do you pay other people to allow you to do?” This is a powerful, often overlooked indicator. Whether it’s playing arcade games, going to a concert, or subscribing to Netflix, you are paying for an experience you value.
- “What do you obsess over that you dream about?” What topics, hobbies, or tangible items occupy your thoughts? This could be anything from the latest streetwear drops to planning a future vacation.
It is crucial to cast a wide net. Do urges participants to think beyond their profession and include tangible things, digital apps, websites, sports, and hobbies. It doesn’t matter if you’re good at them. You just have to love them. He shares an anecdote of a friend who relentlessly practices at a skate park. “He’s not very good,” Do admits, “but he shows up early every single morning. He keeps doing it, and it's a wonderful thing to see.”
This challenges the very idea of what should go on your list. It's not about performance; it's about passion. Building a strong personal brand often starts by sharing these very pursuits, as explored in how to build a personal brand.
Column Two: What You're Good At
The second category, what you're good at, is often easier to identify but requires just as much honesty. Do color-codes this yellow or gold, representing skill and strength. This is about what you have already mastered or have a natural aptitude for.
The prompts for this section are more direct:
- What you are paid to do: Your current profession is the most obvious starting point. Someone values your skill enough to exchange money for it.
- What you excel at naturally: What comes easily to you that others find difficult? This could be solving puzzles, understanding complex ideas, or empathizing with people. We often have blind spots here, so Do suggests a simple tactic: “tap him on the shoulder and politely ask him, ‘Hey, what do you think I'm good at?’”
- What you trained to do: This includes formal education like a university degree, but also any dedicated practice. Have you taken a course, read five books on a single topic, or practiced an instrument for years?
- What you’ve practiced repeatedly: If you sketch, code, or build models consistently, there’s a high probability you’re good at it. Repetition builds competence.
The workshop examples reveal the breadth of this category. Lists included hard skills like cinematography, editing, and curriculum design, but also crucial soft skills. Participants wrote down “anticipating other people’s needs,” “hosting dinner parties,” “calming people down,” “mental toughness,” and “having warm conversations.”
One participant, an agency owner, listed “automating processes and integration.” This highlights how specific technical abilities belong alongside more general human talents. Recognizing these skills is the first step to packaging them into a high-value service, a theme central to running a successful solo business as detailed in the secret to a $1 million solo agency.
The goal is a comprehensive inventory of your capabilities, both the ones you advertise and the ones you take for granted.
Column Three: What The World Needs
This third and final column is the most difficult and often the most important. It shifts the focus from the self to the collective. To find a truly viable niche, you must solve a problem or serve a need that exists outside of your own desires. Do color-codes this blue, for the world.
The question, “What does the world need?” can feel overwhelmingly large. Do advises breaking it down. “Think small,” he suggests, “like neighborhoods, communities, organizations that you belong to.” Replace the word “world” with “my subgroup” or “my industry.”
This is where purpose meets opportunity. It’s an idea echoed by sales legend Zig Ziglar, whose famous quote Do paraphrases: “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.” This is the essence of building a business. You are not a problem seeker; you are a problem solver. Identifying these problems is your primary task. One framework for this is finding what's already working, a concept explored in discussions about attracting your ideal clients.
To make it more concrete, Do suggests looking for what’s trending. Not trendy, which is fleeting, but trending: a groundswell or movement that is on the ascent. “Is there a parade for it?” he asks. A parade signifies an organized community with shared values and needs.
The workshop participants generated a list of pressing modern needs:
- Sustainable businesses and farming
- Affordable, high-quality education
- Greater social justice and transparency
- Destigmatizing mental health and therapy
- Better online classrooms and virtual communities
- Simplified online learning for children
- Bringing untold stories of suffering to light
These are not just abstract ideals. They are markets. Each one represents a group of people searching for a solution, a product, or a leader. Your ability to connect your passion and skills to one of these needs is the formula for turning purpose into profit.
The Power of Randomness
Once you have your three lists, the real work begins. If you only look for the obvious connections, you will arrive at the obvious, and likely crowded, solutions. The goal of this exercise is to generate something new, something that only you can create. To do this, Do introduces an element of chance.
He calls it gamifying genius.
The instruction is simple: combine one item from each of the three columns at random. If you are using index cards, you shuffle each color-coded stack and draw one from the top. If you are using a piece of paper, you can use dice to randomly select a numbered item from each list.
“We want some strange combinations, some strange juxtapositions to come through so that you have to sit there and think, ‘What connects these two random things?’” Do explains. “You're gonna have to really stretch your creative muscles.”
This is where innovation is born. Consider a hypothetical combination pulled from the workshop’s collective list:
- Love: Board Games
- Good At: Curriculum Design
- World Needs: Simplified Online Learning for Children
Separately, these are just interests and skills. Combined, they spark an idea: a business that creates educational board games with integrated digital components, designed to make remote learning more engaging and effective for kids. This is not an idea you would likely stumble upon through logical deduction alone. It’s a product of forced connection.
Another combination:
- Love: True Crime Podcasts
- Good At: Storytelling
- World Needs: Uncover Untold Stories of Suffering
This crystallizes into a clear mission: create a podcast or documentary series that uses the compelling format of true crime to investigate and report on underrepresented humanitarian issues. This approach serves a real need by leveraging a popular format, a strategy often seen in successful content creation and explored in lessons on building content that gets a reaction.
The randomness is not a gimmick. It’s a cognitive tool to bypass your brain’s established pathways. It forces you to build new bridges between disparate concepts, and in those new connections lies the potential for a truly unique and defensible niche. It reframes the search for a dream job away from finding a perfect fit and toward inventing one, a core tenet for many successful entrepreneurs like those discussed in why your dream doesn't need money.
Stop Searching, Start Building
Most professionals are waiting for clarity. They believe their purpose is something to be discovered, like finding a landmark on a map. They analyze, they plan, and they wait for the perfect opportunity to reveal itself.
This is a fundamental mistake.
Your purpose is not found. It is built. It is constructed, piece by piece, from the raw materials of what you love, what you are good at, and what the world is willing to pay for. The Ikigai framework is not a map; it is a blueprint and a set of tools.
The work is not to wander aimlessly hoping to find your passion. The work is to systematically interrogate who you are and what you can offer, and then to creatively combine those elements into something of value.
Stop waiting for a moment of perfect clarity.
Generate your lists. Embrace the strange combinations. Start building the intersections that only you can see. That is where your genius lies. That is where your future is waiting.
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“Passion is the genesis of genius.”
— Chris Do
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