Tracing the Edges of My Ikigai: What You Can Be Paid For
What it means when your paycheck no longer reflects what you’re building
Illustration generated using AI image tools, prompted and directed by the author.
“I need you to give me a date for your last day.”
There was nothing subtle about it. I had already told my manager—clearly and more than once—that I didn’t have anything else lined up yet, and that I was still looking for something that aligned with my values and the kind of work I wanted to do next. That didn’t seem to matter. The pressure continued anyway.
At the time, I was in a senior leadership role that, on paper, looked like success. I had scope, budget, and authority. I was being paid more than I ever had before. And yet, the conversation had shifted away from what I was trying to build to timelines, succession, and making room for someone else.
What struck me wasn’t just the pressure to leave. It was what that pressure revealed.
My paycheck no longer reflected the systems I was trying to improve, the people I was investing in, or the culture I was working to shape. It reflected a role that needed to be vacated. A position to be backfilled. An obstacle to someone else’s plan.
That was the moment I realized the question wasn’t simply what can I be paid for?
It was what am I willing to be paid for if it costs me alignment?
That experience is what made the fourth Ikigai quadrant impossible for me to approach abstractly.
Ikigai, at its simplest, is often described as the intersection of four things:
- What you love
- What you’re good at
- What the world needs
- What you can be paid for
In the previous posts, I walked through the first three—what I love, what I’m good at, and what the world needs—sharing the questions I asked myself and what surfaced as I worked through them. Each of those quadrants allowed a certain kind of freedom. They were reflective, personal, and unconstrained by immediate practicality.
This last quadrant is different.
What can I be paid for brings everything back to earth. It’s where reflection meets responsibility. It forces you to reconcile values with reality—bills, commitments, trade-offs, and the fact that work has to function in the world as it actually exists.
Because of that, I didn’t rush into it.
I let the earlier reflections sit for a while. I paid attention to what felt energizing and what felt heavy. And I thought about my career not as a story I tell, but as a life I’m responsible for—one that supports a family, honors commitments, and has to be sustainable over time.
That’s the lens I brought to this final set of questions.
The questions
These were the final five questions I spent time with:
- What skills or work do I currently get paid for?
- If I had to pivot tomorrow, what strengths would come with me?
- What services or knowledge could I confidently charge for today?
- What kinds of problems would individuals or organizations gladly pay me to solve?
- If money were not an issue, what meaningful work would I still choose to do?
I assumed this part of the exercise would feel more transactional than the others.
It didn’t.
What became clear
At a practical level, the answer to the first question is straightforward.
I get paid to be a senior manager of software engineers.
That means my value is no longer tied to how much code I write, but to how well I lead people, build teams, create clarity, and help work move forward through others. For a long time, I carried some quiet tension around that shift—as if stepping away from hands-on coding meant I had lost something important.
Sitting with this question helped me see it differently.
What I’m paid for now is judgment.
Context.
Trust—the ability to make decisions when the path isn’t obvious and help others move forward with confidence.
If I had to pivot tomorrow, I wouldn’t be starting from scratch. I’d bring grit and adaptability. I’d bring the confidence that I can learn quickly and adjust when circumstances change. I’d bring the ability to write and speak clearly, to create psychological safety, and to be diplomatic without being evasive.
I’d bring experience building teams, growing people, and helping individuals stretch beyond the roles they thought defined them.
Those aren’t abstract qualities. They’re things people and organizations actively look for—and pay for.
What I could charge for—and why that matters
When I asked myself what I could confidently charge for today, a few areas stood out.
Coaching and mentoring, particularly around leadership, career decisions, and difficult conversations.
Advising on automation, systems thinking, and how teams actually work in practice.
Helping organizations move from good intentions to real execution by reducing friction and increasing trust.
What surprised me wasn’t that these things are marketable. It was how closely they line up with the earlier quadrants.
The overlap is hard to ignore.
The problems I enjoy working on.
The people I feel drawn to help.
The kinds of environments I want to be part of building.
The work organizations are willing to invest in.
They aren’t separate threads. They’re different expressions of the same underlying shape.
The hardest reconciliation
The final question stayed with me the longest:
If money were not an issue, what meaningful work would I still choose to do?
The answer wasn’t “stop working.”
It was to be more deliberate about who I work with and how.
I would still choose to build teams.
I would still choose to work with people who are curious, self-directed learners with growth mindsets.
I would still choose environments where experimentation is encouraged and failure is treated as part of learning, not as something to be punished.
What I wouldn’t choose is disengagement, especially disguised as professionalism. I wouldn’t choose working with people who treat care as optional, who hide behind “that’s above my pay grade,” or who avoid responsibility for the quality of what they contribute.
That distinction mattered more to me than I expected.
It clarified something simple but important:
Being paid well isn’t the goal.
Being aligned while being paid is.
Pulling it together
When I step back and look at all four quadrants together, something settles.
My Ikigai isn’t tied to a specific role, title, or technology. It’s about creating conditions where people can do their best work and become more of themselves along the way.
I love building and explaining.
I’m good at clarity, trust, and untangling hard things.
The world needs environments that respect human potential instead of wearing it down.
And I can be paid to help build, lead, and protect those environments.
That intersection doesn’t promise ease. But it does offer coherence.
And coherence, I’m learning, is its own kind of peace.
This exercise didn’t give me closure. It gave me direction. What I do with that direction is the part that comes next.