The Bitcoin Ikigai

An “Ikigai” is a Japanese Venn diagram whose purpose is to guide you in your choices and help you find out what to do with your life. It consists of four circles, each representing one of the following:

What you love

What you’re good at

What you can be paid for

What the world needs

You’re supposed to be in the middle, encapsulated by all of the four circles. Devoting at least some of your time to doing something in Bitcoin is a good start. If you’re a hodler, this is your chance to find your ikigai.

If you’re a hodler you either love Bitcoin or you will, sometime in the future. You might still be in the curiosity phase, especially if you bought your first Bitcoin recently but if you keep them and resist the urge to panic sell, you will soon develop a crush on them. Furthermore, you can find something you love through Bitcoin. I didn’t know I liked writing until I found the right subject. I knew I had a creative side and I knew I loved to nurture it from time to time by shutting off from reality and giving in to whatever wants to come out of my brain, whether it’d be an article, a song or a drawing. Regardless of what type of passion you might have, incorporating Bitcoin in it somehow won’t do you any harm. On the contrary, it might inject new life into your work and attract a different audience.

Finding what you’re good at can be hard. Especially if you take the Dunning-Kruger effect into account. This effect describes incompetent people’s inability to know about their own incompetence. That knowing if you’re good at something requires the same level of skill at that something as being good at it does. Not even presidents are immune to this as you might have noticed recently. A rule of thumb for anything you do is that if people appreciate it, you might be good at it. In any case, getting to know more about any subject can’t be bad. Furthermore, you don’t really need to be good at programming or writing or mathematics to contribute to the success of Bitcoin. Being slightly good at convincing people is enough.

What you can be paid for includes more than just your day job. If you’re a hodler, Bitcoin adoption makes you money indirectly since more adoption and more hodlers means a higher Bitcoin price. In the absolute best case scenario however, you’re getting paid in Bitcoin directly. On a small scale, this is probably easier than you think. Sell something! The internet is a gold mine, you just need to find a way to extract the gold. Don’t follow the flock, try to find your niche. It will pay to do so in the long run.

The world needs Bitcoin. It needs curiosity and it needs knowledge. It also needs a new, global, fair, system of value transfer because the ones we have right now suck. Big time. The current monetary policies of the world have funneled half of the world’s resources into the hands of a select few in a very short time. They have left billions of people unbanked and required almost all of us to take out huge loans just to be able to live in the houses our fathers and grandfathers built. The faster we can replace the old system the better. Knowledge is the red pill and it needs to be prescribed to everyone. Be the doctor!

Doing something for Bitcoin might not put food on your table at first but it might in the future and helping to fulfill this prophecy is extremely rewarding. It just might be your Ikigai.