Ep. 132 - Ikigai & The Career of the Future - with Kate Roberts
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Kate Roberts is a global social entrepreneur and champion for women’s leadership through business, philanthropy, sexual health, and art.
Kate has had a 30-year career of championing women's leadership through non and for-profit ventures, with a focus on women's sexual reproductive health, sexual wellness and exponential philanthropy. She co-founded Maverick Collective together with Melinda Gates and The Crown Princess of Norway, and more recently, founded The Body Agency, a global fem tech and e-commerce company, and its foundation.
Doing the inner work to figure out the alignment of what you are good at, what you love, what the world needs, and what you can be paid to do is important and illuminating — but few people are able to articulate how you take that alignment and put it into action in the real world like Kate.
Pioneering the Career Mashup
I think Kate was living the career of the future years before anyone else; a brilliant mashup of entrepreneur, marketer, speaker, artist, podcaster, documentary producer, and philanthropist that allows Kate to leverage the skills of corporate marketing to drive social impact and positive change in the world.
I really see her as a pioneer in truly thinking about how you can align your purpose and the unique skill set that you have built through your unique experience, in transferring the skills from one area of your life to every other area of your life
And when you can unleash that and reflect all of your talents across these different facets of you, that’s energizing; it’s what gives Kate the fuel to continue to create and change the world.
Ikigai & Bringing Your Career Mashup to Life
Ikigai is a Japanese concept that translates to something like “a reason for being.”
According to psychologist Katsuya Inoue, ikigai consists of two aspects: "sources or objects that bring value or meaning to life" and "a feeling that one's life has value or meaning because of the existence of its source or object.”
It is, in essence, a way to approach living life with more meaning and fulfillment. It has slowly grown in popularity in the West, where it’s usually introduced as the intersection of four questions:
What are you good at?
What do you love?
What does the world need?
What can you be paid to do?
The idea is that purpose, social life, what you like to do, work — it’s all connected, and the experience of life is better when you take a more holistic approach.
For Kate, this often means leveraging corporate marketing skills to raise money for public health charities; she’s good at fundraising, she loves creating new projects, the world needs better public health infrastructure, and she can support her own living using these same marketing skills.
One of Kate’s passions has been reducing the harm caused by HIV/AIDS. She was able to raise $400k in seed innovation money to open a clinic and figure out what would actually improve things for the population in Zambia. They were able to figure out something that works, and as a result, secured $400M in funding to scale up the impact of this program.
We All Deserve Ikigai
We all deserve to have a career like Kate’s; to see the world change for the better because of what we put into it — and I firmly believe that this is possible when you figure out what lies at the intersection of what you are good at, what you love, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for.
Finding your ikigai, approaching your own life like a market researcher, however you want to contextualize this self-audit: this is the first step that I think anyone has to take in creating the career of the future.
Because, while possibilities and opportunities exist that just never existed before, you literally have to create that career, that impact, from nothing. And that’s hard! Success is going to look a little different than climbing the corporate ladder and getting a job. Success is probably going to include a few failures.
But at the end of the road, there’s a life and career custom-tailored to you, and I think that’s worth the effort.
Best Career Advice
“No is a full sentence.”
Definition of Success
“Success, for me, is happiness.”
Key Takeaways:
Ikigai is a Japanese concept that translates to something like “a reason for being.” It is, in essence, a way to approach living life with more meaning and fulfillment. It has slowly grown in popularity in the West, where it’s usually introduced as the intersection of four questions:
What are you good at?
What do you love?
What does the world need?
What can you be paid to do?
You can’t make a sustainable impact on the world if you can’t support yourself at the same time.
Finding your ikigai, creating your career mashup: crafting the life that you want is possible today thanks to all of the tools, markets, and opportunities available to us, but it’s not easy or simple. You have to create something that doesn’t exist yet, and that’s always going to be difficult, but it’s also going to be rewarding.
“People create change, not money,” Kate says. “Once you have your champions, the money will flow, but it's champions that change the world. And I have spent my entire career looking for those champions.”
Resources
Learn more at https://www.kateroberts.org
Listen to Sex, Body, and Soul: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sex-body-and-soul/id1578534520
Discover The Body Agency https://www.thebodyagency.com