ikigai intersections

Check out the following diagram. (Hat tip to Pelin Urgancilar for sharing it with me.)

For reference see this blogpost by Paul Campillo

The trouble with these sorts of ikigai illustrations is that they do not display the level of returns.

What people will pay the most lies mostly outside of what you want to do. Hence you will get rewarded less if you move to the intersection of blue and pink circles. What you can do now is probably what everyone else can do equally well as well. In other words, you need to invest in yourself to qualify for what people will pay the most. Hence your returns will decrease even further if you try to move to the intersection of all three circles. (A better label for this middle area would be "Happy & Average!")

In short, the more circles you intersect with the more sacrifices you will have to make. People stay away from the middle, not because they are lazy, but mostly because they feel the trade-offs involved with the process.