🔎 Be Successful, Rich & Happy - Find Your Ikigai

Be Successful, Rich & Happy - Find Your Ikigai

If there’s just one concept you should get your head around this week, this is it.

This is the Japanese secret to living a happy life, and as an entrepreneur, it couldn’t be more true.

So what on earth is an Ikigai? Well, it essentially means your ‘reason to wake up in the morning’. It's a powerful framework which has been in place in Japanese culture for hundreds of years, but importantly for you, it’s one used by entrepreneurs today to start a business which matters to them, in a profitable way.

Let me break it down for you.

At its core, Ikigai is the convergence of four essential elements:

1. Passion: what you love.

2. Skill: what you're good at.

3. Mission: what the world needs.

4. Profession: what you can be paid for.

When these four elements align, you find yourself in the sweet spot the Japanese call Ikigai, where your personal satisfaction and the value you provide to the world intersect.

If you hit a couple of them, then you’ll find some satisfaction but will struggle to hit long-term success. However, if you hit all four, your sense of purpose will be immeasurable.

These are the components in which successful entrepreneurs strive when planning a business. 

In the earliest step of starting a business, overly eager entrepreneurs can jump head-first into what the majority of people are trying to do - find a quick win, which is no long-term plan.

This ultimately leads to throwing away time and money to make money, and failing as they go. 

Let’s say you’ve found a way to make a quick buck - that’s great! Money is money. But long-term, you will lose the motivation and interest in the business as it’s missing a key ingredient in the formula - passion! 

Likewise, you are passionate about something, but there is a lack of demand for it. That means, that although you’re hitting the component of passion in the formula, there is no demand, which, in turn, will impact another component - the ability to make money from it. 

From here, this will have a domino effect on cash flow and generating revenue.

You can now start to understand how these components in the formula feed into each other.  

Finding Your Ikigai as an Entrepreneur

This process takes a combination of self-awareness and reflection. But it’s not as hard as it sounds if you approach it methodically. Here are the three steps:

• Self-reflection

  Understand what makes you feel happy and fulfilled. What are your interests? What do you enjoy doing, even if you aren’t getting paid for it? Realistically, how much money can you invest to start and build the business?

• Strengths and Skills

  The second component is around your hard and soft skills. Hard skills could be technical or industry-specific knowledge. While soft skills could be communication, your ability to sell, problem-solving, etc. Your business doesn’t have to be around your main skill and you’ll learn and develop more skills as you go. However, understanding what you have to work with will help you play to your strengths.

• Assess Market Opportunities

  Now external factors. Research the market and understand the target audience. What do they value? Look for trends, gaps, and opportunities. What do other businesses or competitors offer? Identify unmet needs or problems that your skills and passions can address. This step is crucial to ensure that there is a demand for what you plan to offer.

Put simply, through either a lack of demand, lack of cash flow, lack of skills or lack of passion for what you’re doing, businesses do not have a sustainable foundation to grow. By finding your Ikigai, you’ll find success, wealth and happiness.

The Outpost’s Opinion: This may seem like a lot to think about. But remember, the purpose of the Ikigai formula isn’t to stop you from starting but to help you start something which really works. It is a framework to help you understand what makes long-term success both as an entrepreneur and within your business. Now go find your Ikigai!

E-comm is Taking TikTok to New Heights

Many doubted the longevity of TikTok.

But after its clever pivot to incorporate e-commerce and specifically Shopify into its platform, it’s clearer than ever that it’s not going to take the same fate as Vine.

With more Gen Z-ers opting to use TikTok over Instagram, TikTok Shop has huge potential and it’s influence is wide-reaching. For e-commerce brands and drop-shippers alike, the potential is tremendous.

So what is TikTok Shop?

There are three components to it:

Live Shopping - where merchants and creators host live stream events to sell products to their audience in real-time.

Shoppable Videos - found in the TikTok feeds, users can see a video of a product and also click through to buy.

Product Showcase Tab - located on the seller’s profile, this is a mini e-commerce catalogue where merchants can display their products to their audience.

Let’s run some numbers and see how big the opportunity is for merchants.

Although only just under 10% of its users made purchases through the platform in 2022, that number has risen to over 30% in 2023.

Out of its 1bn monthly active users, a whopping 49% of TikTok users said the app plays a role in their purchasing habits. The opportunity for brands on the platform has never been greater.

The mobile-first app fuels mobile commerce, with users doom scrolling through their feeds before coming to a product they like and making the decision to buy it, all in-app through their mobile phones.

According to Insider Intelligence, it’s expected that just under 50% of e-commerce sales will be made through mobile phones in 2027.

TikTok is going to be a big player in the move, targeting a hefty $20bn in merchandise sales by the end of 2023 - up from $4.4bn last year.

Its integration with Shopify, impressive user engagement, and influence on purchasing habits have reshaped the digital landscape as we know it.

In a world where e-commerce is ever-evolving, TikTok Shop stands as a beacon of opportunity for those who seize it.

The Outpost’s Opinion: If you’re a brand or seller, TikTok is a great place to be. You don’t have to be using TikTok Shop to have success on the platform, but posting product videos will help your brand or hustle build awareness with consumers who are ready to buy.

Twitter: One Year On

It was October 27th 2022 when Musk’s escapade to buy Twitter was finally complete.

‘The bird is freed’ were the four words he wrote to tell the world the ugly and hostile transaction had been completed.

Now, twelve long months later, what’s changed? Apart from the name, some would argue not a lot. Let’s take a look.

At the time of the purchase, Twitter employed around 7,500 staff. Now, according to Apptopia, it employs around 1,500, down 80%.

Maybe that’s not a bad thing, a deliberate act to reduce staffing costs and overheads shortly after the takeover where many staff were sacked or walked out.

Unfortunately, that also included many of the content moderation team.

The initial hiccup here, was that Twitter advertisers started boycotting the platform after realising content which should have been restricted or deleted. A mistake Musk and Twitter took seriously…

Before going on to reinstate the accounts of serial content offenders such as Donald Trump, Andrew Tate, Kanye West and others. A move which received a mixed reception.

But a recent report carried out in September 2023, almost one year on, found that Twitter (now X) has the highest amount of disinformation across all of the top social platforms, with Facebook coming in second and YouTube having the least.

This report even resulted in a formal warning being given by the EU for the platforms lack of performance towards content monitoring.

So for content moderation at least, you could argue that things are possibly worse than before. Sorry Elon.

Now let’s talk about the blue tick. You know, the one that appears next to a name of a government official, celebrity or any other notable account on the platform.

Musk opted not to remove it (that’s a good thing)… but decided to use it as a token to show that people are paid subscribers to Twitter blue (that’s a bad thing).

This resulted in an outcry from official accounts with large a following who lost their verified blue tick, for it to be handed out to anyone who subscribed to the premium service.

Oh, and the rebrand of Twitter. In July 2023, Musk announced that he would be rebranding the platform. What’s more, it will be called his favourite letter, X.

Rebrands work. They’re a smart move when done correctly. The issue is, that this one wasn’t so good. The biggest sign a rebrand hasn’t worked is when the customers ignore it. Four months on, people still call the platform Twitter.

But it’s not all bad for ‘X’… in their eyes at least. They have made some forward-thinking changes. Their recent press release insists that ‘the future is bright’.

Here are some of my favourite points (with my comments in brackets) as to their reasons why the future is bright:

1.  Freedom of Expression: X is now a place where people can express themselves. (A bold statement given the recent warnings on content modification.)

2. Safety: Safety on X remains a crucial priority - but our work is not done. (Recognising their ongoing issues.)

3. User Base: Over half a billion of the world’s most informed people come to X every month. (A considerable number indeed.)

4. From Twitter to X: We transformed Twitter into X, the everything app. This move enabled us to evolve past a legacy mindset and reimagine how the world consumes, interacts, watches and, soon, transact - all in one seamless interface. (Justifying the rebrand. Maybe it will come good, but it’s had a poor start.)

5. Payments: We want money on X to flow as freely as information and conversation…. (we’re) moving towards launching a global payments system - more soon! (Something we’re excited to hear more about.)

Here you can read the full list of 23 points list on why the future is bright for X.

So is the future bright for X? Well, yes, it could well be. But the last 12 months haven’t set the standard which they will want to carry forward.

Their reasoning as to why the future is bright seems to be a bit of a smokescreen, a bit of PR and a bit of damage control.

The Outpost’s Opinion: The rebranded platform has undeniable potential. But I’m yet to see anything to genuinely grab my attention. With my business/ecomm hat on, I’m excited to see how transactions will be made in the app. TikTok has made it work incredibly well. It could be the making of the platform if done well, or another nail in the coffin. What this space…