It’s not actually that hard to find balance and experience fulfillment. Most people just go about it backwards.

Last week a friend told me he’s on a quest to find his one true passion. That one thing that’s been missing all his life that will not only provide fulfillment but will be the perfect career.

He asked if I’d heard of ikigai. I had, but as happens with most nuanced concepts, this friend had reduced it to a bit of paperweight wisdom.

In his mind, ikigai is nothing more than the Venn Diagram that has been popularly associated with the term.

The straightforward diagram is a good tool for thinking about your ideal next job, which lies at the intersection of what you’re good at, what you love, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for.

There are two problems with trying to find your ikigai using this diagram, however.

First, fulfillment doesn’t come from finding the one thing that sits in the center of your personal diagram. We are multifaceted beings, and life and the world are infinitely complex. Fulfillment is an accumulation feeling.

It takes a lot of work and constant effort to stand on top of a one-legged stool. But it’s easy to stand on a stool that has four legs. So, looking for the one thing that provides you fulfillment is a fool’s quest.

The second problem is that what’s in each of those four circles changes throughout your life. In my lifetime, entire industries have come and gone. As I’ve aged, my skills have changed, and so have my interests. Some themes persist (like my love of writing), but more has changed than stayed static.

Adaptability is a critical part of fulfillment. Unless your idea of fulfillment is constantly battling reality, you’ll do much better over time reassessing and redefining what fits in those four circles.

Like balancing atop a one-legged stool, it’s a lot harder to keep the center of the diagram on the one thing than it is to let the center of the diagram shift and move as the contents of the four circles shift and move.

Maybe a better metaphor is a typical drone. It’s impossible to keep a drone flying level and stable with a single propeller. That’s why helicopters have a tail rotor.

Most commercially available drones have four propellers. Little adjustments to any of them will keep the drone stable and level, or send it off somewhere else.

It’s not that hard to find balance and experience the feeling of fulfillment, but it becomes nearly impossible when you approach it backwards.

So instead of trying to engineer the one magical, perfect description that will fit the center of your ikigai diagram, constantly adjust your understanding of what’s in each of those four circles, and manipulate them to what feels most right right now.

When you’ve done that right, fulfillment follows.

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