Hector Garcia's The Ikigai Journey and Adventurousness (O4)

Hector Garcia and Francesc Miralles followed their bestselling Ikigai with The Ikigai Journey, a more practical guide to the Japanese idea of a reason for being. The sequel's key correction is that ikigai is not a fixed destination you locate once, described on a page of lines from the book: "Our ikigai is very similar to change: it is a constant that transforms depending on which phase of life we are in." The comfort with letting your direction shift and following it into new territory is, in the Big Five, one facet.

Comfort with a shifting direction is Adventurousness

That facet is Adventurousness (O4), under Openness, the preference for novelty and new experience over the settled and familiar. The book's whole stance, that your purpose should be allowed to transform as you do, asks for O4: a willingness to outgrow an old answer and go looking for the next one. A high scorer reads this as permission, happy to let ikigai be a moving target through different seasons. A lower scorer, more attached to a stable answer once found, feels the friction the book is prodding, the discomfort of a purpose that will not sit still.

What the authors do well is tie the shifting purpose to actual exploration, since a new phase of life reveals capabilities you could not have found by staying put. The point is not to abandon what you have built but to keep sampling the unfamiliar, because a reason for being that never meets anything new tends to calcify into a role you are just performing. For a lower-O4 reader the usable version is modest, deliberately trying one unfamiliar thing per season, treating novelty as a small practice rather than a personality you lack. Ikigai here is less a place on the map than a direction you keep re-checking as the terrain changes under you.

Read your O4 to know whether this book feels freeing or unsettling. If it runs high, The Ikigai Journey affirms a restlessness for the new that you already trust, and the value is the frame for why your purpose keeps evolving. If it runs low, the more honest read is that a changing ikigai runs against your preference for a settled answer, and the small, scheduled dose of novelty is the way in. A purpose that transforms with each phase of life is only unnerving if you expected to find it once and be done.

Read the book: The Ikigai Journey: A Practical Guide to Finding Happiness and Purpose the Japanese Way by Hector Garcia.

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