A multidimensional ikigai
What happens if we stop defining ourselves by a single label?
Have you ever looked back and realised a decision had bigger consequences than you expected?
Four years ago, Egle and I decided to move from London to Portugal on a whim. We came here on holiday after the first Covid lockdown because Portugal was one of the few sunny destinations we were allowed to fly to from the UK. Three weeks later, Egle was the first to ask if we really had to fly back to London. Could we stay?
The following month, we flew back to London, but we didn’t return there. Instead, we sold some of our stuff, packed the rest into 8.5 cubic meters, put the confused cat into her carrier for the biggest trip of her life and returned to Portugal, where we rented the holiday home we were staying in on a long-term contract.
I just stepped down as CEO of Makers and was about to start retraining as a coach. It didn’t feel like a big deal. We could always go back to London, and I had no idea if I would manage to build a coaching practice or if I would enjoy doing it.
Now, four years later, I realise that what I’ve done was far bigger than moving to Portugal or becoming a coach:
I let go of a single label that defined me professionally.
I decided to build a business under my own name.
Letting go of labels
In my twenties, I was a software developer. A simple label.
In my thirties, I was a founder and CEO. Also, very simple.
In my forties, I am:
A founder coach
A soon-to-be podcaster (to be launched in early September)
An entrepreneur
An expert on CEO succession in startups
A meditation teacher in training
Advisor, consultant or mentor
In hindsight, this feels like a massive shift. Instead of finding a box to fit in — a software developer or a CEO — and trying to fit it as well as possible, I’m following my curiosity to find out how my work matches the world's needs.
It’s like a multidimensional ikigai. Instead of finding one thing at the intersection of what you love, what makes money, what you’re good at and what the world needs, I’m doing this exercise along many different dimensions at once.
This feels like a very different way of being. None of the labels above fully describes what I do; it’s a constantly changing mix of all of them.
A business under my own name
An inevitable consequence of chasing a multidimensional ikigai is seeing my name — Evgeny Shadchnev — as a primary label communicating what I do. Two things are simultaneously true: my name communicates what I do perfectly, and it completely fails to communicate what I do.
It communicates it perfectly because there’s only one of me in the world doing exactly what I do. It fails to communicate it because my name says nothing without further context.
I spent the previous decade building a business that exists separately from me. The best evidence is that I could leave it as a founder and CEO, and now a different team is running it. Much of my own suffering came from my failing to fully separate my own identity and the identity of the business. Every early-stage founder knows what it’s like to feel that the business is you and you are the business.
Building a business under my own name is the ultimate fusion of identities. Funny that. This means that all business challenges now feel deeply personal again. The argument that there’s “me” and there’s a “limited company” and these are separate doesn’t fly anymore. It doesn’t even try to take off.
But it also feels strangely empowering, as if it were simultaneously deeply restrictive and deeply freeing.
wrote well about this:
It’s not all fun and games — maybe I’ll write another essay about the challenges of it all. But I’ve tried enough things by now to know that nothing is all fun and games. Every way of life and work has its challenges. What matters is how we face them and what we learn from them.
I know I’m far from being alone trying to find a multidimensional ikigai under my own name. My friend Beta Lucca is a founder, speaker, singer, podcaster, investor, consultant, BAFTA winner, and more. She calls herself “MULTI” and is on a mission to show that we can always reinvent ourselves.
writes well about this on her Substack dedicated to portfolio careers:I certainly didn’t invent this type of work structure. Freelancers and solopreneurs have been around forever, but it feels like something’s shifting. Every second person I speak to is on a similar path; ditching full time to consult here or contract there, or launch a digital course, write a newsletter, start a podcast, build a product, or play around with an idea. Portfolio careers are on the rise and to me this makes perfect sense, because they’re more reflective of the way humans are built. We’re multi-dimensional, multi-faceted, multi-passionate beings, so surely our work should be multi-dimensional, multi-faceted and speak to our multiple passions.
Many of us are realising that we don’t want “traditional” anymore. We want unique.
We want something that’s ours.
It does feel like something is shifting, indeed.
Have you felt the pull of trying to find your own multidimensional ikigai?