Ikigai Career Example: The Four Circles Pointed at Google

Almost everything written about the Ikigai diagram demonstrates it on a person who does not exist. The four circles are drawn, a hypothetical teacher or designer is placed at the centre, and the intersection resolves neatly, because the example was constructed backwards from the answer.

This is the opposite. It takes one real career decision, published by the person who made it, replays it through the four circles using only the information available at the time — and the diagram gets it wrong.

That is more useful than another clean example. A framework you have only ever seen succeed is not a framework you know how to use.

The decision

In October 2015, Alice Bentinck published a short essay on Medium titled "Why I turned down Google and so should you." It is a first-person account, under her own name, of a decision she had made some years earlier on leaving McKinsey & Co.

She opens by saying she already knew what she wanted:

"When I was leaving McKinsey & Co, I knew that I wanted to build a startup... I knew that building a startup was a way for me to get intense satisfaction from my career.

But instead of founding a startup, I got a job."

Then she lists the three things that pulled her the other way — and they are the three that pull almost everyone:

1. "I was told that startups fail." Her peers' response to her wanting to found a company was that most startups fail.
2. "It felt risky to leave a prestigious company." It gave her social approval, from peers and future employers.
3. The Google offer. "My peers kept on telling me how lucky I was — 'think of the free food!'"

Her answer to the third one is the sentence the whole replay turns on:

"I wasn't excited by the job at Google. I wanted to build a startup, so why would I invest time doing anything other than that?"

Her own summary: "I left McKinsey, turned down Google and created Entrepreneur First with my co-founder Matt Clifford."

What she actually knew at the time

This table contains no hindsight. It is the state of the decision as her essay describes it — which is the only fair input for a replay.

Input	Google offer	The unstarted company
Compensation	Market-leading, immediate	£0
Evidence she could do it	An offer in hand from Google, plus McKinsey	None yet — no company, no product
Co-founder	n/a	Not yet found
Peer verdict	"Think of the free food"	"Most startups fail"
Social proof	High, immediate	None
Her own stated enthusiasm	"I wasn't excited by the job"	"Intense satisfaction from my career"
Downside if wrong	Leave and take another job	Unemployed, with a failed venture attached

The four circles, run on that table

The framework page defines the fourth circle precisely, and the precision matters here: what the market currently pays you, today, not hypothetically.

Circle	Google	The unstarted company
What you love	✗ — "I wasn't excited by the job"	✓
What you're good at	✓ — they made her an offer	✓ — McKinsey-trained, but unproven at this
What the world needs	~ arguable	~ arguable
What you can be paid for	✓✓ — decisively	✗ — it pays nothing, today

Score it the way the diagram is drawn — four co-equal circles converging on one intersection — and Google wins three-to-one with one tie.

The diagram would not even have flagged this as close. Google sits squarely in the pair-quadrant the framework page already names: Profession, the overlap of good at and paid for, described there as "Competent and well compensated. Also hollow — the burnout quadrant." The diagram knows that quadrant is a trap. Its own scoring still walks into it, because three ticks beat one.

The Decision Replay

What the framework says	What she actually did	What actually happened
Take the Google offer. Three of four circles favour it, including the one that is unambiguous. The alternative satisfies exactly one circle and fails the pay circle by the framework's own strict definition.	Turned down Google. Founded Entrepreneurs First with Matt Clifford in 2011 — a "talent investor" backing people before they have a company, a team, or an idea.	EF raised $200M at a $1.3B valuation in 2026. Companies built through it are worth $16bn, up from $3bn at its 2021 raise, across 600+ companies. Bentinck is now CEO.

The diagram was not marginally wrong. It was wrong in the direction of the safe, legible, well-compensated option — which is the direction a framework is supposed to protect you from.

The Hygiene Circle

Here is the part that makes this more than an anecdote. Bentinck, in the same essay, reaches for a framework to explain her decision — and it isn't Ikigai.

She notices that when people describe what is good about a big-company job, they name sleep pods and free food, and she asks the obvious question:

"If these are the best parts of your job, why are none of them to do with the actual work?

These are peripheral benefits. These are hygiene factors. They stop you from being dissatisfied, but do they give you deep job satisfaction?"

That is Frederick Herzberg's two-factor theory, from The Motivation to Work (1959) and the 1968 Harvard Business Review article "One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?" — the most reprinted article in HBR's history. Herzberg's claim is that job factors fall into two categories that are not opposites:

	Examples	What it can do
Hygiene factors	Salary, working conditions, company policy, supervision, perks	Remove dissatisfaction. Cannot create satisfaction.
Motivators	Achievement, recognition, responsibility, the work itself, growth	Create satisfaction. Their absence does not create dissatisfaction.

Now lay that over the four circles, and the asymmetry is impossible to miss:

The Hygiene Circle — three of Ikigai's four circles are motivators and one is a hygiene factor, but the diagram draws all four the same size. "What you can be paid for" is a threshold, not a score. Ask it as a yes/no — does this option clear my floor? — and then make the decision on the other three. The moment you let it vote, a factor that by Herzberg's evidence cannot produce satisfaction is outranking three that can.

Run Bentinck's decision that way and it resolves in one line. Does the unstarted company clear her floor? She was leaving McKinsey with a Google offer in hand — her downside was another job. Yes, it clears. Then decide on love, skill and need — where the startup wins on the circle she describes as producing "intense satisfaction," and Google loses on the one she names outright.

Same four circles, same inputs, opposite answer. The only thing that changed is that one circle stopped being allowed to vote.

Where this misleads

Three limits, and they are load-bearing rather than decorative.

This is a survivorship case. Most people who turn down a Google offer do not build a company worth $1.3B, and the ones who do not are not writing essays. The Hygiene Circle does not say take the risk. It makes a much narrower claim: pay should not be the reason the decision goes either way, because it cannot produce satisfaction in either direction. That is compatible with staying.

A threshold you cannot afford to set is not a threshold. Bentinck's floor was unusually cheap to clear — McKinsey optionality is itself a form of safety, and "my downside is another good job" is not most people's downside. For someone with dependants, a visa tied to an employer, or no savings, the pay circle genuinely is the decision, and no reframing changes that. The Hygiene Circle applies above the floor, not to people standing on it.

Herzberg is contested. The two-factor split came from critical-incident interviews with accountants and engineers in Pittsburgh. Vroom (1964) and House and Wigdor (1967) argued the result reflects attribution bias — people credit themselves for their satisfactions and blame conditions for their dissatisfactions — which would make the clean separation an artifact of the interview method rather than a feature of work. The theory has also been criticised for generalising from individualist, middle-class, professional settings. Treat the hygiene/motivator split as a useful lens with real empirical baggage, not as settled fact.

And one about the diagram itself, which the framework page documents at length: the four-circle Venn is not Japanese. It was drawn by Andrés Zuzunaga in 2011 as a model of purpose, and Marc Winn swapped the centre word to ikigai on 14 May 2014. Bentinck's essay is from October 2015 — seventeen months after the diagram went viral, and she still didn't reach for it. That is a data point in its own right.

Now run yours

The replay above is only useful if you do it on your own fork. Three steps, in order:

1. Write the "what you actually know" table first, before any framework. Two columns, and be honest about the empty cells — the unstarted option is supposed to have blanks.
2. Ask the pay circle as a yes/no. Does the weaker-paying option clear your actual floor — not your current salary, your floor? If no, stop; the decision is made and no framework will unmake it. If yes, the circle has done its job and is now out of the discussion.
3. Decide on the remaining three, weighted by which one you would most regret being wrong about.

For step 1 and step 3, the free Pros and Cons worksheet is the fastest way to get both columns out of your head and onto something you can look at — it runs in the browser with no signup.

Want the four circles on your phone, with AI help filling them in? Framework for iPhone & iPad ships an Ikigai worksheet alongside 100+ other frameworks.

Want to go deeper

• Ikigai framework — the four circles, the pair-quadrants, and the full provenance chain for the diagram
• Pros and Cons — the right tool once the pay circle is settled and you are choosing on the other three
• Regret Minimization — the framework for step 3, when the deciding question is which mistake you could live with
• Pre-mortem — run before you commit: assume the choice failed, and work backwards to why
• Pre-mortem Example: The Failure a Premortem Cannot Catch — the other Decision Replay, on a startup shutdown with a published nine-cause postmortem
• Pros and Cons Example: 9 Pros, 5 Cons, and the One That Decided It — a replay where the framework returns the right answer for the wrong reason

Cover photo: Jens Lelie on Unsplash.