Freedom.
I got a separation offer from my company, and was feeling uneasy with the term unemployment. It is horrible - it crosses out all your achievements, skills, connections, value. But my husband said: you know what, it is not unemployment, it is freedom - to re-wire, to re-build and re-invent yourself.
With Chris Do · Be You Till Full
Singapore 2025
And then my career coach introduced me to IKIGAI. I listened to the audiobook while driving long miles across the South Island in New Zealand, making mental notes, framing my next move. I added more to the mix - AI trainings, new use cases I built myself - and then, as a pinnacle, attending Chris Do's workshop in Singapore. It swept me off my feet and pointed me in a new direction.
Chris Do uses the term "Unbland Yourself™" to describe moving away from safe, generic personal branding toward something more authentic, distinctive, unconventional - and even a bit weird - in order to stand out in the creator economy. He frames personal branding as an inward journey: discover who you are first, then express it outwardly, rather than treating it as a purely external marketing exercise. Chris mentions IKIGAI a lot - the Japanese concept of sources of meaning and motivation that make life feel worth living, not just a neat Venn diagram of passion, profession, and market need.
And then I thought: what if I take the four-dimension IKIGAI and add more sauce into it? I tried - using Manus, Perplexity and Claude - and it helped me find an interesting intersection I would never have thought of on my own. I am working to build it as we speak.
And somewhere in that process, something clicked: if I needed it and it was great for self-exploration, what if I offer it to the world? That is how Unscript IKIGAI® was created.
So what is it, exactly? It is your unique reason for being - expressed in a way that is unapologetically distinct, not sanded down to fit trends or other people's expectations. It means peeling away the generic labels and scripts that make you look like everyone else, embracing the quirks and unusual skill intersections that are genuinely yours, and letting your real sources of joy show up in your work - even when they don't fit a conventional career narrative. Not school–job–promotion–retirement. A path you actually authored. Think of it as a rough diamond shaped by ocean waves, not by a human cutter.
I am offering you the same exploration that shifted my own direction. If the result resonates - go deeper. And if it surprises you, even better. That is exactly the point.