I’ve built a new app.

But this one begins with no money at all.

No pensions.
No investments.
No budgets.
No retirement calculators.

Just four questions:

What are you good at?
What do you love?
What does the world need?
What could you be paid for?

Those four questions sit at the heart of the Japanese idea of Ikigai — often translated, a little loosely, as your reason for being.

You may have seen the familiar four-circle diagram before.

I have.

Many times.

And I’ve always thought there was something powerful hiding inside it.

The problem is that most Ikigai exercises give you the diagram, ask you to fill in the boxes, and then leave you to work out what it all means.

So I built something different.

Meet my-ikigai.app

my-ikigai.app is a simple four-question reflection tool.

You write.

AI listens.

Then it reflects back what it sees.

Not a personality type.
Not a score.
Not a generic report with your name pasted into it.

The interpretation is built from your own words.

It looks across all four answers together and identifies where your skills, loves, contribution and economic life already overlap — and where they almost overlap.

It gives you an Ikigai statement, explores the familiar territories of passion, profession, vocation and mission, and then looks at the near-misses: the places where three parts of your life may fit, but something important is still absent.

That last part interests me most.

Because very few of us are completely lost.

More often, we are nearly aligned.

We may be good at something and well paid for it, but no longer love it.

We may love something and believe deeply that the world needs it, but have never discovered how it could support us economically.

We may have built a perfectly respectable life that somehow doesn’t feel like ours.

Sometimes the problem isn’t that we don’t have a direction.

It’s that the signal has become buried beneath all the noise.

Before the plan comes the direction

This is why I love using Ikigai as an introduction to the Academy of Life Planning’s GAME Plan.

Traditional financial planning has a tendency to start downstream.

How much have you got?

When do you want to retire?

What return do you need?

How much risk can you tolerate?

These are legitimate questions.

But they aren’t the first questions.

Before asking how your money should be arranged, there is a more fundamental question:

What is all this money supposed to help you do with your life?

At the Academy of Life Planning, we call this plan life before money.

my-ikigai.app is a very small expression of that principle.

The whole exercise takes place before a financial conversation begins. It asks nothing about your salary, qualifications or job title. Instead, it starts with the human being and lets the financial questions come later.

That matters.

Because money is a means.

Life is the end.

When we reverse those two, financial planning can become an exercise in preserving wealth without ever asking what the wealth is for.

Looking towards your favourite future

One of the ideas running through the GAME Plan is what I call your favourite future.

Not a prediction.

Not a rigid twenty-year plan.

Not somebody else’s idea of success.

Your favourite future is simply the future you would choose to move towards, knowing what you know today.

That distinction matters.

You don’t need to know exactly where the journey ends before you start walking.

You just need to know which direction looks more like you.

That is what I hope this little app can do.

Turn your head.

Change the direction of your gaze.

Help you notice something you had perhaps already been telling yourself, but hadn’t yet put into words.

The first rung of the ladder

I don’t expect anyone to discover their entire life’s purpose in eight minutes.

That isn’t the promise.

Transformation rarely happens because an app gives you an answer.

It happens because something causes you to ask a better question.

And then you take a step.

Perhaps your Ikigai reflection confirms that your life and work are already remarkably well aligned.

Perhaps it reveals a gap.

Perhaps a sentence jumps off the page because you know immediately that it is true.

Perhaps you realise that something you have treated as a hobby, frustration or impossible dream deserves a little more attention.

That is enough.

Because the first rung of a ladder doesn’t need to take you to the top.

It just needs to be low enough to step onto.

my-ikigai.app has deliberately been designed that way: one sitting, no account and no commitment. The Academy spec describes it as a natural front door into a deeper “plan life before money” conversation rather than a complete planning proposition in itself.

AI as a second brain, not a substitute brain

There is another reason I wanted to build it.

I think this is a good example of how AI can help restore human agency rather than remove it.

The AI doesn’t decide your purpose.

It doesn’t tell you which career to pursue.

It doesn’t prescribe a life.

You supply all the raw material.

The machine simply provides another pair of eyes.

It notices connections.

It reflects patterns.

It helps you see what may already be there.

That is an important distinction.

The intelligence is artificial. The life is yours.

This is the philosophy behind much of what we are building at the Academy of Life Planning.

Advice out.

Agency in.

Technology should increasingly help people understand, choose and act for themselves — not manufacture another dependency on someone or something claiming to know what is best for them.

Try it

If you are at a turning point — changing career, approaching retirement, returning to work, considering a business, or simply wondering whether the life you are living still fits — give yourself eight quiet minutes.

You don’t have to know the answers before you begin.

There is no score.

There is no correct Ikigai.

Just answer the four questions as honestly as you can.

Then see what comes back.

You can keep the resulting reflection, print it, return to it, argue with it, annotate it or ignore half of it. The app stores nothing; the session belongs to you.

And if something in it makes you think:

“Yes. That’s the direction.”

then perhaps you’ve already taken the first step.

Because a better life plan doesn’t begin with a spreadsheet.

It begins by looking in the right direction.

Find yours at my-ikigai.app.