Deciding on Enough
Enough is as good as a feast
I recently fell into a social media comparison trap. I fell fast, tumbling down the ‘what if’ rabbit hole before I even realized it was happening.
I’ve followed this particular content creator for a long time. She’s a very successful, creative business woman who is around my age, also with two little girls. A recent video she posted stopped me in my tracks, my comparison engines revving at full speed as the short montage played.
The video featured she and her husband with their newborn baby daughter, happy together in the hospital. Text overlaid the video, showing the revenue her business generated in passive income on the day she gave birth.
It wasn’t a small number.
Doing a quick calculation (and all things being equal) her passive income streams generate roughly $2.5 million in revenue each year.
Whoa.
The whole point of the post was to promote the ways in which email marketing has allowed her business to grow an exponential rate, the caption reading: “If your business is reliant on you showing up, you don’t have a business… you have a job.”
My mind immediately went into strategy mode:
How can I replicate this success?
How can I be making passive income at even have a fraction of her passive income?
How can I replace my “job” with a “business”?
How do I do what I’m doing but bigger? Better?!
Before I continue, I want to say that I genuinely respect this individual and I think what she puts into the world is both meaningful and marketable, but the information she shared that day sat like a lump in my gut.
With dissatisfaction for my life and my work and my worth beginning to brew, I stopped myself and I got still… What was I feeling?
Was it desire?
Was it longing?
Was it jealousy?
Surprisingly, it wasn’t any of the above.
After contemplation (paired with a heavy dose of gratitude, reflecting on the abundance in my life), I realized what I was feeling in that moment was a need to hear a different perspective, a different story.
A story of enoughness in a world constantly demanding more.
And it became clear that I needed to write this story for myself and for anyone else who’d benefit from hearing it.
Enough is Enough
This story encourages the act of deciding what’s ‘enough’ for oneself, recognizing that more is not always better and celebrating that there are many (many!) different approaches to the same situation. And when I’m grappling with an issue, I find that it helps to use tried and tested tools in my toolbox: my telescope, microscope, stethoscope and kaleidoscope.
Telescope 🔭: This allows me to zoom out and see the big picture. It helps me realize that I’ve grown compared who I was 2 weeks ago, 2 months ago and 2 years ago. My telescope helps me better understand that very few things thrust upon me are truly urgent, allowing me to respond appropriately and in due time.
What are my needs and what are my wants, both financially and creatively? How much money do I need to support my family and how can I earn it without having to make a major course correction in my career?
I am incredibly privileged to be able to do work I enjoy that provides a liveable income. There will always be things about my job that I’d rather avoid, but I get paid to do work I believe in that puts a roof over my head and food on the table with some left over for non-essentials. I often think about the few years I spent after graduating from university when I lived in my grandparents 1950’s bungalow just north of Toronto. Each of the closets in the three bedrooms are small by today’s standards. My grandparent’s post-war generation didn’t have a lot of stuff to fill huge closets. The equivalent closet in my current home is easily 5-10x more space than my recent ancestors... and it’s full! The omni-present and targeted nature of today’s advertising is hugely influential in shaping our society’s consumer behaviour. And I don’t think I’m objectively any happier than my grandparents because of this stuff so why on Earth would I need or want any more than I already have?
Income inequality is significant both locally and globally. As reported by Credit Suisse, a net worth of just over $90,000 US (assets minus debts) means that you’re still richer than 90% of the people on planet Earth. Moreover, if you have just over $4,000 you’re richer than 50% of the word’s population. The amount of money needed to live is very much dependent on your geographic location — countries and cities within those countries vary widely — but the discontent I was feeling made me really think about what enough money looked like for me. Which brings me to another key question…
Why would I aspire to build a business that generates $2.5 million a year?
This sounds like a ridiculous question (I mean who wouldn’t want $2.5 million rolling into their bank account each year?!) but I seriously have to ask myself why do I need this much money? Because it would require spending time and energy growing my following, serious list-building and working on the business side of creativity to promote myself in a way that I’m just not interested in doing for a huge sum of money — more than I would ever need — with no guarantees of it ever happening.
After all, having excess riches and extreme wealth is an experience in this life. Once needs are met and financial security is found, money not life-changing. To quote actor Jim Carrey: “Alrighty then!” Just kidding, he said this: “I wish everyone could get rich and famous and everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that's not the answer.”
In a 1978 study entitled “Lottery winners and accident victims: is happiness relative?” compared happiness levels of 22 major lottery winners, 22 control participants and 29 paralyzed accident victims. The study found that the lottery winners were not as happy as you’d expect and the accident victims were not as unhappy as you’d expect.
“Eventually, the thrill of winning the lottery will itself wear off. If all things are judged by the extent to which they depart from a baseline of past experience, gradually even the most positive events will cease to have impact as they themselves are absorbed into the new baseline against which further events are judged. Thus, as lottery winners become accustomed to the additional pleasures made possible by their new wealth, these pleasures should be experienced as less intense and should no longer contribute very much to their general level of happiness.”
Hedonic adaptation — the tendency to get used to new things with dissipating happiness, constantly creating new baselines — is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing in the face of tragedy and a curse in the face of successive levels of happiness. Everything is relative and while more money will provide short-term thrills, fifty years of psychological study shows us that it won’t provide long-term, lasting happiness.
Microscope🔬: This allows me to zoom in and pay attention to the details, appreciating the small, everyday wonders available to me if I’m looking for them.
What do I look forward each day? What gets me up in the morning?
In their book Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life, authors Francesc Miralles and Hector Garcia, interviewed more than 100 elderly residents of Okinawa, Japan (a blue zone with some of the longest life expectancies in the world) to discover commonalities that helped many live long, healthy lives. Beyond a healthy diet and physical activity, they found that Okinawan’s have something unique in each of their lives that they feel is worth living for. ‘Ikigai’ refers to a passion that gives value and joy to life. In approaching each day with an ikigai in mind, finding joy and purpose is not about needing to eradicate work, but doing meaning work with and for meaningful people.
Aside from spending time with my family and my dog taking me out for walks, writing, reading, dreaming up new ways to build community in my classroom, developing creative prompts for students, finding new interesting people with whom to have interesting conversations about design/making/teaching…this gets me up in the morning.
Stethoscope 🩺: This allows me to hear — really listen — to the world around me and the people in it. There are few gifts as coveted and as rare as giving someone our full attention.
(This particular scope wasn’t always in my toolbox, but my brilliantly creative and insightful friend, Nat Lumby, suggested I add this one, as well as the next one.)
If I listen deeply to what my inner knowing is trying to tell me, what I hear is…
“A passive income makes so much sense. By putting in hard work and effort now, I can save time and produce huge results in the future.”
But if I listen a little more deeply, what I hear is actually a question…
“Can I do more with less?”
If I’m doing meaningful work for meaningful people that pays the bills, is there really a need to change that? Can I make my needs fewer so that I may live more richly and more satisfied with what I have instead of constantly longing for excess?
After all, money is a two sided equation: income and spending.
And the rules of the equation are simple: spend less than you make and save some for later.
This is a common thread in the minimalist community. You don’t need a lot of money to live a beautiful life. You don’t need fancy things to live a beautiful life. Cultivating strong relationships will make you far happier then stuff ever will.
In fact, Harvard conducted the longest-ever study on happiness that began in 1938 and lasted 85 years with 724 global participants studied in an effort to discover what makes humans happy. Researchers found that career achievement, money, exercise and a healthy diet were not the foremost happiness predictors. Instead, positive relationships were consistently found to make us happier, healthier and live longer. If you’re looking for a long-term investment that’s most proven to pay (metaphorical) dividends, community and connection are sure bets. Money can buy you necessities and comfort, but it can’t buy you happiness.
In fact, this has me thinking about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, a pyramid of physiological and psychological needs said to motivate human action in ascending order: physiological needs like food and water, safety and security, social needs like friendship and family groups, self-esteem and self actualization/personal growth. Financial blogger, Mr. Money Mustache, observes the backwards nature of trying to buy happiness: “Our consumer culture encourages us to look upwards and earn respect, sexual intimacy, confidence, and even self actualization with the new Toyota Highlander or Ford F-150, when doing so actually destroys our security.”
It’s almost like we’re trying to flip the pyramid on it’s head and it feels impossible to find balance in this precarious upside down state. So instead of longing for more and building a business that can afford all the luxuries of the world, what if I can do more with less?
Kaleidescope ✨: This allows me to appreciate joy, experience play and feel child-like wonder as I move through this short, precious, mysterious life.
When it comes to work, I have an audacious, counter-cultural and unrealistic-sounding goal: work needs to be a source of fun.
I actively prioritize joy, experimentation and play in my classroom. From an outsider’s perspective it may appear trivial or unimportant to go about work in this way, but a light-hearted approach to rigorous work makes all the difference for both students and myself. Creative prompts, Crayola markers and curiosity live at the start of each class. ‘Serious fun’ helps students connect to the material inside and outside of the classroom, as well as connect students to themselves, their peers and their instructor.
If I can sustain myself and my family doing work that I genuinely enjoy, why would there be any need to make more money doing work that I objectively enjoy less?
This reminds me of the fable of ‘the fisherman and the businessman’, shared in many books and publications, translated by author Paulo Coelho. I will share it again here:
There was once a businessman who was sitting by the beach in a small Brazilian village.
As he sat, he saw a Brazilian fisherman rowing a small boat towards the shore having caught quite few big fish.
The businessman was impressed and asked the fisherman, “How long does it take you to catch so many fish?”
The fisherman replied, “Oh, just a short while.”
“Then why don’t you stay longer at sea and catch even more?” The businessman was astonished.
“This is enough to feed my whole family,” the fisherman said.
The businessman then asked, “So, what do you do for the rest of the day?”
The fisherman replied, “Well, I usually wake up early in the morning, go out to sea and catch a few fish, then go back and play with my kids. In the afternoon, I take a nap with my wife, and evening comes, I join my buddies in the village for a drink — we play guitar, sing and dance throughout the night.”The businessman offered a suggestion to the fisherman.
“I am a PhD in business management. I could help you to become a more successful person. From now on, you should spend more time at sea and try to catch as many fish as possible. When you have saved enough money, you could buy a bigger boat and catch even more fish. Soon you will be able to afford to buy more boats, set up your own company, your own production plant for canned food and distribution network. By then, you will have moved out of this village and to Sao Paulo, where you can set up HQ to manage your other branches.”The fisherman continues, “And after that?”
The businessman laughs heartily, “After that, you can live like a king in your own house, and when the time is right, you can go public and float your shares in the Stock Exchange, and you will be rich.”
The fisherman asks, “And after that?”
The businessman says, “After that, you can finally retire, you can move to a house by the fishing village, wake up early in the morning, catch a few fish, then return home to play with kids, have a nice afternoon nap with your wife, and when evening comes, you can join your buddies for a drink, play the guitar, sing and dance throughout the night!”
The fisherman was puzzled, “Isn’t that what I am doing now?”
I am privileged to have fun spending my days teaching and making and talking to interesting people about interesting things. If I desire to become wealthy beyond my wildest dreams, I can actively build a business through intense self-promotion, clever email marketing and other spelled-out strategies used by traditionally-successful content creators. Once I expend great energy, time and resources getting to a point where I could have almost anything I could ever desire, I can then begin to do what I really want: have fun spending my days teaching and making and talking to interesting people about interesting things.
Slaying the Enoughasaurus
One of the many thought-provoking people whose journey I follow is Annie, a minimalist living in Los Angeles: the land of fame, fortune and excess. She enjoys simple pleasures and helping others see her counter-cultural perspective on doing more with less.
One day she shared a simple and profound phrase that practically leapt of the screen at me: enough is a decision, not a number.
I took a screenshot, which I revisit often. Before that moment, I had never thought about ‘enough’ being a decision; something I could make a choice about and that I have ultimate control over.
Conversely, I’ve learned that thinking about ‘enough’ as a number simply doesn’t work. There’s always the next best thing out there to tempt us. Do I like nice stuff? Sure. Am I enticed by beautiful clothes and fun gadgets, online and offline? All the time.
But when I choose to adopt the mindset that enough is a decision and not a number, I can stop trying to accumulate more to try to buy happiness. That dress I COULDN’T LIVE WITHOUT now sits alongside all of my other clothes in my large closet. And it doesn’t have nearly the same appeal now that I own it; the anticipation leading up to acquiring an object is often more fulfilling than owning the item itself. Not to mention the added costs of maintaining, storing and ultimately discarding the item, as well as the emotional guilt of not getting my money’s worth and the clutter that comes with acquiring more and more and more and more…
As The Cheapskate Next Door, Jeff Yeager, puts it: "Conditioning yourself to spend less and to be content doing so is the way to slay your Enoughasaurus… at what point of accumulating more things can you be content?”
Financial author, Dave Ramsay puts it another way: “We buy things we don't need with money we don't have to impress people we don't like.”
Not to mention that buying the latest and greatest to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ is flawed… the Joneses are broke! Household debt in North America continues to rise at staggering rates ($16.9 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2022!), due to higher mortgage, auto and student loan balances according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
All things considered, I choose to make the decision that I have enough. My stuff does not define me, no matter how convincingly highly-targeted ads try to tell me otherwise.
My best friends will not stand up at my funeral and say “she had really nice clothes and her shoe collection was incredible!” My best friends will hopefully talk about my kind heart and my generous spirit and all the other qualities that make me, me.
This doesn’t mean I won’t ever yearn for new stuff or buy things I don’t need (hello new hammock), but I have control over it and not the other way around.
Enough is a decision and I decide that I not only have enough, I have more than enough. I am enough.
Fortune(ate) Cookies
Circling back to the start of this story, I respect and applaud the content creator making this strategy work for her, finding massive monetary success along the way. However, it’s not necessary for me to pursue the same path, feeling ‘less than’ for my differences in time investment, influence and income. It’s just not a good match.
My telescope, microscope, stethoscope and kaleidoscope have helped my strategically-minded gut feel more settled, guiding me back to my different — yet equally abundant — path. A path of creative output interwoven into a teaching job with a huge dose of gratitude throughout. I’ve found meaningful work with and for meaningful people and I have community where I can foster new connections, investing in current and future happiness.
More money/stuff/power/influence isn’t always better. Sometimes the answer can be found in doing more with less; addition by subtraction. As a fortune cookie I opened once read: Enough is as good as a feast. And I feel full.
