What is “Enough” in Your Life?

If you had enough money to sit on a beach and drink margaritas for the rest of your life, would it be “enough?” That depends on what your goals are, doesn’t it?

In fact, I still remember a conversation I had with an extremely smart, talented, but also highly materialistic person. He asked me what I considered “enough” money. For me, it was enough money to be “free.” That meant I could go where I wanted, with who I wanted, when I wanted. It meant I could CHOOSE whether to have a job and not HAVE TO take a job for the money. Him? He was very different. For him, having “enough” money meant $1,000 suits, $200,000 sports cars, a mansion, and having enough money to flash and spend that everyone around him knew he was rich. Now, you might think I’m getting ready to explain to you why I was right, and he was wrong, but the truth is there’s no right answer per se.

By that, I mean, there are a lot of things like money, fame, love, success, happiness, and power where practically by definition, you almost can’t have too much of it. How many people would turn down a million dollars with no strings? How about a hundred billion? What about a trillion? Same thing with fame. The only thing better than being famous is being MORE FAMOUS, just like the only thing better than being loved is being even more loved. Who wouldn’t want even MORE SUCCESS, MORE HAPPINESS, or MORE POWER?

In fact, who do we tend to idolize as a society? The people who have the most of these sorts of things in different areas.

People like Donald Trump, Taylor Swift, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Lebron James, Michael Jordan, Tom Brady, J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, Dwayne Johnson, Warren Buffett, Lady Gaga, Mr. Beast, Kim Kardashian, Tiger Woods, Mark Zuckerberg, Barack Obama, and J.D. Vance.

Of course, your first thought after reading that list is probably something like, “Half of those people are huge @ssholes! I don’t admire them at all,” which is a good place to start talking about what is “enough” in your life. The reality is that EVERYTHING COMES WITH A COST. This was touched on in a couple of podcasts I was listening to recently,

The first featured the founder of Whoop tracking software, Will Ahmed, talking about the price people pay to succeed on Modern Wisdom:

You like the look of Patrick Mahomes or Michael Jordan? Perfect example. Like, ...what is he? Probably 50, something like that? I don't know how old he is. ...Doesn't look happy. A man who is tormented by drive and perfection and obsession. He was the greatest. Okay. But... that's the price that you need to pay. Elon was asked on Lex's show three years ago… says something like, how are you doing? And he takes a little moment, and he goes, most people think they would want to be me. They don't want to be me. They don't know. They don't understand. My mind is a storm:

This is the richest guy on the planet. Sending rockets to space, building world-changing cars. He's on stage in Japan doing robot dances and fathering a million children. He's actually easier to compare to some professional athletes than any other business leader. How so? In just that it's clear that he's got a drive that he's tormented by and he's willing to sacrifice everything else for it. And you see that with the world's best athletes.

Well, the thing with at least the problem with looking at anybody through the lens of a narrow pursuit, like the success in business or the success in the sport is that you only see the one vector that they've channeled their outputs into and you don't see any of the other fissures that their costs leaked out of, right?

Well, what if this guy hasn't had sex with his wife in like two years? What if they're drugging themselves to go to sleep and stimulating themselves to wake up in the morning? What if their relationship with their father or their mother is just non-existent? What if they hate themselves? What if they can't bear to look at their body in the mirror? You know, all of these things that happen and you go, okay, but they're the great, the greatest, they're the best. Yeah. Would you want that? Is that what you want? Because you don't, as you said earlier on, it's kind of stupid to just look at one element, either of a business or of a person and say…I really want (golfer) Rory McIlroy's Master's (jacket). The not being able to sleep at nighttime because he's obsessing about that shot he missed. I don't really like the idea of that so much, but the Green Jacket, that sounds great.

It's like, you don't get to piece this person together. Someone is a whole, right? His level of obsession, totally like just throwing shade at Rory's… mental state, but I imagine his level of obsession, inability to let go of things…is the reason that he's got to that. It's not some weird bug on the side of the code that makes him Rory McIlroy. It's a feature that is a part of his performance.

We like these people. We like the idea of being able to do the things that they do, but do we want to pay the price they did to get where they are? Pretty clearly, the answer is “no,” because percentage wise, so few people push themselves to the absolute limits of what they can do. They don’t do that because it’s PAINFUL, IT’S MISERABLE, IT’S CRUSHING. Does that mean it’s not worth it? Nope, but if you judge how desired it is by the number of people willing to pay the price to get it, it’s obviously really small.

That brings us to Ben Greenfield’s conversation with author, Sahil Bloom. Sahil had some more things to add to this:

It's a lot of power just comes from being more self-aware about the things that you really want in life. When you know what you actually want in life, you're able to take actions to build towards those things.

My life fundamentally changed when I realized that I would never trade lives with the people I was reading books about. We read all these books about these successful people, whoever it is from history or the present, and we celebrate these people, and we admire them. And we very rarely think about the sacrifices and the trade-offs that those people made in the form of relationships, in the form of time, in the form of stress, in the form of health, in all of these other areas. And we're convinced and told by society that those are the things that we should want.

And what I found over and over again was that often those people had pursued a path that I would view through my lens as the Pyrrhic victory. They won the battle but lost the much bigger-picture war. And we don't have to look far to find examples of people like that.

We…know people who have made hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe billions of dollars, and we pat them on the back. We celebrate them, we admire them, we might even write books about them. And we ignore the fact that they have three ex-wives and four kids that don't talk to them. And we tell that person that they won the game.

And my life changed when I started asking myself, is that actually a game that I care to win? And the answer is no. And knowing that has meant that I am able to pursue things in a very different way.

It is certainly true that being near the pinnacle in something requires even talented people to be so obsessive that they have to leave all sorts of other critical parts of life undeveloped. Want to be CEO of the year and mommy of the year? It’s not going to happen. Want to be Mr. Olympia AND a good husband? That’s pretty unlikely.

Of course, most of us don’t want to be at the pinnacle of human existence, we just want to have a good life, but we blow that good life up by allowing ourselves to fall into the trap of never feeling like we have ENOUGH in certain areas.

Like what? Well, many of these are so common that they’re practically stereotypes at this point:

* How about the dad who becomes so focused on earning money to give his family the best of life that he eventually loses his family because he’s an absentee husband and father?

* What about the person who is so desperate for social interaction that they spend all their time on X and forums talking to people that don’t even know their name and never make friends in the real world?

* How about the woman who wants to get married and have children and never does because she doesn’t think any of the legions of good men who actually see her as a potential mate instead of a one-night stand are good enough?

* What about the person who gets so obsessed with adhering to the political messages of people who don’t care about them at all that they cut off their friends and families who do care about them because they’re not on the same side?

* How about the person who loves animals so much that they end up housing them in a hellhole because they take so many of them in?

* What about the spouse that has a good marriage, but abandons it because they’re just sure that there must be something even better out there?

* How many people spend so much time building perfect imaginary lives in video games that they don’t have time to build up their real life?

* What about people who get so focused on avoiding pain and discomfort that they can no longer hack the real world because someone might drop a “microaggression” or they might have to do something that makes them anxious?

* How about the person who spends so many hours every week obsessively trying to make money that they destroy their health in the process and all that money they earned does them no good?

* What about the Hollywood star or social media influencer who goes to ever more disgusting lengths to get everyone’s attention because they never feel like their fan base is big enough? What happens when they realize that they don’t want the admiration of the sort of people that love who they’ve become?

* How about the guy who builds an incredible physique that makes him look like the pinnacle of health, but destroys his body with drugs to do it?

* What about the people who make themselves miserable by going into debt because they’re buying expensive purses, watches, cars, and even homes to give others the false impression that they’re successful?

“Settling” has almost become a dirty word in our society, but the reality is that most people should “settle” in a lot of areas in their lives. None of us have enough time to know it all, do it all, or become outstanding in every area.

The only reason we believe people are doing that is because we live in a world where everyone is heavily incentivized to present their best selves to the world and hide the ugly parts of their lives. “How do they do it all?” Well, when you look closely, you will almost always find out that they didn’t.

You should have goals. You should try to make your life better. You should try to improve yourself constantly, but it’s also smart to say, “I can be happy with this level of success. This is enough,” in a lot of areas of your life.

If you don’t consciously take the time to understand what you want out of life, you may find yourself throwing what you want most in the gutter in order to obsess over a game that was never worth playing in the first place.

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