It’s been almost 7 years since I started learning about investing. It has kept me curious throughout all these years, as I read more about it and learned how it works. Some of the lessons were profound and some very trivial.

Out of all of them, the one lesson that I would give the most weight is this: having a sense of what’s enough. It’s something that sounds very simple yet keeps me intrigued the more I think about it. It’s probably one aspect of investing (and many things in life) that would give you the highest leverage, used the right way.

I like to think of having a sense of ‘enough’ as a skill that can be learned over time. I would still consider myself a novice at this skill. One thing that makes it hard is the fact that it’s not pure science, perhaps it’s a combination of science and philosophy. In terms of investing and personal finance, it can be more than a number. In this post I want to attempt to define what is enough and see how we can strike a balance between having enough while maintaining a reasonable growth momentum. I will try to cover this through the themes of investing and careers. The point of having enough is not to get to a state where you do nothing, perhaps you can define enough as the rate of growth that gives you the right balance with no regrets in the future.

Over the years, I have come to realize that our end goal is to minimize regrets at the end of our lives, that is to look back and feel less or no regrets.

Defining what is ‘enough’?

Imagine having a meal and you are offered another serving even though you are full. What’s your instant reaction? Most probably you will say, “No, thank you. I have had enough.”

Our bodies have a mechanism to signal when we have had enough food. While not a perfect mechanism (we do overeat at times), it works fairly well. Sadly, we don’t have a built-in mechanism to signal when something’s enough for every aspect of our lives. More on that later, but let’s define enough first.

Enough is a ceiling.

Beyond enough, you may not receive any more perceivable value. You may be accumulating more of something, but that may not translate to anything better, and perhaps it may worsen the optimal state or feeling.

Enough is a state of equilibrium.

A few examples:

  • In investing, enough could be the point where your investments can cover all your personal finance goals while accommodating uncertainty.
  • In your career, enough can mean getting the job where you can contribute your best, while you are paid fairly with good prospects for growth.

How do you find your ‘enough’?

I think this is the most difficult question. In investing, you could create a spreadsheet to arrive at a number that represents how much money is enough. A spreadsheet formula can perhaps give you the exact amount of money that you would need to retire, based on the time you define. For your career, you can find a job that checks the boxes for the compensation, growth, ownership and contributions you can make, and you could potentially call it enough.

What we don’t see

The problem with the above approach is that it doesn’t (always) account for uncertainties of life. What works now may not work tomorrow making the plan break in the future, making your enough number futile as you get there.

If someone had made their career plan 10 years ago, they would not have even remotely thought of how AI would change their careers as it is doing now. Same with a financial plan, nobody would have predicted the disruption in companies riding the AI wave, and the ones that plummeted over the past few months.

I am not saying we shouldn’t work on it. A better approach might be to aim for a range rather than a concrete number.

Measure your ‘enough’ as progress rather than an end goal

If you set your ‘enough’ as a fixed value - say your investments hitting a million dollars - you will never be content until it happens. Even if you have made 0.9 million, at which point the rest makes only a marginal difference to your goal, you may still not be able to stay content. Treating it as a marathon rather than a sprint helps.

If you have defined your dream job to have 5 characteristics (whatever those are), and your current one only has 3 of them, consider yourself 60% there. Doing this mentally reinforces the fact that you are making progress and you are not stuck.

If your retirement target is to make around a million dollars and you have already amassed 700k of wealth, consider yourself 70% there. Getting out of thinking your goals in binary (done/not done) is perhaps the strongest step to understanding where you actually stand.

The most important thing - cultivating an inner sense of enough

“Hence in being content, one will always have enough.” – Lao Tzu

Regardless of whether you have enough or not, having an inner sense of enough is probably the biggest factor that will help you stay grounded.

You won’t have a quality life if you have more than enough but your inner self is still craving and wanting more. Similarly, you’ll have a good life if you develop a sense of enough, even if you are just getting there. That mental calibration is probably worth much more than the remaining money you need to get there.

There are two important things that can change your inner sense of ‘enough’:

  • The ability to think and comprehend how much you already have (The ability to know and understand how close you are to having enough).
  • Having reasonable desires and wants. (These are the two factors that will stop you from getting to a state of enough)

A lot of what you are doing today stems from your thinking that you don’t have enough.

Imagine if you had all the money you ever needed, would you:

  • Still continue to work at the same job you are in today?
  • Prioritize things like health, peace of mind, hobbies, philanthropy, etc., over your career?
  • Remain in the place where you are today?
  • Let go of some of the people from your circle and spend more time with the ones you value the most?

Answers to these questions will reveal your priorities and where you should focus going forward. Most likely your life would massively shift if you got everything you wanted in terms of money (not saying that will make your life perfect).

You are probably sacrificing, doing things you don’t like doing, for the sake of getting to a point of ‘enough’. As with many things in life, it’s often worth looking back once in a while to see how far you’ve come. Perhaps you are already near the point of ‘enough’, or perhaps you’ve crossed that point long ago but never noticed. And sadly, a few may go astray and are getting farther away from ‘enough’ because they never thought about it. Habits and routines just suck you into the loop of life that it’s easy to forget where you wanted to go in the first place.

That’s probably enough for today about enough.