Just Enough

You know that business hero you read about recently? The fabulously wealthy CEO, revered by his staff, who is happily married, coaches a little league baseball team, has a golf handicap of two, paints like Cézanne, serves at the soup kitchen, and never has bad breath?

It's a myth. Harvard academics Laura Nash and Howard Stevenson remind us of this in Just Enough. No-one, but no-one, has it all. By definition, you can seek to maximize achievement in one area only. And even in that one area, you can never achieve the maximum. More is always possible.

Nash and Stevenson researched "enduring success," which they saw as an amalgam of happiness, achievement, significance, and legacy. They found that managers who had experienced this hadn't tried to maximize their career achievements. Instead, they had invested heavily in many other arenas of their lives. 

But how had they found the energy to do that? By being willing to settle for just enough:

Instead of trying to have it all and do it all, you have to learn to go after just enough. Beyond that, you really begin to waste your energy at the cost of your opportunity to address your other needs.

Hold it. Doesn't enough mean "second-best"? It needn't. Nash and Stevenson put it this way: 

By just enough we don't mean settling for the minimum. Just enough is actually a vehicle for actively making choices that get you more, not less, through achieving satisfactions on more dimensions in life.

Forget the mythic business hero. Aim to achieve success on your own terms. In this quest, let yourself be guided by a delicious paradox: If you want to end up with more, then learn to settle for enough.

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