Success as a Zero-sum Game

When (as related in my last ezine) Charles Handy attended his father's funeral, he saw a community pour out its love for a quiet and humble man. This experience changed his life. He came to see that if success means the pursuit of more, and more, and still more, it is foolish:

If you follow the god of More, you never win. That is because there will always be more.

Instead, he became converted to what he called the Doctrine of Enough:

The Doctrine of Enough says that if you can work out what Enough is, then and only then are you able to stop at Enough.

I too am a convert. "No idea," I wrote in 2003, "has had a more liberating impact on me over these last fifteen years." But I am in a minority. The prevailing view still links success with the pursuit of more money. As Harvard academics Laura Nash and Howard Stevenson say in a newly published book, Just Enough: