I don’t have megayacht money.

I just finished Andrew Wilkinson’s new book, Never Enough.

If you don’t know Andrew, he is a self-made billionaire who founded Metalab and Tiny, an investment firm that owns Dribbble, Creative Market, Aeropress, and more.

The book is absolutely worth a read, but I want to take a second to focus on one specific lesson from the last few chapters.

Everyone thinks their life would be better if they had just a little more.

If you ask someone who makes $25,000/year what they need to be comfortable, they will say $50k.

If you ask someone who makes $50,000/year what they need to be comfortable, they will say $100k.

If you ask someone who makes $1,000,000,000 what they need, they will say $2,000,000,000.

I think we all know intuitively that less is more. That we don’t need that one better thing. That another $50k, or 500 square feet, or 50 horsepower isn’t going to make us happy.

But we seek it out anyway.

We have an instinct to compare ourselves to those around us, often only noticing where we fall short.

In Never Enough, Wilkinson tells a story of meeting with a series of incredibly wealthy people, including one worth over $10 billion, who couldn’t stop complaining about Bezos's wealth. Finally, Wilkinson stopped him, asking, “What can Jeff Bezos buy that you can’t?”

The man responds “I have superyacht money, but I don’t have megayacht money.”

In The Gap and the Gain, Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy hold the mantra to ‘always measure backward.’ 

In other words, forget the gap between you and whatever arbitrary target, comparison, peer, or goal you have. Only care about how far you’ve come in your own journey.

Somehow, even the billionaires can still fall into the gap mindset.

If you’re a human being on this plant, I would highly recommend reading both Never Enough and The Gap and the Gain.

Then send me an email and let me know what you think.

be good

z