Every year, on the first weekend of the year, it’s probably worth replacing the dried spices in your pantry. The best, freshest spices still taste like the spice that’s on the label, but they taste more like themselves.
That’s what successful brands and freelancers do as well. They relentlessly do the work to act more like themselves.
First, we have to figure out what we are, what we stand for, and what people expect.
Then we get a chance to be more like that.
By the time you get around to embracing the fashion of the moment, it’s almost certainly too late.
The leading edge is defined by the fact that most of us aren’t on it.
An essential feature of every bottle is the neck. No neck, no bottle.
There are bottlenecks in every process, every project and every method. Something is limited. We can pretend that’s not the case and avoid the discussion. Or we can see it as an opportunity.
Successful organizations are good at embracing and working with their bottlenecks.
If you went back 45 years, the built world would be eerily similar–the clothes, the cars, even the haircuts.
Except you’d quickly notice that there were no personal computers and no smart phones. That for seven or ten hours a day, every day, people were interacting in real life, not with their screens. Many of us can’t remember what we did all day.
The same thing probably occurred after the adoption of electricity. We acclimate to the new normal.
What happens a year from now, when most of those ten hours have been transformed by AI? We probably won’t remember what it was like today.
If you buy an Ikea table, you’ll need 8 bolts to put it together. 7 is not enough.
This is a functional sort of ‘enough.’ It can be critical to our survival. “I have enough medication to last through this illness.” “We have enough food to feed our family.”
But this isn’t the stress that we often feel in social or financial settings. That’s the bottomless, n+1 habit of never having enough.
Our needs got hijacked and turned into endless wants. Marketers and adjudicators of cultural standing turned ‘enough’ from a functional requirement to a never-ending tactic.
The not-enough of the driven hedge fund bro in the Hamptons, or the not-enough of the person hoarding resources, or the not-enough of the generous but nervous host who finds a sort of fuel in worrying about being hospitable. The not-enough chronicled in magazines and social media accounts. It’s the not-enough of someone counting online metrics, and the not-enough of the athlete who doesn’t simply want to win, they want to break a record.
This is a choice, and it is simply about the story we tell ourselves. There’s no absolute measure, no certain number of nuts and bolts needed in the optional search for solace and status.
On the other hand, when we find the insight to choose what our enough is, the people around us often respond warmly and in kind.
Insufficiency isn’t a tool or an advantage. It’s a hack, a distraction and a place to hide. This is a choice, a simple one, one we can remake each day.
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