I’ve said before that this blog grew out of a crazy idea about giving up the profits of a successful business in order to spend that money on increasing the salaries of our employees.
That’s really a simplistic example of the core idea.
But this idea isn’t limited to millionaire executive types.
What if, instead of borrowing $50,000 to buy that jacked-up Chevy your wife’s been eyeing, you bought yourself a little four-banger Ranger and used the couple hundred extra bucks you’ll save on your payment every month to start helping your neighbor earn a few bucks so he can pay for new shoes for all his kids who are always running all over the place?
Or what if you just didn’t spend so much time working to buy that $50,000 Chevy so you could spend some more time with the old widow who lives across the street? Or volunteering at a soup kitchen? Or teaching your oldest boy how to mow a straight line when he does the neighbors lawn? Or reading a book that helps you be a better person?
The point is, this life isn’t all about work. Work begins to consume us and business leads us astray because they start to be about satisfying our desires instead of being about enabling us to live comfortably. And that’s just as true for the poor as for the wealthy among us.
James Clear recently wrote about the Diderot Effect, which is basically the idea that when we begin to focus on obtaining what we want, we will continue to multiply our wants at every step.
The way out of this spiral of consumption is self-denial or, as James puts it, living a “carefully constrained life.” At the end of the article James says it another way: “my goal is not to reduce life to the fewest amount of things, but to fill it with the optimal amount of things.”
Getting crazy is about defining that optimal amount. It’s about learning to give so much—in terms of our time and our attention as well as our money—that it’s just a little bit crazy.
