Quick tips
- Describe one ordinary Tuesday you would live again.
- Add up that Tuesday's month. That is your enough number.
- Write it down and date it. An undated number drifts.
You got the raise, or the promotion, or the client you spent a year chasing. You were right to want it and you were right to go and get it. And then, about two weeks later, you noticed something slightly annoying: the target had quietly moved again, and you were already measuring yourself against a new number you never actually chose.
That is not greed and it is not a character flaw. It is what happens to any number that has never been written down. An unnamed target drifts, and what it drifts toward is whatever the people immediately around you appear to be earning.
Naming your own number fixes that, and it does not fix it by asking you to want less. Enough is a target, not a lid, and it is the figure that tells you which effort is aimed at your life and which is aimed at somebody else's.
How do I work out how much money is enough for me?
Describe one ordinary Tuesday you would happily live again, then price that Tuesday's month. That is your enough number, and it works because it is built from a life you actually want rather than from a figure you heard somewhere.
Do it in that order and it takes about forty minutes. Write the Tuesday first, in real detail and in the present tense. Where you wake up. What you eat. Whether you commute, and how. What your body does that day, because an hour of training is a real line with a real cost and leaving it out gives you a number you cannot live on. Who you see in the evening. What you do not have to worry about.
Then price it. Add up the month that Tuesday implies: housing, food, transport, health, the training, the childcare, the trips, a line for the irregular things everybody forgets. Round it up rather than down. The output is one monthly figure and one sentence describing the day. Two things, both written, both dated.
Why does the number keep moving once I get there?
Because in the absence of a chosen figure you use the people around you as the measuring stick, and the people around you keep changing as you climb. This is well documented rather than a personal weakness.
A study across 109 nations published in Nature Communications found that in 80 percent of them, wellbeing tracked a person's income rank inside their own country more strongly than their absolute income. That is the mechanic behind the moving target. Every promotion puts you in a slightly different room, the rank resets, and the number you are unconsciously chasing goes up with it. Nobody decides that. It just happens to anybody who has not named a figure of their own.
The written number is the defense, and it is a cheap one. Once your enough number exists, a new room does not silently change it. You can still choose to raise it, deliberately, on purpose, with a reason. What you cannot do any more is have it raised for you by a lunch conversation.
Does more money actually keep making life better?
For most people, yes, which is why this article does not end with a suggestion that you stop. Two of the best studies on the subject reached different answers and then their authors sat down together and reconciled them.
The 2010 paper by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that how people evaluated their lives kept rising with income, while their day-to-day emotional wellbeing appeared to level off. A 2023 paper in the same journal by Matthew Killingsworth, Kahneman and Barbara Mellers revisited it as an adversarial collaboration and resolved the conflict: for most people happiness continues to rise with income well beyond the earlier ceiling, and the flattening turned out to be concentrated in the least happy fifth of people.
Read that honestly and it says two things at once. Going after more is not a fool's errand, and the returns are real. And the size of the return depends heavily on what is going on underneath, which is the part a number on its own cannot fix. So name the target, then go after it, and keep the underneath in working order while you do.
What is the money above the line for?
Somebody else. That is the whole answer and it is the section most articles about enough never reach, because a target with nothing above it is just a ceiling wearing a nicer word.
Once you have a monthly figure, the interesting question stops being how much and becomes what the surplus is for. Decide that in advance too, in the same forty minutes, because a surplus with no job attached will find one on its own and it will usually be another upgrade. Our founder's version is the proof here rather than a suggestion: he says giving back was another secret of his success, that he looked constantly for chances to coach, train, advise, lift up, commend and champion the people in his sphere, and that what came back was tenfold. He did it the whole way up, while he was still short of money and standing, not once he had arrived.
Practically, the surplus is not only money. It is the introduction you could have kept, the afternoon of the skill you get paid for, the junior colleague you tell what you actually earn, the name you say in a room they are not in. Deciding that in advance is what turns enough from a limit into a plan, and it is why this exercise should leave you with more ambition than you started with rather than less. You are not naming a number so you can stop. You are naming it so you know what the rest is for.
What if my number is a long way off?
Then you have the most useful thing an ambitious person can have, which is a specific target and a real gap. A named gap is a plan waiting to be written. An unnamed one is just a low background hum.
Break it once. What is the gap per month, and which of the three levers closes it: earning more, spending differently, or waiting longer while something compounds? Most people find the answer is mostly the first one, which is good news, because earning more is the lever with the highest ceiling and the one this whole pillar is built to help with. Then pick the single next action and put a date on it, because a gap with no date attached is a wish.
And do not shave the number down to make yourself feel better this afternoon. A target you quietly lowered is a target that will not motivate you next spring, and you will know you did it. The honest number, even at three years out, does more work than a comfortable one at twelve months.
Write it down and put a date on it
Two lines on one page. The monthly figure. The Tuesday, in a sentence. Then the date you wrote them, because a number without a date is one you will not notice drifting.
Look at it once a quarter and ask a single question: is this still the day I want? Sometimes it will not be. People change, a child arrives, a body changes, an ambition gets larger rather than smaller. Raising your number on purpose is not failing the exercise, it is the exercise working, because the point was never restraint. The point was that the figure is yours and you know when it moves.
What you get for those forty minutes is the thing that makes twenty years of hard work survivable, and it is not calm in the sense of slowing down. It is aim. You will negotiate differently when you know exactly what you are negotiating toward. You will say no faster to the work that pays well and points nowhere. And you will go harder at the work that closes the gap, because for the first time you can see the gap closing. That is what enough is for. Not less wanting. Better aimed wanting, held steady long enough to actually arrive.
Sources
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PubMed Central), Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PubMed Central), High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being
- Nature Communications (PubMed Central), Social status and the relationship between income rank and well-being in 109 nations