My blogging friend Chris Guillebeau, a unique special man who has chosen to live life by his own rules, wrote a wonderful post last year that really nailed this concept.
In the past few days, this topic has come up in various conversations. I love Chris’ work, and you will too. If you get very interested, check out his story so you better understand his perspective. In any case, the issue is never about how much money we have, but what we are willing to live with, and live without. I am often reminded of the wonderful quote from Fight Club–“the thing you own, end up owning you.” Most of the stuff we have, we don’t really need, and usually the desire for a new thing is only motivated by the lies from Madison Avenue on TV.
Chris wrote, “As I see it, sufficiency simply means enough. It means having everything you need and not lacking for anything. Right now, that’s exactly how I feel – I’m not getting rich, but I really do have everything I need. It’s a pretty good feeling. I also know that there have been other times in life when I’ve had more money but felt less secure about it. This tells me while money is an important part of the answer, I also know that sufficiency is not all about money.”
Later he really nails it by saying, “It’s important to think about sufficiency because if you don’t know what it looks like for you, you can easily fall into scarcity. The thing with scarcity is that you operate under the principle that resources are limited and that we can never truly have enough. We’d better work as hard as we can to ensure that we don’t lose out to someone else. This is the default mode of operation for most of us. The challenge is to be self-aware and rise above it. For me, the most important principle of personal finance is self-awareness. The values of frugality and generosity are also important to me, but I don’t think either can be consistently practiced without first being self-aware. Both frugality and generosity have to be related to a deeper value of clearly understanding how we think about money.”
Like I said, he nailed it. So, how about you? Are you living with a spirit of abundance or a spirit of scarcity? Its easy to figure out when you look at how you handle things like sharing with others. Take time to read the full article and be motivated towards financial freedom by pursuing simplicity and sufficiency.