Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller are two of the most famous authors of the twentieth century, writers of classics that have sold millions, including Slaughterhouse-Five and Catch-22. They were friends, and there’s an old story Kurt Vonnegut wrote in The New Yorker after Joseph Heller passed away:
True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.
I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22’
has earned in its entire history?”
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
Not bad! Rest in peace!
4
What does a Greek philosopher have in common with the Rolling Stones?
Greek philosopher Epictetus says, “Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.”
A famous Persian proverb hung on my aunt’s kitchen wall reads, “I cried because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet.”
And the Rolling Stones sing, “You can’t, always get, what you wa-ant. You can’t, always get, what you wa-ant. You can’t, always get, what you wa-ant. But if you try sometimes, you just might find—you get what you neeeeeeeeeeeeeed.”
5
When does making a million dollars feel like nothing?
Thinking about the trouble we get into when we fall into the Culture of More reminds me of a dinner conversation I had with my friend Josh Tannehill. Josh was asked by his company to move from CEO to an advisory role, which meant he was going from making a couple million a year to half of that. Still a great job. Just a lower-level position than he had before. Less responsibilities. Less than what he wanted.
I asked Josh over dinner how he was feeling about the new job.
“I’ll be honest,” he said. “I’m worried about making ends meet. Donna’s running a design store that loses money but gives her so much joy. We’re halfway through building our retirement home north of San Francisco and the invoices keep getting bigger. Plus there’s our place on Martha’s Vineyard. Our whole family meets there for Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. With the amount of moving we’ve done for work, it’s become our home. But the boats, taxes, and maintenance are too much. With two kids in grad school and our oldest needing financial support, I honestly don’t know what to do.”
I felt sorry for Josh. He was in pain. He was an unfortunate example of what the Culture of More can do.
What’s the solution?
It’s time for the three words.
Remember
The
Lottery
Remember the lottery.
What does that mean?
It means be conscious of your problem-scanning machine’s Amygdala Hijack, be conscious of the more you want, and be conscious to remember how lucky you are to be where you are. Remember you have enough! Remember more isn’t always better.
Remember the lottery.
6
The classic tale of the Mexican fisherman
A boat is docked in a tiny fishermen’s village.
A tourist wearing expensive sunglasses and a fancy watch walks by and compliments a fisherman on the quality of his fish and asks how long it took him to catch them.
“Not very long,” answers the fisherman.
“But then, why didn’t you stay out longer and catch more?” asks the tourist.
The fisherman explains his small catch is enough to meet his needs and those of his family.
The tourist asks, “But what do you do with the rest of your time?”
“I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, and take a siesta with my wife. In the evenings, I go into the village to see my friends, have a few drinks, play the guitar, and sing a few songs. I have a full life.”
The tourist jumps in. “I have an MBA and I can help you! You should start by fishing longer every day. You can then sell the extra fish you catch. With the extra money, you can buy a bigger boat.”
“And after that?” asks the fisherman.
“With the extra money the larger boat will bring, you can buy a second one and a third one and so on until you have an entire fleet of trawlers. Instead of selling your fish to a middleman, you can then negotiate directly with the processing plants and maybe even open your own plant. You can then leave this little village and move to New York City! From there you can direct your huge new enterprise.”
“How long would that take?” asks the fisherman.
“Twenty or twenty-five years, at most,” replies the tourist.
“And after that?”
“After that? Well, my friend, that’s when it gets really interesting,” answers the tourist, laughing. “When your business gets really big, you can sell your company stock to the public and make millions!”
“Millions? Really? And after that?” asks the fisherman.
“After that you’ll be able to retire, live in a tiny village near the coast, sleep late, play with your children, catch a few fish, take a siesta with your wife, and spend your evenings drinking and playing guitar with your friends.”
7
How to use the three words on your very worst days
The Mexican fisherman already had enough. He didn’t need to remember the lottery. He knew he’d already won!
You and I aren’t so lucky. I used to feel stress several times a week. When the car in front of me didn’t move on a green, when I dropped and shattered a glass on the kitchen floor, when I had a deadline coming up next week. I felt like my life was on the line. I felt frustrated if everything wasn’t going right.
What did I do?
Remember the lottery.
In these moments I moved my head to a zoomed out state.
When I was a kid I lay in bed picturing my body slowly floating up and up and up over my bed and my room and my house. Then I’d picture floating even higher, above the neighborhood and the city and the clouds into low-orbit outer space. I would gaze down at the distant flickering lights of my hometown. And I’d imagine my problems way down there. And nothing felt as serious.
Remember the lottery.
So let’s try this together. How small does Earth look next to Uranus and Neptune and Saturn and Jupiter? Well, if we are a golf ball, they are tennis balls and bowling balls. And how big is the sun compared to our golf ball? It’s larger than a house!
And as we keep zooming out there are hundreds of thousands of stars just like our sun filling up our Milky Way galaxy. What’s a galaxy? A clump of stars, gas, and dust held together by gravity. We live in one, and scientists estimate there are six hundred thousand stars in our galaxy alone.
Yes, our sun is just one of six hundred thousand stars in our galaxy. We are all spinning out there! But it goes much farther. How much farther? Well, have you seen this before?
It’s the Hubble Space Telescope. Basically the world’s biggest camera. It was invented to take pictures of outer space from outer space. We blasted it off more than twenty years ago, pointed it into the deepest darkest corner of the universe, and opened the shutter for a few months. Then we closed the shutter, pulled the camera back to Earth, got the picture developed, and guess what came back?