To know enough is enough is enough to know.

We all want more. We are competitive beasts by nature, and we struggle to turn off that competitiveness even when doing so is in our best interest. We need more.

The “more” can vary, of course. I’ll never be a car guy. Give me $1 trillion and I would still likely drive a Honda. But loyal readers will be well aware of my boat fetish. We’re all keeping score in some way or another.

Someone smarter than me once wrote about the brilliance in the Founding Fathers adding the words “the pursuit” in front of happiness. Life and liberty were, to their eyes, unalienable rights, but happiness was not. Only the attempt to find happiness was promised. We humans are blessed with the license to pursue happiness, but doomed to never feel we have reached that destination.

I can’t change who I am, let alone change who you are. I wouldn’t dare try. But there is power in at least recognizing our limitations and attempting to course correct to minimize the damage done by them. Finding satisfaction, reaching that destination, is beyond my reach. But perhaps I can at least avoid screwing things up further if I admit it.

Oliver Burkeman is a really good journalist and the author of "Four Thousand Weeks," a book named for the average number of weeks in a human life. You should read the whole thing, because I couldn’t begin to do it justice here. But he does hit on an important theme that needs to be highlighted.

We constantly feel the need to accomplish, but instead of celebrating our accomplishments once we reach whatever the goal is we instantly set new goals. Graduated from high school? What’s your college plan? Valedictorian four years later? Do you have a job lined up? Youngest ever to make vice president? How long until you have a corner office?

There’s a whole industry of productivity hacks and gurus set up to exploit our desire to constantly want more than what we have.

There’s nothing wrong with ambition. (Well, ok there is but that’s a major tangent and you don’t want us going there.) There’s even upside to ambition: Without it I’d still likely be on the couch in my parents’ basement playing video games.

But Burkeman argues, quite effectively I think, that ambition comes at the great cost of us not being able to enjoy the moment, and to celebrate the accomplishment. We’re so focused on the next mountain we have to climb that we never get to enjoy the view.

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So what does this have to do with investing? I missed Amazon in 2000. I missed Tesla in 2015. I wasn’t even invited to the party when GameStop went ballistic. I was invited to the Bitcoin party all the way back in (I think) 2013, when (from memory) I could have bought a few coins for ~$25/apiece. (The price is over $20,000 today.) The things I’ve missed... The own-goals I have scored… Frankly, I have zero idea why anyone would ever take my advice.

Yet… It is easy to miss out on the fact that things are good enough. Despite those stumbles I’ve somehow stumbled my way into having tuitions funded, retirement secure. I get to say “no” when I want to say “no.” We have the financial freedom to travel to great places, and a pretty remarkable amount of control over our lives. There could be more, but there is plenty of enough.

Our time-traveling minds are constantly obsessed with things in the past, and things in the future. The brain is endlessly disconnected from the body forced to live in the present. I think (at least for me) it is impossible to prevent this.

But we should take a moment every now and then to consciously fight back against the time travel by appreciating the today. It’s bound to be good for our mental wellbeing. And that grounding can be the extra energy we need to fight back against the temptation of more, and to avoid making bad decisions as a result.

The title of this post is a rough translation of Chapter 33 of the Tao Te Ching. I have been told numerous times by people smarter than me it is a very poor translation. But I really like the wordplay.

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