You Have Enough Already:
In an interview at the annual Genius Network Event in 2013, Tim Ferriss was asked, “With all of your various roles, do you ever get stressed out? Do you ever feel like you’ve taken on too much?”
Ferriss responded:
“Of course I get stressed out. If anyone says they don’t get stressed out they’re lying. But one thing that mitigates that is taking time each morning to declare and focus on the fact that ‘I have enough.’ I have enough. I don’t need to worry about responding to every email each day. If they get mad that’s their problem.”
Ferriss was later asked during the same interview:
“After having read The 4-Hour Workweek, I got the impression that Tim Ferriss doesn’t care about money. You talked about how you travel the world without spending any money. Talk about the balance and ability to let go of caring about making money.”
Ferriss responded:
“It’s totally okay to have lots of nice things. If it is addiction to wealth, like in Fight Club, “The things you own end up owning you,” and it becomes a surrogate for things like long-term health and happiness — connection — then it becomes a disease state. But if you can have nice things, and not fear having them taken away, then it’s a good thing. Because money is a really valuable tool.”
If you appreciate what you already have, than more will be a good thing in your life. If you feel the need to have more to compensate for something missing in your life, you’ll always be left wanting — no matter how much you acquire or achieve.
Every Aspect Of Your Life Affects Every Aspect Of Your Life
Human beings are holistic — when you change a part of any system you simultaneously change the whole. You can’t change a part without fundamentally changing everything.
Every pebble of thought — no matter how inconsequential — creates endless ripples of consequence. This idea, coined the butterfly effect by Edward Lorenz came from the metaphorical example of a hurricane being influenced by minor signals — such as the flapping of the wings of a distant butterfly — several weeks earlier. Little things become big things.
When one area of your life is out of alignment, every area of your life suffers. You can’t compartmentalize a working system. Although it’s easy to push certain areas — like your health and relationships — to the side, you unwittingly infect your whole life. Eventually and always, the essentials you procrastinate or avoid will catch up to your detriment.
Conversely, when you improve one area of your life, all other areas are positively influenced. As James Allen wrote in As a Man Thinketh, “When a man makes his thoughts pure, he no longer desires impure food.”
We are holistic systems.
Humanity as a whole is the same way. Everything you do effects the whole world, for better or worse. So I invite you to ask:
“Am I part of the cure? Or am I part of the disease?” — Coldplay