While standing inside a Jimmy John's store yesterday and waiting for my order, I happened to look up and notice a sign on the wall with a lot of text on it. It's above the eye line, so it's not something that I've ever noticed before. Since I had a minute or two before my order was ready and had left my phone in the car, I decided to spend it reading this sign.
The sign said, "How much is enough?"
And the story read:
An American investment banker is on vacation and notices a small boat returning to shore. Inside are several large, beautiful fish. The banker compliments the fisherman on the quality of the catch and asks how long it took to catch them.
"Not very long," the fisherman replies.
The banker, puzzled, asks why he doesn't stay out longer and catch more fish.
The fisherman smiles and says he has enough to support his family's needs.
The banker then asks how he spends the rest of his time.
The fisherman says he sleeps in, fishes a little, plays with his children, takes a siesta with his wife, and in the evenings strolls into the village where he sips wine and plays guitar with his friends. He has a full and happy life.
The banker scoffs and says, "I have an MBA from Harvard. I can help you. You should spend more time fishing. With the extra proceeds, you could buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from that, you could buy several boats. Eventually, you would have a fleet. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman, you could sell directly to the processor, maybe even open your own cannery. You could control the product, the processing, and the distribution."
He continues, "Of course, you would need to leave this small village and move to Mexico City, then Los Angeles, and eventually New York, where you would run your expanding enterprise."
The fisherman asks, "But how long will this all take?"
"Fifteen to twenty years," the banker replies.
"And then what?" asks the fisherman.
The banker laughs and says, "That's the best part. When the time is right, you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public. You would become very rich. You would make millions."
"Millions?" the fisherman asks. "Then what?"
"Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal village. Sleep in late. Fish a little. Play with your kids. Take siestas with your wife. Spend your evenings drinking wine and playing guitar with your friends."
The fisherman smiles.
Rarely do I read something that sort of stops me in my tracks, but this was definitely a series of words that caused me to pause and reflect.
What really resonated for me is the concept that the Fisherman already had everything he wanted and needed, and someone else thought he could have so much more. But at what expense?
I hear from people quite often today that they would prefer to trade off their sanity, their time with family, and parts of their earnings in exchange for a quieter life, without the stress and the anxiety their career currently brings.
It's wild to think we also create all of these barriers for ourselves, like the expensive house, the cars, the private schools, the wardrobe, the assets we don't really need, and more, so we end up having to create that full-on fishing operation.
And I am not naïve to the other side of this argument, because ambition is not the villain here, and growth is not something to apologize for.
I have built teams, chased revenue targets, taken big swings in my career, and I genuinely believe that earning more can create options, leverage, and freedom that would not otherwise exist. The issue is not the size of the boat. The issue is whether you are expanding because you are curious and energized, or because you are trying to outrun a definition of success that was handed to you by someone else.
There is a massive difference between building something because it excites you and building something because you are afraid of being perceived as small.
The part that lingered with me as I stood there waiting for my sandwich was not that one path was right and the other was wrong, but that the fisherman seemed clear. He knew what enough looked like for him. He was not anti-growth. He was simply aligned.
Meanwhile, most of us are sprinting toward a version of retirement that mirrors the life we say we want right now, except we have decided we are not allowed to have it until we have earned some arbitrary badge of financial validation.
The danger is not that we work hard. The danger is that we never pause long enough to ask whether the end goal we are grinding toward is actually different from the life we could design today with fewer self-imposed obligations and a more honest definition of enough.
I love the fact that the fisherman knew exactly what he wanted, what he needed, and how much effort he wanted to put in to get it.
Do you?