To some people the phrase ‘just enough’ doesn’t mean anything, which often makes them fall prey to insatiable greed and avarice
HAVE you ever noticed that reflection when Ramadan gets sharper? The inner sanctum of the soul looks to renewal. The brain sends messages that it’s time for the annual clean-up while the body gets vacuumed of toxics and antigens allowed to proliferate in the system over months of abuse and food binging.
Look no further. The best source for emotional nirvana is the Holy Quran.
Read it to understand, to absorb its meaning and not just rattle it off. What good is that?
“This book, without doubt, has guidance in it for the conscientious ... they follow guidance from their Lord, and they are the happy ones,” (the Holy Quran).
Saeed is satisfied. At the time of Iftar there is a long line of limousines with Pakistani families come to buy samosas, the best in the area. Khan Kebab is a small outlet. There’s hardly any place to stand. “Why don’t you expand?” I ask him. “I am happy with this little space and Allah gives me enough to lead a comfortable life. I am not greedy for money,” he tells me.
He has expanded; but, for different reasons. Behind the store, he has built a small platform looking to the Kaba, where he and his fellow Pakistanis offer their prayers. I see contentment on Saeed’s face. A calm quietude. He has been in America for decades and could have acquired a chain of restaurants. Instead of being a capitalist, he chose to stick to his small business and serve his Creator in the true Islamic tradition.
But let me hasten to add, Saeed is a rarity in this land of opportunities. Some might even call him an oddball, letting slip chances to make fast bucks, considering the monopoly he possesses for producing the best chicken tikka masala for miles around in New Jersey that is infested with American fast food joints, a sure turn-off for Asian palettes in search of spice and halal food.
The silent man with a thinning hairline and a mark on his forehead, a symbol of submission to Allah, is now in illustrious company. Laura Nash, who lectures at the Harvard Business School has written a book, Just Enough: Tools for Creating Success in Your Work and Life after interviewing hundreds of people hungering for more and more. The Type-A, as they are known, keep raising the bar for the best and the two little words ‘just enough’ have no meaning in their frenzied lives. Giving the example of a young entrepreneur who sold his software business for $19 million, making him, at 39, a stunning success story, yet one with an unhappy ending. “Was he proud? Happy? Eager to try something new? No. He felt ashamed to tell his peers he hadn’t made more,” notes Nash.
And that makes no sense to her. She is at a great loss to understand why people rarely feel that they have enough money, and why they are driven to get more and more.
“People have rewritten the Midas story — they think somehow it is enviable to turn everything to gold ...well, King Midas’s touch left him hungry and killed his daughter.”
The Harvard lecturer outlines four areas that she calls “spheres of life” that can lead to a more meaningful existence. They are: happiness, achievement, significance and legacy. “And having just enough in each sphere is more fulfilling than having way too much in one of them.
“You’re going to enjoy a good cup of coffee a lot more if you don’t start worrying about whether it’s the best cup you can get,” she says. “And you’ll feel better about contributing to medical research if you don’t think you must give as much as Bill Gates.”
How does one seek out happiness, achievement, significance, and legacy (whatever that means)?
Nash, who is 55, takes a page out of her own life. Even though she can secure a tenure at Harvard and become the great academic that her peers lust after, she is just happy being a lecturer because she doesn’t want work coming before her family. Wanting to be a good mom to her two daughters — who needed her in their adolescent years — Nash wants no more.
Early childhood shaped the lecturer’s spectrum of thought. Her parents provided her the cue. Both were wounded in the Second World War: her father lost part of an arm and her mother injured her knee when explosives blew up prematurely.
But here’s the difference: while her dad converted his loss of mobility into something a lot more meaningful, consoling himself that now he would now have time for jazz, poetry and other things he loved, her mom, by contrast, spent much of her time looking for a “new form of physical therapy to restore her lost mobility.”
She was always seeking ‘goal maximization’; while her father found his level of ‘just enough’.
Obviously Nash appears to have modelled her philosophy of life on her father. He not only found happiness and achievement but also gave great importance to what activities he pursued, allowing both happiness and a feeling of fulfilment overlap.
Nash’s mother on the other hand never found her cup of contentment as she continued her incessant search for overcoming her physical handicap. At the age of 16, Nash lost her father. Her best friend went to Yale because he was male (girls were not allowed at Yale then). No big deal, nor any serious heartburn: Nash was happy to go to the Connecticut College for Women. She saw Yale “as preferable, but the Connecticut College was just enough.” She majored in Greek and Latin and later went to Harvard for a doctorate in classics.
It was in the mid-70s that she began to understand the fascination of power. “The ancient Greek heroes had tragic flaws that brought them down, as happened to former president Richard Nixon.”
Switching to government and business, which she called “the two areas where contemporary issues of power and morality played out”, Nash became fascinated by the values and behaviours of successful people. “I had this growing sense,” she says, “that the definition of success in business had grown too narrow, too based on money.”
Martha Stewart, America’s domestic diva, the housewife who became a billionairess by baking cookies in her kitchen, growing vegetables in her garden, using great marketing tools and later developing a line of domestic items, went to jail last week.
Greedy Martha wanted to add $50,000 more to her billions by cheating on her stocks. She got found out, lost millions in lawsuits and is now behind bars for the next five months. She has lost all, because she never believed in ‘just enough’.
“Do you really want to be the total celebrity CEO, or just the parts about winning and wealth?” wonders Nash.
Imagine the poor legacy that Martha Stewart and her ilk (the heads of Enron, Worldcom, Tyco), discredited chief executives have left behind. Nobody cares for them, they are nothing but objects of contempt and ridicule for those who have watched these towering business luminaries tumble.
In sum, map your own chart to happiness; define your own terms for achievement; set your own goals for significance; and decide the legacy you want to leave behind. And it can’t be all about money.
Customize your moral compass and the rest will fall into place.
To some people the phrase ‘just enough’ doesn’t mean anything, which often makes them fall prey to insatiable greed and avarice
