The Sufficiency Story
“Once, a powerful executive went on vacation — his first in fifteen years. As he was exploring a pier in a small coastal fishing village, a tuna fisherman docked his boat. As the Fisherman lashed his boat to the pier, the Executive complimented him on the size and quality of his fish.
‘How long did it take you to catch these fish?’ the Executive asked.
‘Only a little while,’ the Fisherman replied.
‘Why don’t you stay out longer and catch more?’ the Executive asked.
‘I have enough to support my family’s needs,’ said the Fisherman.
‘But,’ asked the Executive, ‘what do you do with the rest of your time?’
The Fisherman replied, ‘I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take a siesta with my wife, and stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my friends. I have a full and busy life.’
The Executive was flabbergasted. ‘I’m a Harvard MBA, and I can help you. You should spend more time fishing. With the proceeds, you could buy a bigger boat. A bigger boat would help you catch more fish, which you could sell to buy several boats. Eventually, you’d own an entire fleet.’
‘Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you could sell directly to the consumers, which would improve your margins. Eventually, you could open your own factory, so you’d control the product, the processing, and the distribution. Of course, you’d have to leave this village and move to the city so you could run your expanding enterprise.’
The Fisherman was quiet for a moment, then asked, ‘How long would this take?’
‘Fifteen, twenty years. Twenty-five, tops.’
‘Then what?’
The Executive laughed. ‘That’s the best part. When the time is right, you’d take your company public and sell all of your stock. You’d make millions.’
‘Millions? What would I do then?’Josh Kaufman. The Personal MBA, 167-168.
The Executive paused for a moment. ‘You could retire, sleep late, fish a little, play with your children, take a siesta with your wife, and stroll into the village each evening to sip wine and play the guitar with your friends.’
Shaking his head, the Executive bid the Fisherman farewell. Immediately after returning from vacation, the Executive resigned from his position.”
Reflections
Kaufman uses this parable to introduce the concept of sufficiency and when a business is successful. He says, “If you have enough profit to do the things you need to do to keep the business running and make it worth your time, you’re successful…” (168).
I think this is a wonderful mindset for anyone who works, whether running her own business, working a traditional 9 to 5, working nights in a warehouse, or going to school and working as a barista. It is easy to get swept up in “the rat race,” or, as Ryan Nicodemus says in the documentary Minimalism, “… [T]his mentality of getting a better promotion, getting a better house, getting a better car, getting a bigger paycheck, being able to buy more expensive bar tabs…” (13:01-13:12).
It’s hard to realize that all we need to make is enough to be sufficient. I think part of the difficulty is the effort it takes to realize what “sufficiency” looks like in our individual lives. This requires us to sit down, look at the nitty-gritty and discomforting details of our finances, and evaluate everything we own. We have to ask hard questions. “What do I need to do to get out of debt?” “Which items are actually adding enough value to my life to justify keeping it?” “What do I want my life and the space I live in to look like?”
These are not simple questions and we won’t know the answers to them right away. Nevertheless, to move toward sufficiency and to realize that we do not need to sacrifice our relationships, health, passions, and adventures for the sake of a perhaps-unnecessary amount of income, we need to explore difficult questions.
I do not think this is a call to give up “the good life” or “The American Dream,” but a call to reassess our situation and our values to determine if our life as we know it actually lines up with the life we most desire to live.
Resources
- Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things. Dir. Matt D’Avella. The Video Project, 2016. Kanopy. Web. 3 May. 2019.
- Kaufman, Josh. The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business. Reprint edition, Portfolio, 2012.
- You can read Kaufman’s full section on Sufficiency here.
- Photo from Philippe Bourhis on Unsplash.
