When is Enough…enough?

I have a rich uncle…that’s so trite and yet so fun to write! He had a knack for business and risk/reward. So, he industriously built. At some point, a friend of his, and perhaps a brother in faith, asked, don’t you have enough?

How would I answer that question if it were asked of me? After 2 years in college? After 4? After 6? After 2 children? After 4? After 6? After 2 rental houses? After 4? After 6? After 2 orphans helped? After 4? After 6? After 2 hours of prayer? After 4? After 6?

It seems that we focus on financial stuff with a very different lens than almost every other part of our life, and it is to our own harm that we do so. Money is the result of things. It is the result of either good things or bad things. So, to ask if you have enough money without bothering to inquire how the money came to a person seems as silly as observing a skinny person who is in cancer treatments and assuming they are a disciplined, health-minded nutrition guru. Imagine the embarrassment of going up to such as person and asking them for their best health tips!!

One who ‘will be rich’ views the world as if money is the goal, not the byproduct. Why would you keep building a business after it is producing enough money to put food on the table for a family? The most obvious reason, from my standpoint, is that the business owner’s perspective has changed from focusing on his own immediate needs (providing for his family) to focusing on the needs of others: providing the good or service to more people that want it; employing more people at a wage that enables them to put food on their family’s table; providing capital to communities for shared projects; and providing resources to individuals in communities who are not able to provide for themselves.

Typically, the assumption is that business owners keep building to heap up to themselves riches. How about we stop assuming and actually go ask business owners. What is your WHY?! I bet if you asked 100 business owners, you’d get 100 different WHYs. You know what’s interesting? When I was an employee, do you know who I thought about? Do you know what my WHY was? IT WAS ALL ABOUT ME! How interesting. It is easy to assume business owners are selfish and employees are selfless. In my own experience, I was just the opposite. I, as am employee, was selfish. Now as a business owner, I think and care for all the other people way more than I ever did as an employee!!

When is enough enough? The answer: when not another person can be served by what you offer. That’s when it is right to stop.

Should you serve others to the exclusion of your family, your church, and your community? The driven person who wears his finger to the bone serving the larger community (either as a driven business owner, politician, Mother-Teresa type, or whatever) while neglecting the service of those nearest him ought not to be honored…but neither should the person who can serve more people but buries his talent in the sand instead.