185 - What does practicing “enough” look like?

[00:00:00] Caroline: Welcome to What Is It All For? A podcast designed to help you grow your online business and pursue a spacious, satisfying life at the same time. We are your hosts, Jason and Caroline Zook, and we run Wandering Aimfully, an unboring business coaching program. Every week, we bring you advice and conversations to return you to your most intentional self and to help you examine every aspect of your life and business by asking, What Is It All For? Thanks for listening. And now let's get into the show.

[00:00:28] Jason: And I'm here too. Well, hello, and welcome to our podcast, the last episode of 2023 for us.

[00:00:41] Caroline: Can you believe?

[00:00:42] Jason: Wow. We will be taking a break from the podcast until January. So as of recording this episode, I think this goes up on November 16, I believe.

[00:00:54] Caroline: I think that sounds right.

[00:00:56] Jason: And we will be taking off of the podcast. We are doing some traveling. We're going back to the US for three weeks.

[00:01:01] Caroline: Our first time back since a year ago.

[00:01:04] Jason: Didn't want to pack all the podcast gear with us and think about that. And then when we get back, it's getting into December, which is when we normally take off. So it just made sense that we're going to take a break from the podcast maybe a little bit early, and we hope you all will not miss us too much.

[00:01:17] Caroline: Too much. But just enough? Enough is the key word of this episode.

[00:01:20] Jason: Oh, wow.

[00:01:21] Caroline: Miss us just enough that when we return in January, you will see our little episode pop up in your feed, and you'll be like, yeah, what are those Zooks doing?

[00:01:31] Jason: Maybe it'll have different podcast art?

[00:01:34] Caroline: You always do this.

[00:01:35] Jason: I'm just saying maybe. I can say maybe.

[00:01:36] Caroline: Okay, I can agree with maybe.

[00:01:39] Jason: Six months ago, I could have said maybe.

[00:01:42] Caroline: Maybe it won't.

[00:01:42] Jason: That's not saying anything.

[00:01:43] Caroline: But you know what? Maybe it won't.

[00:01:44] Jason: Exactly. Anything's possible when you put your mind to it.

[00:01:48] Caroline: Maybe is such a beautiful word.

[00:01:50] Jason: That's what I mean. Like, you started to get, like, a little bit like, what are you saying? But I'm like, it's just maybe.

[00:01:55] Caroline: Well, because who does the podcast art, Jason?

[00:01:57] Jason: I mean, I could do it if you want.

[00:01:59] Caroline: Maybe you could.

[00:01:59] Jason: I will bust open Photoshop. I will create a rectangle. I'll choose the color. Drop a couple of photos of us in there. I'll pick Impact font.

[00:02:08] Caroline: I'll create a rectangle.

[00:02:10] Jason: Yeah, I'll just use a little rectangle tool, and then I can size it up and down easily, and then it doesn't get pixelated. Hey, at least I'm not making marquee boxes anymore and filling that with a color. Big steps.

[00:02:21] Caroline: Babe.

[00:02:21] Jason: Big steps. If you guys need Photoshop tips, send us an email. Anyway, let's get into this episode. We have kind of danced around this topic in multiple episodes of the podcast. We felt like, let's do a...

[00:02:34] Caroline: Dedicated episode.

[00:02:34] Jason: Full one, especially this time of year. I think it's helpful to chat about.

[00:02:37] Caroline: Yes, and the topic of this episode, as you saw from the title, is the idea of enough. And this is one of those topics that I think I thought we did a dedicated episode because we talk about it so much. We talk about it inside of our coaching sessions. We talk about it in conversations with each other. We talk about it with friends. It definitely is a concept that permeates just about everything we do in our life and business. But we realize that maybe we don't have enough episodes fully dedicated to the topic. So that is what we're going to try to do today. And really what we wanted to tackle was what does it mean to have an enough mindset in business and life, and how does that actually show up specifically speaking? Like, how do you practice this notion of contentment, and how do you square that with the paradox of also wanting to grow and change? And how do we think about that specifically? And I want to give a shout out to my friend Nicole, who is always sending me voice notes about our podcast episodes and is always a wonderful wealth of podcast topic ideas.

[00:03:42] Jason: Yeah, it's great. Also, we didn't write it in the notes, but I was just thinking back to when do you think the enough number started for us? Because I have an idea of when I think it started, but then, I don't know when it actually officially started between us.

[00:03:55] Caroline: I can't think of a moment, if I had to guess, put a finger on it. I think it was when we came together to form Wandering Aimfully, and we sat down, as we always do, and said, what is our goal with this? What are we trying to accomplish? And I think that's when we realized that a lot of these financial goals are arbitrary. And I think that's where you brought a bit of your experience with your first business. IWearYourShirt. And saying, I wanted to make a million dollars. I realized that doesn't even mean anything to my life.

[00:04:31] Jason: Exactly.

[00:04:32] Caroline: Is that where you thought?

[00:04:33] Jason: For me, it was 2013.

[00:04:34] Caroline: Yeah.

[00:04:35] Jason: It was when I finally shut that business down, and my entire goal, that entire five years of running that business, was, can this business make a million dollars per year?

[00:04:43] Caroline: Right.

[00:04:44] Jason: And it never did. And I remember feeling like a complete failure, and then I just had this moment where after I recovered from the fallout of that business and everything that went along with my identity, with that business being like, this is really dumb. This was such an arbitrary goal. Like, I picked this goal because society says a million dollars is cool, and it's an amount of money that...

[00:05:04] Caroline: You wanted the rubber stamp that said successful.

[00:05:06] Jason: Exactly. And all it got me trying to reach that number, that arbitrary number that didn't even have anything that I sought out for my life, that I broke down and said, I want a million dollars because of x. Like, I'm going to put this much here and this much here into this. It was like, no, I just want this number. And in chasing that number, all it did was stress me out because it was such a big number number, and it was so hard to reach. And so I think for us, when we got to 2018 and we started building Wandering Aimfully together, we both sat down, and for five years, we had kind of been making a certain amount of money, but we had never kind of talked about goals, specific financial goals of money. And I was probably just, like, rallying against them because I had spent five years trying to hit a goal that I never did. And I was like, well, screw goals. They don't work. And then we came back around. We're like, okay, well, let's look at this differently. What would every part of our life in business expenses look like? And then what would that number add up to if we just said, what would a good enough life look like? Let's get through those numbers.

[00:06:00] Caroline: And we'll talk about that in this episode of for you listening. How do you actually define your own enough number? And before we get into the meat of the episode, I think an important caveat to wrap this entire conversation in is this idea that everyone's version of enough is going to look different. And we only share this concept as a means of something that has been very valuable in our lives, something that has helped us, we really think, enjoy life more and kind of, like, live from a place of more abundance and not so much in the financial scarcity mindset that I think, to some degree, we both grew up with. And so I think a lot of people are wanting that. So this is one avenue to maybe try to cultivate that more in your life. But what this episode is not is, like, how you should live, how you should make decisions, how you should or should not spend your money. That is not what we're interested in. As always, we are here on this podcast to introduce some ideas that maybe run counterculture to the main narrative of business, which is what Jason was describing, which is often this arbitrary pursuit. We see startup stories and all the time it's hockey stick growth, and it's always growth for growth's sake. And it's always the cover of Forbes and 300,000,000 and 500... And it's just, this narrative is always what I call this high score mentality, where it's just the game of it, right?

[00:07:28] Jason: Yeah.

[00:07:28] Caroline: And that's fine. Some people play business just for that high score game. But I think we've also seen a lot of stories where when you do play that game, you run the risk of, it's like, what does that cost you for playing that high score type of business game? And what it a lot of times costs you is your health, your free time, your family, your mental health, your sanity. And so we like to be here on this podcast introducing different concepts for people who want to live a more balanced way, who want to run a business with an emphasis on working to live, not the other way around. And so this enough mindset is one thing that has defined that for us. That's what we're going to get into.

[00:08:10] Jason: We're definitely going to get into some more about the financial number, but a couple of things that I wrote down that I want to talk about with just using an enough mindset for life decisions. So I think it's very practical and easy when it comes to the financial part to define some things, because you can look at actual data in your life, but some of these enough mindset decisions for just what's going on in your day to day life can be a little bit more nebulous and more difficult. And it's very much, I think the enough mindset is helpful to push back against the keeping up with the Joneses, because I think so much of our society is set up for, especially coming from the US, and now we don't live in the US anymore, but you still see all the incredible capitalist forward ideas and things and things that are for sale and new things that pop up. And it's just like, I think I need to have that. I think I need to have that. And I think that so much of that, to a degree, it's very hard to not buy things. It's very hard to not get caught up going, well, I guess I need a bigger house, and I guess I need that new car. And so I think for us, what we really started to do was just sit down and at every big decision that we would come up against in life is to try and just define, okay, well, but what would good enough be? Because there's always going to be an opportunity to speed up the hedonic treadmill of life and get more out of life. But in having some things predetermined, you can know, okay, well, I'm confronted with the decision and I feel like I should buy this thing or I should do this experience or whatever, but do I really need to?

[00:09:43] Caroline: Yeah. And I think what I'm hearing you say in that, which I've never articulated before, but when you talk about some of these buying decisions or things like that, it's recognizing that new is not a good enough reason to buy something.

[00:09:55] Jason: Right.

[00:09:55] Caroline: And so it's about digging deeper into your own personal values and really interrogating and evaluating your desires to make sure that they are true and not just manufactured by capitalism. Right. That's not a rejection of capitalism for me because I'm not going to sit here and pretend that I don't want to buy things. That would be hypocritical. But it's about interrogating it to the degree that you can make sure that you're not just buying it for the sake of new.

[00:10:23] Jason: Can I jump to my fourth bullet point here? Am I enough mindset for life decisions?

[00:10:27] Caroline: Absolutely. I'd love for you to jump to that.

[00:10:28] Jason: I bake two to four loaves of sourdough a bread week every single week. I bake a batch of cookies or a batch of cinnamon rolls every single week.

[00:10:36] Caroline: It's a carb heavy household.

[00:10:39] Jason: I'm living... I'm living to carb. I'm carbing to live.

[00:10:42] Caroline: Yeah, carbing to live.

[00:10:43] Jason: And it would be like, I watch tons of recipe videos, and New York Times has a great series on different batches of cookies. And every single one of those videos. What do you see in the video? A stand mixer. Kitchenaid stand mixer, whatever brand, it doesn't matter. But there's this device that people use in baking, like good bakers, professional bakers, bakers who are well known on the Internet. And it's like I'm constantly seeing it. And it's not like they're saying, like, you have to buy this to do this, but it is exactly that. It's the shiny thing. And I think about, like, I'm not trying to toot my own horn, but the bread that I make is delicious.

[00:11:18] Caroline: It's delicious.

[00:11:19] Jason: The cookies and cinnamon rolls that I make are fantastic.

[00:11:21] Caroline: Very good.

[00:11:21] Jason: And there's nothing in having the Kitchenaid stand mixer that would make any of those things any better. And if anything, it's actually just a distraction in figuring out the least path of resistance to continue to do these things well and not add in something else that seems like I should have because other people have it. And so I think this is, like, such a stupid example, but I bring it up because it is one of the perfect enough mindset ways of thinking where you go, I'm already doing the thing in a way that I like and enjoy, and we both get value from, I don't need to spend 300, 400, $500, whatever it is, on an extra thing because I'm seeing everybody else use it when they're making these things. So it's just like, it's one of these examples of, like, it may sound stupid to some of you, but I think there is a big group of you listening that are probably like me, where you're like, but the experience could be a little bit better if I had this, couldn't it? You're like, yeah, but the experience is already good enough. And so I don't need to try and take it up one notch better because society, culture, et cetera, is telling me that I should.

[00:12:25] Caroline: And because here's what happens too when you do that. And again, this is not like everyone's going to have their own desires and their own spectrum of desires. So maybe you are the person that's like, no, but the standing mixer, really, this brings me deep joy.

[00:12:38] Jason: I'm not going to let you do that. The stand mixer. It's not a standing mixer, is it.

[00:12:43] Caroline: Because it has a stand?

[00:12:44] Jason: Because it stands upright.

[00:12:45] Caroline: Well, that would mean that it's standing, wouldn't it?

[00:12:47] Jason: No standing.

[00:12:47] Caroline: Hey, you should have said that it was for the stand.

[00:12:52] Jason: All right, now I have to buy one, because I just have to have one.

[00:12:54] Caroline: Well, this entire episode is scrapped. No, you might be the person. Thank you so much for correcting me that it Stands.

[00:13:03] Jason: This is a running joke in our house. Stan or Stan?

[00:13:06] Caroline: Are you saying Stan?

[00:13:07] Jason: Stan? Yeah. Okay, good.

[00:13:09] Caroline: The Stan mixer, fine. It's like you have to interrogate that for your own. But what Jason is saying is, I did interrogate it, and I realized that this is not a necessary part. Know, bring up the experience that much of a notch. And the point I was going to make is, what happens is when you do sort of latch on to some of those things subconsciously, when you go, okay, well, baking, it kind of diminishes the experience at that point. That is actually good enough because you go, well, it's not the experience with the stand mixer. And suddenly an experience that was perfectly delightful now feels lacking right. And so I think practicing in enough mindset is shifting your mindset from what this experience is lacking to what this experience is full of. At its heart, it is a gratitude practice. It is a contentment practice. And it takes exactly what the word sounds like. It takes, it takes repetition of training your thoughts to recognize what you are abundant in versus what you are lacking.

[00:14:13] Jason: Yeah, I just had three other examples for the enough mindset because the majority of the rest of this episode is going to be about your enough number.

[00:14:19] Caroline: And your business goals, your financial goals.

[00:14:22] Jason: So one I wanted to talk about was planning for vacations. So this was pre pandemic, was the last time we planned for vacations. But I remember distinctly that we would sit down and we would talk about where do we want to go and what's our budget for the vacation. And you find yourself on like a hotel booking website or whatever, and you're like, ooh, if I just go up like $100 more a night or $200 more a night, you get this. And again, it's this classic example of there always seems to be a little bit more that you can get, but when you actually interrogate and look at like, but look at what I'm looking at, going to it is good enough. I'm going to be in a place that is tropical or whatever that feels the way I want it to feel. I feel like the incremental increase in value of whatever the next lud option up is just not worth it. And we've seen this play out in spades, right? You book the place that's within your budget and you go and you say, I don't even think those other places exist. I'm just going to be here and be present in where I am and what I'm doing, and I'm going to enjoy every moment of this that I possibly can. And there's not a single vacation that we've ever taken where I know there was a better option that wasn't that far much higher than our budget, but what we chose was good enough. And what we chose was a worthwhile memory that we've created forever. And we didn't have to do X, Y and Z higher than that. And I think it's like, again, some of these are going to be kind of silly examples where you're like, oh, well, I only have x budget for a vacation, so I can only do x. It's like, yeah, but you can take a vacation and you can go somewhere and you can experience things. And so I think it's really important to define what enough would look like for that specific experience, because then it makes your decision making very simple when you're looking at the hotel booking websites as an example.

[00:16:06] Caroline: Yeah, it reminds me. All of these examples are just reminding me how much that metaphor in my head, and I'll come back to this train metaphor later on in the episode. But enough to me is just applying the brakes in your own mind, because our natural state is always going to be that hedonic treadmill. It's always going to be the more, more and more. We're literally wired for that. And so what an enough mindset does is it's these mental breaks that you apply to that natural state of not enoughness, that you push back on that a little bit in your own mind so that you can find abundance and gratitude. And so all of the things that you just described, I think, are concrete examples that, silly or not, I think are very helpful for people to attach to their brain. Oh, that is what enough actually looks like in our day to day lives. It is the stand mixer. It is the vacations. It is buying a car and realizing that we didn't actually need a brand new car.

[00:16:59] Jason: It would have been easier to buy the brand new car, to be honest. We were looking at it, but it would have also been $10,000 more money. We just kept talking about, we're like, but what is good enough? Yes, the new car is easier, it's newer, it's going to be shinier, and it's going to be fun to get that brand new car. But wouldn't it be better to save $10,000 and just get an experience that's 85% as good? And then we also have 10,000 extra dollars. That's a no brainer.

[00:17:26] Caroline: And here's what I also want to say about that, because I think the car is a great example of that. I think when we say enough, sometimes people think bare necessities, right? And that's not what it means to us. If you define enough through just bare necessities, any car that runs and gets you from point a to point b would be enough. Right? But I think the way that we operate and use that term in our lives, it's about more than the bare necessities. It's more of a break on the upper limit than it is a break on the lower limit, if that makes sense.

[00:18:00] Jason: Exactly. Because if it were up to me, we would be driving a McLaren P one everywhere. So we'd have, like, a $2 million car that we can't afford.

[00:18:07] Caroline: Yeah, we need brakes on the upper limit.

[00:18:09] Jason: And then you would be like, a Toyota Corola is fine. And be like, okay, but we got to meet in the middle.

[00:18:13] Caroline: Right? But the point that I'm trying to make, yes, that is exactly in the line of thought of what I was thinking. But I just wanted to really hit that point home, because the point of this conversation is to talk about preventing us from growing for growth's sake or from sliding into that hedonic treadmill. It's not to say that all of us are bad people if we want more than the bare necessity. I just don't think that's realistic.

[00:18:40] Jason: No. And I think, again, this goes back to what I was saying of, like, when you live in kind of like a capitalist driven culture, it's very easy to be like, hey, you need this. And, hey, you need this. And hey, you need this. And it's like, I don't actually need any of those things, but my life would be a little bit better if I had x because I've actually been driving the same car for 15 years, and cars have gotten safer, cars have gotten electric. Now's the time to finally upgrade a car that makes sense, but also, I can buy a used version of that car. I don't have to buy a new version. So it's like, yeah, I think there's a lot of different steps in there, too, where you realize that whatever your version of enough is, it evolves over time, just like ours. Ours has totally.

[00:19:20] Caroline: And I think that there's something like a little bit insulting about people who have gotten to a place where they don't have to worry as much about money and they have financial resources to be able to make decisions to make their life more convenient or to make their life safer or to give them more optionality. It's a little bit insulting to hear people then tell you who might be struggling for every paycheck that you just probably shouldn't want all the things right. I think it's why so many people rail against the financial advice of when people who are making a bunch of money off of selling financial courses go, don't have lattes. That's what people are railing against is like, don't tell me that I can't want my joys in life when you are at a place where you have amassed quite a few joys. Right? So that's the thing that I just want to caveat all of this with is enough is not about saying that you need to just only want for the bare minimum in life. I want you to go out there and live a beautifully rich and satisfying life. Lord knows we've gone after that. But I do think in that same breath, on that same token, it's about recognizing when that pursuit is enough.

[00:20:34] Jason: Yeah. And I think the really helpful thing for everyone listening is to hear is I think we have gotten past, well, we have gotten past the place of, first of all, achieving our enough number, but we have also gotten past the place of the short term squeeze for long term ease.

[00:20:49] Caroline: Right.

[00:20:49] Jason: And so we've talked about this in previous episodes before, but in 2013 to like 2015, 2016, we were in a short term squeeze phase.

[00:20:57] Caroline: And what Jason means by that is budgeting. Like extreme budgeting, limiting ourselves on our spending so that we could get out of debt, putting all of our extra.

[00:21:07] Jason: Money towards looking at where every single dollar that we had spent, which we still kind of do, but we were looking at every single week. And so it was basically every single week going, hey, where can we save like $20 or $100 or what phone call can I make to a credit card company, a utilities company, the cable company, to try and save $20 a month? And those are decisions that I think for those of you listening to this who were like us, maybe in 2013, you're in debt. It feels like, how could I ever have an enough number? Like, I have debt. I can't think that way. And I think part of the thing that we have talked about on this podcast many times, and we have a full debt payoff article you can check out at Wandering Aimfully, debt that goes through our entire debt journey and how we paid off our debt, which was over $100,000, is that you do have to do some of the hard things and you do have to do some of the things that really aren't fun. And that's, again, the short term squeeze for long term ease. There might be a couple of years ahead where things feel like there's not a lot of abundance, there's not a lot of joy, but there are small things that you can plan for. Right? Like, I remember we still had like one movie per month that we would go to the movie theater and we didn't cut that out completely. It would have been easy to save that $40. But we're like, that's like a date night for us. That is something that we love and cherish. And we're still going to get the big popcorn, we're still going to get the M&M's but we can't do it every week. We can only do it once a month, and so you keep that joy in there. So I just wanted to share that because I think it is helpful. Like you, it's easy to hear people talk about when they've gotten to a place like where we are, where we're out of debt. We've reached our enough number. We're trying to help share with you where we are now. But also, it took us ten years to get to where we are now in a very focused manner. And that that might be your journey, and that's okay. And it's really just to look at. It's very possible. It just might take longer than you want it to. And that's how it felt for us as well.

[00:22:52] Caroline: Definitely. And I think that's actually a good segue before we get too far into the episode, just to define a little bit more what we mean by this enough number. And also what we don't talk about quite as often, but there's kind of two target numbers.

[00:23:05] Jason: Is it my feet?

[00:23:07] Caroline: It's not your feet.

[00:23:07] Jason: Okay.

[00:23:08] Caroline: We should talk about your feet more, though.

[00:23:09] Jason: That's what I was saying. Okay.

[00:23:11] Caroline: So inside of our program, WAIM unlimited, we talk about these two target numbers a lot. The first one being what we call your MMM number. That's just MMM number. And it stands for your Monthly Minimum Magic number. And it's MMM because it's delicious. And then your enough number. These are the two kind of financial targets. And the difference is that we define your MMM number as the minimum that your business needs to make every month to cover your expenses, both your business. I mean, if you're a solopreneur, your business expenses and your living expenses, however you define that. And so when you're starting out in your business and you want to maybe go full time, that MMM number, you forget about an enough number. You just want to hit that MMM number. Right. I remember when I started Made Vibrant, and I was making $1,000 a month in my design business, which was not enough to live on. I had not yet reached my MMM number, and I was like, I don't even know what a rich and satisfying life looks like. I'm just out here trying to do this full time, so this can be my job. Right? And so that's kind of that first checkpoint that you are striving for. And I think it's important to note that know, like Jason was saying, we're out here talking about enough. We're out here talking about, and we'll get into some of the decisions that we make in our business, because we come from a place of enough. And a lot of those decisions have to do with leaving money on the table and rest and taking the month of December off. And you might be still trying to go for your MMM number, not your enough number, and you might go, hey, I actually can't take time off because I'm not to the place where I'm thriving yet. I'm just surviving. And so there needs to be space in this conversation for that place in the journey as well. We hope you're still finding moments of rest. We hope you're still baking that into your business and moments of joy. But we recognize that if you're early on, you might have to do some of that hustling, and we hope you're not burning yourself out in the process. But I think it's important to note that you might just be in a different place right.

[00:25:08] Jason: Before we move on to the enough number. So for those of you who might be thinking like, okay, great, but how do I define this number? What does it mean? The way that we kind of talk about it is like every bare minimum expense. So just like, the expense to cover your rent, the expense to cover your bills, the expense to cover your groceries, it is not a lot of frivolous things like eating out, entertainment, that type of stuff, shopping, all of that gets pushed aside. It is like the bare minimum. This is just like what you have to make to survive. And then throw in a little bit extra so that you have an emergency buffer. So maybe that's saving $100 a month, $200 a month, whatever feels right to you. But that number is the number that you basically say I can get by every month. It's not going to feel like I'm thriving, but it is going to feel like I can cover all my bills. Bills. So in the example of when you started Made Vibrant, $1,000 a month was not enough to hit your enough number, but it actually wasn't that much higher. It was like maybe $2,000 a month. Your MMM number. Sorry. Yeah. So when you were making 1000, when you defined it, let's just say it was $2,000. So you go, okay, great. I actually don't have to make as much as I thought. And this is what we hear all the time with Wandering Aimfully members who go through this exercise is they go, oh, I actually thought my baseline expenses were higher, but I didn't actually look at every single thing that I needed to pay for every single month, because most of us don't, because we're just not taught to do that right then you realize, like, oh, I need to make less with my business than I thought. If I just cut out a couple of things and I'm a little bit more strict, that's awesome. That feels empowering, because then you go, oh, I don't need to make, like in the made Byron example, I don't need to make $5,000 month. I just need to make two. I can get there. That feels more doable.

[00:26:43] Caroline: Yes. And that's what that purpose of that first checkpoint, the number is. The purpose of that is to make it more doable. And so that's why we kind of define that a little differently, because we recognize how hard it is when you're getting your business started. So that's kind of your first checkpoint. Your next checkpoint is then your enough number. And your enough number is above and beyond just the bare necessities. It's everything that we've already talked about in this episode. It's that place in life where you close your eyes and you imagine what would it feel like to live a beautifully rich and satisfying life? How much money would be enough every month to have the house that I want and have the childcare help that I need and be able to take care of my parents or go on those trips. What is that number? And then break it down line by line. And this is the important step there, because going all the way back to the beginning, what Jason said, the reason we even set this up in the first place was because we were like, what even is a million dollars a year mean? Again, that's just numbers. That's just high score. And if you just say a million, when you hit a million, you're just going to want to hit 2 million. But if you say it's actually 543,000 a year, whatever, that breaks down to by month, because I can give money to these causes. I can go out to dinner this many times a month. I can save for my retirement. This much I can put this into. If you actually know line by line, there's something deeper behind that number. And I think that actually makes it stickier and grippier in our minds so that we aren't stuck playing the high score game where profit and revenue and the competition is the most important thing.

[00:28:26] Jason: This is the other thing that we've heard from a bunch of Bonner game for the members who have gone through and done this exercise is they define the MMM number and then they go, well, okay, but how do I set my enough number? And a lot of times we just say multiply it by three or four times. That's just an example number. Multiply your MMM number by three or four times, and then take that number and then break that number down. So how much would that increase what you could pay for for wherever you live? How much would that increase what you could give to causes? How much would that increase, what you can save? How much would that increase for childcare? All the different places. And then look at all that and go, does that feel like enough? And, oh, maybe I need, I'm only getting left with, like, $200 a month for a car. I've been living off of $200 a month for a car for 15 years. That one I want to double or I want to triple, whatever.

[00:29:16] Caroline: And you might find the opposite. Sometimes you might go, okay, that three to four times gives me x amount of travel year. We don't like to travel that much. Let's lower it.

[00:29:23] Jason: I think this, for us, shopping is the easy one for us, that we've always had a line item in our budget for shopping. It was very small in 2013, and it has gone up. But then every year when we look at our shopping budget, we'll go back and look at the previous year and go, yeah, but we only spent like, $400. Let's bring that one down. And does that increase any other areas that need increasing, or does it just actually bring our whole enough number down just a little bit? So I give you that as an example of someone listening to this episode who might be thinking, oh, great. Now I have a formula for how I could define my own enough number, how to break it down into a bunch of different categories, and then how to look at that and go, and this is what I've absolutely adored hearing from our members is in the exact same way they said it about the number. They say it about the enough number. They go, this is way less than I thought I had to make.

[00:30:12] Caroline: Because also, what you're really saying when you set your enough number is like, that's what rich would feel like.

[00:30:18] Jason: Exactly. And it's so different for everybody else.

[00:30:20] Caroline: Rich life was going to be actually that number.

[00:30:22] Jason: And I remember early on in WAIM, when we first started talking about this, there was a person who messaged us, and she was a single mom, and she was like, I went through this exercise and I thought I had to make $100,000 a year. I only have to make $60,000 a year to live an enough rich life for me and my kid. And that in itself is so empowering because it removes the stress of then, well, now I have to triple my business income or quadruple or ten x or whatever, that's daunting. That's incredibly difficult. So I give you some of these little example exercises to think about when you're going through this, because it's been so helpful for so many people within WAIM, that in recording this, just I hope many of you will write down these two numbers. I would love to hear from you if you want to send us an email. Hello@WanderingAimfully, you don't have to tell me your numbers, but just let me know if just doing the exercise of breaking it down and actually seeing it for the first time ever, written out your number and your enough number, what did that feel like? Was that actually empowering? Because I know it has been for us. And every time that we've set an enough number and then when or if we hit it, we then review and change, and we didn't review or change our enough number for two or three years after we hit it, and then that's okay. And then you go, okay, well, now I have new goals, which we'll talk about, and now I'm going to make a new enough number. And that's great. So it's not like something you have.

[00:31:36] Caroline: To stick with forever, which we'll talk about later on in the episode mode, is kind of this paradox of enough being this breaks system, but it doesn't mean that you can never make more money, and it doesn't mean that you have to subscribe to the same number for your entire life, at least not for us. We have a whole section on that because it's complex. And I know it's a little bit confusing at first because you go, well, isn't the point to kind of cap yourself? And that's not how we think about it. We think about it as breaks, not a cap. But before we move on, I wanted to talk about one mistake that I do think we made in setting our first enough number was we didn't contribute or we didn't think enough about the fact that our business expenses would scale. Well, we did think about it, that our business expenses would scale as our revenue scaled, but we didn't know to what degree. As it turns out, in our enough number we were like, okay, well, if we're making "X" amount of revenue, then our business expenses will probably be $5,000 a month, right? Well, turns out our greatest marketing engine in our business is affiliates.

[00:32:42] Jason: Which we didn't have on the plan when we made the enough number.

[00:32:47] Caroline: We had to experiment a lot to find this repeatable, sustainable engine, and we pay out a very healthy commission. So our affiliates, our affiliate cost is like, we could be making $40,000 a month in revenue, but it's $15,000 a month in expenses. So that's $25,000 in profit. And that scales very linearly as the revenue scales. So that's something that you want to think about as well as when you're building out that enough number, make room for what the business expenses are going to be at that level.

[00:33:18] Jason: And I think the mistake that we made was we set the enough number and then we never went back to tweak. Well, what does it actually look like as we added this new expense into our business? Which is a big expense.

[00:33:27] Caroline: Exactly.

[00:33:28] Jason: If you want to read through our entire journey to enough. I wrote about this at WanderingAimfully.com/330. So that's 330 because our enough number was $33,000 per month. And you can read how we started at zero, absolutely nothing on our revenue journey, and then worked up over the course of three years to hit that number. And then what it felt like when we actually hit that number and then kind of all the things along the way that reach different milestones throughout that journey. So that's all shared at wanderingaimfully.com/330 if you want to check it out.

[00:34:00] Caroline: Great. So now that we've talked a lot about how to establish your own enough number, let's just get even more granular about how does that specifically show up in our business once we hit that number? So when we hit our enough number, which we did in late 2021, did we just magically never want for anything again? Or did we say no more way members? We are never accepting new members ever again. I mean, we thought about it. We actually did have a conversation of like, do we just cap it now? But anyway, we'll get into the whole cap idea.

[00:34:32] Jason: Yeah, I think two things I wanted to share about when we hit our enough number, and I think I included the video on that journey page so you can actually watch our reaction. But two things I wanted to share.

[00:34:42] Caroline: Do you remember where we were?

[00:34:43] Jason: Yes, I do.

[00:34:43] Caroline: Me, too.

[00:34:44] Jason: Number one, I remember when we hit that number. Three things now, when we hit the number, we actually didn't even realize it because we were just so in the weeds with business and things and whatever, and we had forgotten about it. But I think that's also the beautiful thing. Not because we had forgotten about it, because we were just like chasing money for money and we didn't pay attention. It was because it had given us the ease and peace of mind.

[00:35:07] Caroline: Exactly.

[00:35:07] Jason: That we didn't have to think so much about trying to grow our revenue exponentially. It was, oh, we're inching toward this number, and that number gives us the quality of life that we want. So that was the first thing. The second thing was we were going through some pretty gnarly family drama at the time. And I think this was the super relatable moment to share for all of you. It's likely that you'll hit your enough number and it will not be a perfectly sunny day when it just happens and you realize it and everything is great. And that is exactly what happened for us. We were having a real shitty family drama situation. And then we hit the number and it was like, well, this is a real dichotomy, because on one hand, we're stressed out and worried about this thing, but on the other hand, we just hit this milestone that we were working out really hard for over the course of many years, and we wanted to celebrate. And I remember in that moment just being like, I don't know what to do with all these emotions.

[00:35:59] Caroline: Yeah, so many emotions. Which I think is just how life is. Right. And I think that's also something it points out. Something about this. Enough mindset that I hope is coming across in this whole episode is it's not the perfect answer to all of your money woes, right? It's not the thing that's going to magically make you stop wanting stand mixers that you don't need. It's not the magical thing that's going to make you wake up one day and never have money pressure. It's not a silver bullet, but what it is, is a framework that can help you bring more gratitude and abundance into your life. And so that's what it actually did for us. So if we're answering the question, how did it change how we show up in our business? I think Jason actually pointed out, even leading up to, as we got close to it, it changed. And what it changed was we didn't feel like we had to push ourselves so hard.

[00:36:44] Jason: That was my third thing.

[00:36:45] Caroline: Okay, go ahead.

[00:36:46] Jason: Just that. So it removed this urge to always be thinking about trying to make more money.

[00:36:53] Caroline: I wrote down it changed the energy behind making money. And so it was not this chase anymore. It was not this endless pursuit where you're being chased by all these money anxieties. It was a different type of energy that we could bring to making money. A much more generative energy, a much more coming from a place of abundance, coming from a place of enjoyment, actually, because we had established that milestone in our brains and we had achieved it. And it's like we took this big collective exhale of just being like, we're good. It doesn't mean we're never going to worry about money again. It doesn't mean that I feel completely secure. We all carry those money stories with us that I'm not sure will ever go away. Especially if you're someone who grew up in a household where money was extremely fraught. I don't know if that'll ever go away because it's in our wiring. But you can change your relationship to it, and you can change the way that it's no longer a tiger chasing you towards your business goals.

[00:37:55] Jason: I was just going to say, it's funny that you mentioned the tiger chasing you because before we set an enough number, it felt like when we were just going after making money, you're running at full speed to try and reach a target that doesn't exist.

[00:38:10] Caroline: Well, okay, that's fine, but before. This is the train. And I just can't allow you to take this metaphor from me.

[00:38:16] Jason: I just finish this real quick? Because it's a different metaphor that goes along with your metaphor. Okay, so imagine if you don't have an enough number set. It feels like you're just being chased by a tiger.

[00:38:26] Caroline: Yes.

[00:38:27] Jason: And you're running as fast as you can, you're doing everything that you can, and it feels like you're never going to get away. And eventually you're just going to get caught by the tiger and you're not going to make enough money and whatever.

[00:38:36] Caroline: And that panic and anxiety lives with you 24/7 exactly.

[00:38:38] Jason: But what changes? Just when you set an enough number, that's like a realistic number based on your life and your journey. It feels like you're being chased by a neighbor's cat. Because you're still working, right? You're still running and you're looking back like, hey, man, come on, can we be done with this? And you're still going. But the good thing is that eventually you hit a place where you outrun that cat and the cat gets tired and they give up. And that, honestly, is like the relief that you feel where the tiger will never stop chasing you because it's just an insurmountable amount of energy and you're going to get caught.

[00:39:11] Caroline: The cat will get distracted by a laser pointer.

[00:39:12] Jason: Cat's going to get distracted. And I think that's truly. If I could articulate what it felt like to switch from arbitrary financial goals just based on big numbers to a set enough goal for our lives and everything that we wanted. That's the difference that it felt like for me.

[00:39:26] Caroline: Okay, I do like that metaphor.

[00:39:28] Jason: And we're not even cat people.

[00:39:30] Caroline: And we like, well, we might be cat people now, my metaphor that I wanted to shared that this is how it shows up in my brain, and I'm glad there's two of us, because some people might resonate more with the tiger metaphor. Some people might resonate more with the train metaphor. Whichever one you like, you can make up your own metaphor.

[00:39:46] Jason: Pick your own metaphor. Might be the new name of this podcast.

[00:39:48] Caroline: We're a very choose your own metaphor kind of family.

[00:39:50] Jason: Exactly.

[00:39:51] Caroline: My metaphor that I always think about in describing this is this train. And so I think about the way that most people do business, and it is this train. It's like a runaway train barreling down the tracks. We just watched what was the mission impossible movie.

[00:40:03] Jason: We watched Dead Reckoning, part one.

[00:40:05] Caroline: Dead Reckoning, part one. The brakes are broken, and it is just barreling towards this train down the tracks, right? And that's where a lot of people, I feel like, operate from in business, especially, like, from big business people, they don't even know where they're going. They just know that that train better be going as fast as possible, right? And similarly, if you're a small business owner and you do feel like you want to do this full time and you do have all these money anxieties, you, too might feel like that train needs to go full speed ahead. Because all you know is that you can't be left without money, okay? To me, what MMM number does, and what an enough number does is it gives you these train stops, these stations along the tracks, a destination, and more specifically, the enough train stop, it gives you permission to put on the brakes, to fix those brakes and to go, I'm going to slow this train down to the point where I can at least enjoy the scenery, right? Like, I can see what is the beauty that is outside of these train windows, because when the train is moving so freaking fast, you're not even looking around to enjoy the journey. You're just like, I just got to go as fast as possible. And so that's what it did for us when we hit that number. It allowed us to slow down to the point where I could just freaking enjoy the ride. And it doesn't mean the train stops. This is the whole thing about the cap. It doesn't mean that you don't ever make more money or you don't have goals, because I do think that there is something to the fact that we, as human beings, we need purpose, we need goals.

[00:41:36] Jason: Let's just be honest. Life gets more expensive. As time goes on it just happens..

[00:41:40] Caroline: Exactly. And it does happen. So the train doesn't stop, but I just slow it down enough to go. Now it's going at, like, the perfect pace. I look around, I love this train. I love the place we're at on this journey, and it just gives me a different vibe and energy of my business journey.

[00:41:57] Jason: Great double metaphors for everyone to choose

[00:41:59] Caroline: from.

Whether it's the tiger, whether it's the train. I hope that that helps kind of solidify in your mind the value of this mindset. And so, going back to what we were saying about how does this actually specifically show up in our business once that energy did change? The funny part, we didn't plan this at all, but we hit our number in late 2021, and then in 2022 is when we were traveling full time for a year. And I think we were actually probably under the illusion that we would work more when we were, like, not more than usual, but I thought we would be able to work quite a bit when we were traveling. Absolutely not.

[00:42:33] Jason: Yeah. I mean, I think there was a natural capacity ceiling that you hit and that I also hit that I didn't realize for me either. I was like, I'm going to be in cafes and it's going to be great, and I'm going to have my laptop, and I'm going to get all kinds of work done when in essence, it's like, okay, we just got on that flight. We got to this Airbnb. There's something wrong with it. We had to get here. Our rental car didn't quite work out. Oh, we got to go to the grocery store. And then before, you know, I have 47 minutes to be able to work today.

[00:42:59] Caroline: And maybe we would have worked more had we felt like that tiger was still chasing us, but it wasn't.

[00:43:05] Jason: But it would have made the whole trip, I think, a lot more stressful.

[00:43:07] Caroline: Exactly. And so that is what the enough mindset allowed us to do, is to basically coast for all of 2022, to have this once in a lifetime opportunity to see the world for a year.

[00:43:20] Jason: To see ten countries in Europe.

[00:43:22] Caroline: Okay, but.

[00:43:22] Jason: You know what I mean? It's a worldly podcast here.

[00:43:27] Caroline: It's a very limited view of the world, let's just be honest. But to travel, we'll say, and to basically just only show up for our members and deliver for them, but not do any outward marketing. And our launches didn't do as well as others had in the past. And it was okay. It was more than okay, because I looked at the life we were able to live and I thought, man, if we're able to keep our business going and to support our members while also living this beautiful life, that's what an enough number does for you, right?

[00:44:00] Jason: Yeah. And it's a testament, too, to the three years of work that we put in to identify the right audience, identify the right offer to build systems and processes into our business. And these were all things we didn't have in the beginning. But by getting those things going and smooth before we went on this journey, we could work less because we had more things working on our behalf that previous us did.

[00:44:21] Caroline: Right.

[00:44:21] Jason: And so I think for many people listening to this, it's going to take you years to hit your enough number, but have that be okay, because in that time, you're also building in all kinds of different processes, systems. Your offer is getting honed, your audience is getting more trust built with you, and that gives you a lot of leverage that when you do hit your enough number, your train can slow down, the cat you can stop running from for a little while. And it all makes, I think, everything a lot easier, which is how we felt last year. Sure.

[00:44:49] Caroline: The biggest thing for me is an enough mindset gives you permission to say no. Because, for example, this year we had candidly higher financial goals by the end of the year, mainly because we want to save for a house.

[00:45:03] Jason: Well, I think this is a perfect place to say, you set one enough number and then you hit that number, and then what do you do from there? And basically for like a year, we didn't do anything. We just said, well, that was our number. We hit it. Like, let's not do anything drastic. Let's just live with the number that we had set. And then all of a sudden, life changed for us. Right. Like, we moved to a different country. We decided, okay, well, think we want to buy a house here. We think we want to buy a house here. Also, we have some family stuff where we think we're going to need money for it down the road. That's an expense we didn't even see coming. So now we need to reevaluate that number.

[00:45:36] Caroline: Right, which I do have in the next section so we can talk about that. But before we move on, I want to just going back to that permission to say, no point. We had these goals this year to save up more for a down payment. And part of that was we were going to do too many launches in between our fall enrollment periods. And when it came time to do those launches, which we had planned for in January of this year, we said to know we're in a place where we're enjoying living in Portugal, we really considered what would it look like to put these launches together, these mini launches, and we said, but you know what? We're making enough money. So it's like, if it means that it'll take longer to get to the down payment on the house, the new enough goal, that is okay for us because we've already hit that enough goal. Right. And so that is, to me, the power of enough is it says you can make decisions where not everything in your plans is for the end result of profit and money.

[00:46:38] Jason: Yeah. And I think even for us, in 2019, when we had established our MMM number and we had our enough number set and you had a year of dealing with anxiety, there were a lot of things we said no to in our business because it was easy for us to say, well, we can hit our number and we're not going to hit our enough number as quickly as we want to, but your mental health is more important than hitting our enough number. So let's live off of our MMM number for a little bit longer. And that became an okay thing to also use as a way to say no. That even if it's going between MMM number and enough number, you still have the leverage, if you're hitting your MMM number, to say, great, I'm not going to stress myself out. I'm not going to add more on my plate because there's a lot more going on in my life that I have to take care of. And if I just give myself another year to take it slow, that's okay, too.

[00:47:23] Caroline: Yeah. And it's like when people email in during an enrollment period and they tell us they're not in a good financial place, but they want to join WAIM, we're able to say, please don't join WAIM this time around. We're able to, quote unquote, leave that money on the table.

[00:47:39] Jason: Yeah, we love leaving money on the table.

[00:47:40] Caroline: Because I would never want that person to over leverage themselves. And we can take summers off and we take December's off and we can make all of those decisions because we have now reached this place where we know we're good. It doesn't mean we stop having goals, which, again, we'll talk about in a second. But it allows you to confidently say no to things to save your mental health or protect your piece. And you can't do that if you're playing the high score version, the arbitrary version, where it's just all about the scoreboard and it's all about growth for growth's sake. If it's growth for growth's sake, you're always going to optimize for profit and growth's sake, which means that you're going to have to push out things like your mental health, what you do to get there, even sometimes sacrificing some of your values and things like that.

[00:48:26] Jason: Also, it's important to note, too, just because you hit your enough number doesn't mean you're not continuing to reinvest in your business. This year alone is a perfect example of we did two huge projects this year for our business, and one of them was one of the biggest expenses we ever had and redoing our entire members dashboard and area. And so I think you might be listening to this and thinking like, great enough number, you can just coast. You don't do anything. That's not what we've done. We hit our enough number and now we're like, well, great. We still want to invest in our business. We want to make things better. We want the whole experience for our users to feel awesome.

[00:48:55] Caroline: Yeah.

[00:48:56] Jason: So we're going to continue to reinvest in that.

[00:48:57] Caroline: And we get it. This is by nature paradoxical. So we did an entire episode earlier this year called the Satisfied Striving Paradox, all about this concept, which is, it's so hard to hold two of these sort of seemingly opposing truths at one time, which is enough, is a framework that allows you to feel content and satisfied and to make decisions that say, I'm not going to try to push it in order to eke out more from my business. Right? And in that same breath, you can say, but I'm also a person, and I want to grow and I want to evolve my business and I want to continue to get better. And so how do you hold those truths? And there are more things that I do want as I get older in life. And how do you hold those two opposing truths at one time? And the answer is just you. Do you manage those two things? You employ the two mindsets in balance with one another in a way that feels like they are acting together to create equilibrium in your business. And that's how we like to think about it, is this equilibrium idea. So to us, meeting your enough goal doesn't mean that you stop wanting things, or it doesn't mean that you stop having goals in your business or you stop making money. So it's not like a cap on the money that we make. It's a way to signal to our brain what contentment feels like.

[00:50:16] Jason: Exactly.

[00:50:16] Caroline: And to operate from that place.

[00:50:17] Jason: And it makes life so much less stressful, and it makes decision making so much easier because you have these parameters that you've set for yourself specifically. And I think that's the thing I always come back to whenever I think about our enough number is it's for us. It is for our specific, unique way that we want to live life. And everybody listening to this podcast has a different enough number. What doesn't matter for the majority of you listening to this is making six or seven figures in your business. It really doesn't. Because when you boil it down for your specific life, where you live, for what you care about, it is probably a lot less than you think. You've just never defined it because you've just said, well, these big numbers seem great, and people that are fancier than I am are talking about them. So I want to be fancy, too. So I want to hit these numbers.

[00:51:05] Caroline: Yeah. And I think what it really boils down to for me is intention. It doesn't mean you can't grow, but what is the intention behind the growth? Right? And so going back to what we were saying about our enough number has changed slightly because we do want a house, and we are coming up on the chapter of our life where we will have kids and our parents will be aging, and those take different levels of financial. I don't even want to say responsibility, I know that is the word. But above responsibility, like financial resources, to make those experiences the way that we want them to be, that requires a different enough goal. And we don't beat ourselves up about that. But it's just about the intention, right? It's not about just moving the goalpost for the sake of moving the goalpost. But why am I moving the goalpost? I just listed out the reasons. Cool. As long as we know the reasons behind why we are moving the goalpost, that's enough for us.

[00:52:05] Jason: Exactly. And I think that when we sat down to kind of redo our enough number this year or the end of last year, whenever we did it, it was with all these new things in mind that we didn't know about. And so I think that's why this is a really good practice for every single year, whenever you're doing your yearly recap and goals and looking forward. It's just good to reevaluate your enough number and to make sure, am I changing this? Because I'm changing it based on, like, oh, I just want to make more money or have other things come to light that I didn't maybe see that I need to now account for.

[00:52:35] Caroline: Right. And it kind of goes back to your stand mixer example in a way. Okay. It's about interrogating where does this desire actually true for me, and where is this desire not true for me? What is manufactured and what is true. Right. So it's like in the example of a new house. We want a house. We have owned a house many years ago, but, okay, that's going to take money. Is it because we think you should own a house, or is it because we can define. Okay, we want a home base for our growing family. We want the ability to decorate places which we've never had.

[00:53:15] Jason: It gives us guarantees.

[00:53:16] Caroline: Guarantees we don't have to move every year, which is something that we haven't had. So really, for us, it's less about that and it's more about creating a sense of permanence and a home that we haven't had for many, many years. Right. So in that shifting of the goalpost, as long as we together come to the same reasoning for why that goalpost is being moved and we interrogate, is this desire true or is it manufactured? I think that is, like, a good question to ask yourself.

[00:53:43] Jason: Yeah, for sure. And I do think that there's something to be said for every part of your financial situation that you're looking at. Just really questioning. Really questioning into it. Is this something that I specifically want in my heart of hearts, or is this just something someone sold me a dream about? And I'm thinking that I need that thing.

[00:54:03] Caroline: Right.

[00:54:03] Jason: And I think for us, if given the option to rent for the next 20 years of our life, but guaranteed, it would be our place and no one could take it out from under us or buy and have to do the big down payment and then the maintenance of a home and all that, we'll take renting all day long. If there was certainty and guarantee that it would be our home and we couldn't get kicked out. I'll take renting.

[00:54:24] Caroline: Right. Which is a good way to interrogate, to make sure that it has nothing to do with just the owning of.

[00:54:30] Jason: A home is like a thing of owning.

[00:54:31] Caroline: Exactly. So we've talked about a lot of things. I think this is a good place to maybe wrap it up and just say, that if you are listening to this, you may not be at your enough number yet. In fact, I will venture to say that probably most of you listening are not at your enough number yet.

[00:54:47] Jason: Hold on a second. We have 29 cinnamon rollers now, and I know that some of them are. They're making that cinnamon roll money. So I would just say, true.

[00:54:56] Caroline: That was an assumption of me.

[00:54:58] Jason: Exactly. Sorry, I didn't mean it.

[00:55:00] Caroline: I reject my assumption. I just think if they've gotten this deep into this episode.

[00:55:04] Jason: Yeah, for sure. They're still like, okay, hold on.

[00:55:09] Caroline: I just wanted to say that if that is you, if you haven't gotten there yet, that's okay. And you might still be on the train where it's going a little faster than you'd like, and you do feel like you're having to hustle more than you would want to. And this episode is not to say that there's anything wrong with that. This episode is just to hopefully encourage you to sit down and take the 15 to 30 minutes to write line by line. What that enough number for you looks like, so that you can start to see on the train tracks. You can start to see that stop ahead of you. And I hope that in seeing that stop, in seeing the place where you will finally be able to apply the brakes and start to enjoy the view a little bit more, I hope that'll be motivating for you.

[00:55:50] Jason: Absolutely. And if you could turn that tiger into the neighbor's cat so you're getting chased by a much smaller.

[00:55:55] Caroline: Both ending with our own metaphors.

[00:55:58] Jason: My last thought was, and I think this is something that's very hard for a lot of people to do, and it was very hard for me to do it as well. If you are at a place where you do feel like you've hit your enough number, or even if you've hit your number and it feels right to you to be able to say to yourself, I've made it. Because I think the phrase of making it in our society looks like big success and looks like flashy, huge numbers, fancy things. And for a lot of us, it's not that at all. What it is is it's peace of mind. What it is is it's calm. It's less stress. It's having a business that you actually like working on. It's having a family that you're super proud of. It's living in a place that you really cherish and think brings you a ton of joy. You can say that you've made it even when you haven't hit some stupid financial goal that someone has put out there, that you think that that's actually what it means.

[00:56:49] Caroline: And even if you haven't had the fanfare of playing to a sold out stadium. Because I feel like that's what I picture when I think of. I think of celebrities and people who have the adoration of millions of people. And if that is our benchmark for making it, ain't none of us going to make it.

[00:57:05] Jason: No.

[00:57:05] Caroline: And I think it's like very few of us will ever get there. So I think you're absolutely right. It is more of a recognition of life's simple moments where you realize, wow, I fell asleep last night without racing thoughts about money. I've made it.

[00:57:21] Jason: Yeah, absolutely. Are you going to buy a standing mixer or are we still good?

[00:57:25] Caroline: Okay, now I'm getting confused because it's a stand mixer, right?

[00:57:29] Jason: Yeah, exactly. At the end, you passed.

[00:57:32] Caroline: Okay, good.

[00:57:32] Jason: Yeah, because you didn't immediately say that. No, we don't need that. Because we already said we don't need it. All right, that's it. I hope you enjoyed this episode of our podcast. Maybe I'm sad it'll have a different name when we come back in January. Maybe it won't.

[00:57:44] Caroline: Maybe that's the beauty of the word maybe.

[00:57:46] Jason: But we did take new photos, so we have new photos to use.

[00:57:49] Caroline: Okay, now you're just really trying to sell it.

[00:57:51] Jason: Listen, Photoshop is open right now. I popped that open. I got that rectangle set up. Impact font is ready.

[00:57:57] Caroline: Do not make rectangles using the marquee tool.

[00:57:59] Jason: And I think I'm actually going to try to make our episode art myself for our current podcast. And then if your podcast player shows you individual episode art like mine does, please, you'll get to see my Photoshop version.

[00:58:11] Caroline: Please do not. That's not happening.

[00:58:13] Jason: Okay, goodbye, everybody.

[00:58:14] Caroline: We'll see you in the new year.

[00:58:15] Jason: Have a great holiday season. Do all the fun things.

[00:58:18] Caroline: Take care of yourself. Try to rest a little bit.

[00:58:21] Jason: When you see your family. Just hold your breath. It's going to be okay.

[00:58:25] Caroline: We love you, and we'll see you in January. Okay, thanks for listening. Bye.