The Mirage of Never Enough

The journey of embracing "I have enough" and of finding the wealth that can't be taken away.

I just finished reading Andrew Wilkerson’s book, Never Enough: From Barista to Billionaire. I devoured it in a few days and couldn’t put it down.

The book is a beautifully and thoughtfully told story of Wilkerson’s journey of growing up in a middle-class Canadian family and the incessant drive to create wealth that led him to become a billionaire. As a kid, he used to sit on top of the stairs, listening to his parents fight over money and spending. He was determined to create so much wealth that money would never be an issue for his family again, only to realize that no amount of money ever seemed to be enough to create the peace and safety he craved.

It was a brilliant example of how our childhood traumas shape the person we become.

Reading the book has prompted some deep reflection about my own journey with and my relationship to wealth.

I grew up low-to-middle-class in an immigrant family. My parents used to work 364 days a year in San Francisco Chinatown at our family herb store. In the evenings, after dinner, my entire extended family of eight would gather in the living room to pack pills for the store.

As I wrote in “Coming Home to My Roots”:

When I was young, the eight extended family members who lived with me would gather around the living room after dinner. We'd turn on the latest Chinese soap opera — my favorites were the martial arts shows — and begin our at-home assembly line.

I'd scoop sixty pills from a big bag and pour them into a plastic bottle. My brother would shove cotton balls into the bottles and snap on lids, careful not to break the tamper-proof plastic rings.

My grandma would fold instruction sheets into thirds, wrap the sheets around the bottles, and put them into individual cartons that my mom folded from printed card stock. Folding the instruction sheets was my least favorite activity — my fingers would feel dry, itchy, and in desperate need of lotion afterwards.

My dad's godmother would pack ten cartons into a bigger box and stick on the official golden seal that finalized the product for sale at the family store.

We did this every night and many weekends. I'd rotate through the different stations and make a quarter for every box I completed on my own. On a good day, I'd make $5.

Coming Home to My Roots: A Journey in Loving the Parts of Me I'd Once Rejected

From a young age, I was confronted with the realities of money. My parents would sometimes have me work the cash registers at the store, where I got the direct experience of where our family’s hard-earned cash came from.

For years growing up, I dreamt of “making it” some day with a tech job earning a six-figure salary, which at the time seemed unheard of for my family. I surprised myself when I hit that dream with my first job at Google. And seemingly without much pause or thought after hitting that goal, I decided to focus on creating more wealth.

For the first decade out of college, I spent a significant amount of my free time learning about wealth. I studied how to earn it, how to accumulate it, how to invest it, how to grow it, how to spend it wisely.

I read books on investing and managing portfolios from Warren Buffett, Burton Murkiel, John Bogle, Benjamin Graham, and other great investors of our time. I read books like MJ DeMarco’s The Millionaire Fastlane and Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Work Week on how to frontload work in life and how to retire early. I learned practical money management from Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You to Be Rich and took courses from him on how to create a rich life.

I wanted to be a responsible steward of wealth. I was aware that I had much to learn around it, and I felt strongly motivated by the desire to create financial independence and freedom for myself and my family.

All that energy and focus on wealth served me well for a long time and paid off. But like Wilkerson, I’ve come to realize that I’ve also been running a false race. Because as much as I’ve been driven by the desire for freedom, I’ve also been subconsciously driven by fear — the fear of not having enough and of losing what I did have if I wasn’t careful.

The other day, on a call with my coach Mina, I connected with my fear and pictured a hungry ancestor squatting on the dirt in an open-air building, cooking a scant pot of rice on the fire. It was a visceral glimpse into the poverty that some part of me was fighting hard to avoid.

I’m realizing just how much of my consciousness and behavior is subconsciously driven by survival, of making sure that my family has enough. If only I generated enough income and created enough wealth, then I’d finally be safe and be able to relax.

Unfortunately, the fear and the survival strategies have also blocked me from seeing the truth: I am wealthy, and I have enough. And that’s been true for a long time.

I cried when I acknowledged that on the call. For the past forty years, so much of my identity has come from not having enough. So much of it has been wrapped up in planning how to create enough in the future, in being the hard-working provider creating enough for the family.

I can feel the tension of the identity wound up in my muscles — how it contracts my awareness, how it takes away from what’s true in the present moment.

In reality, I have enough financial wealth to buy my family’s first home. I have enough to support our lifestyle. Most importantly, I have the type of wealth that can’t be measured in dollars — a deeply loving partnership, a baby on the way, nourishing friendships, and a supportive community in Boulder that I’m excited to raise kids with.

It’s as if the part of me running the survival strategies that had kept my ancestors alive has been engaged for so long and hard that it’s completely missed the memo around how much wealth and safety I’ve already created in my life.

It’s like I’ve been flailing in the water, thinking the flailing was what was keeping me afloat, only to realize that my body is just naturally buoyant and that the frantic activity hasn’t been necessary.

I’ve been projecting and externalizing my own safety onto money, rather than feeling the safety inside my own body.

“What’s the wealth that can’t be taken away?” Mina asked me at the end of our coaching call.

What if I already have enough? What if I trusted that I always will? What if I no longer needed to work to survive? What happens if I let go of the deeply baked survival programming?

I can sense the possibility in those questions, and they also make me feel uncomfortable.

Because if I strip away all the behaviors, strategies, activity, and thoughts that stem from the fear of not having enough, what’s left for me to be and do?

I have no fucking clue. And that’s both exciting and terrifying.