I ran a business for a decade. I thought about money most days of that decade, sometimes most hours of it. And I never once wrote down what "enough" actually meant to me, until after I'd already sold the business.

That's not carelessness. If you'd asked me at any point along the way, I could have given you a number. What the business might be worth. What I needed the deal to clear. What a good year looked like versus a bad one. Those numbers were always close to hand, because the business kept asking for them.

When you're running a business, certainly the way I ran mine, cash is king and you never stop feeling it. Most of my energy went on keeping cash in the business, covering the gap between what was owed to us and what we owed out, making sure a tight month didn't tip into something worse. In that state, stepping back to ask a reflective question like "what does enough actually mean to me" isn't just unlikely, it's almost impossible. There's no room for it. The business doesn't stop needing you to make the next decision long enough for you to make that one.

It doesn't go away, though. It just waits for a quieter moment to turn up, usually somewhere around 2am, well after the decision it should have informed has already been made without it.

I see the same pattern constantly, and not only with people who've sold something. Someone negotiating a redundancy package knows the number on the table down to the pound, but has no real sense of what number would actually let them stop worrying about money. Someone weighing up early retirement can tell you their pension value to the penny, but has never once sat down and worked out what their version of enough looks like against it. Someone deciding whether to take the next role can tell you the salary difference to the exact figure, but has no idea whether either number gets them anywhere near what they're actually trying to build.

The pattern is always the same. We're fluent in the numbers other people are asking us for, and largely silent on the one nobody asks us for, which happens to be the only one that actually matters to us personally.

Here's what I'd say to anyone in the middle of a transition, of any kind: define enough before the moment that needs the answer, not after. Not as a vague sense you carry around. Written down, specific, tied to what your life actually looks like once money stops being the thing you're optimising for.

It doesn't have to be perfect. It's allowed to change as your life changes. But having a version of it, any version, written down rather than just felt, changes how you sit in every negotiation, every offer, every decision that involves a number. You stop asking "is this good?" in the abstract, and start asking "does this get me to enough?", which is a completely different and much more answerable question.

This is exactly what section five of the Poreia Clarity Framework is built to do. It won't hand you a number, nobody can do that for you, but it will walk you through actually working one out, properly, instead of leaving it to turn up uninvited at 2am. It's free and takes 20 to 30 minutes.

​poreia.co.uk​

Have you actually written yours down, or is it still just a feeling?

Richard

The Poreia Perspective