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Just Enough
by Laura Nash and Howard Stevenson
How much is enough?
How do you define success? Is it achieving a high level of status in business or your career, even though you may have to make great personal sacrifices to achieve it? Is it leaving a legacy through a brilliant discovery, dedication to a cause, or correcting social injustice? Is it about commitment to family at the cost of achieving other goals? Or is it about having the freedom to do what you want in life?
The answer, in short, according to Harvard Business School professors Laura Nash and Howard Stevenson, is that success is a combination of all of these things. Happiness, achievement, significance and legacy are not words one often hears in the same sentence because they are conflicting human needs, but the authors assert that the key to real success lies in finding balance between these “competing desires.”
Their book is about recognizing ‘just enough' in a world of ‘infinite more,' and about how to truly get the most out of life.
It's easy to walk into a bookstore and find dozens of books on how to achieve success in certain areas of your life, but there are few books that look at the fundamental question of what success is in the first place. If it is based on too narrow an interpretation, as the authors point out, “Success can make you a stranger to yourself. The great successes risk personal isolation even from those they love most.”
In conducting interviews for the book, they “sought out people who, whatever their wealth or accomplishment, are not totally performance-driven or self-absorbed, who are able to experience intrinsic satisfaction from their activities.”
The people who were able to achieve balance between different areas were both dedicated and adaptive: “they managed to retain a deep sense of commitment to whatever they were engaged in, in spite of having these multiple targets.” “They could attend to family. They could act in their own interests but also in the interest of others. Instead of chaos, they created a coherent sequence to their goals around success.”
Almost everyone now knows someone who is doggedly pursuing monetary success, trying to reach a level that will bring them celebrity status and make them the next Bill Gates. Nash and Stevenson question the cost of such a relentless pursuit and ask, “Why do we swallow the myth when it is so unreachable and so many of the celebrity examples have failed to stand up to the test of time?” Their answer: “Two factors seem to be particularly responsible: the unprecedented growth of the free market and the explosion of the media through new technology (meaning information industries in general) in the 1990s.”
Instead of spotlighting lopsided successes (someone who has achieved great things in only one area), the authors examine individuals who have achieved success in multiple life roles, including Peter Ueberroth, former baseball commissioner, organizer of the 23rd Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 1984, and successful entrepreneur. “Twenty years after his success with the Los Angeles Olympics, he is still building,” the authors note, “always taking time out to be with family, insisting his employees do the same, still engaged in community projects, still passionate about golf.” When the authors interviewed Ueberroth, they had to take a break when a client sent over ice cream and Ueberroth invited his staff into his office to enjoy it. On a table in the office was a beautiful orchid another client had sent the day before and the authors noticed Ueberroth “was experiencing a genuine pleasure in the flower itself.”
“Success is not a one-liner or a headline, it's a novel you write over time,” the authors tell us, delivering a message that many of us need to hear. Although their book is sometimes repetitive, they make a convincing argument that less is more.
Title: Just Enough
Author: Laura Nash and Howard Stevenson
Publisher: Wiley
ISBN: 0471458368
Review written by: Marc Duane Anderson
Reviewer's Rating:8
Reader's Rating: 0
Reader's Votes: 0
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