Playing with House Money
I saw a television commercial the other day for a local investment firm, with the claim that they’re “Serving Middle-Class Millionaires.” It features images of yachts and oceanfront homes—obviously, the hallmarks of the middle class.
Recently, I also read an opinion piece by Megan McArdle in The Washington Post with the headline “The $400K conundrum: Why America’s urban rich don’t feel that way.” It included this line: “These people are rich by any measure, and they are spending their money on things only rich people can afford, such as living in the best school districts and in or near amenity-rich megacities.”
In both cases, the disconnect between people’s actual financial situation and how they feel about their situation was striking.
In her article, McArdle argues that people in the households she cites “are rich in a peculiarly modern way: in the context of a meritocracy where elites are supposed to re-earn their position anew each day.” Put another way, the disconnect also means that they’re constantly striving and feeling like they don’t have enough.
As a coach, I’ve seen this mindset when talking to people who clearly don’t like their current jobs, but see lots of risk in doing something about it. Through discussion, it’s often clear that they (intellectually) know they can find a similar job in a reasonable amount of time and that they have more than enough savings to bridge the gap. Still, emotionally, these folks feel less-than-able to make a move to improve the joy and satisfaction they feel at work.
A few weeks ago, when facilitating a conversation with several coaching colleagues, I posed the following question: When you’ve seen clients make substantial changes in their lives, what were the most important mindsets and behaviors that enabled that change?
Eventually, we circled around a common factor—people were able to make a change once they realized they had the power to change.
It’s probably the same with finding greater joy and satisfaction at work—at some point, we just need to realize we have the power to create joy and satisfaction, and then make whatever choices are required to do so.
In the book Designing Your Life, David Evans and Bill Burnett suggest an exercise that could be a helpful start to making that choice—reflecting on and writing down your Workview. They write, “If you discover and are able to articulate your philosophy of work (what it’s for and why you do it), you will be less likely to let others design your life for you.”
As an analytical matter, it would also be helpful to reground our financial beliefs about what constitutes “enough” for us to feel safe and comfortable. In Having It All…and Making It Work, Quinn Mills talks about how we can get sucked into a mindset of more is better: “Our concept of how much is enough can change as our wealth increases. The more we begin associating with others who have greater means, the more our eyes open to the possibilities of what ‘more’ can do.”
Without a firmly grounded definition of “enough,” it’s hard to really see the freedom that we have.
I suspect that many of us, with that analysis, would find that rather than not having enough, we’re actually playing with house money. Not only have we passed any objective standard of material safety, we’ve also built enough skill to do an awesome job at work with a sustainable level of effort.
That is, in reality, we hold all the power to craft the professional life of joy and satisfaction that we desire.