Hustle culture puts the focus on "more." More money, more customers, more social media followers, more attention, more, more, more.

By embracing the idea of "enough" you can define your version of success, you can set professional goals based on your personal life circumstances, and you can avoid the trappings of hustle culture.

The first question we want you to think about as you read this article: Are the goals and dreams you're striving for your own, or are they things you're being told you SHOULD want?

That’s a powerful question to answer honestly and the idea of hustle culture kept us from discovering our own definition of success for many years.

It’s time to stop feeling like you're always working at maximum capacity and start shifting your work-life balance to a place that supports your realistic goals.

Societal pressures are real. The perfect lives we see on social media are consuming our feeds. Taking huge risks and “going for it all” are things that are praised and applauded in a toxic hustle culture landscape.

Let’s slow down and shift from more… to enough.

What Is The “Enough Mindset” And Why Should You Embrace It?

Plain and simple, the way we define the “enough mindset” is: Clearly defining your own limitations in life and business that YOU feel confident, comfortable, and happy with.

Many years ago, I was a self-proclaimed hustle bro who was trying to make $1,000,000 per year with my business. The highest revenue number I ever hit was $600,000 and in that same year I experienced massive burnout for the first time.

I hired employees, I worked 12-14 hour days, I spent no time thinking about my physical health (hello Diet Coke + Chipotle diet 😬), I had racked up nearly $100k in business debt, and I started to experience extreme negative emotions that I'd never had to deal with before.

If you're feeling like you're constantly burning the candle at both ends and that you don't have anything close to a healthy work-life balance, embracing "enough" will help you just like it did for me.

Working hard and pushing yourself are the common themes of hustle culture. Finding a balance, focusing on your mental health and physical health, and setting realistic goals based on your personal life are the pillars of striving for enough.

How To Define Enough For Your Life And Your Business

Let’s dig into how to define your enough because enough is subjective to each and every person. Our enough goals may be wildly different from your goals, and that’s okay!

We don’t want this article to only focus on money, but we all know money is a huge part of our lives. So let’s get the money convo out of the way and then we can move on to other things.

Defining Enough: Start with your MMM Number and then establish your Enough Number

The hustle gurus will tell you to strive for some arbitrary financial goal (ex: $1m in yearly revenue). We believe a better system starts with one of our favorite life hacks, setting your MMM Number and your Enough Number.

Your MMM Number is your Monthly Minimum Magic Number

This is the bare minimum amount of money you need to make ends meet for your current situation. Too often a baseline isn’t set when it comes to money, and that’s why we all chase more, more, more of it.

Trust us, we don’t want you to live off the minimum amount of money you need forever, but you have to START with that number.

The MMM Number formula:

1. Minimum monthly living expenses +

2. Minimum monthly business expenses +

3. Paying off debt (monthly payments) +

4. Peace of mind cushion (monthly savings) = Your MMM Number

You should be surprised at how low that number is compared to the bigger numbers you’ve been thinking about. You should also feel empowered at how low this number is and that you can generate this amount of revenue without having to come close to opting in to hustle nonsense or working until you burnout.

Your Enough Number is the monthly goal you're striving for

Once that you have your MMM Number, it’s time to establish your Enough Number. Think of your Enough Number as the next mountain you want to climb but one that doesn’t have a mountain after it. The second (enough) mountain is your ceiling. It’s your cap. It’s your line in the sand to avoid chasing more.

The Enough Number formula:

1. Your MMM Number +

2. Realistic monthly revenue growth in your business +

3. Additional money you want to save/invest/donate each month = Your Enough Number

What is YOUR Enough Number for your current situation? Is it less than you may have been shooting for these past months or years? It should be!

When the pursuit of success is correlated more directly to your life, it becomes less daunting and becomes more rewarding when you do finally climb to the top of your enough mountain.

IMPORTANT: If/when you hit your Enough Number, you can stop growing. You can slow way down. You can embrace the fact that you made it to the top of your (enough) mountain and didn’t sacrifice your sanity to get there. This is a beautiful place to be in life, and we should all strive to feel this sense of personal success. And, if your circumstances change and you want to set a new, higher enough number, that's perfectly okay to do too!

What level of quality in your work is good enough?

Hustle culture ideology will tell you that perfectionism is your friend. The work you do needs to be the BEST and needs to dominate your competition. In our experience, we've seen that focusing on perfectionism in our work only leads to unhappiness and a lack of joy.

Now, we're not saying you should take a ton of shortcuts, publish subpar work, and outsource everything you do as cheaply as possible. Quality is VERY important, but you should be able to create an enough baseline that helps you feel more in alignment.

There's a ton of productivity porn out there, and while we believe being productive is conducive to running a healthy business, constantly chasing outcomes defined by other people is not the answer to life.

Publishing good enough work is better than publishing nothing at all.

You may be in a situation where you aren't sending an email newsletter, publishing a YouTube video, uploading a new podcast episode, sharing social media content, all because perfectionism is actually keeping you trapped.

The hustle gurus will tell you that you have to be on a constant creation and publishing schedule that's simply not possible for your life. Much like your MMM and Enough Numbers, it's important for YOU to define a schedule that is best for you.

• What platforms are enough for you to post new content on?

• What cadence of publishing is enough for your business?

• What quality can you stay consistent with right now that's enough?

It can feel weird to put work out into the world that you know isn’t as perfect as it could be. But, perfection is subjective, and if you’re the type of person that focuses on perfection, your good enough will absolutely get the job done.

How much margin do you want in your life?

This is a very important part of the enough conversation. You can interchange the word “margin” with white space, free time, downtime, etc. It’s rare that we actually plan for space in our lives. It’s rare that we prioritize having an abundance of time. Yet, isn’t all the time and energy we spend working for a goal of… not working in the future?

We like to ask ourselves this question often: What is it all for anyway?

• What are the countless working hours for?

• What is all the stress for?

• What is striving for some gigantic goal for if it leads you to have zero margins in your life for what actually matters?

Are you the type of person that needs a slower start to your day? Then you need to build morning margins into your schedule.

Are you the type of person that needs more savings? Then you need profit margin and minimizing expenses is huge for you.

Are you the type of person who gets overwhelmed easily and needs frequent breaks? That’s OKAY. That’s not a weakness. It simply means throughout your day you need to prioritize breaks, self-care moments, etc.

Margin and free time should not be luxuries we earn at the end of our lives. They are things we should build into our lives right now.

3 Ways We Combat Hustle Culture with Enough

Defining enough audience and customers

This is directly related to setting enough money goals. It's easy to follow the hustle nonsense that tells you to build a huge audience on social media or aim for thousands of paying customers. But, does your business actually need that to survive and thrive?

We're not chasing any metrics defined by someone else for our businesses. From our personal experience, having a small, but highly relevant and engaged email list is incredibly powerful for real growth!

Being able to say "we've made it" without feeling guilty

Say the phrase "I've made it" was incredibly hard at first. Because, when we think of "making it" we think of loads of money, fancy cars, huge house, blah blah blah. But that's just a generic version of success created by societal norms. Instead, we embraced our own idea of having "made it" when we figured out how to maximize the value and enjoyment in our lives and businesses based on what matters most to us (flexibility, freedom, predictability, and fun).

Defining enough adventure in our lives

Speaking of fun, like anyone else we love a little adventure! But, it's easy to get caught in trying to achieve a bunch of life bucket list goals that we don't really care to accomplish. Adventure, to us, means exploring a nearby city, going to a new restaurant, or spending a year slowly traveling through 10 countries in Europe (which we accomplished back in 2022!) The idea of "adventure" will greatly vary person to person, which is why it's so important to define what enough adventure is for you.

We Want You To Focus On Enough and Ignore Hustle Culture

Focusing on "more" and chasing constant productivity is a losing sum game. Once you get more, you only continue to want more. We’re pre-wired this way. Human beings instinctively collect more because thousands of years ago we had to if we wanted to survive. The things we have the ability to collect have changed, but our instinctual habits to collect things have not.

👉 It’s time to define your enough.

👉 It’s time to create more margin in your life instead of filling every moment with work.

👉 It’s time to embrace the fact that you may need way less (of everything) than you think you do to be happy.

It’s time to draw your line in the sand and realize you’ve been on a path that isn’t congruent with who you actually are or what you really want in your life.

We hope this article helps you make an important shift in your life, a shift away from toxic hustle culture to more striving for enough.