Less can be more

When it comes to motivational speakers I have noticed a theme. They all seem to present information to motivate listeners to do great things. If you aren’t changing the world, then you are failing, they argue.

They say that everyone is here for greatness. We all have capability to do amazing things in life. We can all live in wealth and glory, we just have to tackle life.

I have a few problems with this approach. I understand it. Nobody wants to get inspired by someone that gives a realistic view of life. Instead we want to hear the emotional ideas to get us to feel hungry for more.

But it isn’t more that most of us need. We have chased the idea that “more is better” while creating the systems that leave things worse.

The reason is that when we use “more” as the measuring stick, we never have enough. And, the more extreme ways we acquire more, the more we crave.

This leads us to ignore many of the basic elements in our life and focus on the leverage points. But without a solid foundation, leverage is taking extreme and often unnecessary risks.

The systems thinking approach is different. It doesn’t become about more it becomes about improvement. We start to take note of where we are and then work to improve. We do this little by little, step by step.

Sometimes this means that we get “more.” But often times it is about realizing what we have that we don’t need. Or we notice that we don’t want more we want better.

When we get to this point, we understand what is involved in acquiring more. We often have to sacrifice important things we currently have so we can have more of something else.

Instead of looking at your life and searching for how to get “more” start to look at ways to improve what you have. This might seem like less but what you are doing is building up the foundation. Then you can can leverage the foundation you built to create a better life.

You can put in the time redesigning your life so you have what you need in each area. Instead of craving more and more you work to get better and better. This can give you a happy, successful, balanced life, rather than an extreme one craving more.