Enough.: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life

Chapter 11. What's Enough For Me? For You? For America?

In a book entitled Enough., you may be wondering: What's enough for Jack Bogle? What's enough for you? And the giant question that looms over the United States today, what's enough for our society?

The idea of enough wealth was clearly on Joseph Heller's mind when he commented on Kurt Vonnegut's observation about the financial riches of their billionaire host. But, as you now know, I've taken the idea of enough far beyond money, to our business system and to the lives we live. So before I talk about the wealth issue for me, for you, and for the United States, let's think a bit further about the relationship between happiness and success, especially the right kind of success.

Albert Schweitzer got it exactly right. "Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success." Honestly, I think that nearly all of us have a pretty good notion of what happiness is, and the extent to which we have found happiness in our lives. And all of us have experienced, to one degree or another, both the joys and sorrows of life, its pleasures and its pains, its bright surprises and its profound disappointments. Yet we come to realize, again, in almost all cases, that "this too shall pass away." So we survive and we move on. By and large, we human beings are a resilient bunch.

Psychologists have pretty accurately described the three major factors that define human happiness. Money, it turns out, does provide happiness, but as we quickly ...