The case for enough | GB70

In this episode, Illana Burk challenges the relentless chase for 'more' typically associated with business success. She discusses the pervasive culture of endless growth driven by capitalism and its impact on small business owners and entrepreneurs. Instead, Illana advocates for redefining success by embracing the idea of 'enough,' which involves understanding personal values, making informed decisions, and building a sustainable and fulfilling business. She shares practical steps and personal experiences to illustrate how fundamentally changing one's mindset can lead to a more balanced and rewarding life. Tune in to explore how you can shift your focus from perpetual growth to finding true purpose and satisfaction in your business.

For more details, visit illanaburk.com.

Good Business is hosted by Illana Burk, CEO of Illana Burk Consulting llc and strategic coach and advisor to entrepreneurs, creative leaders, and industry disruptors the world over.

For more of illana around the web:
Web: illanaburk.com
On TikTok: @illanaburk
On Insta: @illanaburk

Transcript

Welcome back to the Good Business Podcast, everybody. I am your host, Illana Burk, and today we are talking about enough. So we begin with one word, and that word is more. That's what we're all supposed to want, right? More followers, more money, more success. All so we can have more stuff. Better stuff.

Fancier stuff. But for what? Right? For what? As a small business owner, as an aspiring leader, as a solopreneur, all we ever hear is that the key to success is endless growth. Scale, scale, scale. Grow, grow, grow. More, more, more. We need to outpace our competition. We need to scale up. And we spend so much time and energy figuring out what that means to us.

How to be bigger, how to make more money, how to have more followers, all the things, right? We are so used to, as a culture, not just us, those of us listening to this, we are so used to this warm and fuzzy idea that This is like the perpetual goal that we barely even contemplate whether that's actually what we want or need, whether more is really the thing.

We've totally fetishized this idea in our culture that the perpetual financial growth is the same thing as fulfillment. We actually have made those things synonymous in our culture, like welcome to capitalism, right? And with that idea, we all careen towards burnout and then fault those who can't hack it.

That's what culture does to, to us in this like crazy meat grinder of, you know, late stage, late stage capitalism. So we totally end up losing touch with our values. If we even knew what those were to begin with, right? A lot of people really don't. We kind of have assumptions about it, but we don't ever stop and think about it.

And we end up alienating the very customers we started off trying to help while chasing higher ticket opportunities and offers. It's like a really bananas hamster wheel when you really shine a light on it. See, it's a playbook that was designed and crafted by a few very wealthy people a very long time ago who understood that dangling a perpetual carrot in front of the masses would result in highly centralized wealth and power.

For them. Definitely not for the rest of us. And the cornerstone of this plan was making the idea of enough seem like the quaint ideals of the weak and lazy, right? We've had that hammered into our minds, especially as Americans and those of us that come from Western cultures. It's like, if you don't hustle, you're lazy.

And if you can't hustle, you're weak. It's ridiculous, but that's what our culture is permeated with. And it's become like a magic trick of almost biblical proportions. It's like, look over there, chase that dream that never existed in the first place, modeled by the very people who set up the game and who have never wanted for anything in their lives.

While we sell you every course, tool, product possible to help you achieve something. That they convinced you that you wanted in the first place. It's kind of nuts, right? But when you plant your feet and you look hard at the guy on stage with the wand and then choose, To turn heel and walk in the opposite direction, you're choosing a revolutionary act of chasing enough.

But choosing enough is really, really complicated. It requires a level of agency, curiosity, and really hard work that is almost contrary to what business growth and leadership is usually sort of designed to be. It means redesigning success for yourself, and that is harder than it sounds. Man, when you stop making, like, making as much money as possible, the thing that you find synonymous with success, if that stops being true, trying to figure out what success actually is and what's really, really true, like, down to your bones is, like, really, really difficult.

Because when you really stop and think about it, most of how we shape our lives, our goals, and our sense of achievement is drawn from the culture around us. And increasingly, that culture is shaped by whoever has the best marketing. So breaking out of that cycle of desire that's based solely on what we're told we want and need is really, really difficult.

But when you do, you can build a business and a life that's actually sustainable, people focused, and truly rewarding. And it is actually possible. I am proof. And many of my clients are too. It really is possible. So that sounds great, right? Bye! All this stuff sounds nice and floofy and fun and great and then you're sitting there going like, right, but how do I do that?

Where do I even start? So glad you asked. It starts with seeing the exchange between you, your buyers, your clients, and your customers as a collaboration instead of a transaction. This begins the process of shifting your perspective on the culture of commerce as you experience it with your people. When you can change your perspective, You can actually start changing your behavior because you're reacting to different things.

You're, you're responding to a different set of stimuli. Next, you start the very difficult work of really, really looking hard at what you have, what you need, what you want, and what you value. And if you don't know how to do that, I have developed a course for that, which I know sounds really weird to talk about that right in the middle here, but it's really great.

It really helps you do this. It's called the Stardust Principle, and I wish everybody would do it, and, um, it's affordable, and you should buy it. And yes, I can totally appreciate the irony of plugging my course in the middle of this. But it is designed to do exactly this, and it has my entire career of experience poured into it.

And I just did it with some clients, and man, they worked so hard. It was so, we got through like a quarter of it in four hours, because it is so difficult to actually identify what you value, but it is a path to help you do that. Onward. So when you know, like really know what you value, you can use that as a filter through which you run your goals, your ideas, and your decision making.

Gives you a framework to do that so you can evaluate things accurately. Which is, like, a bigger deal than a lot of people think of it, you know? Being able to make really good decisions and look at your ideas and go, Is this a good idea for me? Is this a good idea for now? Is this a good idea for somebody else?

And be able to make those decisions with a clear head. That's what truly understanding what your values does. It helps you do that. It helps you make decisions and let things go much more quickly without regrets and second guessing and all of that, which, I mean, as we all know, plague us as business owners.

Should I do this? Should I do that? Should I do this? Should I do that? Should I try this? Should I try that? Right? Really deeply understanding your values is what helps calm that noise and makes it a lot easier. So, for example, I'm going to use myself as an example and kind of walk you through what this looks like in my business, in my life.

So, I value my time with my daughter above just about everything else. That means that my entire business is structured to minimize the amount of time I have to spend away from her, especially while she's little, she's nine. And she still likes me, so I'm going to write that for as long as I can. As a result, I work to minimize the impact I make through, excuse me, I work to maximize the impact that I make through vehicles that have the highest chance of the widest spread of my work with the lowest time commitment.

That's what helps me make those decisions because I know what I value in my orbit, right? So when I evaluate ideas for viability, one of my primary qualifiers is, can this thing double as something else? How do I accomplish the most with the fewest number of steps? And this is true for a lot of people. A lot of us have constraints on our time, on our energy, on our physical abilities that make this like really critical.

So this is something that might ring true for a lot of people here that are listening right now. Like, how do you accomplish the most things with the fewest number of steps? So when I am evaluating What I'm, you know, a couple of ideas, it always has to do more than one thing. So that's one of my filters, right?

If, if the idea that I have in front of me can't double as something else, or I can't draw resource from it in some other way, then I say no, because it's going to take too many of my resources with not enough return. So for example, my small paid group, is also where I record my podcast, for example. I record my podcast so that I can pass down knowledge and experience, and so that it hopefully helps foster a new generation of leaders to as many people as possible in the least amount of time.

My client appointments are where I look for inspiration for TikTok posts. I invest time in commenting genuinely and connecting with people on my socials because that's where I find inspiration and topic ideas to write longer pieces about. You get the idea, right? Everything is also something else. So that I'm not spending research time looking for topics, I pull those from my social media.

So that I'm not spending, X amount of time recording a podcast and then I'm going to talk about the same things with a paid group. I made those into one thing. So this is like how you can start to think about decision making based on what you value. So finally, I focus my energy on building my authority and my skill as a coach so that I can have a significant impact in the least amount of time.

That allows me to command a solid coaching rate, which means I can make enough for the life I want. in less time than if I couldn't charge as much. The result is that I work three and a half days a week, and my days aren't any longer than I want them to be. And if it's too hot out, I don't work for a few hours in the middle of the day, and I have the luxury of that.

I also keep my expenses as low as possible, and I keep my business really lean. And even with all that perceived constraint, I still live in Europe, I buy nice things when I want to, and I save for retirement, my kid's future, and I make enough for what enough means to me. That number is going to be different for absolutely everybody.

But the point is, I enjoy it, and scaling is not even something that's on my radar, because it doesn't fit with my priorities. It doesn't fit with what enough looks and feels like to me. I'm comfortable where I am, and being comfortable where I am indefinitely is totally okay with me. And that runs absolutely that flies in the face of everything that we are told about capitalism, everything our culture tells us about being a business owner.

It's always supposed to be about more, but what if it's not? You know, that's something that we've all decided to buy into and we don't have to, you know, we can decide to not buy into it anymore and when you decide not to buy it and buy into it anymore, all kinds of things can shift. You know, I had a really long conversation with a client a couple of days ago where she has written nine books, I think one of them is, has been a bestseller for like eight years.

And. We got on the phone and she was lamenting that her last book didn't do as well as she hoped it would do. And she was talking about her numbers, and the interesting thing was, I had just gotten off a call with a client who was releasing their first book, and had sold like, 50 copies in their first week, and they were absolutely freaking over the moon that they sold 50 copies.

And then I get on the phone with, Client A, and they're like, I only sold like 2, 000 copies the first week. And she was like bummed and feeling really like comparing herself to friends that are more successful writers and that sell more and are on the bestseller list. And we had to have this conversation about enough again, which I it's so it doesn't matter what level you're at, because she was like, Lamenting something that deeply permeates our culture and that we all are affected by no matter how much we don't want to be, we all have these moments, myself included, where we're going, man, I wish I had more, right?

Where we're comparing ourselves to what other people have or comparing to other people's success. People call this imposter syndrome. I don't particularly care for that term. I think it's more like we get. You know, overwhelmed by the, uh, by how much the, this message permeates our, our whole culture and our whole being and everything we read and see that we're supposed to want something other than what we already have.

And every once in a while, that gets to us and we have to talk ourselves out of it again. So this is your cue to talk yourself out of it. Because when you embrace the idea of enough, you free up resources and creativity so that you can not just create a business, but a legacy. One where success isn't just about endless growth, but about having a meaningful impact, having balance, and having a deep sense of purpose.

And that's a future that in which everybody gets to thrive. So all for joining me today. That is it for the Good Business Podcast. I will see you all in a couple of weeks. Thanks so much. Bye.