What Is Enough?

(Scroll to the bottom of this post to hear it as a podcast!)

Enough.

The word brings about so many pertinent questions…

Do you have enough? Are you doing enough? ARE you enough?

I’m fortunate to be in a position with my age, financial situation and the current stage of my career, where I can say that the work I’m doing is optional. I realize many of your reading may not be in this situation yet. But you will in the near or the far future.

Over the last 10 years, I’ve had this gradual decrease in the amount of clinical work that I do, to the point where I was doing the minimum to feel comfortable with my skills and meet the requirements for active board status as an anesthesiologist. But then over the last 2 or so years, I’ve added a little more. We have so many projects on our homestead that require lots of capital, I had some good opportunities, and I wanted to contribute more financially.

All the while, I continue to do my nonclinical wellness work like writing my book, speaking at conference and retreats, coaching, and putting out this podcast. But lately, I’m not at home as much as I’d like to be.

On top of this, and if you’ve been in clinical practice for a while, you’ll understand… When I have a crazy case, regardless of the outcome, it makes me question if I should be done. I realize logically that these kinds of cases and come and go during a career regardless of how long you’ve been in it, but as I’m in the later stages, they just get to me and stress me out more than they used to.

So what’s been on my mind lately is this:

• When is it time to stop?
• If I stop my clinical work and decide I stopped too early, it’s much more difficult to start again because I’m in a procedural skills-driven field.
• Have I done enough in the realm of anesthesia and/or in the realms of wellness and content creation to be fulfilled and satisfied with my contributions?
• I’m more worried about having enough purpose and fulfillment than I am having enough money after I stop.

My example shows that there are tangible and intangible types of enough.

Elisa Chiang recently did an episode of her Grow Your Wealthy Mindset podcast where she talked about a study on the regrets of retirees. Most of the regrets noted by the people interviewed in the study were not related to dollar amts. It was more like, “I didn’t realize that two years into my retirement, my spouse would die and all the plans we made would be turned on their heads.” Or, I wish I had known that I wouldn’t be healthy enough to do all the traveling in retirement that I had planned for, because now I have a disability.”

This past spring, I attended and spoke at the 2026 WCI Physician Wellness and Financial Literacy conference. Some of the talks I attended discussed strategies for spending and drawing down your investments in retirement. One of the most eye-opening things I learned is that very often, people who’ve saved a lot of retirement money end up dying with way more than they need. This is true even if they end up needing long-term care or have a long hospitalization at the end of their lives. The habits that helped these people accumulate a comfortable sum backfired on them once they were spending down, because they were too conservative. They didn’t know they had enough and they could have loosened the reigns a bit.

Being human, there’s always this lingering thought that we don’t have enough. And it makes sense, really, because our brains are evolutionarily wired to pay more attention to scarcity. When food and resources really were scarce, this constant hum of worry served us. But now, it’s not always a relevant thinking pattern.

Having a scarcity mindset is tied with fear and comparison. And the thing with it is, it never stops unless you interrupt the thought pattern. You can challenge your thoughts that come from scarcity and reframe them. Like, “I don’t have enough money right now” is a thought you may have, and you can come up with an alternative thought like, “I have the skills and intelligence to make the money I need.” Maybe you have the thought, “I can’t make this change at work because I won’t have the support I need.” How about thinking instead, “I can source the tools I need to make this change.”

If you’re a listener of this podcast, I’m almost 100% sure that you’re meeting your basic needs, and you’ve either developed or are developing good habits related to paying off debts and paying yourself first by saving some money for the future before you allocate the rest to other things. I think the more relevant question is probably:

“When will I feel like I’ve done enough to walk away from XYZ?”

It’s pro-social to want to do more because, as professionals, we live by a code of integrity, and we have a sense of duty to our patients, our clients, and our friends and family too.

The enough you’re trying to find doesn’t have to be about stopping your profession like what I’m contemplating in my personal example. It can be about walking away from a role, or trying to figure out if you should take on a new project. Many of my coaching clients are trying to either walk away from specific roles or take away some work days or shifts so they can feel more balanced. And it’s hard to do when you’re worried about enoughness.

So… Do you think you’ve done enough? Let’s first talk about being enough. You may not feel worthy of making the change you want to make, like working less or retiring.

But as I’ve talked about in my book, you are already enough, you are worthy just because you exist here on this planet. You’re already enough, and you have the permission and the ability to see “enough” in whatever way you want to see it.

Jennifer Wallace talks about enoughness in her book Never Enough as a concept of mattering. In fact, she has a whole new book called Mattering. We all matter to someone in our lives, whether that be family members, coworkers, patients, clients… and hopefully, you matter to yourself. And to a higher power that you believe in.

So how do you figure out if you’re doing enough, or if you have enough?

Let go of comparisons

It’s soooo easy nowadays to compare ourselves to everyone else. There will always be someone who has more and/or who does more. But you have no idea what’s going on beneath the surface level of all those posts and photos. So why compare what you’re doing or how much you have to someone else?

Figure out where your sense of “enough” is coming from

Whose standards or expectations are you trying to live up to, and are they realistic for you and for the life you want?

I told this story in Lean Out about realizing that, as an anesthesiologist (and now more recently as a person who lives and works on a homestead) I really don’t need a lot of fancy clothes. I had a huge closet full of silk skirts, heels, and the like – a throwback to days of having to dress up for clinic in med school or even back to the days of working in corporate America. And one day, I realized, this doesn’t fit my current lifestyle at all.

So now, with the exception of a small capsule wardrobe of business wear that I circulate on repeat for conferences, my closet consists of casual things and no fancy shoes.

Ask yourself: Will I have FOMO if I quit this thing or make this change?

Jordan Grumet talked about this question in his recent Earn and Invest Podcast episode where he outlined 10 unexpected joys of being retired. He said he doesn’t feel bad anymore about passing up on opportunities, because he’s had enough travel and adventure. He doesn’t feel like he’d be missing out on the next thing.

Jordan said, “I’ve made enough money. I’ve achieved enough things. I’ve created enough of a career. I’ve made enough friends.”

I loved this quote.

Remember to stay in the present moment

Right now is the only moment we really have control over. If you operate from a worry of not having enough in the future, you’re destined to stay where you are and never make any changes. I tend to fall victim to this, so I need to take my own advice: You don’t have to have everything planned out and projected for years in advance. Trust that you are doing the practices now such that you will have enough money for the future. Trust that you know yourself well enough to address the question of doing enough.

My parting question (well, actually three questions) for you today are: What if you already have enough? What if you’ve already done enough? What if you are… enough?

How would these realizations change your current life?

Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below!