The Question Every Desk Worker Should Ask

It was 7pm on a Friday in Seattle, and I was supposed to be out exploring the city with my girlfriend. 

Instead, I was blankly staring at my work laptop thinking, “What the heck am I doing?”

That summer had been full of Slack messages at the dinner table and Jira tickets late at night. My manager was on leave, so I’d taken on extra work. I kept telling myself the long hours would be worth it, because when it was all said and done, I’d get a promotion.

And then… I didn’t get it. 

So there I was at my computer, stuck in a loop of self-questioning:
Why did I work so hard? Why did I care so much about that promotion in the first place?

A few weeks later, I asked these questions out loud to a friend and his response caught me off guard:

“Did you need the money from that promotion?”

I paused.

“I mean, have you ever tried to figure out how much money you actually need?”

I was embarrassed to admit that I’d never thought about it. I’d spent my first six years out of college chasing promotions and raises without considering what the money was really for.

On my first day of business school at UNC, the dean put up a slide ranking business as the highest-paying major on campus. Then she showed salary trajectories for investment banking and consulting, which shot towards $500k per year early in a career.

I remember thinking:
“Okay… well this is sick. This is how you win.”

Salary became my scoreboard, the main way I understood success. And I never questioned that scoreboard until my friend brought it up years later.

So that night, my girlfriend and I tried to figure out what ‘enough’ looked like for us. We sat down with ChatGPT and painted a picture of our ideal life: the house we imagined, how many kids we wanted, the things we loved spending money on. We factored in taxes, retirement, inflation, healthcare…all the things. Eventually we landed on a final number — the combined salary we’d need to support that life.

When I saw the number, I was shocked. 

It was way lower than I expected. And even more surprising, we were already on track to hit it.

Yet here I was, sacrificing important aspects of my life to speed up a promotion timeline that didn’t really matter. That realization hit me hard. For the first time in my life, I saw that I didn’t need to climb faster.

I just needed to figure out where my own finish line was.

Morgan Housel writes that there are two ways a person can use money:
1) as a tool to live a better life, or
2) as a measuring stick to compare themselves against others. 

For most of my life I’d been firmly in camp 2. Defining what “enough” looked like started to change that. Instead of asking, “How do I get more?” the question became: “Now that I know what I’m aiming for, how do I build a life I actually enjoy?”

At some point in your life, you’ll make the last penny you’ll ever spend.
Most people just don’t realize when that happens.

So I built a calculator to help answer that question using the same exercise my girlfriend and I went through.

If you’re curious what your own “enough” number might be, you can try it here: https://enoughmoney.life/ 

There’s a free version that gives you a high-level number, and a deeper report if you want the full breakdown.

The end goal here isn’t to lower your ambition; it’s to give you clarity on what you’re aiming for in the first place. From there, hopefully you can spend less time blindly pursuing money and more time building a life around what matters to you.

-Nico


P.S: As always, would love to hear any thoughts you have on the article, or any feedback you have on the calculator!

If you’re interested in how I built the calculator, I went on a friend’s new podcast to talk about it. You can check that out here.