I've done this before —this story, this metaphor —but it doesn't lose its value in the telling, time and time again.
I'll reframe it this time by referencing it against my early life, but in essence, it centres around Gimli the dwarf, a character in The Lord of the Rings.
If you love Lord of the Rings and all of the stories related to it like I do (and billions of others). You’ll understand that Gimli is part of a lineage, a long line of people, a long legacy, that legacy comes to a culmination in The Lord of the Rings. But the dwarves, as a race in The Lord of the Rings, are greedy; they hold things, they dig, they mine, they bank. These are the people who are tight, people who are restrictive with money, at least that is a reputation.
Basically, this little metaphor centres around the fact that the company in Lord of the Rings find themselves in front of the elven Queen who can read their minds and talk to them without opening her mouth. In the book, she talks to each of them individually about what will come next in the quest that they have undertaken to try and beat the bad guy. But to Gimli she says this phrase, ‘gold will run through your fingers, but over you gold will have no dominion’. This is one for the quote wall in the practice, because it's like a reverse prophecy. The more you try to do things properly and the less you worry about the money often, the more the money comes.
When I was a new graduate, I went straight into the hospital service, dropped 50% of my wage potential against my friends and then worked for 5 years, way behind my friends in the hospital and then DFT as a developing clinician.
On a low-ball calculation of what that cost me at that stage, it was about 128,000 pounds (something in the region of 250,000 pounds in current money). I'd also worked about twice as much time as my friends over the first 5 years, and so effectively I'd earned something like a quarter of the salary.
I remember when I was at DFT (VT in my old money). I was talking to my then-boss, Andy Keetley, with whom I worked in Ilkeston, about what my aspirations were for my dental earnings. At that stage, I told him that if I could ever reach 60,000 pounds a year (still an extraordinary sum of money and a huge sum of money to the vast majority of the population), I knew I would have made it. If I were able to do that and work 5 days a week, that would be a success. My dad had taught me this years ago. If I could work 9 to 5 and have enough money to pay my mortgage and feed my family, he promised me that I'd beat the system. He was not able to do that, to beat the system.
And so, 60,000 pounds became my enough, it was the level of enough. Maybe there would be more than that for other things, if I were really, really lucky, but enough would be 60K.
Nobody needed more than enough.
I hit that number pretty quickly, and I'd always promised myself that I would work less if I hit that number and just hold the number, not work more for a bigger number. I never did that, not because I wanted more, but because I loved my work and I loved the opportunities it gave me, and then I became Gimli the dwarf.
Relatively speaking, from where I came from, gold flowed through my fingers. I guess it's up to other people to decide whether it has a dominion over me or not. There were times in my life when it did, just because I put myself in positions of risk.
But to get back to enough, to be in a place of enough. There is no better place to be, there is no better quest, there is no better goal.
Set your enough, start with enough. Everything else is likely to fall into place.
Blog Post Number - 4346