When more stops being more
Stephen Wools built the businesses and renovated the house. Now he is selling it. His third life lesson is about knowing when enough is enough.
"More is more" is a phrase Stephen Wools says almost daily, and it is not a compliment. What he means is that the more you grow, the more headache you take on. A bigger business means more problems to solve and more people to hire, and at some point the question becomes whether any of it is still worth it.
His third life lesson is simply: when is more enough?
He is selling the house
He lives in a big house on the coast. Near his parents, a large Dutch family within walking distance, by his own description a perfect lifestyle. He renovated it himself during COVID with his cousins.
He and his partner are now actively looking at selling it, because she keeps saying they do not need it, and he thinks she is right. He is visibly unpacking that - he worked hard for it, he built it, and he does not want to sell it.
Her argument is unglamorous and hard to counter. It is more to clean and more to run.
You create your own necessity
This is the sharper version of the idea. Big house, therefore work harder. More space, therefore more things to fill it with. The obligations are not handed to you; you manufacture them and then serve them.
He watched the same thing happen in the agency. They grew to fifty staff and a long client list, and then found themselves asking why it was not working and why they were not paying themselves. His view now is that some of the best-run agencies have three or four clients.
The cookie
Stephen reaches for Bart Simpson going back for the cookie while Lisa tells him it is going to zap him, and for a habit from Geo's casino days. He used to see people on a hot run and quietly suggest they tap out while they were ahead. They never did. They lost it all.
His example of somebody doing it differently is Nicolas Cage stepping back from the limelight, on the basis that he has got enough.
What he is actually asking
The question he keeps putting to himself is when he would be satisfied - how many venues, how much money, at what point he could say he is good with this.
He has no answer. He is honest that he probably never will. But the discipline he draws from it is worth borrowing: be careful what you benchmark yourself against, particularly the five-second social clips of people with Ferraris, because that is not real life. You are here for eighty years if you are lucky.