Many people who have explored self-development are familiar with a diagnosis called “inadequacy.” Those who have worked through past wounds know that their roots always lead back to relationships with parents or teachers and coaches for whom nothing was ever good enough.
After all, that same model carries over to school (where there’s a maximum from which points, grades, and stars are deducted) and to the workplace, where there’s always something missing. In the usual rules of the game for organizations, two things are missing: time and/or money. There’s never enough of either.
But without scarcity, there would be no model of economic growth in the capitalist sense as we understand and value it in our cultural context—and on the basis of which we define success. If a person already has enough, they will not consume more, and the economy will not grow.
A sense of inadequacy is not something that, once diagnosed, would actually benefit anyone in the context of economic growth by helping us recover from it.
This realization can be very reassuring in many ways—that this feeling isn’t something you can get rid of, because the world around us, in the name of economic growth, always makes it clear that there’s still something you need “for happiness.” And if we understand this and simply accept that, on some level, this feeling will always remain within us—and that it’s actually beneficial in the context of our own work for others to have a little of it too (so that they’ll consume our products or services)— then we can lighten one of life’s burdens a little more.
If we don’t like this, we’ll have to start addressing the system itself, of course, and I believe we all know that this is what needs to be done. I talk about this a lot in my next book, and I’m currently looking for one more test reader.
I already have four beta readers who will receive the manuscript next week, but I’d like to find one person whom I don’t know personally at all and who would be a very critical reader. So if you’re someone I don’t know, but you’re a manager and would be willing to proofread my next book, please let me know in the comments below.
Pictured here, I am fine-tuning the final draft of my book’s manuscript on a mountaintop in Brazil.
