There is a strange paradox about life. Seldom is the one we are living the life we think we should be living.

Somehow we can never get quite enough money, or power or titles or sex or adventures or love or anything to truly feel we’ve got our share. Like hungry birds in their nests, our beaks are always open, demanding yet another worm. There is always some better position, some higher level of responsibility, some more exalted realm we think should be ours.

Unfortunately, this is the life we’ve been given. And the really bad news is that no matter how many promotions and marriages and pay hikes we receive, there will probably never be “enough.” Our brains are simply wired to think this way.

I learned this when I was a 20-year-old junior copywriter earning $14,000 a year. At the time, I considered earning $25,000 the high life. Then I’d be happy, I thought. Then I could buy clothes, go out to dinner, relax about my bills. Naturally, I was wrong.

Six months into earning $25,000, I was still pining, only now, I wanted something better than Burger Heaven. I wanted decent off-the-rack instead of Loehman’s. And because I had an inflated sense of my wealth, my bills were worse than ever. It was the old trick of human nature -- I simply wanted that which I did not yet have.

The same is true of our work. The illusion is that the next job, that one just beyond our reach, will finally make us into the superhero of our dreams. Just one more promotion and we can finally write home to Mom with pride, riding the floats of our imagination down Main Street as we wave and smile to the crowds.

What we never take into consideration is that with all that glory comes work, and risk, and hitherto unforseen challenges. Suddenly we have to make decisions that leave some people seething. Or suddenly we will be surrounded by both detractors and fawning subordinates. We will no longer have friends in our workplace, because the boss never does. Instead, we will have professional relationships in which we can never truly, honestly relax. People will be perpetually lining up to make demands of us, and we will have more responsibilities than we ever imagined we could keep up with.

And then we’ll be longing for … you guess it … the good old days. As the saying goes, it’s lonely at the top.

Lately I’ve been reading T. Harv Eker’s good book, The Millionaire Mind. In it, he talks about the four posts of building wealth as saving, investing, earning and ‘simplification’. The first time I read this, I thought ‘simplification’ referred to some obscure investment strategy, when in fact it meant …just …. simplifying.

Cutting back on what you spend.

Being satisfied with less, not more.

What a novel concept!

To put it in vaguely Zen terms, there is no ‘there’ to get to. Striving for more is just a trick of the mind.

There is no quantum point at which you will finally feel like you have ‘enough’ money, success, or power. Eker says you have to retrain your brain, basically, to think like a millionaire and focus on wealth building, instead of ‘stuff building’.

And the same is true with dream-building. You don’t need ‘more’ time, inspiration, tools or luck. You simply need to slow down, focus on what you’ve got, and allow yourself to get really grounded in your current reality. Then you simply need to dig in and get to work … in the here and now … with what you already have.

Pretty simple when you come right down to it, isn’t it?