Too Much of A Good Thing: Drawbacks of a Life of Excess & Why Constraints Are Good for You

I recall my stay in Taiwan in the summer of 2023. It was a rough summer on the family side so I retreated into a lot of good food. I also love the delicious tea drinks that Taiwan is renowned for around the world. It got so bad I was ordering 6-8 orders of oolong, green tea, passion fruit tea, orange tea like every day. For myself! 

And as they say, too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing. I end up not enjoying it as much when it’s so easily accessible or just normal. It’s like when you have too much Vitamin C or D, that it becomes toxic to your body. 

I tend to go pretty extreme in life as my family knows. It’s one of my best and worst traits. 

I gorge myself on amazing food when I am in Japan or Taiwan or really anywhere I visit.

I have way too many books. Like literally 20,000 books at least, so many that I pay for storage and cannot ever read in my lifetime, although I will make an attempt to do so. That is why I am called the ultimate Tsundoku, Japanese term for a person who acquires reading materials but lets them pile up in one's home without reading them. 

I travel far too much in my goal to join the Centurion club which are people who have visited at least 100 countries. I’ve now visited 74 countries as I write this in 2024. But all at the neglect of my family. 

Too much money? You would think having too much money is not a problem. But actually Morgan Housel wrote about this. It can become an issue due to Social Debt. 

“A subtle problem with money is that assets are easy to measure but liabilities can be hidden. Measuring lottery winnings is simple: $3.9 million, down to the penny. But how do you measure losing your privacy? Or the nagging doubt that some friends only like you for your money? That’s way harder.

When you bought a new, bigger, house, you thought you’d be happier. But then you realize that the reason you wanted a nicer house was to socially compete with other people who had nice houses. So once you got a nice house, you just started dreaming about even nicer homes. 

Once you accept that having the nicest home in your social group is your goal, it becomes not only an obsession but a game that cannot be won, since the group you compare yourself to shifts with each salary increase you receive.

My theory is that the more money people have, the more social debt they tend to be burdened with.”

What an interesting insight. That there can be too much of a good thing. Although you can argue the other side of this is Stalin’s quote “Quantity has a quality of itself.” 

So why do I raise this? I think it shows that constraints are important. That quality can be far more important than quantity. And there can be too much of a good thing. 

But based on my experience in life and business, it’s not usually the big companies with tons of resources that change the world. It’s usually startups with much less money and people but more high quality and focused people who actually succeed. This is because the big company has too many legacy businesses, people and mindset. Basically social debt. 

It’s not always the rich kid who does well in life, it is usually the Poor Smart & Hungry kid who does. Poor kids like startups have nothing to lose and everything to gain. So don’t worry if you don’t have a lot now. You can absolutely change this. Constraints drive creativity. Too much can sometimes become a curse.