How Much Is Enough?

How Much Is Enough? You Tell Us

"One way to figure out what's worth striving for in the future is to assess your satisfaction with the present," says Tom Morris in his Short Course. The Fast Company-Roper Starch Worldwide survey represents our effort to begin that assessment. By posing a series of questions to participants in an online survey, we sought to learn the deep feelings and strong impulses that shape the choices that working men and women make about their jobs and their lives.

We asked respondents about balance in their lives -- and, more indirectly, we asked them to appraise other people's lives as well.

We offered them choices -- more money or more time? more power or more time? more challenge or more time? -- to see how they established their priorities.

We asked them to explain themselves: What really matters to them? And we asked them to evaluate stuff: What are the rewards of success -- and what are the seeds of excess? And then, with the findings of the survey in hand, we cross-referenced questions and answers, and we cross-indexed the responses by gender, age, and income. The result is an in-depth look at how people in the Fast Company community answer the question "How much is enough?"

Here are some of the key lessons that we took away from the survey.

1. Balance is a choice: You can have it if you want it. A large majority of respondents be-lieve that balance is a matter of individual responsibility and personal choice: 87% said that people who want to achieve balance in their lives can do so -- if they're willing to make certain trade-offs. Evaluating where they are in their own lives, a surprisingly high number of respondents (60%) said that they are able to manage the demands of both their work life and their private life -- a response that, taken at face value, would suggest that for many people, the question "How much is enough?" is not a terribly pressing one.

2. But the outside world makes balance hard to achieve. At the same time, the survey revealed that a shadow stretches across people's thinking about the issue of balance. While most respondents said that their lives were in balance, most also admitted that they would do things differently if they didn't feel money-related pressures. In fact, 77% said that if money were not an issue, they would either quit work or reduce their working hours. The survey uncovered evidence that, despite their willingness to accept responsibility for the choices that shape their lives, many people don't feel that they have complete command over those choices. Nearly 50% of respondents said that they have no control over how many hours they work; 88% said that they find juggling work life and personal life difficult; and 84% said that people have to work as hard as possible "in order to compete."

When offered an array of possible strategies for pursuing balance, people rejected any that required them to compromise their career. Changing the type of work they did, moving toward part-time or freelance work, or simply "giving up the idea of being a superstar at work" -- all were viewed as nonstarters, even in the name of balance. And the issue of compromise cast in sharp relief a gender gap that divides men and women on a wide range of career and value-based choices: Male respondents were more likely than female respondents to dismiss work-related trade-offs out of hand.

3. Sooner or later, it all comes down to money. For most respondents, money matters most. Money, the majority of them reported, is the most powerful factor in their success, in their satisfaction, and in their ability to determine the structure and substance of their lives. To test the power of money, we gave people an in-your-face choice: Which would you rather have -- a $10,000-a-year raise or an extra hour per day to spend at home with your family? No less than 83% of respondents opted for the cash -- even though 91% of respondents had indicated earlier that making their personal lives more of a priority was important to them. When we asked them to indicate factors that would help them achieve balance in their lives, 86% identified "making more money" as critical.

If money is so important, how much more of it would people need in order to stop worrying? The sums that most people named were surprising -- not because they were so outrageously large but because they were so relatively small: In an age of multibillion-dollar IPOs and multimillion-dollar lottery winnings, 70% of respondents said that it would take no more than an extra $50,000 a year to free them from money worries and to permit them to work the way they wanted to.