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Once a week, I take one idea and put it under the microscope. Sometimes it’s about business, sometimes it’s about how people think, and sometimes it’s simply an observation about the world around us. If it challenges the way you see the topic, then it has done exactly what it was meant to do.

I've been reading Rory Sutherland's Alchemy this week, and I got stuck on a single idea for three days straight.

It's called satisficing.

If you've never heard the word, it lives somewhere between two things we all already know: maximizing and satisfying. Maximizing is the relentless hunt for the absolute best option, no matter how long it takes. Satisficing is choosing the option that's simply good enough. You settle for good enough because the downside of getting it catastrophically wrong is too high to gamble on.

Once I understood it, I couldn't stop seeing it everywhere.

Most of the big decisions in life work exactly this way. The person you marry. The car you drive. The country you choose to call home. Nobody actually evaluates every possible spouse on earth, scores them on a spreadsheet, and selects the global maximum. That would be insane, and you'd die single. Instead, we find someone wonderful, someone who clears the bar, and we commit. We choose good enough, and then we build an entire life on top of it.

This is also why brands exist, by the way. We happily pay more for a name we recognize because that name is a promise — a promise that the product carries a lower risk of being terrible. When you strip it all the way down, we're paying for the absence of disaster.

Then I started running my own life through this lens.

Before we go any further…

Some years ago, I was working at a facility that made pesticide fluids for Central American agriculture.

The kind of place where they won't let you through the front gate without a full hazmat suit and a respirator. The kind of place where they run you through a chemical shower before clocking off to lower the risk of skin cancer.

Some weeks, I worked from 4AM until 8PM and still couldn't pay my bills, so I looked online to make more money.

I tried building a social media following like every guru told me to. I spammed affiliate links across Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Quora for months. Not a single sale.

Then I noticed something while visiting Tony Robbins' website. 

He was running what I now call an e-Farm. I checked Bob Proctor's website. Same thing. Tim Ferriss. Same thing. Robert Kiyosaki, Jordan Belfort, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Every person making serious money online owned an e-Farm and nobody was talking about it.

I scraped together what I could, borrowed money on my credit cards, and figured out how it worked.

Within a few weeks, I was getting real commission checks in the mail. Within a few months, I walked away from the chemical factory for good.

I wrote everything I know about building an e-Farm from scratch into a book called The e-Farming Manifesto. It covers the complete blueprint from zero subscribers to a profitable asset you own outright, without posting content, chasing followers, or depending on any platform.

Use coupon code SHIP4FREE at checkout to get it for $9.99 before the offer expires.

Now, as I was saying…

The country I live in, the cars I've owned over the years, and the woman I married all went the same way. So did the business I run, the people I hired, and the partners I went into business with. The marketing methods I bet on, the investments that paid off, and the ones that quietly went to zero — every single one of them was a satisficing decision.

I never had perfect information for any of them. I had a slice of the picture, a ticking clock, limited money, and a gut feeling. And in every case, I picked the option that looked good enough to keep me out of catastrophe.

Take where I live. I didn't visit all 195 countries, build a scoring system, and crown a winner. I found a place that felt safe, that worked for my family, that cleared the bar — and I stayed. Was it the single optimal location on the planet? I have no idea, and I'll never know. That was never the question I was actually answering. The question was always quieter and far more honest: is this good enough to commit to without regretting it? Every time the answer came back yes, I committed.

I'll be honest — at first, that realization stung a little.

There's something almost deflating about admitting that the life I'm proud of, the one I built from nothing, runs on a strategy that boils down to "good enough." It doesn't sound heroic. It doesn't match the story we like to tell ourselves about bold visionaries making genius moves while everyone else hesitates.

But then the second half of the thought landed, and the whole thing flipped.

Everyone else is doing exactly the same thing.

We satisfice because life demands it. Life is an enormous, ambiguous environment, packed with variables we can see and far more that we'll never see coming. We're forced to make decisions with incomplete information, under pressure, with limited time and limited resources. There is no version of reality where you get to sit and wait until the data is perfect and the path is obvious. You move, or you stall out. And stalling is its own kind of terrible decision.

Under those conditions, the smartest thing a human being can do is steer clear of the truly ruinous option and keep going.

That reframed something I'd been quietly carrying for years.

I've made some not-so-great calls in my life. We all have. And for a long time, those were the ones I replayed at night — the deal I shouldn't have taken, the hire that blew up, the investment I watched evaporate. I measured myself by my misses.

But when I actually sit down and tally it all up, honestly, the math looks completely different. Considering where I started — with no map, no plan B, and no safety net underneath me — I've made far more good decisions than bad ones. A handful of them were genuinely great. And remarkably few were ever truly catastrophic.

And that's satisficing, doing exactly what it's built to do.

So here's where I've landed this week.

I think most of us keep score the wrong way our whole lives. We celebrate the big wins and the bold bets, then beat ourselves up over every miss. But the people who end up with good, stable, free lives are usually the ones who dodged the disasters long enough for the small good decisions to add up.

The disasters you sidestep matter every bit as much as the wins you celebrate. They just never show up in the highlight reel, so we forget to count them.

Maybe the real measure of a life well lived is simply how many terrible decisions you managed to avoid along the way.

And strangely, that idea brought me a kind of peace. After years of grading myself on the mistakes, satisficing handed me something I wasn't expecting — permission to feel proud of a life built on a long string of good-enough decisions that, all stacked together, turned out pretty great.

Turns out good enough was always enough. 

P.S. If you enjoy these ideas, you’ll love the deeper conversations we have on the List Building Lifestyle podcast.