What Do You Do When Most of Your Life Is Good but the Final 20% Still Keeps You up at Night?

Would you risk 80% of good for the promise of great? SHOULD you?

Before I sold everything I owned — house, business, and all — and threw in the towel on a “normal” life, I loved quite a lot of my life.

A great relationship? A house I loved? A well-stocked wine cellar (very important for this Somm)? Check, check, and check again.

Sometimes I wonder — did I really risk 80% of a good life for the 20% that kept me up at night?

Yeah. I did.

Many people I’ve met cannot get their head around why you would want to change everything if, on paper at least, most of your life looks pretty much sorted.

But that 20% is what niggles you at 3 am. It’s what wakes you up at 5 am. It’s what keeps you restless.

My life is pretty good. Why can’t I shake the feeling I’m meant to be doing something different?

Here’s why.

A life in 10 parts

This is super simplified but seeing as I felt my life was roughly 80% good vs. 20% bad, I thought it would be helpful to look at life in 10 different parts:

1. Relationship status

2. Job

3. Accommodation

4. Family

5. Friends

6. How you spend your leisure time

7. How you spend your money

8. Spirituality

9. Mental health

10. Where you live

How do yours stack up? What works and what doesn’t?

Pre-2020, I was super happy with seven of those areas, somewhat happy with one, and very much not happy with two.

The dodgy 20%? One was my mental health. The other was the more pressing issue:

No.10 — Where I lived

This is a problem because where you live impinges on pretty much all other nine areas — including your mental health.

It also affects your career, proximity to family and friends, what sort of accommodation you can afford, how you spend your leisure time — all of it. 

Arguably, it could be the most important thing on that list.

Alas, where I lived didn’t jive with me at all. I frequently joked that if I could lift my house and my business away from my little corner of England and deposit somewhere I actually wanted to be, I would probably have never sold everything and left.

Even though on paper only 20% of my life felt truly bad, it was not an evenly weighted 20%.

This uneven weighting is one of the reasons why a mostly good life can still break you out in night sweats.

And it’s why you need to stop listening to people who tell you that the last 10 or 20% doesn’t matter.

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It’s better to be slightly imperfect in all 10 areas than completely screwed in one

Your mom and dad were right when they told you that you can’t always get exactly what you want. Life ebbs and flows and thus those 10 life areas are in a constant state of flux. They’re never going to all be perfect and how satisfied you are with each of them will change as you age.

For my part, my aim is to have all 10 of those life areas bobbing around 70–80% — and improving all the time. That’s far preferable to nine at 95% and one at 5%.

This is why it’s better to keep an even keel across all these areas rather than relentlessly pursue one area in the misguided hope that it’ll count more than others.

Like when people put all their eggs into their accommodation basket then wonder why they still feel so unsatisfied once they’ve bought their dream home.

Or they try to find the perfect relationship then once they find it (debatable), they wonder what’s next?

Or they ignore their mental health entirely which gives it license to slowly — or not so slowly — deteriorate their peace of mind.

Humans are wired to look at the negative. If there’s a part of your life that’s only 5% good, you’re more likely to only focus on that and not on the other good parts of your life.

It’s better to imperfectly improve in all areas than bring one to perfection whilst ignoring the others, or grudgingly accepting that one element is completely screwed whilst doing nothing about it.

Both scenarios will still keep you up at night. Take it from me.

Use a simple life to make improvements

I know, I know, I say the same thing most weeks — pursuing a simple life is the key here.

But this is a simple living publication so I’m running with it.

Tuesday’s paid essay was about how simple living isn’t an identity, it’s a framework that sits atop your life, including these 10 areas. It influences everything including your job, your accommodation, money, mental health, and where you live.

It’s also the cheapest, most sustainable way to make those improvements so many of us desperately crave.

• Spend less money on stuff you don’t need = improve no. 7 — how you spend your money.

• Downsize to a suitably sized home = improve no. 3. - accommodation.

• Cut down the fluff in your appointment book = improve no. 6 — how you spend your leisure time

Again, I sound like a broken record when I say none of it is easy and it will take time, perseverance, and likely a metaphorical head bang against a wall or two.

But eventually, implementing a simple living framework is the thing that will help you achieve 70-80% satisfaction in all 10 of those areas.

It’s then you have at least a shot at sleeping better at night.

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Funnily enough, I’m less satisfied in many more of those areas than I was when only my mental health and where I live was screwed. On the road, I’m occasionally at the mercy of crappy accommodation. Sometimes I miss friends. Sometimes I spend more money than I’d like. Sometimes my mental health is terrible.

The big surprise to me has been how little these across-the-board downgrades have affected my overall satisfaction levels.

Overall, I’m happier and more satisfied than ever.

I may have downgraded some of those life areas from 80% good to 60 or 70% but I no longer have any part languishing in single figures.

If you’re picking up what I’m putting down here, this is good news for you. It means that you can stop striving for perfection (if, like me, you’re that sort) and start making small, incremental improvements to each area of your life.

Small is my jam. Small is easy. Small is achievable.

Small is where it’s at.

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