Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
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Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♀️ Maya’s target that keeps moving
Maya is a project manager who writes a newsletter on the side, and sells a small course to her readers.
Both keep growing, and it still doesn’t feel like enough.
A sponsor offer comes in, and she takes it, even though she can’t say whether she needed it.
So she now works more hours on the side than she does at her day job.
🧩 Her struggle:
She never wrote down what enough would be,so every month she decides she needs a little more.
That weekend, a friend sends her the true story of a musician
whose side project also grew far bigger than he ever planned,
and who sold it for $22 million.
Guess what he did instead of keeping it.
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🎸 The musician who already had enough
Derek Sivers spent ten years as a musician in a circus.
He was the ringleader, and he played about a thousand shows.
In 1997, he moved to Woodstock, New York, and started selling his own CD on his website.
Then his musician friends asked if he could sell their CDs too.
So he did, and that little side project became CD Baby.
Get this — it grew into the biggest online store for independent music.
More than 150,000 musicians sold their music through it.
In 2008, a company called Disc Makers wanted to buy it for $22 million.
Most founders would take the money and start planning a bigger life.
Derek already knew how much he needed.
In his own words, he “just wanted to make sure I had enough for a simple comfortable life.”
He didn’t own a house or a car, or even a TV.
So a few months before the sale, he gave the company to a charitable trust.
Disc Makers bought it from the trust, not from him.
The trust pays him 5% of its value each year,
and the rest goes to music education.
Later he wrote, “When I decided to sell my company, I already had enough.”
He didn’t need the $22 million to feel rich.
He had decided what enough looked like before the offer came,
so most of it went to music education.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Enough Line
Derek had decided what enough was before the $22 million offer came,
so giving most of it away was an easy decision.
This hack is called The Enough Line.
He didn’t decide what was enough after the money came.
He settled the number first, and then when the offer came, the decision was easy to make.
Enough isn’t a limit on what you earn.
It’s the number that tells you when you can say no.
So when the next offer comes in, we check it against a number we wrote down, not against a feeling.
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🛠️ Maya’s turn
So what about Maya, whose target keeps moving up every month?
That evening, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it what her life actually costs in a year.
The reply from her AI sidekick is short:
Write that yearly number down, and check every new offer against it before you say yes.
She writes the number on a sticky note above her desk.
When the next sponsor offer comes in on Friday, she turns it down.
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🌅 Three months later
Maya has turned down two offers she didn’t need.
She takes Fridays off from the side project now, and her readers haven’t noticed any difference.
Enough isn’t a smaller life.
It’s a life where you get to stop chasing.
Write down your enough number before the next offer arrives.
That’s it, my fellow trailblazers!
Yours ‘helping you build an AI sidekick that works and makes money while you enjoy life’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below works out your actual number from your real costs, then shows you what it
changes about the next twelve months.
🧰 What you’ll need
What your life costs in a year, and what you’d add if money weren’t the question
- Include the boring parts. Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. about $74,000 with the mortgage, the car and the childcare, plus two trips a year and not flinching at the grocery billWhat you tell yourself you’re aiming for, and what the chasing is costing you right now
- e.g. honestly just “more”, and I have said no to three weekends and I am short with the kids by ThursdayWhat you’d keep doing even if the number were already covered
- e.g. writing the newsletter, and probably the course
🚀 How to run it
Open your AI sidekick, ChatGPT, Claude, or whichever one you use.
Swap the three examples, the text inside the curly brackets, for your own, then run it. If your AI sidekick can already see your notes, you can run it as is.
🧪 Want to test it first? Run it without changing anything, and it will use the examples.
CONTEXT:
- Use my own material first. If you can see my drafts, my sent issues, or my subscriber dashboard, pull the real details from there instead of the examples below.
- If you know how I write, use my voice. Otherwise, write in a clear, warm, no-jargon voice — first-person, plain words, no startup-speak.
- If you know who my readers are, write for them. Otherwise assume employed people building something on the side.
- If I have replaced the examples, use only mine. If an example is still there, fill it in from what you already know about me, and mark it as your assumption. If you don't know anything about me yet, use the example exactly as written.
- This is not a budget and not investment advice. Do not tell me where to put money. Work out one number and what it decides.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
What my life costs in a year, including the boring parts, and what I would add if money were not the question:
{e.g. about $74,000 with the mortgage, the car and the childcare, plus two trips a year and not flinching at the grocery bill}
What I tell myself I am aiming for, and what the chasing is costing me right now:
{e.g. honestly just "more", and I have said no to three weekends and I am short with the kids by Thursday}
What I would keep doing even if the number were already covered:
{e.g. writing the newsletter, and probably the course}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The number — one annual figure my life actually costs, with the additions I named, shown as a simple sum.
2. The gap — how far the side project is from covering it, and what that distance really is in monthly terms.
3. What the number decides — three things I am currently saying yes to that it would answer for me.
4. What survives the line — the things I said I would keep doing anyway, which is the part that tells me what this is really for.
5. The date — when I check the number again, so it is deliberate rather than quietly creeping upward.
Then tell me the one thing I am chasing that has nothing to do with my number.