I’ve been talking about idols lately, roughly a dozen times this summer. Some of it in interview rooms, because I’m hiring. Some of it over coffees and calls, because a couple of friends I mentor are both mid-pivot right now, one of them 3 jobs into a single quarter, the other a founder trying to decide how big to swing.
Different rooms, same conversations. The topic always opens in the same place. What should I do? Which offer? Which direction? Take the safe seat or bet on myself?
The easy thing to do is answer the question they asked. In good, systematic fashion, I draw on root cause analysis and start asking “the 5 whys”. Why this offer vs that? Why does this direction appeal to you? Ultimately, underneath “what should I do” is “what do I actually want, and why.” Underneath that, quieter, is the one that’s hardest to say out loud. When is enough?
I recently got a sharper tool for this from Arthur Brooks, being interviewed on the Triggernometry podcast (shoutout to my friend Micah Rowland for the suggestion). Brooks borrows an old idea from Thomas Aquinas. Back in the 13th century, Aquinas said we chase four substitutes for God: money, power, pleasure, and honor/fame. Four idols, in his framing. The thing we organize a life around, whether or not we ever chose it on purpose.
David Foster Wallace said the same thing in plainer English. You worship something. Everybody does. The only real choice is what. And the default gods, the ones you slide into without deciding, will eat you alive.
So Brooks gives us a way to find our idols. It runs as an elimination. Four idols on the table: money, power, pleasure, honor/fame. Aquinas called it honor. Brooks says fame. Both are pointing at the same appetite, and it’s bigger than red carpets. It’s the hunger to be admired, to matter in other people’s eyes. Think an academic wanting people to talk about and admire their most recent published paper. Ok, onto the elimination rounds:
Which could you give up tomorrow and feel nothing? Cross it out.
Of the three left, which could you live without? Cross it out.
Of the final two, which one actually runs your daily decisions? Which one is quietly setting your calendar, your yes, your no? Which one comes up first in your inner dialogue?
That last one standing is your idol. And it’s rarely the flattering answer you’d give on a values exercise. This is why it matters when you’re staring down a career decision:
An idol has one defining property. It never says enough.
More money doesn’t close the money account. More admiration doesn’t fill the admiration account. The appetite grows on the diet. That’s the whole trap Brooks writes about in From Strength to Strength, what he calls the striver’s curse: you keep feeding the thing that made you successful, and it keeps handing you a bigger bill.
Now drop a job seeker inside that. If your idol is running the search, and the idol has no satiation point, then no offer will ever feel like the answer. You take the role and feel the itch again by spring. You turn down a good one because some invisible number went unhit. You’re negotiating with something built to never be satisfied.
I have a founder/friend with a good business and a real fork in front of him. “Do I run it as a healthy lifestyle company, or swing for something much bigger?” He’s been circling that call for months. The strategy is the easy part. What he can’t answer is the question sitting under it. What’s the number that would be enough. Until he names it, every path looks equally plausible and equally unsatisfying. And even when he writes down that number and puts it in a drawer, I can almost guarantee you that when he hits it (and he probably will), that number won’t be enough the next time he pulls it out of storage.
It’s an undefined enough.
Aquinas held all four as good things sized wrong. Fine servants, terrible masters. Each one a God-shaped appetite pointed at something too small to fill it. Which is why the cup never fills, no matter how much we pour.
I’m going to state the obvious: this side of heaven, you and I probably can’t kill the idol, and pretending we have only makes it stronger. But seeing it clearly gets us in the intellectually honest struggle, which is where we all need to be.
Once we can name the thing, we can define enough. On purpose, in advance. A number. A title. A shape of life we decide is sufficient before we go chasing. And then once we can name it, we share it with others, our closest confidants, to keep us in check. Brooks calls the practice a reverse bucket list. we take things off the list instead of piling more on. we name what we’re willing to live without. Enough stops being a destination we’re hunting and becomes a line we draw.
That’s the real work under the job search. Nobody can tell you which offer to take until you’ve told yourself what you actually want, and you can’t answer that honestly until you’ve met the idol setting the terms.
So before you touch the resume, run the elimination. Find the one that’s really driving. Then, while you can still think straight, decide what enough looks like and write it down. The offer gets easy to read once you’ve done that. The hard part was never the offer.
If you had to say your “enough” out loud today, a number, a role, a life you’d call sufficient, could you? Or would you hear yourself reach for “just a little more”? For me, my idol is honor, and I can honestly say that I’m prone to reach for more.
-eddy-