How to Boost Your Satisfaction and Fulfillment in Five Minutes per Day

There are two ways to achieving everything you want.

No person has the power to have everything they want, but it is in their power not to want what they don’t have, and to cheerfully put to good use what they do have. — Seneca, Moral Letters, 123.3

Satisfaction and fulfilment. Two words that get thrown around a lot, especially in the space of personal development and philosophy. They can be made into complex and airy-fairy concepts, but I am a fan of simplicity. Life’s complicated enough, so no point in adding to that.

Fulfillment is “the achievement of something desired, promised, or predicted” and satisfaction is “fulfillment of one’s wishes, expectations, or needs, or the pleasure derived from this.” So, in simple terms: fulfillment and satisfaction refer to the pleasure you get from achieving your dreams, getting what you want, and having your wishes come true.

There is a simple way to express this. I call it the satisfaction equation:

Wants = Haves

Your Wants are all the things and achievements you are wishing for and dreaming of — the stuff that you don’t yet have but would like to.

Your Haves are what you already have achieved or acquired — from a pair of socks over the being a knowledgeable individual to healthy children.

As long as this equation holds, you will be satisfied and fulfilled. But if it gets out of balance because you want something that you don’t have, your satisfaction deteriorates.

Although your Wants and Haves are two sides to the same equation, most people only work on their Haves. It seems easy and straightforward enough. You want something, so you have to work until you have it. More money, a new car, a hot girlfriend, front row seats at a Tim Ferriss seminar, a banging beach body, your own business.

Look, I don’t want to keep you from going after your dreams. If it is something that you enjoy doing and that will make you happy, by all means — go for it.

However, what I want to bring to your attention is the fact that a heavy focus on only one side of the equation brings a lot of problems with it. Overworking, comparing yourself with others all the time, and neglecting what you have in favor of what you don’t to just name a few.

But do you know what’s even worse? Balancing the equation by only working on your Haves is never sustainable. Sooner or later, your brain will come up with more desires, with more Wants that you have to turn into Haves in order to fill the hole that has opened up inside of you. Think about it: How many things have you achieved or bought, how many dreams fulfilled only to want something else a couple of months later?

I’m going to be honest here with you: Most of you will never get completely rid of your desire to have more. We humans are experts in looking for things we don’t have and putting them on our Wants list.

But you can still become more satisfied and fulfilled without chasing more Haves all the time. You can still avoid getting caught in an endless game of chasing more, more, and more.

How? By focusing on the other side of the equation.

Want nothing = Have everything

I know that this is easier said than done. I’m a realist, after all.

“Uh, you just have to want less and be satisfied with what you have, then you’ll be happy.”

No shit, Sherlock. If it was that easy, we’d all be doing it. But since I don’t see a lot of people with Zen level satisfaction walking around, it seems to be a bit harder than that. So let’s go at it, step by step.

First, let’s look at where our ever-increasing Wants actually come from. Two things immediately come to mind.

First, we humans are social animals. We compare ourselves with others, see that they have things we don’t and then our inner monkey goes apeshit because want want want.

Second, we get bombarded with advertisements, photos, videos, and stories of what we don’t have. We are confronted with what’s possible all the time. That’s the problem with a world of endless possibilities — you’ll never be able to experience them all. There is always something better, faster, cheaper, shinier. We fear we’re missing out on living a great life if we don’t have the best product, if we don’t follow through with the latest biohacking morning routine or if we’re not as smart or good looking as we could be with a Blinkist subscription and a gym membership.

But this isn’t meant to be a rant about social media comparison culture or dirty marketing tactics. Ranting only makes things worse and I’d rather be helpful to you.

Plus, unless you decide to live like a hermit, you won’t be able to escape all of that. So what can you do to stop your Wants from ever increasing? Well, for starters, you could learn to focus on what you already have.

Have everything = Want nothing

The problem is not that you don’t have enough. The problem is that you don’t know that you have enough.

We live in a fast-paced world. The time we take to enjoy the fruits of our labor and what we have achieved is often way less than the time it took us to get there.

After an initial period of joy and satisfaction, most things we achieve or obtain are quickly forgotten. I’m as guilty of this as anyone else. I love sneakers. I’ve had a period during which I bought two pairs a month. There are six pairs sitting on the shelf behind me and another ten or so stacked in boxes on my closet. The problem is that even after I bought all of them, I still wanted to buy more. My Wants were outrunning my Haves again. However, I haven’t bought a single pair of shoes in more than half a year.

So what did I do? How did I break this vicious cycle?

By appreciating more. By being grateful. By taking the time to look at my life, all the things I have and consciously enjoying them. By focusing on where my Haves equaled my Wants, I was able to stop my Wants from constantly outpacing my Haves.

The more you are grateful and consciously experience what you have, the more you will notice that you already have a ton of things others would kill for. (That’s no exaggeration as I assume you have access to clean water.)

By doing so, you increase your Haves because you become conscious of the ones you long had forgotten. And in turn, you reduce your Wants. The result? Your satisfaction equation becomes more balanced — ergo, more satisfaction and fulfillment.

Two ways to practice gratitude

I love efficiency. The thought of small input — large output gives me that funny feeling in between my big toes.

And if someone were to ask me how he could improve his life the most with the smallest possible effort, I’d say gratitude without a doubt.

It takes about five minutes per day but will give your life an immense boost — simply because it reminds you of how good you already have it. And if that isn’t the coolest thing since the invention of sliced bread, I don’t know what to tell you.

All you have to do is think of the things that you are grateful for in your life — the sun shining, the dollar bill you find in your pants yesterday or the fact that the neighbor’s kids aren’t being noisy for once.

This sounds simple but can be a bit challenging, especially in the beginning.

So here is a little tip. In the morning, I like to approach the whole thing from the inside to the outside. I start with what I am grateful for about myself and my mind. Maybe I slept exceptionally well that night. Maybe I just slept better than last night. Maybe I’m grateful for my body getting in shape for summer, the fact that I have near-perfect eyesight or that I learned a lot by reading during the week.

Then I move further outwards, to my surroundings. One of my potted plants is blooming? Awesome. My room’s clean because I vacuumed it yesterday? Way to go. After that, I further expand. House, city, the country I live in, the whole world, and so on.

If that concept doesn’t resonate with you, you can also do what I do in the evening. Go through your day in chronological order, from getting up to going to sleep. What happened that you are grateful for? Did you catch a bus although you were late? Did someone send you a nice text message? Did you manage to get home in time before the rain?

Whatever way you do it, do it consistently. In the morning to start your day right or in the evening to recap all the good things that happened. It takes about five minutes and keeps your Wants from going apeshit by reminding you of all your Haves.

Keep your balance

A man’s wealth must be determined by the relation of his desires and expenditures to his income. If he feels rich on $10 and has everything he desires, he really is rich.

— John D. Rockefeller

I’m aware of the irony of this quote coming from the first billionaire in history and one of the richest men to have ever lived. It’s true nevertheless.

Think hard about your desires and be careful about what you add to your Wants.

Is it something that is born out of comparison with others, conjured up by an advertisement, or deemed necessary by society for some other reason?

Or is it something that you have thought about and decided that it will increase your satisfaction and fulfillment long-term if you manage to turn it into a Have?

Fulfillment and satisfaction neither come from your Haves, nor your Wants. Rather, they come from maintaining balance between the two. And to achieve this balance, you have to work on both sides of the equation.