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Big Enoughness

August 21, 2020

By: Lee LeFever

I write books and run a company called Common Craft. I recently moved from Seattle to a rural island. Here, I write about online business, book publishing, modern home construction, and occasionally, dumb jokes.

A recent New York Times article called “Want to Make It Big in Fashion? Think Small, Like Evan Kinori” introduced me to the term “enoughness”.

It was in long-ago 1973 that the economist E.F. Schumacher first published “Small Is Beautiful,” a seminal (and, to the surprise of some, best-selling) collection of essays critiquing Western economics. Mr. Schumacher was among the first to champion sustainability, localization, small-scale industry and “a humane employment of machinery” to yield a more benevolent form of capitalism, one that utilized human effort and ingenuity for the common good.

“Enoughness,” was a Schumacher coinage. Plenty of abuse was heaped on him at the time — mainly he was attacked as an unprogressive Luddite — yet these days his ideas seem prophetic. Maybe it took a worldwide pandemic to remind us that the antidote to too-muchness may be enoughness. Small may be beautiful, indeed.

This, of course, is music to my ears. Big Enough is an ode to “enoughness” and the belief that it’s time for people to think differently about success and how to achieve it according to their values.

Learn more about Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful.

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