What does enough look like? I needed an answer this week, because Sufficiency First, the philosophy at the heart of my book in progress, Small Steps, needed a logo. Two, in fact: one light and one dark.
My answer: a bowl, filled to the brim. Not overflowing. Not half empty. Level with the rim, holding exactly what it can hold.
The image carries the argument in miniature. A bowl has a limit. Fill it past that limit and the surplus spills onto the table, wasted or taken from someone else’s share. Leave it empty and the household goes hungry. Sufficiency sits between: the point where a family, a village or a country has what it needs and stops treating “more” as the goal.
Above the bowl, a sun rises. The order matters. The bowl fills first; the dawn comes after. Secure enough (food, shelter and work with a name attached) and flourishing has ground to stand on. Chase accumulation first and the bowl never fills for most people, however bright the skyline.
An old proverb put it better than any logo: “Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me” (Proverbs 30:8).
I am not the first to put sufficiency first. Climate researchers such as Yamina Saheb have urged a “sufficiency first” principle for energy and buildings: cut demand before chasing efficiency. Saheb gives sufficiency two limits: a floor of decent living for all and a ceiling set by the planet’s carbon budget. A bowl filled to the brim honors both. Most of the climate work presses on the ceiling. Small Steps starts from the floor: how poor communities reach enough, and why small, local paths get them there more reliably than big ones.
The design itself took small steps. I worked with AI tools, and their first drafts reached for a circle of joined hands, the stock image of countless NGOs. One AI, asked to critique the work bluntly, called it generic. The bowl came later, through revision.
Expect to see the bowl again: at the end of two short animated videos I’m making to explain Sufficiency First, and here on this site.
A full bowl, and no more. Three shapes carry the whole argument.