The old way of comparing of a “glass half full” vs a “glass half empty” is a cheap and annoying way of explaining optimism vs pessimism. It’s nice and simple, but reality is not nice or simple. I think that we often treat our mindset as a fixed entity like gravity or aging. We can’t escape it, it’s just the way we are programmed and the lens through which we view life. FALSE! We CAN change it. We can change it whenever we want.
In recent and not so recent history, this idea of changing our mindset to one of optimistic abundance has been infectious. Napoleon Hill wrote books and gave speeches in the 1930’s and 40’s about this very topic. Since then a virtual explosion of popular books have become bestsellers. The Secret started the real snowball and since then there have been a slew of successful self-help books claiming you just have to believe that you are worthwhile, successful, and whatever else seems attractive to you….and those things will manifest themselves in your life as if by magic! How convenient! Like some cosmic mind-reading genie just slowly delivering my deepest wishes to my life like an Amazon package.
By and large I think this is complete and utter falsehood. But the inputs are not. The decision to change your own mindset to one of hope, optimism, and abundance has been one of the most powerful shifts in the last 10 years of my life. It’s not because the cosmic genie delivered good things to me. It’s because the things already in front of me began to take on different meanings and I began to act differently.
The alternative to abundance thinking is scarcity thinking. Along those same lines are pessimism, finite thinking, victim-hood, and excuses. Blaming outside forces for the bad things in your life is toxic. And expecting good things in life to happen to you just because you think about them or made a nice vision board for your closet is actually quite similar thinking. Either way, you are expecting something else to meet your needs and change your circumstances to suit your taste.
I want to argue for a shift in mindset as a beneficial and necessary practice long before any circumstances change. Please do not read this as accepting rose colored glasses as the new norm and just pretending like everything is great. Divorcing reality is not the aim and it is obviously going to create more problems than it solves. Acknowledging your feelings of pain, suffering, anger, hurt, or disappointment are still allowed and encouraged. But they aren’t the theme any more. The gap between what you imagine would make you happy and where you stand today is no longer the focus. The things you don’t have are not the song playing in the background of your day. Let’s get into it.
- An abundance mindset welcomes challenge.
- A scarcity mindset holds on to the comfort of staying comfortable.
- An abundance mindset accepts failure as a means to learn.
- A scarcity mindset is afraid of failing and avoids it by not acting in the first place.
- An abundance mindset seeks growth.
- A scarcity mindset isn’t even concerned with growth.
- An abundance mindset asks questions.
- A scarcity mindset states excuses.
- An abundance mindset uses fear as a motivator.
- A scarcity mindset is tied down by fear.
- An abundance mindset keeps a person moving, even if very slowly.
- A scarcity mindset keeps a person stagnant.
- An abundance mindset focuses on what could happen, and what is possible.
- A scarcity mindset focuses on “can’t’s”, “don’t’s”, and “won’t’s”.
- An abundance mindset is more open to the unknown and the accompanying discomfort.
- A scarcity mindset is locked into the known and comfort of the familiar.
- An abundance mindset holds ideas open-handed and accepts new ways of thinking.
- A scarcity mindset grips the same old ideas and ways of thinking with rigidity.
- An abundance mindset is willing to break away from the norms of the social group to do something new, different, and “unusual”.
- A scarcity mindset accepts social norms as the allowable boundary and mirrors what everyone else is doing.
- An abundance mindset is willing to risk and give.
- A scarcity mindset hoards what is in hand.
- An abundance mindset is courageous.
- A scarcity mindset is cowardly.
- An abundance mindset takes ownership.
- A scarcity mindset blames.
- An abundance mindset acts before anyone can comment on it and despite criticism.
- A scarcity mindset waits for permission or approval.
- An abundance mindset innovates.
- A scarcity mindset repeats what has been done before.
I feel like I can be critical of the scarcity/victim mindset because that is the way I thought for the bulk of my life. The interesting and counterintuitive thing here is that despite the scarcity mindset I held, I was also eternally optimistic. It seems like these 2 things are at odds and couldn’t coexist, but that is faulty thinking. We have to accept the nuance and variability of the way we think. We have been trained to process in different ways by family, friends, teachers, coaches, leaders, bosses, coworkers, entertainment, and our own innate bend on life. All of that mixes together to form complex cocktails of processing power. Be slow to label yourself as one or other of….anything.
Remember, this is not totally binary. We aren’t 100% in one camp or the other. Odds are good that you will be a gradient of the two. Some situations may trigger one form of thinking. It’s an interesting experiment to observe in yourself once you see the mindsets for what they are. Watch how you react to good or bad things happening. What how your parents or siblings react. Watch how your spouse reacts. We all betray our philosophies of thought in our language and communication methods.
As I mentioned, growing up I was very optimistic. In fact a way that I learned to cope with difficulties was to point out the “bright side” or the silver lining. Well, that sucks that your car was totaled, but at least you get to go buy a new car now! (Not helpful) Despite the perpetual optimism and positivity, I also held onto an underlying rip current of victim-thinking. It was much more subtle and sinister than I realized until very recently. Labeling things as out of my control, something I didn’t know how to do, or as “just the way it is” polluted my thinking. If I’m honest this was behavior I accepted from my social groups growing up. Seeing “those” people as successful was like watching lightning strike. An amazing natural phenomenon that you could only sit back and observe. The optimism even contributed to the scarcity thinking in a way, because we would work to accept everything as good or decent or worthwhile. Thinking everything is good seems positive, but in reality it doesn’t label anything inferior as such. You can’t identify areas of opportunity and grow them. You can’t set a goal to change things because why do they need changing at all? They are already good. As the famous saying goes, “Good is the enemy of great”.
Finally, after 31 years of living this way I began to realize that the most successful people in the world don’t just happen into their success. The best athletes train immensely hard, optimize their lives around their craft, and do everything possible to be the best. Entrepreneurs work day and night to get their new company off the ground and find ways to force it into existence. Virtually anyone who has accomplished something noteworthy, impressive, interesting, or difficult has a work ethic that dwarfs my own. Somehow the concept that I alone am standing in my own way never occurred to me. I alone choose NOT to work on that side business. I alone choose to stop working out. I alone chose too eat unhealthy food. I alone choose to stay up too late on my phone instead of getting the rest I need to perform at my best. I alone can choose to reverse those habits and start opting for better inputs. No one has a gun to my head and is telling me I have to do or not do anything. At most, perceived (not overt, outspoken) social pressure may shift my mindset. That’s it! Who is here to stop me but myself?! No one! Once that reality started to sink it, a lot of things changed.
I realized that if I wanted to be more effective at work and have the potential to advance professionally, I needed to change the inputs. There was no use waiting for a supervisor to notice the work I did well and hope that sometime that might amount to a promotion, raise, etc… That’s not a strategy. That’s insanity. Keeping the same inputs and expecting a different result. Instead, I chose to work harder than I ever had before. I was focused and driven to get everything done as quickly and accurately as possible. Work tasks got demolished as soon as they hit my desk. I was even more focused and driven than my boss. He had to quicken his pace to keep up. Emotionally there was a big shift too. Before, I was open to socializing with coworkers and looked for ways to bring up common topics and chat. Now, I only held conversations that added value and kept socializing to a sentence or two. My habit before was to mentally comment on the times that I was “bored” and wanted things to change. I would expect other people to bring me things to do, tell me how to do them, and help me whenever I had a problem with them. Then I’d wait patiently for more. Now I knocked out everything in front of me, then went hunting for more. How can we do better in this area? How can I track our progress? How can I get started on something that we will need to do anyway next week? Where is the next opportunity? What are we not paying enough attention to? How can I understand our business better? And on and on.
It was a professional maturing period that was far overdue.
After that I realized that I was making excuses for my physical health and fitness declining. As I navigated my early 30’s, my body didn’t naturally stay in shape like it did a decade before. A belly was developing. Any leg muscle that remained from past years of exercise was in a state of atrophy. My arms were undefined and lanky. My cardiovascular fitness was at absolute zero. Was it work stress, buying a house, navigating married life, and anything else external that stopped me from being healthy or in shape? NOPE. It was just me. Wanting to watch Netflix and eat a couple pounds of gummy bears every week. Things had to change and I had to change them. Running long distance has basically been the opposite of my natural tendencies forever. And that’s what I chose to start with. A single mile was a painful grueling slog. After a few weeks it got a little easier. Then 3 miles became the norm. After a few months, I actually ran a little over 6 miles! Which was the longest run of my life. Before too long 10+ miles was happening…somehow. The culmination of my running was helping a friend during his 50 mile ultramarathon by running the last 21 miles with him. It took a while but it wasn’t even that difficult overall. Since then I’ve started a fitness (any money) related blog. You know this because you’re here. I also have an Instagram account @Brendan_fitnessandmoney where I post most days. And the best of all, my Youtube channel. It’s been a lot of work but has been a blast connecting with people online. I’ve committed to fitness challenges and have helped inspire other people to make better decisions with their own health and fitness.
These are just a couple examples of the areas where this mental shift has radically improved my quality of life as well as my success with goals. I’m working on things that are really satisfying and am more disciplined than ever. My time is spent on things that actually matter, which is probably the most satisfying overall. Knowing you can look back at the day, the week, or the year and feel good about the choices you’ve made and the impact they bring is so fulfilling. I want this for you. I want you to be happier, to produce more, to achieve more goals, to have some goals worth achieving! This is the kind of life I think we were meant to live, not the kind of passive, excuse-filled, victim-hood existence we often choose instead.
How are you choosing a mentality of abundance or clarity?
What do people around you choose to believe?
How were you taught to think when you were growing up?
What makes the people around you successful? How do they think the same or differently that you?
What have you known you should do for years but haven’t made progress?
What could you accomplish if you had a new mindset?
Abacus Fitness and Money 