Few cliches in self-help are as popular as hatred for so-called “scarcity thinking.” Scarcity thinking is an evil mentality that assumes somewhere life has trade-off. Steven Covey told us that synergy was one of the 7 habits, the opposite of scarcity thinking. Entire books have been written about having an abundance mindset, and avoiding a “zero-sum” mentality. Recently, I was told about some  negotiation in a class where the scarcity/abundance dilemma was made the first topic. The two approaches were simplified into two graphs. One, where participants fight over pieces of a pie, the other where they focus on growing the pie and each having larger shares. The metaphor was an interesting choice, because I’ve personally never witnessed a pie grow in response to demand for more of it. Even if the abundance mindset is a good strategy most of the time, it’s wrong often enough to warrant skepticism. Which is why I loved the recent article by Chris Guillebeau:

“I like this quote from a David Sedaris article. Sort of an adapted ‘carpenter’s triangle’: ‘One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work.’ The gist is that in order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two.” … We’d all like to think we can be successful without cutting off one of the burners. But when you start deconstructing it, I’m not so sure.

The real flaw of the abundance obsession is that it makes us forget life has tradeoffs. As David Sedaris suggests, it might be impossible to glow brightly with one of life’s burners without having to turn another off. To Be Good Enough or To Be a world Famous? Abundance thinking works well if your aim is to be “good enough”. With the areas of your life, if you narrow down your categories enough, you can probably beat the average on all of them. You could be in decent shape, have an alright social life and okay professional success. It might take a lot of work, but it doesn’t need extreme sacrifices. But to me, this thinking breaks down when you want to move from “good enough” to “world famous.” Getting into better-than-average shape isn’t too hard considering most people don’t even exercise regularly. But getting into world-class shape is a full-time job. The reason good enough doesn’t need extreme sacrifice is that your competition isn’t trying very hard. When your aim is moderate success, you’re mostly competing against the millions of people who put in almost zero effort. The solution to good enough is often just to work hard enough. But becoming world famous changes the competition from the hoards of slackers to the elite individuals who are already trying their hardest. Getting more here often means giving something else up. Whether that comes from your personal life, as Sedaris suggests, or from your professional life as you sacrifice other skills to become the ruthless master of one. Success may not be a direct function of how much you sacrifice for it. Some people will have more talent. Others will stumble upon creative strategies that accomplish more. But if your arena is filled with the self-selected best and they are already trying their hardest, it seems stupid to assume you can get away with anything more than lip-service to fuzzy notions like life balance. Love this article? Join Us On Facebook and Twitter for more inspiration

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