Scarcity v. abundance.
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Notes
Scarcity mindset:
- Fear of running out of ideas, insights, or generosity
- Based in fear of being insufficient (lack of trust in self)
- Selfish
- Leads to isolation from the audience who needs you and who cheer you on or challenge you
- Creates more scarcity
Abundance mindset:
- Creativity is contagious
- Exchanging ideas, leading our best work to get even better
- Multiplies
Art lives in culture, and culture exists through engagement.
Thoughts
When I think about music, I’m not so nervous about scarcity. Even if there are limits to my imagination, I have so much to learn (which generates new ideas) that I’ll be dead long before I run out of new things.
It’s not the same with writing, though. Awhile back (I’m afraid to look up exactly when this was), I made a big show about how I was going to write short stories regularly. I had a handful of ideas—still have them, in fact—and figured that with some discipline (ha!) I could crank out a couple stories per month. They didn’t need to be great, but I’d grow my abilities. And growth breeds growth.
That “year of living short fiction” was a disaster. I finished a total of two stories—one kind of short, the other too long—and that was it. I believe I’ll write more, at some point, but I don’t have any sense that it’s the type of thing I can just crank out. Too much of Pressfield’s Resistance, for sure. But also, too much of the scarcity mindset that Seth writes about here.
One important aspect of this “abundance mindset”1 that I’ve not really embraced: the community aspect. Being both shy and introverted leads me to withdraw, not engage, with others.
Or perhaps that’s not fair. It’s not so much that I withdraw, but that I don’t reach out. Once connections are made, I’m relatively fine. (This explains how I can run a classroom, for example.) The power of new DAWs and plug-ins, along with the inertia from COVID isolation, makes it hard for me to imagine seeking out a jam session or performance opportunity or whatever. It’s too easy to work on my own.
But if the abundance mindset is fed through the interactions of culture, of audience engagement, of connections among creators, then I’m probably missing out on an important component of art.
This series is meant to capture my thoughts as I work through Seth Godin’s The Practice. It’s a book with over 200 (very short) chapters, which I hope to work through and, I further hope, to implement over time.
If you’re interested in more of Godin’s ideas, or my thoughts about them, you can check out this collection of posts. Note that if you’re more interested in the former, you should probably get Godin’s book and read it yourself; my notes will be both incomplete and idiosyncratic, and my thoughts will relate to my own experience.
But if my thoughts resonate with you, or if you think I’m just silly, I welcome your comments.