Having a Mindset of Abundance
Choose to live a life full of possibility
On one particularly feel-good day over the summer, I was sitting with one of my close friends and mentors, talking about my day and what I saw for myself in life. She looked at me and said, “Saalik, you’re super abundant right now.”
As soon as she spoke, I resonated with that word, abundance, and immediately began to notice where I felt abundant in my life. Now, months after that conversation, I’ve reflected on abundance, and why having a mindset of abundance, rather than scarcity, is so powerful.
Abundance vs. Scarcity
Thinking about life in a scarcity mindset is to think about life in strict limits of what we can and can’t do. There’s a constant calibration. Your inner voice is constantly whispering to you: “This is why it won’t work.” or “Be reasonable. You can’t do that.”
Thinking in abundance allows the traditional limits of the world to be set aside because you’ve made an active decision to discard those limits. You’ll get done what you need to get done, faster than ever before, because your sheer will is strong enough to push you through.
The difference in thinking between scarcity and abundance lies in getting rid of constraints when you start your day, so that you’re acting from a place of possibility and openness, rather than placing constraints on yourself before you even brush your teeth.
Want to try being abundant? Keep these next points in mind as you realize the limitlessness of your life.
There are endless things to consume
Where I first noticed abundance in action was in the amount of knowledge there is to gain in life. There is so much I want to learn about. That endless hunger drives me to experience everything I can. I feel like a machine when I consume content. Give me podcasts, books, movies, video games, anything. I’m ready to gobble them up.
Think about what you consume on a daily basis. Now create a list of things that you want to consume but haven’t gotten to yet. You’ll realize it’s almost endless.
There are endless things to create
I’ve been having a lot of ideas lately. And instead of hanging on to them, and telling myself to wait and think about them another day, I’m indulging myself and mapping them out, and nurturing them through conversations about them.
I may not act on them right away (because frankly, I don’t have the time or space to do so) but I’m not dismissing them as I may have in the past. I’ll act on them when the time is right. That goes for this blog post too! An early draft of this sat in Notion in July. It’s September, but I came back and started working on it again when I felt the time was right.
Brainstorm all of the things you can write, draw, code, build and contribute to. You’ll never be bored trying to check that list off.
Energy Management > Time Management
Time management is overrated. If you’re a knowledge worker, your outcomes are quality over quantity. It doesn’t matter how long you spend doing something, as long as you finish that something, and finish it well.
When I get a burst of inspiration or motivation, I seize that and don’t let go. I won’t save it for another day. I used to think of energy and time as similar things: finite resources. While time is finite, energy, in my opinion, can be close to infinite.
That mindset shift has made me wildly more productive and has been the source of a profound change in my attitude towards work and life. Energy is so weird, in the best way. The more you do things that you like, the more energy you have. It compounds on itself. You don’t have to “save” energy for later if you’re doing something enjoyable. So, counter-intuitively, I get more energy by expending more energy.
That’s at the core of having an abundant mindset. Your energy is limitless — you just have to choose to see it that way!
Choose to be abundant. See the world as a place where you have unlimited ability to create, consume, contribute, and grow.
Go do your thing, and do it in abundance.
Thanks for reading! Check out my website, saaliklok.com, more posts on Medium, and my side projects.
