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It may be obvious to any arborist reading this article, but for those of us less inclined to study dendrology in our free time, I should point out that “money doesn’t grow on trees.” I want to be clear about that because, as often as I hear parents use that phrase with their kids, I have to assume there is a large group of children in the world climbing trees looking for money.
Give me a second to remove my tongue from my cheek so I can continue.
If you’ve read any of my other posts, you probably already know I’m going to take some exception to the phrase “money doesn’t grow on trees.” In full disclosure, I’ve used it before with my own kids, and it has worked wonderfully to get them to stop asking me to buy something.
Since I am guilty of using it, I’m not going to cast the first stone, but I do have a bone to pick. The phrase is intended to help a child understand that money is limited and it doesn’t come to them as easily as walking to a tree and picking it off. That’s a great idea when we want them to stop begging us for a new toy, but maybe not an idea we want to convey long-term. The unintended lesson is that money is in short supply, hard to obtain, and precious. A perfect definition of scarcity.
Embarking on a wealth mentality journey inherently forces us to re-evaluate our long-held beliefs about money and happiness. Oftentimes that means we identify ideas that we have been carrying around since childhood, only to find out they are wrong. I have found that one of the most prevalent fallacies about money, which I still carry around, is scarcity mentality.
How many times have we heard ourselves, or others, say:
I can’t afford it
Money doesn’t grow on trees
We don’t have enough money
I don’t have enough time
I’ll never be rich
I don’t know if I will ever be happy
Why can’t I meet the right person?
According to Bob Wiley in What About Bob?, “There are two types of people in this world: Those who like Neil Diamond, and those who don’t.”
Two other types of people are those with a scarcity mentality and those with an abundance mentality—or at least those working on having an abundance mentality.
If you haven’t heard about scarcity and abundance mentality before, let me explain.
People with a scarcity mentality feel afraid there isn’t enough of something and it will run out before they get any. In economics, we often compare our resources to a pie. Someone with a scarcity mentality looks at the resource pie and worries there isn’t enough for everyone.
Contrast that with someone who has an abundance mentality. They believe there are plenty of resources in the world and if the pie is too small we should just make a bigger one so everyone can have as much as they want. Scarcity versus abundance mentality has an effect on everything people do, from how they work, earn money, play, treat others, and seek wealth.
This can be a complex topic to explain to our kids. I used an example of a barrel of oats to help illustrate this point to my own brood; it worked well so I want to share it with the wealth mentality families. Imagine an old barrel, like those found in virtually every barn in the country. The barrel is filled to the brim with oats.
A person with a scarcity mentality will look into this barrel of oats and worry about their share.
Now imagine a scenario where the oats become your life source. If you don’t get your share of the oats every day, you will die. One day, someone comes along and says to himself, “I have worked extra hard today; I think I deserve a double scoop.” What would you do or say to him?
What if everyone in the community needed those oats to live? What do you think most of us would do all day? What would we focus on?
My guess is that most of us would stand around the barrel and make sure no one took more than they should. Any oats that we actually got out of the barrel would be hoarded and hidden away so no one else could get them and so we wouldn’t lose them.
That is the clearest description of the scarcity mentality I can think of. Someone who is stuck in scarcity spends their time worrying about how much is left for them and how they can hold onto their finite resources. The barrel and oats become their focus and they are unable to look beyond it.
Scarcity mentality results in fear and anxiety. If we believe that there isn’t enough of something for us then we feel an immense fear that we are going to be left out. This leads to anxiety about our future. If we don’t believe we have enough money, we hold fast to our current status in life, completely unwilling to change anything, for fear that we will lose what we have.
I was recently talking to a friend who is stuck in a job that he hates. His boss is a jerk—verbally abusive in front of peers, micromanages everything, takes all of the credit, won’t allow anyone else to make decisions, doesn’t listen to feedback—you get the idea. My friend desperately wants to do something else but he is stuck. “I can’t rock the boat or say what needs to be said to make things better,” he says. “I’m the sole provider for my family and I can’t afford to lose this job, so I’m going to stick it out.”
This friend is fixated on the scarcity of joblessness and has allowed it to create fear and anxiety in his life. Unfortunately, fear and anxiety usually lead us to make poor choices; which are self-fulfilling prophecies.
We tell ourselves there isn’t enough money and we could never be rich, then, whenever we see opportunities we can pursue, we choose to hold back, in fear that we will lose what we have. Lo and behold we don’t create more wealth. We then look at the negative outcomes of our choices and say, “see, I told you there isn’t enough. I was right all along.”
Scarcity incites fear, fear leads to anxiety, anxiety influences choices, poor choices give poor results, and poor results cause us to believe that scarcity is real.
Let me go back to the oat barrel one more time. For someone with a scarcity mentality, focusing on the barrel and hoarding oats is logical. They never stop and consider that their entire thought process is built on a false assumption. The barrel isn’t the only place to find oats. So what does someone with a wealth mentality, or abundance mentality, do differently?
They don’t get stuck in the zero-sum game of the oat barrel. Instead, they walk out of the barn, into the field, and get to work planting more oats. They choose to ignore the barrel—despite the clamor from the barrel watchers—and focus instead on the abundance that is available to them.
Abundance mentality takes us out of barrel watching and forces us to look beyond our current situation and see what is available for us. It takes us from telling our kids, “money doesn’t grow on trees,” to, “we could buy that but we choose not to, let me tell you what you could do to have enough money yourself to buy what you want.” It takes us from, “I can’t afford that,” to, “what will I have to do to be able to afford that?” It even takes us from, “I’ll never meet the right person,” to, “there are many wonderful people out there that I would love to know better, what do I need to do to be the kind of person they will want to be around?”
Going from a scarcity mentality to an abundance mentality is not easy. I still have internal—and external—battles every day. Here are three things that I have found helpful to break me out of my scarcity thinking.
For many years of my life, I lived in fear of being poor. I didn’t know how to be rich, but I did know how not to be poor so I threw myself into that goal. I worked hard in school, got good grades, fought to receive multiple graduate degrees, found a good job, and another one after that, each new job taking me higher on the corporate ladder and increasing my pay. I saved religiously and spent almost no money on “frivolous” things. My bank accounts grew and after some time I finally felt somewhat secure from being poor.
Unfortunately, I was also afraid to use my money for anything useful. I left a large amount of my money sitting “safely” in a zero or low-interest savings account for many, many years. I had retirement accounts from work and my own IRA, but everything else just sat in the bank. Scarcity mentality at its finest.
It took me a long time—much longer than I would be willing to admit—but I was finally able to identify my fear-based money choices and make changes. My first investment was $5,000 in a hybrid car technology—which I am still hoping pays out. It has not been a successful investment (yet—keep going Hybrid Technology, LLC) but it was just what I needed to finally break out of my scarcity mentality. It helped me to have the courage to invest in other things that have proven to be much more successful and advance along my wealth mentality journey.
Moving from scarcity to abundance is difficult—even our own minds fight against it—but it is definitely worth the effort to move away from our fear. Innovation, motivation, happiness, and fulfillment all live in the world of abundance.
I have to consciously work to model abundance mentality (and avoid passing on my scarcity mentality) to my kids, almost every day. You see, I know there will be plenty of barrel watchers in their lives, so I choose to focus on the abundance.
Go ahead, teach your kids that money can grow on trees if they can figure out how to do it. That is the wealth mentality way.