Photo by Waldemar
Brandt on Unsplash
103 Think abundantly to achieve your purpose
Humility, anyone?
Do you think abundantly? Do you live
abundantly? Do you give abundantly? As God does? As humanists do?
What does all that mean?
Perhaps you have followed my career
change as I take up writing. Some courses have been helpful:
teachers regularly refer to an abundance mindset. It means giving
out generously, overdelivering. We try to be creators of
abundance.
On the other hand, abundance mindset is
often invoked to goad the customer into thinking higher prices.
Sellers claim great benefits from their products and then promise
great earning power to those who complete their courses.
Abundance thinking sets the stage for high price tags—for the
advertised course and for the products the students will sell
afterward. One writer even bragged of his intention to retire
with several tens of millions of dollars. The pitch fell flat.
What is there in my attention span that could possibly benefit
from tens of millions of dollars? That is not who I am, not my
place in history.
Marketing uses artificial scarcity to
make items appear to have value. Price is not value. Genuine
value, like love, does not depend on scarcity. Unpolluted water
becomes economically precious as the supply dwindles, but the
value of water has always been life itself, whether or not we
have had to struggle to obtain it. Your progress is the value of
my writing, and I create no deadlines (fake scarcity) to inflate
the price.
Article 102 asked who even wants self-improvement. To be
valuable, growth requires a reason beyond scaling up for its own
sake. In this blog, value is not materialism; it is character
improvement, which does not 10x from reading this blog! Here we
discuss ideals and sort out the ones that best fit our talents.
Our abundance is the lives we improve, the better world we help
others create. Small minds monopolize the material goods,
hold the political power, and practice unlimited spending.
Choice
Granted, most people think too small.
They eke out, they hoard, they stockpile, trying to be
self-sufficient. That obstructs the vision of who we are
together. If we conceptualize out of abundance, we do not focus
on our individual net worth on a future date. Instead, we combine
human capital into a structure that addresses all our needs. The
planet supplies us abundantly if we spread out the resources
properly. We can’t become more secure than that! As pointed out
last week, it depends on desire. We will achieve fair abundance
when it is our collective choice to do so.
To live on a grand scale starts with a
grand overview. It is mindboggling for one person to fathom the
aggregate of our needs. Instead, individuals specialize and share
perspectives. Our results reach as far as our combined
comprehension takes us. The global pandemic has taught us that we
cannot stockpile individual security. Although leaders identified
the global danger of an airborne virus years ago, the practical
response required extensive collaboration and real-life
information. The previous article urged a scientific approach to
individual development. That project pales in urgency compared to
vaccinating the entire human population faster than we did to
eliminate smallpox. Accumulated money fails to help until there
is vaccine to purchase. The abundant mindset is not material
wealth, it is willingness to cooperate.
Time for humanism
There is a peculiarly human capacity we
call empathy. It includes reciprocity: once I have your back,
suddenly millions of people have mine. That is our most powerful
stockpile. Abundance mindset is recognizing that there exists
enough and distributing it equally. Whatever the planet contains,
it must suffice for human species survival. Empathy makes us all
equal in our right upon the planet. We have enough knowledge to
keep us in balance without using war to eliminate excess
population. After all, war also eliminates resources, even when
there is no active war in progress. If we divide sustainable
production by human population, that determines abundance. I am
below average for my country and above average for the world. My
life is devoted to accommodating myself to the world
perspective. That is the average that sticks in my
conscience.
The above declaration requires me to
acknowledge again that it refers to humans’ needs, not
meaningless numbers. Money figures vary by locality, and some
people require more food or more medical care than others.
Equality means assuring that the needs are met equally. I
speak of “equality.” I shun the word “egalitarian” because it
connotes “equal opportunity.” The latter phrase is a bombshell,
because more often than not it means that wealth remains in the
control of the aggressive – a far cry from anything I can call
“equality.”
As I turn away from allowing everyone
equal opportunity to grab, I take comfort in a Buddhist
principle: I may take only what is given. How good it would be if
that defined the business phrase “arm’s length negotiation”
implying fairness between equals instead of a strangle hold. The
American system pays lip service to high ideals. Sadly, greedy
people subvert those ideals, and others hunger.
Happiness
A comedy skit used a supercomputer to
determine the meaning of life. The answer came out 57. Of course,
the script suggested spending more time refining the question. An
entrepreneur must recognize that rags to riches is not a purpose.
Do you think your meaning is expressed by your balance
sheet? Alternatively, if the above teacher were to brag that all
the students did 10x their incomes, would that validate the
teacher? Perhaps it matters where the students started. Half of
minimum wage expanded to five times minimum wage might be a
standard of living improvement. Transforming millionaire to
billionaire could instead constitute degradation of overall
societal outcomes.
Reviewing the content of this blog, let
us take joy in our being needed, in the good that we create by
helping others. Let us view these people, the whole of society,
as our product while we let them evaluate their own growth
according to their values. Remember that you do not accomplish
this on your own. The grand overview is a group perspective.
Participate abundantly to achieve your greatest
purpose.
Being For Others Blog copyright © 2020 Kent Busse
Have you shared this with someone?
