The Scarcity Mentality can be defined as the belief that everything is limited, and thus it is better to be selfish then generous.
It’s a cynical term by nature and as author Stephen F. Covery says, it’s based around the idea that there’s not enough of the pie to go around. Or to be even more specific, the belief that if you have a pie and give someone a big slice of it, that automatically means there’s less for you.
Any human being is capable of possessing this mentality, and it can be manifested in almost any area of life, including: business, love, finance, and family.
The thing to understand about having the scarcity mentality is that it hurts you. That’s because in a sort of universal irony, those who have this scarcity mindset often end up getting the exact opposite of what they want out of life.
Let’s look at some concrete examples:
There’s the jealous lover who’s so possessive that he ends up driving his partner away, thus leaving him alone and with no one to love.
There’s the business owner who is so obsessed with profits that he marks up his products 75% higher than all of his competitors, can’t bring himself to EVER give customer’s a discount or deal, and never provides refunds. Because he doesn’t care about his customer’s they don’t care about him. His store becomes empty until he finally has to shut down the business at a large loss.
There’s the collector who is obsessed with obtaining but never with giving. When she finds an item that she can’t get without help, no one is there to help her because she’s never built those relationships with others.
And then, there’s the person who refuses to share their pie. Because they don’t share with others, others are much less likely to share with them. So in other words, they are manifesting their own brutish reality in a very real way. By being scarcity oriented, they have alienated others and thus set up a world where the things they most covet really are scarce. But that is a false reality because, were they to just believe in abundance, then that same items, feelings, or emotions would be readily abundant to them.
At the crux of it, living life with the scarcity mentality is like always having blinders on. When there’s one single pie, and several hungry people, the scarcity-oriented person becomes jealous and guarded. They feel threatened, and they see no other outcome then there now being less pie for them.
But when a person who has an abundance mentality experiences the same situation, they are more than eager to share the pie with everyone else. Why? Because they love to see others be happy and content. And because they do not have blinders on, they realize something incredibly obvious that the scarcity-oriented individual does not: when this pie runs out, they can always go bake another one.
Scarcity Mentality Definition
You could also want to consider this --
https://www.stephencovey.com/
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http://www.markettaffy.com/blog
