I’ve been challenged for a long time by a feeling of scarcity and competition – that there isn’t enough money, love, praise, applause, etc. to go around in the world, and that if someone else gets a whole bunch of love or applause, it means there is less for me.

I’ve always known that this mindset wasn’t the right mindset to have because of the negative side effects it created: it meant that as much as I could love and be close to people, sometimes when they succeeded I would have a difficult time being purely happy for them because with my scarcity mindset, their success made me feel diminished.

I had never stopped to think about whether or not my sense of scarcity was actually true – I just accepted it as fact. The supply of love and applause was finite, and more for you meant less for me.

But a few things have happened recently that caused me to pause and challenge that assumption.

First, I started reading the book the Art of Possibility (recommended by my friend Parris) which shed fascinating new light for me on the idea of abundance. Then, right around the same time, I heard someone talking about how there is actually plenty of wealth in the world, there is enough to go around, it’s just not evenly distributed.

All of a sudden my thinking shifted. I realized that all of the resources I had been viewing as finite are actually infinite. And not only are they infinite but they are exponentially generative – giving more applause and more love does not drain the resource, it fills it back up.  The well only has a limited supply of water when you stop giving from it.

There is enough to go around. Your tremendous value and contributions do not diminish mine and mine do not diminish yours.

And now that I’ve deeply realized and felt this, I wonder what the hell we’re all competing for…