Scarcity the secret, obvious key to success in the workplace

Scarcity the secret, obvious key to success in the workplaceScarcity the secret, obvious key to success in the workplaceFor much of ur lives, even when we have more than anyone can ask for, we can feel like we dont have enough too little money, too little freedom, too little praise.We only get ahead when we realize that we have everything we need.Dont believe me? Try this thought exercise and decide if it sounds familiar.Youre swamped at work. S-W-A-M-P-E-D. On top of that, junior people keep stopping by and asking if you have any work for them. You have no time to deal with them. Zero. Your blood pressure rises at these inconsiderate interruptions.The otzu sich day, my friend told me that she welches too busyand will probably missher deadlines. I asked why she couldnt delegate some of her work to the person they just hired. Her response OMG, Maria I completely forgot that he existed.Perception is realityMy friend didnt see the opportunity to lessen her workload because she was nose- deep in scarcity thinking. She was singularly focused on not having enough time.She didnt perceive the entirety of her reality just a sliver of it. We all know the feeling, when our world narrows with worry and we stop seeing the bigger picture.The result is that because we cant see past ourselves at those moments of stress, we also miss the solutions to our worries.Our lives under the microscopePerhaps because I spent many hours during grad school staring down a microscope, I find it useful to think about reality and perception in terms of looking at a biological specimen on a slide.Reality is the entirety of the composite object slide, specimen, and titelblatt slip protecting the specimen. Thats us and everything around us. But looking into a microscope, you can only focus on a single plane at a time, giving you a very different views of the same object. Turn the knob too much, raise the platform on which the slide with your specimen rests, and all you see is the lint and scratc hes on the underside of the glass. Turn it too little, and youll see the smudges on the top of the glass cover. But get it just right, and youre finally in the useful plane, seeing the results of your experiment.The reality of my friends situation was that she had competent resources to help her deal with the crush of assignments. But her attention was focused on the plane where no help was available. The layer of lint and scratches.Its easy to focus on scarcityBeing a lawyer, I am subjected to a constant stream of stories about failing law firms, lower firm profits, and over-abundance of lawyers. The panicked perspectiveof the survival question often overpowers us, keeping us in a loop of scarcity thinking. So to keep going, the right question to ask is how do I become a lawyer with satisfied clients and a growing practice. It is not very productive to ask, how am I supposed to survive when the whole industry is hitting the fan?In their book Scarcity Why Having Too Little Means So Much,Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir describe the problem of scarcity thinking as follows When we think of the poor, we naturally think of a shortage of money. When we think of the busy, or the lonely, we think of a shortage of time, or of friends. But our results suggest that scarcity of all varieties also leads to a shortage of mental bandwidth.It is this shortage of mental bandwidth that causes seemingly irrational behaviors in people stressed by deprivation. Lonely people avoid friends people in debt go on spending sprees overwhelmed colleagues are too busy to delegate any of their work. But these behaviors are rational choices from the perspectiveinduced by scarcity.Remembering the focusing knobChanging our perspective from the tunnel vision of deprivation to seeing opportunity requires vigilance and practice. It requires deliberately focusing away from the very slice of reality that our survival instincts present to us as our whole reality. This is not easy to do.When I firststarted noticing my own scarcity thinking and working on changing my perspective, I needed the help of trusted friends and coaches to turn the focusing knob of my attention until it showed me an entirely different view of the same situation.A good sign of scarcity mentality is the inability to see all of our options. If you catch yourself thinking that a particular situation is hopeless and theres no getting out of it, ask for a second opinion. It mightbethat your focusing knob is juststuck on the wrong plane.