What Abundance Actually Means, From Someone Who Was Broke

The word abundance has been ruined by people selling things.

It shows up in captions over sunsets. It gets used to mean think about money until money appears, which is not a thing, and I understand entirely why a normal person hears it and closes the tab.

I use it constantly anyway, because I do not have a better word for the thing that changed, and the thing that changed is the most useful shift I have made as an adult.

So here is the unglamorous version.

Where I was starting from

My father died when I was nineteen. My mother died eight months later. My health insurance was hers, so it went with her, and the only reason I got a hip replacement at all is that my aunt fixed the coverage in the middle of all that.

Then I became a minor league and independent league baseball player, which is a job that pays somewhere between very little and nothing. In 2011 I was living at Tatum and Thunderbird and starting a shift job at a restaurant while I waited to find out if a major league organization wanted me.

I am telling you this so the next part is not mistaken for the view from a comfortable chair.

I had a real, specific, learned fear of running out of money. It was not irrational — for a long stretch it was an accurate read of my situation. The problem is that fear does not update. It kept making my decisions for me for years after the facts had changed.

What the fear actually does

It does not feel like fear. That is the whole trap.

It feels like being careful. It feels like being responsible. It feels like a completely reasonable person choosing the safe option, over and over, and never once noticing that the same voice is choosing every time.

Concretely, in my life, it looked like this:

• Taking the work in front of me instead of the work I wanted, because the work in front of me was certain.
• Pricing myself low, because a yes at a low number felt safer than a no at a fair one.
• Holding on to arrangements past the point they were good, because leaving meant a gap.
• Treating every opportunity as the last one, which makes you desperate, and desperate is legible to everybody in the room.

Tom Novak once made me ask for fifty dollars I did not get. He was not teaching me about fifty dollars. He was trying to install the opposite of what I have just described, when I was a teenager, and it took me another fifteen years to actually learn it.

The shift

Shayla introduced me to the idea. I had not encountered it, or if I had, it had not landed.

The shift is not "believe money will come." It is this:

Make the decision you would make if you knew you were going to be fine.

That is it. That is the whole practice, and it is a practice, not a belief. You do not have to feel abundant. You do not have to be certain of anything. You just have to notice which voice is choosing, and then ask what the other one would do.

The difference shows up immediately and it is not mystical:

Nothing on the right requires optimism. It requires you to stop letting a nineteen-year-old who just lost both parents make your business decisions.

What it is not

It is not manifesting. Nothing appears because you thought about it.

It is not spending money you do not have. Abundance is not a justification for a bad decision; if anything it makes you more willing to walk away from things, which usually costs less.

It is not gratitude journaling. Gratitude is good and it is a different thing.

And it does not work as a belief you hold. It only works as a question you ask, in the moment, before you answer someone.

What it actually bought me

On 4 September 2019 I quit my last job — one shift a week at a bar I loved, money I did not need. Scarcity says keep it, it costs you nothing, it is a floor. I let it go, and I have not worked for anyone since.

Every business I have built came after that switch, and I do not think that is a coincidence. You cannot build things from a crouch.

Twenty-one years ago a man I never met told me on the phone to get a hip replacement at nineteen and go play professional baseball, when every doctor in the room was telling me to stop. What he was really doing was showing me a person making a decision from the assumption that it would work out.

I have been trying to be that for other people ever since. It turns out that has a name.