Scarcity vs. Abundance: Rethinking Success

Shift your mindset with insights from Seth Godin, Sahil Bloom, and more—on time, creativity, and the truth about lasting success.

Hey, Friends! The school year is sprinting to an end. To all my teacher friends, hang in there. The finish line is in sight. Let’s get into it.

A Time and Place

Seth Godin recently wrote this in his daily newsletter:

The truth is that books don’t sell very well in the supermarket, where there are no other books. They do better in the bookstore, right next to all the other books.

After reading this quote, I reflected on the nature of media and its evolution from being heavily gatekept to becoming wide open. In the days when broadcast radio and television featured a small, finite number of stations, the competition for airtime was fierce and heavily guarded by network executives. Today, where anyone can broadcast themselves on YouTube, Spotify, and countless other platforms, the ability to get in front of an audience is limited only by one’s ability to gather attention.

While that sometimes leads to poor behaviors, like YouTube pranksters who go too far or platforms that exploit their users for monetary gain, the other side of that same coin is much more positive. Podcasters frequently share their platforms with other podcasters, for example. One understandable view could be that they’re risking losing their audience in favor of their guests’, but that thinking fits a scarcity mindset better suited for the network days.

The media landscape today is abundant. Consumption habits are not limited like they once were. Like a bookstore that attracts readers hungry for more books, platforms like Substack help creators reach and share a broader audience.

In the spirit of abundance, here are several other writers on Substack that I’ve been enjoying who overlap with some of what I write about:

• Xinran Ma
  : AI and design

• Jake Varrone
  : Copywriting and fiction

• Duane Toops
  : Collage

• Nathaniel Roy
  : Book Cover Design

• Jack Watson
  : Education and Teaching

Takeaway: Adopt an abundance mindset. Someone else’s success doesn’t come at your expense.

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Time

In Sahil Bloom’s The 5 Types of Wealth, he discusses time in an especially poignant way by visualizing it spent in various categories on a line chart with hours per day on the y-axis and age on the x-axis. In a tweet, he summarized the following takeaways:

1. Family time is limited—cherish it.

2. Friend time is limited—prioritize real ones.

3. Partner time is significant—never settle.

4. Children time is precious—be present.

5. Coworker time is significant—find energy.

6. Alone time is highest—love yourself.

See the original Tweet below:

While the precipitous drop off in “Partner time” at age 85 is especially grim, Bloom’s six takeaways are spot on and worthy of consideration. This graph got me thinking about a seventh, uncharted category: time spent on creative pursuits.

I imagine for most, the highest point would be left of the y-axis. My six-year-old colors every day. He has art and music classes twice a week at school, and he spends hours each day in imaginary play. My guess is that by the time he hits the y-axis, like most, that line would have steadily declined as sports, friends, and other interests occupy that time formerly spent in creative expression.

The law of averages would likely hide the real story of what happens right of the y-axis, though. It strikes me that most people go one of two ways:

1. They fully identify as creative people, and their chart rockets back upward as they pour themselves into a chosen discipline: music, art, dance, etc.

2. They don’t identify as creative, and their chart plummets towards zero.

Though I lack empirical evidence to support this, I observe it with my high school students all the time. As we age, what we do gets wrapped up in who we are. Many of us mistakenly believe we must be painters in order to paint. In fact, the opposite is true. We must paint to become painters.

If your Time Spent on Creative Pursuits line graph has bottomed out, try to channel your left-of-y-axis self.

Takeaway: Your title doesn’t have to precede the act.

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Attribution Unknown

As part of my creative process, I keep a giant note of things to write about in my iPhone. I generally include a quote with attribution and a link to its source, often with a time stamp, in the note. I collect these topics mostly passively, often on the go while listening to podcasts, watching YouTube, or reading for pleasure. I often forget what I’ve added and then get to rediscover cool ideas when browsing through my note.

One such example is a quote that I forgot to add attribution to, and no amount of Googling has yielded a direct match. It’s likely from one of the ten or so podcasts in my regular rotation, but I’m really not sure which one. That being said, I still think it’s a good one and worth sharing more broadly. So, without attribution, here it is:

Creativity often involves combining knowledge, experience, and intuition.

The last part, intuition, is an aspect of creativity that I find particularly interesting. Defined as the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning, it’s a difficult concept to teach. It’s the product of knowledge acquisition, experience, pattern recognition, forming connections, and years of trial and error.

Sometimes we make decisions creatively that are hard to justify, reason, or explain. It can be tempting to second-guess yourself in those moments, but learning to trust your intuition is an important part of maturing creatively.

When I add something to my iPhone note, I rarely, if ever, know what I’m going to actually say when I write the article later. I’m guided by intuition each time I add something to my note, and I’ve built a confidence that something will emerge when I sit down to write. The act of writing itself, therefore, becomes a form of creative discovery—guided by an intuition I’ve nurtured over time.

Takeaway: Systematizing practices that reinforce your creative intuition, like keeping a running topics list, can aid in your creative process.

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Raccoons, Baseball, and Artificial Intelligence

My early hypothesis regarding AI and its impact on the workforce used to be that it would displace many who work in the knowledge-based economy, and what would remain are jobs that require human creativity. Increasingly, though, it seems, AI is knocking on the door of creative work as well.

While experimenting with Open AI’s logo creator, I asked it to come up with a new concept for a logo for a minor league baseball team that we’d been discussing at work, the Rocket City Trash Pandas (a real team). In less than a minute, it came up with this:

Pretty damn good for sixty seconds’ work.

If I’m nitpicking, there are a few issues with the highlights on the fingers of both hands, and the shape and shading of the trashcan is a little off, but one could reasonably argue these are stylistic matters of opinion, not objectively “wrong” design choices. So, where does that leave us? I’m not quite sure, but I do know this: AI stands to disrupt the workforce more profoundly and quickly than compared to any other movement in history.

The rate of change is astounding.

For now, it’s important that we wrestle with these questions, search for clues about what the future could look like, safeguard against unwanted dystopias, and nudge things in a positive direction where possible.

Takeaway: If you haven’t at least started playing with AI, you’re falling behind and will soon sound like one of those people who used to say, “I’m computer illiterate,” almost as a point of pride.

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Rx Bar

Peter Rahal is the founder of Rx Bar, a protein bar made of simple ingredients and real food. Starting out of the basement of his mother’s home, Rahal grew his company to a $600 million exit when he sold to Kellogg’s.

In the early days of the business, he found a devoted fan base in CrossFit athletes due to its taste, protein content, and healthy ingredients. Growing beyond the CrossFit market proved a challenge, though. Rahal found a solution in redesigning the packaging of their product to appeal to a broader audience. In the video below, Rahal provides the best explanation I’ve ever heard of the relationship between client (him) and designer:

I get people coming to me wanting to do rebrands all the time, and they’re so fixated on the agency, that they think the agency comes in and does it, but really the responsibility and accountability goes on the brand owner to articulate the problem to solve and to communicate it in a brief for the assignment for the creative to figure out how to solve the problem.

For Rahal, the word Rx meant something specific to their initial target audience: doing a workout as prescribed (or to a high standard). To the rest of the world, Rx was confusing as its connotation was related to medicine. He determined their name wasn’t terribly important. Through customer discovery conversations, Rahal had learned that the ingredient list was their true value proposition. Since egg white omelets typically come with a premium price, and each bar contained three egg whites, he realized this selling point should be prominently featured along with their other whole food ingredients.

Rahal included these insights in his brief, and then the designer and brand strategist, “extracted, synthesized, and culled it out,” as he said, into its present form. Today, their packaging leaps from the shelves of the aisle, communicates their unique selling point, and serves as a high-water mark for consumer packaged goods.

Many incorrectly think design involves just making something look pretty, but the reality is that design is problem solving. Thus, the role of the client working with a designer is to articulate the problem they’re facing for which design could offer a solution. It’s then the designer’s task to create that solution.

Takeaway: When you think about design through this lens, it becomes easier to assess work objectively: does the work offer a solution to the problem?

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Two More Things

I’m publishing a novella here on Substack. It’s called Windsor Greetings, and you can check it out here. The first five chapters are already out. I’d love it if you gave them a read and then checked back each Tuesday to find out what happens next.

Also, good things are better when shared. If you liked this, it would mean the world to me if you sent it to someone who might like it too.

I’ll see you in your inbox again next week.

Until then,

-Mike