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Welcome to the Success Architect, where we don't just build homes, we build legacies. I'm your host, Jake Lewendahl, custom home builder and coach. Each week, I sit down with builders and entrepreneurs who are ready to 10x their business, their health, and their mindset. This is where blueprints become breakthroughs. Let's get to work. What's up, guys? Welcome back. This is Jake Lewendal and the Success Architect, and I am excited to talk to you about episode two of our financial discussion this month. And today we're going to be talking about scarcity and abundance. And what's interesting is scarcity and abundance are terms that are thrown around like crazy on Instagram with coaches, with whoever. And you know, scarcity is very much poo-pooed and said that, hey, scarcity is the thing that's holding you back, and abundance is the thing that is going to propel you forward. Which I would actually agree with the two, but they've been uh very much oversimplified in my mind. So I want to dive into the difference between the two and how to blend the two together to have a real way of moving forward in life. And a couple personal examples here because I have made plenty of mistakes in my life, and I'm lucky enough that they all so far have worked out, but they were mistakes nonetheless. So let's jump into it. Most people think they have to pick a lane, and that's what I was talking about. Is it's either one or the other. You have a scarcity mindset where you hoard, you have fear that guides your life, and you do everything you can just to protect yourself. Whereas an abundance mindset, at least in a standard conversation, has been known to be spend, trust that your spending is okay, and expand. And, you know, I'm all about spending in order to expand and trusting that it is going to work. And that's how I've done a lot of my life. But there is a model to this, or I guess there's limits to this within reason on how you use this. So the point is to not take these as absolute identities. Uh real philosophy is situational discipline and not getting stuck in one or the other. It is not black and white. Right now, you know, coaching, everything, like I said earlier, there's just this oversimplified like self-help version of the abundance mindset. And it's become a really freaking great excuse for bad decisions dressed up as positivity. And this is a really hard one to understand because honestly, we all should be moving our mindset more toward an abundance mindset. It's going to help us live a better life, it's going to bring us more joy, but there are limits to you know making bad decisions with the term abundance attached to them as that excuse. The opposite end is the scarcity mindset. And there's tons of people who hoard. They are fear-based. And this shows up in money. This shows up in politics. This then shows up after those two in their relationships, and it starts to control someone's life. So finding the happy medium between these two is what we're after. So, first off, like, what is scarcity? And does it have a purpose? So, what we talked about earlier is last week we talked about where the money beliefs come from. And the drilled down version of this is where does scarcity come from? Scarcity is a real rational response to a real past event. And there's there's no there's no shame, there's no judgment in having scarcity. And unfortunately, that is what I think Instagram and social media and society these days have turned it into is like, don't have a scarcity mindset, like get that shit out of my office, get that shit out of my room. I don't want you to put that in the universe, which, interestingly enough, I find myself saying as a joke to some people. But the truth is that scarcity comes from a past trauma, a past real event that did not go that way you wanted it to. Now, where can scarcity sometimes be useful? It can be useful in protecting you in when it comes to finances. It could be great for having emergency reserves, having a savings account. It could be used for debt discipline. You know, some people don't believe in going into debt at all. Personally, I think that's a mistake. I think debt is a tool, but it has to be wielded as a tool in a proper manner. It cannot just be used for willy-nilly things, it is used as leverage for building things. The issue with scarcity is that most people in the money world who have a scarcity mindset refuse to invest. And not only do they not invest in assets or things that will help bring you money later on down the line, the biggest thing that I see a problem with is they are not willing to invest in themselves. Not invest in their team, not invest in their business. Because what if something goes wrong? I just wasted that money, like wasting money on a training or a coach in order to learn a new skill. I personally think that is one of the greatest investments in our entire world, better than any stock, better than any real estate, because you are your own money-producing machine. But a scarcity mindset will say, hey, that's wasted money. I could just go learn that on YouTube, I could so on and so forth. Whereas you are not looking at the return on investment for you to build the skill and what that can get you in the future. Now, the alternative to that is let's look at abundance thinking and how it unlocks things, but also needs to be managed. So, abundance, many people see abundance as freely spending or spend freely. And this I think is a is a bit of a uh it is a mistake. And I've seen this, I'll give two examples. One was I had a student that I was coaching one of the programs that was a trainer for, and we were talking about abundance and creating rewards. And uh in this specific training, we were talking about designing out our life, applying rewards to things that we had accomplished. And he had accomplished a specific task in his business, and we he had gone out and bought a brand new truck. It was a $130,000 truck, super sweet truck. But that day, which was about two weeks after he bought the truck, he was telling me how he had no new work lined up, he had no new work for his employees, and he was struggling. And that was only two weeks after this big reward. And so the thing that I took from that is it was really a slap in the face because I was coaching him to design his life and to apply rewards to specific designs that he had accomplished. And all of a sudden he went out and bought this truck, which by the way was not part of the design and was not my not the thing I told him to do, but it was a reward for something that really did not, did not fit the bill. The issue with designs and rewards is that when you are designing out an accomplishment that you're gonna do in the reward that comes with it, because I've talked about this before, we reward ourselves for accomplishments because that ingrains and installs these new operating systems into our minds. But those rewards have to be commensurate with the accomplishment. And I, interestingly enough, this was after I had this issue with my my coaching student. Six months later or so, I ordered a new car, also in about the same price range. And it was commensurate with the accomplishment I was looking at. It was uh signing a contract, signing a contract on a what a uh nine-figure uh project. And I was going to buy myself this car when we signed this contract. So I ordered the car because it was six months to get it. I was supposed to sign the contract in about three months. Turned out it took us nine months to get to the point, actually, 10 months of getting to the point to actually signing the contract, but my car showed up at month six, and I decided to get it anyway. And not only did this cause some issues in my marriage, because we had talked about that this was supposed to be a reward for the accomplishment, and that I was not going to get this car until the accomplishment came, which made sense. It was part of my design, but it actually put some stress on me, and it actually kind of messed up like my operating system and my understanding of this process because all of a sudden I had this massive ass reward and I had not accomplished the thing. So I kind of kicked myself in the ass and realized like that's not being abundant, that's being stupid. Being abundant is not spending freely, as I said. But the definition of abundance is that there is more available than I can currently see, and that is the mindset that we have to have. So, yes, there is more available than I can currently see. I fully believe that, but it does not mean you go spend money that you don't have or go on a vacation before you've accomplished the thing that went along with that reward. So when you come into real life, that's mindset. When we talk about real life, the abundance mindset can lead to some fantastic things. So your value, pricing your value correctly, whether you're in construction, whether you're in any other business, pricing your product is probably the fastest way to more profit. Underpricing your work is your fastest way to failure. Overpricing, yes, you might not get people in the door, but properly pricing your work is your fastest way to profitability. And when you have an abundance mindset, most likely you're gonna price a little higher and you're gonna be placing value on the service that you are bringing and pricing it accordingly. Investing in yourself and your business. So taking calculated growth risk, hiring the right employee, but doing it at the right time, making that investment, investing in a training that is going to get you a skill that is gonna get you ROI. That is one of the biggest ones and my personal favorite, because I 100% believe that the absolute greatest investments that we have in our life is investing in ourselves. And that's just one example of doing so. The one thing to be careful with with abundance is exactly what I talked about: having no boundaries, having no reserves, mistaking optimism for a plan, mistaking the fact that I thought for sure that this contract was going to get signed, which by the way, it did, it just took 10 months, and it signed for the amount that I thought it was going to, which was fantastic. But that's not a plan. That's just optimism. The other part that I learned from that story is that even though we got this massive contract for a project, that project not only didn't start for three months after the contract was signed, but it was such a slow pace that we are still not at a point where the contract is fully underway. So we do not have all of the project going at once like it was supposed to, which means it's not kicking out the profitability that it was expected to last year in 2025. So that one was a real kick in the ass and a very good understanding. Now, the thing that I learned from this too is not to overvalue your rewards with the accomplishment that you're going to, make sure that they're commensurate with each other, but also to look ahead and tie the reward to the right accomplishment. Because honestly, if I had designed this properly, I would have designed it that that contract was not only signed, but it was fully underway and that it was bringing in the profit it was supposed to. Even if it wasn't complete, it was actually it was underway in bringing in the profit it was supposed to. That was my mistake and a fantastic lesson. So finally, for this segment, the real skill. Which mode does the specific moment call for? So here's a simple framework. You can ask yourself, is this a protect the downside decision or a capture the upside decision? So really simple way to look at this is bidding a job. We are protecting the margin, we are protecting the downside, and or investing in a new team member. That is a capture the upside. And so the idea here is that we are balancing scarcity and abundance. When we're bidding a job, we want to go into it with abundance, but I will say that I have made the mistake way too much in my abundance mindset that when we're bidding a job, we're not competing with anybody else. And I have maybe overpriced it, or I have made an assumption that was incorrect, and we lost the job because of it. And really, it wasn't greed, but it was also me not looking at the whole picture and making a lot of assumptions that did not have any effect to them. The next portion, investing in a new team member, quote unquote, capturing the upside. This is also something where we need to balance the scarcity and abundance. We have abundance knowing that, hey, we are investing in this new person in order to grow the company. But just like with the new car that I bought before the contract was signed, is there a reason to hire this person before the revenue is there to cover that person? Now, maybe there is. Maybe you need to invest in that person in order to create that revenue. Now, make sure you have a really solid ass plan in order to make that happen. Or are you just hiring this person because you want to take a little bit of time off of your plate? Just make sure that you are looking at the full decision. We are living in abundance, but we are looking at the full gravity of the situation and the decision that we are making. Now remember, the philosophy between scarcity and abundance is not a personality. It's a decision-making discipline. And we apply it situationally. We live in the abundance mindset because that is how we are going to grow, but we do it with specific design and specific reward in mind. Action step for listeners today is look at your last three big financial decisions. Which mode were you in? And was it the right decision that you made? Now go back and think about how you want to do it going forward in similar situations. Thanks for listening, guys. I'm super excited for the next episode on this series, and I will see you next week on the next one. Thanks for tuning in to the Success Architect. If today's episode helped you lay a stronger foundation for your business or your life, subscribe and share it with someone ready to do the same with theirs. You can follow me, Jake Lewendahl, on social for daily tips on health, wealth, and building success that lasts. Until next time, keep designing, keep building, and keep leveling up.