In their book Scarcity, Eldar Shafir and Sendhil Mullainathan suggest that scarcity often starts with abundance. 

Imagine you have a deadline next week. That’s plenty of time to do the task—abundance—so you figure you’ll do it later. 

Eventually, you forget about it, and you only remember the day of the deadline. Now there’s scarcity: you have to do it, today, or you’ll face the consequences of missing the deadline. That’s just a simple example. 

That day would be stressful; you have your regular errands to run, and a task on top of that. You have less time and energy to focus on what’s happening around you. This is known as tunneling. 

Instead, imagine if you decided to do the task and submitted it that first day. You’d be completely free of it, and you’d have the options to spend your time however you like. You focused on doing something that first day, which created abundance in the future.

Buying a gift a month before your friend’s birthday means you have many more options. Buying a gift the night before, or the day of, limits the options to whatever stores are around you or can offer overnight shipping. That’s the first takeaway: you can create abundance by working ahead of time.

The second is a bit wider spanning, and it’s about our tendency to time bind our goals. We want to achieve things by specific ages like 30 or 40. 

In my case, I wanted to be a New York Times bestselling author by 30, so badly that I focused on doing stuff I thought those authors did like writing proposals or building audiences, that I didn’t write any book. It was only when I let go of that goal that I wrote my first book, which became Creative Doing.

Another example: a couple of years ago, I talked to a good friend who worked in real estate.  I told him that I wished I had decided to buy property in Toronto earlier, that I felt several years behind our friends. “You’re gonna own a house,” he told me, encouraging me not to worry. That was useful. I agreed with him, that it felt likely that I’d own property at some point in the coming decades. While I couldn’t specify when exactly, I didn’t need to rush to do it. That eased my mind, eventually freeing it up to make the Consistency Journal and resume my business writing practice. 

When you plan only in days or weeks, you’ve got a limited set of options. But when you think in years or decades, the possibilities are much wider. There’s also less competition.

A longer time horizon is a choice. It only becomes available once you can take care of your immediate needs. Playing infinite and natural games makes it more compelling.

Thanks Ricky Yean.