Scarcity

Scarcity or Abundance

Abundance, mindset

If you look at the news channels everyday more often than not you will see things that are wrong , with our world.

On the other hand if you see poor illiterate farmers are using cell phones in India and various parts of Africa. I was surprised to see a demo of how a fertilizer company has given a Voice BoT as part of their mobile application and farmers use it in their language.

Earlier when I used to go to get my haircut done at the salon, after the cut the barber would hold a mirror at the back of my head. Since there were mirrors in the front also, I would see the reflection of the reflection of the rear mirror. Now after the pandemic I have avoided going to the salons because there’s a lot of people. I use a local utility App and they send me a barber at home.

This utility app connects me to the barber because he’s also using a smart phone. After my haircut this barber now takes the photos of how he has cut my hair and shows me. I can zoom into the photo and get the finer details of my cut which I could not get before in the salon. Some people are looking at creative uses of what they (the smartphone) instead of thinking of what they don’t have (the large mirrors of a salon)

Another example of how semi literate people are using the smart phone to cut the time in decision making for closing an order. I was getting a chest of drawers being made. To close the laminate to be put, my carpenter didn’t bring me samples to approve before fixing it in his factory. Instead he saved time and money ( 1 hour in traveling each side and then the time to show me the various options) . He just sent me the photos of all the options he thought would look good and then asked us to choose. Zero cost.

There was a time less than a few years back when we used to spend about a dollar a minute to call North America from India. Today we do video calls virtually free. So much abundance.

The news papers and television channels would make you think the world is coming to an end, because they run a business. They need a higher viewership so that they get advertising revenues.

However if you look at the world around you, you will see so many good things happening. Become inquisitive about them.

Till next time keep an abundance mindset.

Carpe Diem!!!

Scarcity drives Evolution

Human Brain, Innovation, Leverage

A lot of us have heard about the phrase Necessity is the Mother of Invention. The human brain works to finds creative ways to meet the necessities. That’s why the more brain power that exists in a country, the more creative the ideas that can be brought out to meet the necessities of the people. The US was among the first countries which built its immigration policies after the World Wars to ensure that they were able to attract the best brain power from other countries to create more innovation. That is one of the reasons that its still way ahead in creating more innovations.

Today I was reading a book by Steven Kotler – The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer. I have read multiple books that Steven has jointly written with Dr. Peter Diamandis like Abundance and Bold and I like his writing because he does a lot of research on the topics that he writes about. Some may find this kind of detailing boring.

Right in the first few pages of the book I read this statement. And its been going round in my brain. As per him its the scarcity of resources that has made human beings always innovate and evolve. He’s gone ahead talk about the biology of this and you can read the book to learn more.

However the reason that this statement has been moving around my head is that when we learnt the various theories of evolution they were primarily related to nature causing mutations, survival of the fittest etc.

What’s intriguing to me is why are scarcity of resources a reason for the evolution of human beings, while it’s not meant major evolution in the other pieces of nature as much. Lions and elephants I don’t think have changed too much in the last 5000 years or more.

In my blogs I keep writing about how human ingenuity will always find a solution to problems and surviving, what is giving the humans this capability. Is it just our brain power which has helped us survive much more larger animals in the jungles. Is it the fact the 5 figures in each of our hands can be moved and folded causing this. While no other animal stores resources for the future how did the human being get onto this journey of storing resources.

These are some very interesting queries about when the human race broke away from the animal kingdom. In the animal kingdom even now no animal accumulates resources. I will be on the hunt to find out a little more about this and will keep you all posted.

But this statement also has everyday uses in our lives. When a project has limited resources and a deadline is nearing the teams find ways to optimise. In marketing when we have a shortage of resources like most startups and small companies do, we find low cost methods to help. We identify leverage points.

As a matter of fact my last 2-3 posts on Riding the elephant were all about this.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!