Menu
Hey Abundance Coders,
I got an excellent question from a reader this week and it inspired me to write a blog post.
So… here’s what triggered the question. Recently I’ve been sending emails and telling people about my friend Jeff Walker’s free online workshop, which he only offers once a year and is only available for about 2 weeks. When you read this post, his amazing workshop will be closed down already.
Someone named Mark wrote in about the subject line of one of my emails about it, which was “this will be gone soon” and asked:
“But isn’t that scarcity? I’m confused…”
I think that’s an excellent question! And here are my thoughts on the difference between scarcity and a deadline for taking action.
It’s something I’ve felt confused about in the past, and I know others who have felt confused about it too…
So I hope I can offer some clarity.
These days, I think of SCARCITY as essentially a fear-based belief that there’s not enough. Whereas I recognize that a deadline is actually a motivational tool.
When we are moving away from the limiting belief in scarcity, we certainly want to foster a belief that we can access a virtually unlimited flow of abundance into our lives. However, one thing is always limited – and that thing is TIME.
There are only 24 hours in a day. That’s not a belief, that’s a fact.
As Roger Hamilton said in The Abundance Code documentary, if we waste money we can always make more… but if we waste time, it’s gone forever. We’re never going to get it back again.
When you face that fact, it’s very motivating. When you truly embrace the fact that your time here is limited, then you realize that you’d better make the most of it.
That’s when you stop watching TV, you stop checking Facebook, you stop frittering your time and you start making the real changes you need to make to get the kind of life you really want.
You don’t have 1000 years to wait for things to change on their own.
Here’s a couple of examples of how this lesson has played out a in my own life…
When I was writing my book The Abundance Code, it sat around half-finished for years until I finally set a firm deadline to get it done.
I committed to a group of 100 of my clients that I would deliver one completed chapter per week for 10 weeks, until the whole book was finished. And crazy as it seems, I was up until 3am every single week the night before each chapter was due. Because I need deadlines. They help me get stuff done.
With the Abundance Code movie it was the same. I committed to a release date of June 21st, 2016… And I was pulling all-nighters and working feverishly to get it done by that deadline.
Why? Because for me, without a commitment to complete, without a firm deadline, nothing gets finished.
A lot of people are like that, not just me.
So sometimes giving people a firm deadline is the only way to inspire action. And if you know that the action has the potential to change their lives for the better… Well giving them a deadline, when you know it’s going to help them take that step, is an act of kindness.
So in my view it’s not “scarcity” to give a deadline. It helps people make a decision. It’s about providing a motivation to take action and make something happen.
To YOUR Abundance,
Julie Ann Cairns
