I recently read the article “The price of being cheap” by Robert Kawasaki, the author of “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”, who became wealthy through books and seminars based on the books central ideas. In his article he acknowledges the value of living below your means and saving large portions of your earnings to invest in appreciating assets. However he drew a line at being cheap. He feels that thinking like a cheap person causes you to remain a cheap person, even when your rich. He felt this mentality would deprive you of the enjoyment of your wealth. It also deprives your loved ones of the joy of a prosperous and abundant life.
He also said, and I am summarizing his examples; The cheap person has a scarcity mindset and even when they are rich they act like money is scarce and they are afraid to enjoy it. This leads to a joyless existence filled with anxiety and unhappiness. If they only understood how rich they were and started thinking that money wasn’t scarce, but actually was abundant, they would enjoy their money and be happy.
My thoughts and application of this concept.
It was after processing the ideas of unhappiness associated with a scarcity mentality, devoid of enjoyment of the fruits of your labors, versus the joy and happiness associated with the abundance mentality. I began to think of the way this special DPOS reward system on Hive works, and creates abundance. Plus I realized how your attitude towards the reward pool of either scarcity or abundance effects your mood, happiness and the way you interact with people here on the Hive platform.
DPOS equals abundance
One of the concepts of DPOS which is hard for people to understand is that first, the reward pool regenerates itself daily. Second, people’s voting power regenerates daily and third your stake based voting power distributes tokens from the daily regenerating reward pool to the people you vote for with your voting power daily. Repeat those sentences out loud twice please.
This concept is filled with abundance, not scarcity. You aren’t giving people tokens from your wallet, but voting for them to receive tokens from the reward pool. You aren’t directing tokens from a limited reward pool because the reward pool regenerates daily. You aren’t voting for them from a limited supply of voting power because your voting power regenerates daily. Lastly when you look at the record of the reward pool and the use of voting power you realize that we rarely if ever distribute all the tokens in the reward pool and we never utilize all the daily voting power.
A false sense of scarcity equals unhappiness
I think that the anger I see on the platform is because people see the reward pool as being depleted by others or they feel Tokens are being taken away from some people and hoarded by others. The reality is that the reward pool is self regenerating and not depleted and the reality is that people don’t use all their voting power every day. Knowledge of these things can help reduce your scarcity mindset and hopefully your anger. Knowledge can help you give up your resentment. You can have more of an abundance mindset and this can increase your happiness.
The size of the reward pool is large, the number of actual content creators making content every day is small. Some make content weekly, some monthly, some daily and very few more often then that, they are the exceptions. Hopefully you now realize that much of the reward pool created each day and much of the voting power regenerated every day goes unused.
If you think about it, an abundance mindset makes you friendly, engaging and generous. Those traits help you to be successful in suicidal situations like social media. However a scarcity mentality makes you less friendly, less engaging and less generous, which will probably lead to your failure on a social platform. This platform was built for an abundance mindset and the more widespread that mindset is, the more successful the platform will be as a whole.
Once you understand all these things, you start to think from a standpoint or place of abundance. This helps you to let go of your scarcity mindset and accept this abundance mindset and stop being angry. You can then focus on making content or enjoying content, and with the 50/50 split of rewards we all can earn. Both the content producers and content consumers earn rewards. Both are needed and both can earn here. This is a win for both.
Knowledge & understanding bring happiness
An abundance mentality brings calmness and happiness. But it starts with knowledge.