Having grown up with grandparents who were kids during the Great Depression meant that their “scarcity thinking” was passed down whether they’d intended it or not. Sometimes this surfaced as the old chestnuts “Waste not, want not” , “money doesn’t grow on trees”, etc., or being told that something was too frivolous and we couldn’t have it. More insidiously, it surfaced in conversations in the 80s during the Great Recession that the world was as a cutthroat and competitive place, that if you weren’t fast enough or smart enough, someone else would get a bigger slice of the pie. Or worse: someone else’s success meant they got your slice of the pie.
Perhaps in a post-bubble crash where Wall St. and the Bernie Madoffs made off with more of everyone else’s pie, you might conclude that this kind of desperate competition was completely normal. If you grew into adulthood believing that you would have to fight for your job, your pay, your human rights, then it’s completely understandable that you might not question this thinking even when you are the Goose that Lays the Golden Egg.
You— yes, you, Creative-friend, you literally make something out of nothing. You are the Pie-Maker and can make endless amounts of pie. A long as you’re alive and creating, there’s no shortage of pie. There’s no need to compete with anyone other than yourself.
I think what the the covid pandemic truly taught us was remarkable. Certain elements of the Soul-Sucking Corporate Rat Race were finally exposed and we collectively made some conclusions 1) mental health is too important to ignore 2) we can create multiple streams of income doing things we enjoy and feed our soul.
So how can we kick this scarcity mindset completely to the curb? Mostly by not viewing our fellow creatives as competition. By being supportive of our fellow artists. By being encouraging and having unconditional positive regard for our fellow humans and creatives in particular. We aren’t in competition with anyone else. And even though our audiences may overlap, our contribution speaks with a unique voice and experience. Most importantly, we reject the “starving artist” scarcity mentality in order to realize that our creativity already provides us with all of what we need and want.
In the past, I’ve gotten tripped up in this thinking when I wasn’t getting the plummy illustration jobs I thought I should be getting because someone else was getting them. I felt outcompeted, resentful of the industry, jealous of other artists, feeling that I was being pushed outside of the circle by some cruel twist of fate that I couldn’t seem to put my finger on.
I just had to see that my work belonged somewhere else and I hadn’t found that place yet.
As I root out this deeply-embedded mindset in my own thinking, I see many more possibilities for my work. Shedding any need to compete within an industry or with other creatives means that I can let my work unfold as it should, allowing it to develop in whatever form it needs to take and allowing it to speak what it has to say. As a result, my work gets better, it sounds more like “me”, and I reach more of my people.
Never give up or stop making the work. We always need more pie.