Start With Abundance

Foreign.

Tell me about starting with abundance.

Starting with abundance is the opposite of what most people do, most creative people, which is they start from scarcity. They start with, I have nothing, I know nothing, I have to invent, you know, on a blank canvas. And it's related to some of the other principles that we've covered, but it's really kind of the broadest. It's a way of life. It's a way of life where if you don't have abundance in a certain, in a certain area, in a certain activity, in a certain project, you just wait, right? You refuse to start something until the ideas and the resources are plentiful. So let me give you an example. A few years ago, in the midst of one of my course launches. So the course launches are my heavy lifts, they're my go time. Everything gets put aside, right? Everything gets deprioritized in favor of launching this course. So what happened during this particular course launch is I got an inquiry from someone at Toyota, Toyota Motor Corporation, one of the most, one of the largest and most successful companies in the world. A personal sort of corporate hero of mine because of the Toyota production system tps, which is the source of so many incredible insights. It was really kind of a dream. It's like imagine your idol, the person you most admire, calling you up, oh, do you want to work with me? And it was for a workshop. They really wanted to understand design thinking and incorporate more creativity and iteration and adaptation into their work. Design thinking is something I'm an expert on. I actually had a workshop on it, but they wanted something kind of adapted for their situation. And I just thought, okay, I can't start from nothing with this. That was my temptation. Even with all these note taking systems, I wanted to, you know, oh, my ideal client. I'm just gonna set days and days aside and I'm gonna create the most beautiful, wonderful day long workshop that they've ever seen. But I just didn't have the time, couldn't afford it. And so I said, let me sit down, I'm going to set aside half a day, so three or four hours and see what I can come up with. And I came up with a really awesome full day workshop because I happen to have a folder called Workshop Resources. And I had had that folder back maybe five years, which is how long I'd been doing workshops. And notice that I hadn't gone and researched workshop methods, hadn't read a bunch of books and gone, oh, I'm going to become a workshop expert. No, just every time I had Put on a workshop or attended one. See, I had done the work or I had seen someone else do the work. I just collected little bits and pieces, slides. They had used, ways of explaining things, analogies and metaphors, different mindset shifts, even ways of arranging the room, how the tables were arranged, whether the person sat or was standing, whether they had a microphone or not. All these little details I'm writing down, I'm writing down, I'm writing down. So when I sat down for half a day, I did no new research. I just distilled, summarized the things from that notebook that I wanted to use and ended up putting on this full day workshop with literally a half day preparation. And you know how this applies to others is this is how big breaks tend to happen. Big breaks in your life and your career. They don't arrive when you're sitting calmly in your living room with nothing to do and plenty of free time. And they don't just sail into your life like that. For some reason, they tend to happen at the worst possible time when you're already overloaded, you're already stressed, you already have too much to do. This opportunity arises and in that moment, you have to decide. You have to decide if you're gonna take that risk, if you're gonna make that leap. And it's always gonna be a risk. It's always gonna be a leap. But with a second brain, with this slow burn of collecting things, the brain, that risk becomes less risky, becomes something much more feasible because the time required is a tiny percentage of what would normally be needed.

You know what I keep thinking of? I keep thinking of a dinner that you have to cook. 30 friends have surprised you, they've flown in from all around the world, and they say, tiago, I need you to cook a spectacular dinner for me tonight. Would you rather be in your kitchen with the scarcity? Maybe you have some rice and beans in the corner, you have a leftover chicken that you took home from the restaurant last night. Or would you rather be in the middle of Whole Foods where you can pull the sweet potatoes, the fresh onions, the blueberries that have just been picked. And with the second brain, you're standing in the middle of Whole Foods with fresh produce and all of this food and limitless possibility so that when a moment like that happens, the most magical moments of our lives, we're in a place of wealth and richness that allow us to be creative.

Yes, that's it. And the funny thing is, it's starting with abundance is harder to do with money, with food with material things, right? Those have real costs, real trade offs. But ideas are free. I mean, you can go online and find more free educational content, video, videos, essays, ebooks than you could ever consume in a hundred lifetimes. So going back to that idea of being wealthy, you can sort of just decide to be wealthy. In the world of ideas, all you need is a little bit of intentionality to cultivate, store and keep track of those ideas. That is a form of wealth. That is not. You know, the markets of ideas aren't going to crash. It's much harder to be taken from you. It's much harder to lose. Ideas are this kind of thing that is both free and plentiful and that you can store forever.