The perspective of this book is very unique. After reading it, I had a sudden enlightenment feeling, and it revealed to me why we are poor and busy.

I have a relative who is in his early thirties and unmarried. Because I have been using various banks and online loan platforms such as credit cards and Huabei Borrowers all year round, I still have to live after losing my job. As a result, I cannot repay my debts. I can only use loans to pay for my debts. I still owe 300 yuan to the online loan platform. In order to avoid being blacklisted by the bank in order to avoid being blacklisted by banks, I had to work hard every day to earn some hard-earned money by giving away food to pay off my debts, and lived in dire straits. It wasn’t until after reading this book that I realized that he had fallen into the trap of scarcity. Every day, except for simple living expenses, all expenses had to be used to pay off debts. He had to work for twelve hours before he could rest. If he doesn't have enough money, he has to work even harder to deliver food, which makes him face severe scarcity of money and time every month. Once he gets a cold, fever, illness, or an emergency in life and he can't work, he has to lose control and find relatives. Borrow some more from friends, and it's like falling into a vicious cycle over and over again.

This book analyzes the impact of "scarcity" on our lives from the perspectives of economics and psychology. How did this relative of mine step into such scarcity? How can we avoid scarcity? Through the above case, let’s combine it with the theoretical analysis in the book to see what enlightenment it can bring to us.

What impact does scarcity have on people?

Scarcity is the feeling of “having” less than “needs”, not only money, but also time, hunger, attention, loneliness and other abstract elements. Its impact on people mainly lies in the following aspects:

1. Scarcity will capture our brains and change our way of thinking.

Positive: Focus on dividends. A scarcity mindset captures our brains and can produce a positive outcome. When time is limited and we see that time is running out towards the deadline, we will focus on completing the task or goal. The author calls this phenomenon the "focus dividend." For example, when we were young, we usually did five minutes of summer homework for two hours, but only when school was about to start did we start to write seriously and focus on it, and our thoughts did not dare to wander.

Negative: Burden of prying eyes. Take that relative as an example. When he focused too much on delivering food every day to make money and pay off debts, he neglected other important things, such as not having a wife in his thirties and spending time improving cognitive skills. , taking time to exercise and more. In other words, scarcity will bring us a voyeuristic effect. As long as we focus on the scarcity at hand, we will ignore other potentially important things, just like a leopard peeking through a pipe.

In addition to the "peeping effect", scarcity will also reduce "bandwidth" and make us dumber and more impulsive. This is also called bandwidth burden. So what is bandwidth? The so-called bandwidth is our mental capacity, which is a balance of our abilities, including computing ability, attention ability, decision-making ability, ability to stick to plans and ability to resist temptation, etc. In the workplace, it is called comprehensive quality, also called a person's soft power. From IQ to college entrance examination scores, impulse suppression to successful weight loss, it is all related to bandwidth. But we know that the bandwidth of each of us is limited. To put it bluntly, it is like a road in a city. If cars occupy too many road resources, there will be correspondingly fewer road resources for bicycles and trust. On the surface, a father who cannot concentrate on his daughter's competition is not a good father; a student who cannot answer simple test questions correctly is either stupid or lazy. But in fact, they are all burdened by a heavy bandwidth burden; the father is too preoccupied with work to focus on his daughter's game, and the student has trouble sleeping and eating because of the high tuition, not because of limited ability. So the root of the problem lies not with the parties, but with the bandwidth burden caused by scarcity.

2. Scarcity will also make us poor and short-sighted, focusing only on the immediate things and being unable to experience the future, because when we feel scarce, we can easily ignore the long-term consequences and make hasty decisions. Just like my parents, they focused their entire lives on raising a family and were unable to plan for the future in the long term, making their difficult life even more difficult. And my relative, when he was short of money, he wanted to borrow money, but it was difficult for him to think about how difficult it would be to repay the debt in the future. This kind of short-sightedness is called "poor short-sightedness", and he will make himself make suboptimal decisions, such as "borrowing" behavior.

There are two main reasons for borrowing behavior: 1. Too much focus on solving the problem at hand; 2. You can only perceive the present and cannot experience the future. When he borrows, he digs a bigger hole for his future self, and falls into an endless abyss of tearing down one thing to make up for the other.

How can we avoid scarcity

1. Leave some spare time. Because the essence of scarcity is that there is no leisure, so what is leisure? For example, you will understand. If you are traveling far away and you use a large suitcase, then the space will definitely be more than enough. You will also be very casual when packing, and you can basically put whatever you want. If you use a small suitcase, , then you have to be much more careful when packing, weighing which ones are more important. After all, there is only so much space. It often happens that if you want to put a small bag in, you have to remove a pair of shoes from the box. If we have some spare time, we won't have space difficulties. The same goes for when we go on a date with friends. If we go out half an hour early, we will still have time to spare even if we encounter traffic jams.

2. Manage bandwidth and reduce bandwidth burden. Save bandwidth and allocate our limited information processing capabilities rationally. Don't pay too much attention to the trivial matters in life, which can avoid some troubles in decision-making. Act when bandwidth is plentiful. Take an example from our daily life. If you complete the most important things in the two hours in the morning every day, then you need to cut off other interfering matters. The efficiency of work in the morning will definitely be higher than that in the morning or afternoon when things are busy. ; If you start saving regularly when funds are abundant, the amount accumulated will be higher than when funds are scarce.

3. Set reminders. We often have too heavy bandwidth burden and ignore important and non-urgent things. You can set reminders to bring important things back into the tube's field of vision.

Finally, I hope you will benefit from it, become more comfortable, and move toward abundance, including time, money, and relationships.