Defeat Scarcity Mindset -- Before It Kills Your Passion
Tags: books, reading, notes, career
Published: 2020-07-11 02:47:19

---
title: Defeat Scarcity Mindset -- Before It Kills Your Passion
published: true
description: Scarcity mindset is what happens when you quit your day job, put all your eggs into your Overlap, and then struggle to make money. Here's how you prevent it from killing your passion.
tags: books, reading, notes, career
cover_image: https://miro.medium.com/max/5616/0*a9Qu2Crjr1she04Q
---

Scarcity mindset is what happens when you quit your day job, put all your eggs into your Overlap, and then struggle to make money.

Scarcity mindset kills your passion fast.

We don’t want to be stuck in a position where we take on jobs we hate just to pay the bills.
  
That’s why in the last post, we talked about keeping our day job until our Overlap takes over 100% of our financial needs.

{% link https://dev.to/garrett/don-t-quit-your-day-job-yet-1fcl %}

That’s the first and strongest way to defeat scarcity mindset.

One thing we discussed last post is cutting your expenses so you can cut your hours to spend more time working on your day job.

A response I got to that was:

> What if you can’t cut your hours?

It’s likely that some people will not be able to cut hours due to needing the money, even if they cut expenses. Maybe their expenses are already cut.

If that’s the case, I also mentioned in that post that you can work on the Overlap before you head to your day job.

For those who can’t cut their day job hours, but are able to cut expenses, I suggest you put that money into savings.

It is possible that you can save up enough to quit your job outright and work full time on your Overlap to build success.

Sean recommends you do this with 6 months of expenses in the bank.

I was going to attempt this, but I was afraid of being sucked into scarcity mindset, so I was going to do 6 months of my current lifestyle expenses.

That’s about 50% more than my living expenses.

Ultimately I decided that this would put me into scarcity mindset anyway.

For me, quitting my job before my Overlap is making 100% of my cost of living, even if I have 6 months of expenses in the bank, is too stressful.
  
Stress is what puts us into scarcity mindset.
  
We get that stress for money and we start taking on jobs we don’t want to do.

Any job that will pay.

Then we start compromising on price.

We just need that extra $250, right?

Oh, you can only pay $150? That’s fine, I guess.

Then we’re burning out because we have to work 80 hours per week just to make ends meet.

At this point, we’re working way more than we should, making way less than we should, and this cycle continues to repeat.

This is scarcity mindset killing our passion right in front of us.

We must not let this happen.

Another thing Sean [recommends in this chapter](https://overlapbook.com) is that you might have to put your passion on hold for a little while.
  
If you’re in a situation where your job sucks and you’re not energized when you get home, you need to find a new job.

But that takes time. Finding a job is tough.

This is the time to put your passion on hold.

This is the time you need to spend your extra hours on looking for a new job.

Maybe you’re unqualified for anything else.

Use that time to pick up a new skill in a new industry.

It sucks to put your passion on hold, but sometimes it’s the right thing to do.
  
Sometimes it’s the only way to keep your passion alive.

Sometimes it’s the only way to [beat scarcity mindset](https://no-alarms-club.simplecast.com/episodes/defeat-scarcity-mindset).