First, introduce some basic concepts of this book.
This book is divided into three parts.
The first part is about the scarcity mentality is the root of all scarcity.
When scarcity grasps the brain, our attention will focus on how to make the most effective use of our resources. Although this phenomenon has negative effects, it also means that it can benefit from scarcity. We can say that scarcity makes people "focus", and we can also say that scarcity leads to our "limited vision".
We focus, peep, do things and ignore other things for the same reason: those things that exist outside the "pipeline" vision are suppressed. For us, things outside the "tube" are more difficult to see, easier to ignore and easier to forget.
When a person focuses on scarcity, his IQ score will be lower than when there is no scarcity problem. Just like when a computer runs multiple programs at the same time, the CPU will slow down, and the poor will perform worse at this time because part of their bandwidth is thinking about other things. When our psychological bandwidth is burdened, it will make it more difficult for us to control our impulses. Scarcity will form a bandwidth burden, which means scarcity will not only reduce fluid intelligence, but also reduce self-control.
Only some people who want nothing will be full of worries; All people who are experiencing "lack" will have a lot of worries.
Once the scarcity psychology appears, we must deal with the problem of more shortage of spiritual resources.
Scarcity will not only make us unable to make ends meet and allocate resources, but also make us feel at a loss in other aspects of life.
Scarcity can make people stupid and impulsive. When our mobile intelligence and executive control are weakened, we have to rely on more limited brain power to make a living.
The second part is about how poverty and busyness reduce "bandwidth".
The angle between the honeycomb walls is exactly 120 degrees, forming a perfect hexagon. The thickness of each layer of nest wall is less than 0. 1 mm, and the deviation is only within 0.002 mm The mud honeycomb chamber is basically columnar and irregularly bonded together with mud, which is not as delicate as the honeycomb. Why is this happening? The answer is scarcity. Mud, a building material used by mud bees, is rich in resources; Bees have little beeswax as a building material. The poor have no leisure because they don't have so much ability to afford it. The space needed for packing is cheap for people with big suitcases, just like mud; But it's expensive for the owner of the small suitcase, just like beeswax.
With leisure, we will have rich feelings. Leisure not only means inefficiency, but also a luxury psychological enjoyment. Abundance not only allows us to buy more goods, but also gives us the luxury of packaging at will, the luxury of not thinking and the luxury of making mistakes.
The frugality of the rich is different from that of the poor. Thrift is a sense of responsibility for money, and the poor weigh it. Thrifty people will consider whether the price of goods is favorable when buying. What the poor are thinking is what to give up for this money. So people who learn from it don't need to weigh.
The poor are better at maintaining their present livelihood. They can make 1 dollar play a greater role and are financial experts. This kind of professional skills will make them behave more rationally in a certain environment and make it more difficult to make contradictory choices.
Because of concentration, I have professional skills; Because of my major, I have a humble opinion; Due to the limitation of vision, it has produced a series of negative consequences.
Scarcity, especially a peeping mentality, will make you put aside those important but not urgent things, such as cleaning up the office, doing colonoscopy, writing a will and so on. These are things that we tend to overlook.
Looking forward from now, we need to have a broad vision and certain cognitive resources. We need to consider the bills due next month, other possible sources of income and new tasks that may be taken over, all of which require your cognitive ability and some leisure. When the brain focuses on the scarcity of the present, the ability to look forward is likely to be lost because of the burden.
If we are at the "last minute" for a long time, we will continue to be in a state of going from one emergency to another. When we have a peep mentality, we can only solve the problem partially and temporarily. For busy people, this means that there is a lot of pressure on twisted plans, full of mountains of to-do lists and meetings that have been fixed and changed.
The seeds of scarcity trap have been planted as early as when resources are relatively abundant. Moreover, with the development of the situation, the same situation will appear again. You are working hard, but you still can't keep up with the progress. Your life is very depressing, and you secretly vowed never to do such a thing again in your life. After the deadline, you finally climbed to the edge of the trap and caught your breath. At this point, there are still a few weeks before the next deadline. Thank goodness, now you can finally relax. After a few weeks, you can't figure out where all the time has gone. You started working overtime again. Just like the scarcity faced by vendors, your scarcity comes from the mistakes made when resources are relatively abundant.
The poor will always be poor, and the lonely are doomed to continue to be lonely; Busy people will always be busy, and dieters' plans will always end in failure. Scarcity creates a mentality that will make scarcity last forever.
The only hope to change our mentality and escape from the scarcity trap.
No money means no time; No money means it is more difficult to socialize; No money means that the quality of food will be lower and your health will be lower. Poverty means that you are in want of things that determine all aspects of your life.
The poor will show shortcomings in many ways:
The poor will focus on their own problems, form a peeping psychology and make mistakes; The poor lack not only money, but also bandwidth.
The third part is about how to move from scarcity to prosperity.
Imagine that you signed up for a computer training course a few weeks ago. You hope to change your job by studying. At night, the benefits you can get from participating in the training are so abstract and far away. Now you are exhausted. And you know, even if you go to class now, you won't listen to anything. So you missed a class. A few weeks later, when you go to class again, you can understand less than before. Finally, you decide to drop out of school and come back to class when your family problems are solved. After all, you are not in the mood to study now.
Therefore, this course will not only tolerate your mistakes, but also amplify these predictable mistakes you show and force you out of the classroom. When designing a course, instead of always emphasizing the importance of people not making mistakes or improving their behavior, we might as well redesign and lay out the course itself.
For example, we change the course into modular course units, and then start classes alternately in different periods, and move forward together. It doesn't matter if you miss a class or a paragraph. Just transfer to another parallel course one or two weeks later than this course module. If you miss the whole module, it's not too late to learn it when you start the next class. Although this method will delay the graduation time, students can at least really learn knowledge.
We should not continue to treat education, medical care, finance and child rearing separately, but should realize that all these factors are part of the bandwidth capacity.
Just as the financial burden will overwhelm our budget, the bandwidth burden will make it impossible for us to take care of all the above factors. On the contrary, it will have a far-reaching impact on the repair of some bottleneck problems-children's day care services provide more than day care services, and timely financial products are far from being prepared.
A better design needs to include basic insights, such as concentration and bandwidth embodied in scarcity psychology.
4.45 times! Lessons from Mars probe
1On September 23rd, 999, the Mars probe launched by NASA crashed. The reasons for the errors after investigation are as follows: firstly, the satellite Mars probe is usually completed by several subcontractors one by one. The company responsible for manufacturing propellers understands that the received data is expressed in pounds; Another company that makes CPU sends data in metric Newton. Therefore, every time the processor sends an "X", the propeller manufacturer interprets it as "4.45 times X". As a result, the probe slowed down excessively and failed to escape the gravity of Mars.
After analysis, the reasons are as follows:
We can put important things in the pipe. For example, when the supervisor's "pipeline" vision remains at the current meeting, the assistant can bring the next meeting into the supervisor's vision.
Whenever possible, we should turn our vigilance into a one-off action. For example, if you don't want to be vigilant every time you pass the kitchen to avoid getting snacks, you should be vigilant when you go shopping in the supermarket and don't buy snacks at all.
Using bandwidth is to allocate our limited information processing capacity. From this point of view, those decisions that need more information processing will occupy more bandwidth. Every manager with limited time needs an assistant, who should be good at comprehensive decision-making, simplify selection and present clearly.