photo by ms.tea 

Halloween is just around the corner, which means it’s time to start thinking about carving pumpkins.  I remember learning how to carve a pumpkin around our kitchen table from my parents and older brothers.  There was always an element of creativity in terms of the design and certainly some of us were better than others in terms of drawing or actually cutting, but overall we used a consistent system to create our art.

Now imagine that you want to create a really cool Jack O’Lantern this Halloween, but you don’t have a clear process or system for how to do that.  You’ve seen the end result, but you’ve never actually gone through any steps…and in fact you don’t even know what steps there might be!

Odds are your pumpkin is going to look more like road kill than a cool, scary design!  Without a systematic process, you’re stuck with making it up as you go and even though it’s not that hard (once you know how to do it) there are lots of points where you can trash your pumpkin if you do it wrong.

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   photo by Net Efekt 

Imagine that all of the money, influence and power in your world is a pie (apple in this case).  Now imagine hundreds…no thousands…of people in your industry, your geographic space, your niche of business all vying for their piece of that pie!  There is no way there’s enough pie to go around – if you’re going to get the pie you need it’s clear that you need to step on people, be ruthless and constantly be looking out for yourself.  You must win at all costs!

Sound overblown?  Unfortunately it’s not – it’s called a scarcity mentality and most people default to this mentality unless they actively guard against it.  Here’s Stephen Covey’s take (from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Habit #4 Think Win-Win):

Most people are deeply scripted in what I call the Scarcity Mentality….

The Scarcity Mentality is the zero-sum paradigm of life. People with a Scarcity Mentality have a very difficult time sharing recognition and credit, power or profit – even with those who help in the production. The also have a a very hard time being genuinely happy for the success of other people.

It’s an insidious problem because it gets worse with fear, so if you start to struggle in your business, you will shift to more of a scarcity mindset, which brings on more fear, less collaboration and ultimately makes all the problems worse! 

You start looking at all transactions as a Win-Lose proposition – you have to win and the other person has to lose (‘cause there’s only so much to go around).  However Win-Lose relationships aren’t sustainable and you’ll soon find yourself alone against the world wondering why everyone has turned on you!

Overall it’s a pretty bleak picture (especially since we started with apple pie!).

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©2004 Martin Ouellet

It’s been a while since I’ve been to Vegas, but one of the things I really enjoy there is the game of craps.  It’s a fast moving game that the players and the crowd get excited about.  You can win (and lose) a lot of money very quickly, but if you play correctly, your odds of walking away a winner are better than any other game in the casino (except maybe blackjack if  you can count cards…). 

Because the game moves so fast and requires some math to bet correctly, it can be overwhelming, but once you’ve got it figured out it’s a lot of fun (especially if you’re winning)!

The proper strategy of craps can also teach you a lot about successfully running a small business (it’s my blog, I get to use what ever analogies I want!).

Read on and let me know what you think – it won’t take me long to reach the point.  (pun intended). 

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