04: Abundance vs. Scarcity Mindset in Money

Behind Their Success: Ep 4 Transcript

Paden: Ep 4

paden: [00:00:00] Hello, I'm Paden Squires and I'm the host of the podcast

paden: This podcast is for those who are dissatisfied with where they are at in their life and career currently. I used to be one. When I got out of college with my master's degree, I started working in banking. I eventually moved to a Fortune 500 company. I quickly found out being an employee was not for me. I was bored out of my mind. And did not like it whatsoever. Something eventually lit a fire under me. I started studying for the CPA exam, listening to podcasts and reading books every day. By doing that, I had passed all four parts of the CPA exam in eight months and quit my job.

paden: I opened up my own tax firm, having never been paid to do someone's taxes before. in 2014. Since then, I've consistently grown my business. I've had a lot of success in other business ventures, including real estate, property management, among other things. And now I'm looking for a new venture. I want to help inspire you and other [00:01:00] entrepreneurs to achieve their potentials and dreams, as well as learn from the stories of these entrepreneurs as to see what has gone well and what hasn't gone well for them. 

paden: Let's go create a bunch of healthy, wealthy, and wise entrepreneurs

Good morning, guys. Today I want to talk about the scarcity mindset, especially around money and kind of my journey as I've kind of gone through the process of where I've started and, my relationship with money and how I've grown in those areas.

 So I grew up in a single mom household. So my dad was around, he was kind of in and out a lot and really didn't necessarily could rely on him for support. we certainly weren't like destitute or crazy poor or, you know, starving or anything like that, you know, my perception as a kid was that, You know, we certainly probably had less than others.

we didn't deal with any real lack of money problems. the vast majority, you know, tons of people had way worse experiences than I did, But it was still real to me, right? I still could feel like we had less than others. And as a kid, I can clearly remember, my mom losing her job at one point.

And her and my grandma having a conversation of, Oh, you know, how are the bills? And, you know, I, I don't know how old I was then, probably 10, 12 years old or something, but that memory stuck in my brain really hard. Right. Was that, Oh my gosh, where's money going to come from? Right. So I really feel like that's a huge driver in my life of who I am and the studies in the past, I've gone down around money, you know, becoming a CPA, becoming a CFP, and kind of the lifelong study of that I think my biggest drive was I didn't want to be poor, right? I wanted to have money and money just kind of gives you more choices and more opportunity.

It really wasn't until recently where I've started to feel, I would say in the last probably three years or so where I've started to feel like. You know, I'm not necessarily doing things to avoid scarcity, right? I'm not saving and investing money because I'm trying to run away from something, you know, at this point I've really built a vision and I save and invest money because that's going to move me closer to the goals I want and that's a big shift, you know, while humans have two different types of motivation.You can motivate somebody with fear, right? Running away from something, or you can motivate people with something in front of them, like, you know, a carrot, right?

You can motivate people with pleasure or pain, fear is a massive motivator and fear is, often not a bad thing to tap into cause it can be a huge motivator. The issue is, when you live in that world, that kind of dark, fear world, and you're running away from something, it starts to affect other areas of your life.

So while it's good to use it, it kind of has a kick in the pants. In my opinion, or at least with my personality, it's not sustainable, right? It's much more satisfying to be running towards something, right? Running towards some goal, instead of always constantly using fear and lack and scarcity of running away from a goal.

So, you know, that experience as a kid really sent me kind of down the track. 

I started getting really interested in money. I started following the stock market, reading books about it.

Okay, how do these, you know, how do these wealthy people use finance and accounting and different things to create money? and so I've really never stopped then, you know, I was about 18 years old at that point. It's kind of been an obsession ever since but that's always been a lifelong passion of and it's, you know, it's led to a certain level of success,  you know, I'm not finished and I don't know that I ever will be.

But I think, fear is a great beginning motivator, right? But to really take it to those next levels, you got to start running towards something, right? You got to start running. towards a goal, because once you hit a certain level, the fear starts to subside a little bit, right?

My biggest fear was to, you know, not have money. and you know, once you start working up certain levels of the ladder, that fear becomes less and less real because it is less and less real. so you gotta constantly be finding that next motivation level. Otherwise, you're going to plateau.

If you're okay at the level you're at, you're totally fine with that. There's nothing wrong with that. But if you want to go to the next level, you know, changes have to be made. And you got to find that next motivation. And it's really cool to, you know, once you start going down this route of vision casting and finding different goals in your life, it's really cool if you write those down and you go through life and you start to accomplish some of those things.

It's really cool to go back and look at those things. I have notes in different journals around that have kind of my goals, and I'm not the best at writing down goals. I need to get better but the few times I have, or the handful of times I have, it's really cool to go back and look at what those goals were five years ago.

And it never ceases to amaze me how small those goals were compared to where I am now. Meaning I set too low of goals because I want to be reasonable. I only go after things that I think I'm capable of, which is obviously a huge limiting factor. You know, you really don't know enough about yourself to know what you are capable of.

So almost all of us think entirely too small about what we can do. And that is the biggest governor, the limiter of our potential. So find something to run  away from something, right? Using a fear of running away from something is not a bad thing, but it can't be the sole motivator at some point, it'll start to burn you out.

You got to find something to fulfill you, not just run away from something. Use them both, but understand long term find some goals to run towards. That's all I got for you guys. 

Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. If you found it valuable, please rate, review, and share it. That is the best way to help us build this and reach more people, as we're trying to accomplish our goal of help creating more healthy, wealthy, and wise entrepreneurs. You can follow us on social media by searching for me @padensquires, or going to paydensquires.com on the website and social media, we're always sharing tips of personal growth, and there we can actually interact. I'm looking forward to it. 

Thanks guys!