In 2003, we decided to arrange our first business conference about Happines At Work. There were six of us working on it and none of us had ever arranged any conferences before. And we sure had our work cut out for us; we needed to find speakers, arrange a venue, get press attention, get a website, arrange catering, setup 15 workshops at the conference and, not least, sell a lot of tickets.

This was in the early days of the company and the question was: Could a group of people with no experience working on a shoestring budget put together a great, successful, innovative conference on an untested theme for a critical business audience?

Our basic approach to the whole project was “Sure it’s impossible. Let’s do it anyway.??? We totally believed that we could do it. And here’s the fantastic thing: Everything just fell into place. We couldn’t believe our luck. We needed a website – I ran into Niels Hartvig who makes the excellent web platform Umbraco, and he offered to host it for free. We needed a great design – and Niels knew an amazingly talented designer who did it for free. We needed some press attention – and just when I was about to call some journalists a woman walked up to my desk and said “Hi, I’m a journalist, and I’d really like to do a story about you???.

It went on and on like that – everything we needed fell into place so easily, it almost got scary at one point. And this happened at least in part because we believed that it would be easy.

Oh – and when we had the conference it was a huge hit. People called it the best conference they’d ever been to!

In this post, I want to talk about one of the most fundamental ways to happiness, which is to cultivate an abundance mentality.

Some people argue, that businesses are only interested in those resources that are scarce. An abundant resource has no built-in economy – it can’t be bought or sold because it’s freely available to anyone. Air is a good example. Since business is at heart an economic venture, this means that business thinking is skewed towards scarcity from the outset and that which is abundant is ignored or downplayed.

But this scarcity mentality has a serious drawback. If your world view is that all the things you need to grow and prosper are scarce, hard to come by and something you must fight for, then the world becomes a very hard place to live in.

This world view means that we tend to meet others as enemies (or at the very least competitors). It means living in a constant state of worry that you might lose what you have, and not be able to get it back. It also means that every new project becomes a battle against the forces out there that want the same resources that you need to succeed.

But maybe the world isn’t like that. What if everything you need to succeed is abundantly available to you? What if you lived in a world that is more like a greenhouse with a nurturing environment for growth and less like an arid desert? What if people around you were actively trying to help you, not fighting you every step of the way?

That is abundance mentality, and it’s a key to both peace of mind and a great tool for getting great results in the business world.

Here are some examples of the difference between abundance and scarcity mindsets:

So which is it? Is the world a nice, soft, inviting, cuddly place, ready to boost you to success in whatever venture you choose? Or is it a cold, hard, dog-eat-dog competitive place, in which only the strongest and the toughest survive?

Here’s the truth: It is whatever you think it is. Your approach determines the truth.

If you treat everyone around you like they’re out to get you, they most likely will be. If you go into a project treating it like a never-ending struggle for scarce resources that you must fight everyone else for, well guess what – it probably will turn out that way.

But if you trust people to be nice and help. If you yourself are nice and help others. If you trust that there is enough success to go around. If you believe that others don’t need to fail in order for you to succeed. Then you will make that the truth. There’s nothing mystical or strange in this.

It’s simply a matter of other people reacting to your choices and actions. When you believe that the world is a nice place, you’re open and relaxed which means you’re more likely to notice and take advantage of any new contacts, lucky breaks or serendipitous events that come along. You’re also more fun to be around, which means that you meet more nice people and that people want to help you.

Think about the things you truly need to succeed and be happy at work. Good relationships. Good ideas. Motivation. Support. Learning. Curiosity. A great network of cool people. None of these need to be scarce resources. Treat them as abundant, and they will be.

Will it work every time and make everything you need magically appear? Of course not – once in a while you will get burned, but so will the people who use scarcity as their mental model. And when you believe in abundance, at the very least you are more open, more positive, more relaxed and happier. And that ain’t too bad, is it?

What’s your take? What do you believe about the business world? How have you applied an abundance mentality in your work? Write a comment, I’d really like to know!