Abundant everything.

In my junior year of high school my economics teacher introduced me to the "first law of economics": scarcity.  Supposedly, there are unlimited desires and limited resources, so we all need to fight over the size of the slice of our pie.  Three years later I learned that it was complete BS.  In fact, I think scarcity may be one of the most pernicious lines of crap I've been fed.  In fact, when I ponder some of the biggest, fastest growing, most dynamic, companies in the US, they all dominate industries that didn't really exist 20 years ago.  It's a bit boggling when you step back, but

• social media
• smartphones
• tablets computing
• online retailing
• search engines 

are all phrases that were not in the public's consciousness in 1992.  As always, innovation and creativity expand markets indefinitely and add value to all.  There is no fixed edge to the pie.

What does this have to do with concrete, craftwork, or small business?  Well, I found out recently that this also applies a little to the personal wattage we have to do our daily things.  I was honored recently to speak at the Concrete Decor Show, and I really wanted to bring some substance to the talk.  I had attended so many classes where it seemed like the presenter was just filling time with rhetoric and didn't have many real points to make.  I so did not want to be that guy.  So instead, I made the densest 80-some slide presentation I could, and ran through it in a little over an hour (rather than the 2 expected).  I was excited, not well paced, and I'm pretty sure I totally overwhelmed at least a third of the room.  I really hope I'm just being hard on myself and that at least a handful of people got real value out of it, but what I re-learned is that all we ever have is this moment.  Therefore, there is no limit to how many things we can do really well if we stay there.

When I was delivering my ideas, I thought that it would be a process over time, and I was gearing it to what their next step would be with the worksheets and programs I had written for estimating jobs and doing inventory within a decorative concrete company.  I felt like there wasn't enough time to get it all in.  I re-learned that this moment right now, we can either be fully engaged and performing, or out of phase; that whenever we are in future time or the past we burn much more energy than when we are in flow.  Lastly, I discovered that there is an endless supply of creative energy to tap into, and that excellence in one area (fitness, understanding Scripture, business performance, loving truly, creating great art, what-have-you) often pours over into all other areas.  Conversely, "not sweating the small stuff" is only a good transitional strategy out of neurosis.  There is no small stuff.  There is no big stuff.  There is just stuff.  And we can make a lot of it great or we can make it lame.  It's all in this moment.