In this episode we delve into Michael Easter’s Bestselling Book, Scarcity Brain.

Sue delves into the concept of scarcity brain and how it affects our daily lives. She discusses how the scarcity loop keeps us stuck in old habits and behaviours that are not serving us. Sue explores the three components of the scarcity loop: opportunity, unpredictable rewards, and easy repeatability. She provides practical strategies for breaking the scarcity loop, such as removing opportunities, changing the rewards system, and making behaviours less easily repeatable. 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Scarcity brain keeps most people stuck with old habits or things that aren’t serving them.

The scarcity loop consists of three elements: opportunity, unpredictable reward, and easy, repeatable nature.

To break the scarcity loop, one can remove the opportunity, eliminate or make rewards boring, and disrupt the easy, repeatable nature of the habit.

Leveraging scarcity brain involves creating more opportunity, generating unpredictable rewards, and making tasks easily repeatable.

Valuing something requires hard work over a long period of time, leading to a deeper sense of fulfilment and satisfaction.

BEST MOMENTS

“The scarcity loop puts so much pressure on us unnecessarily… I want to talk about how it’s causing you to make bad decisions.” 

“The problem is when you have too much information, scientists have found that you start to make bad decisions.” 

“I’m going to leave you with this thought… I can’t help but feel that if you knew, if we all knew that we were going to die next week, we wouldn’t spend it scrolling social media today.” 

“You can leverage scarcity loop by starting to look at how you can insert those three elements into one of the tasks that you know you need to do, systemise it.”