Here is the full text of behavioral scientist Kelly Goldsmith’s talk titled “How to Make the Most Out of Not Having Enough” at TEDxNashville conference. In this talk, Dr. Kelly Goldsmith makes a surprising case for how a little scarcity can benefit us, both individually and collectively.
TRANSCRIPT:
So today, we are going to work together to solve a puzzle. And that puzzle is, how you can make the most out of the many times, every day, when you feel like you don’t have enough.
And the reason that this is a puzzle is because most people think of not having enough as being a bad thing. But what I want to challenge you all to think about is how we can leverage that feeling and turn it into something positive, something we can benefit from both individually and collectively.
Now, I started investigating this topic after I graduated from Yale and took a job at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern in 2009.
And one reason why I was interested in studying these feelings of not having enough was because I kept noticing that even though we all have access to so much, many people, myself included, frequently talk about their lives as if they’re experiencing scarcity.
And to illustrate how often all of us in this room are guilty of this, I’m going to describe two common types of scarcity that frequently come up in conversation.
Now, first, there is objective scarcity. What objective scarcity means is that we are actually running out of something that we need. So if your car is low on gas, or your cell phone is low on battery, that is objective scarcity.
Similarly, if you don’t have enough time, or you don’t have enough money, or you don’t have enough room in your brain to think about all the time and money you don’t have enough of. Those are forms of objective scarcity too.
And despite the relative abundance in our society, in many ways objective scarcity is still alive and well. For example, we frequently feel like we don’t have enough time. Right?
Why is that? Well, it’s in part because technology has given us unprecedented access and opportunities, and we do not want to miss out, personally or professionally.
Has the fact that we can buy whatever we want, whenever we want, and have it delivered in two days or less caused us to buy less? No.
Has the fact that we can watch whatever we want, whenever we want, on any of our devices, without commercials, caused us to watch less? Right? No. Of course.
We also work more. It used to be that having a day job that paid the bills meant you were successful. Right? Now people feel pressured to have a side hustle.
So if you’re crafty, you need to open an Esty store. If you’re witty, you need to start a podcast. If you like to take pictures of your breakfast, you should be an Instagram influencer.
But where are these additional hours in the day supposed to come from? That’s a lot of pressure we’re putting on ourselves. And a lack of time is just one type of objective scarcity that many of us deal with today.
Now, in addition, there is a second form of scarcity that I’m guessing will also feel familiar after I describe it. And it’s called subjective scarcity.
Now, subjective scarcity is what happens when what we have is actually fine, but we still feel like we don’t have enough.
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What causes subjective scarcity is things like social comparison. Who we compare ourselves to has a huge influence on if we believe what we have is enough.
We can also compare ourselves to the standards or expectations that others have for us, or even the goals that we have for ourselves. And any time we come up lacking, we’re going to experience a sense of subjective scarcity, even if, in actuality, what we have is totally fine.
Now, the reason I believe subjective scarcity is worth understanding is because today, for lots of us, subjective scarcity is increasing. I consider Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram to be the four horsemen of the subjective scarcity apocalypse.
I mean, these platforms give us 24/7 access into all of the lives of all of those Joneses we are so desperate to keep up with. It’s embarrassing to say it, but the deficits in my own life that I have been forced to recognize as a function of these social media platforms are pretty staggering.
This past holiday season, for example, my elf on the shelf placement, which I thought was fine, seemed like garbage when compared to some of my friends, who took the time to make elaborate scenes with tiny cups of milk, and tiny homemade sugar cookies, and even the perfect tiny, little elf-sized napkin.
And our family trips to exotic cities like Cincinnati, Ohio, well, they seemed great, until I realized that this actual friend of mine paid to take her kid on a private yacht around the Mediterranean. This kid is not even two!
So if I’ve learned nothing else from social media, it’s that I’m a very disappointing parent. Now, this is depressing, right?
We regularly feel like we don’t have enough, and sometimes, we’re right. As an academic, I felt compelled to understand how these everyday feelings of not having enough were affecting us as people.
So I teamed up with Christopher Cannon and Caroline Roux to write a review paper. The review paper offers people a comprehensive summary of what behavioralresearch has taught us to date about how scarcity affects our thinking and our actions.
Now, there’re way too many findings for me to cover in the short time that I have with you today. So I want to focus on what I think is most important. And that’s how feeling like we don’t have enough can actually have some positive consequences.
I love these findings because they give me hope to life’s everyday frustrations, maybe they don’t have to be limitations.
Maybe they can be assets. Maybe our constraints can be our most powerful motivators.
The first finding I’m going to share with you today is when we feel like we don’t have enough, we can actually be more helpful and generous with others. And this was something I was inspired to test based on that unique experience that I had in my early 20s.
So the year was 2001. The television show was Survivor: Africa. And that is me, trying really hard to look like a tough guy.
Now, if you’ve never seen the show, it’s basically a human experiment about scarcity that unfolds on national television.
First, tens of thousands of people apply for the show, and there’s only 16 spots available. So even before you get there, you’re well aware that there aren’t enough torches to go around.
Then, once you’re actually in the game, there’s never enough food, there’s never enough water, no one’s getting enough sleep. And to top it off, the biggest scarcity threat of all, there will only be one winner.
Every few days, someone is forcibly ejected from the game by their teammates in front of millions of viewers, which I thought sounded kind of fun.
This was season 3 of the show. I’d watched seasons 1 and 2. I expected all the competition and the deprivation. What I didn’t expect, and what I found the most surprising, is that in the game of Survivor, people are almost painfully nice to each other.
And I should say, if you’ve seen the show, this is something they do a pretty good job of editing out of what makes it to television. When you’re watching, it doesn’t always seem like people are being so kind, but trust me, when you’re there, it’s a total love fest.
Now, if you know anything about scarcity, this should be surprising. We often think of scarcity and competition as things that make us hostile, even aggressive, but that was not what happened on Survivor. People were helpful. People were nice. And I was suspicious.
Looking back on it, I think one reason why people are so nice in the game of Survivor was that our personal success, or failure, on national television was in the hands of our teammates. Therefore, everyone was bending over backwards to help each other, in an effort to save their own skin.
Now, we were definitely experiencing scarcity in many forms, but what kept us being kind to each other was we were motivated to win. And to win, we had to collaborate and build positive relationships.
Our scarcity actually made us strategic and forward looking. And I’m going to argue those are good things.
Now, years later, I found some empirical support for this pattern of behavior in the lab at Northwestern. What we did was we brought in a bunch of undergraduate students and we randomly assigned them to the scarcity condition or the control condition. And in both conditions people did a pretty similar task.
So we gave them a list of common everyday resources: sugar, water, gasoline. For those in the control condition, we had them list three things you “can do with” each resource. So for sugar, bake a cake, sweeten my tea, sweeten my coffee.
The scarcity condition was very similar but with an important twist. Here, instead, we had people list three things you “cannot do without” the same resources. So again, for sugar, bake a cake, sweeten my tea, sweeten my coffee.
What you see is in both conditions, people write the same things. But for half of them, those in the control condition, we’ve got them thinking about having adequate resources to do those things.
And for those in the scarcity condition, we’ve got them thinking about not having enough.
Next, we had them all move on and imagine a scenario that undergraduates commonly face. So we ask them to imagine that they’re studying for a test and they’re really struggling. They ask a friend for some help, and as a direct result of the friend’s help, they end up doing really well on the test.
Now we ask them if they’d like to give the friend a small gift to say thank you for their help. And when that was all we said, those in the scarcity condition were significantly less generous in their gift giving than those in the control condition. This is consistent with the notion that scarcity makes you selfish.
However, when we instead told people that if you gave the friend a gift, they might be much more likely to help you again in the future if you need it, now those in the scarcity condition were the most generous out of everyone.
And this was novel. Because what this suggests is that those in the scarcity condition, those who felt like they didn’t have enough, they could be more selfish or more generous as a function of what was in it for them.
This means that scarcity doesn’t have to be a blunt instrument that makes us more hostile or aggressive, but rather, it’s more nuanced. It can make us keenly aware of returns on investment. Accordingly, we make strategic decisions with our own best interest in mind.
Now, I realize, this may sound like bad news to some. That scarcity increases this form of impure altruism, where people are “giving to get,” but I don’t think this is bad news. I think it’s fine, and even good, to take care of yourself, especially if you’re in a situation where you’re experiencing a threat, like scarcity.
As Stephen Covey famously said, “In the long run, if it isn’t a win for both of us, we both lose.”
Your scarcity can make you better at identifying those win-win opportunities when you help yourself by helping others. And this is just a tiny portion of the data that I’ve collected to date that gives me reason to believe that these common everyday experiences of not having enough, they can be put to good use.
These frustrations don’t have to be limitations. They can increase generosity, and facilitate improvements in culture. They can lead to our making choices to take care of ourselves. And these are positive outcomes, both individually and collectively.
Now back to the puzzle that we started out with. As you go through your day, if you’re made to feel like you don’t have enough because you’re low on gas, or because you check your bank balance, or because you check Instagram, take a moment and take stock of how that feels. It might be uncomfortableor even scary.
Try to let those feelings be a call to action. Let your constraints be what motivates you. Let them remind you that relationships matter, and it is important to be strategic with how you invest your resources and with how you invest your time. Because you don’t need anyone’s permission to take care of yourself.
Now, you guys are all smart people. In reality, you probably have access to most of what you need. When you’re smart and you have what you need, it can be tempting for you to get comfortable.
But one thing I would love for you to take away from this talk is that there are benefits to staying hungry. Benefits not just for you, but for those around you.
Because those people who feel like they don’t have enough are the best at identifying win-win opportunities. And those mutual benefits actually grow the pie. So you don’t just win. We all win.
So if you feel like you do have enough, ask yourself if you might benefit from some additional motivation. Could you do more? Could you be better? Could we all benefit if you raised the bar on what you expected from yourself?
I can promise the one thing we are all truly running low on is time together on this planet. And I vote that so long as we are all still in this crazy game, we play to win… together.
