The Kulka Group

Everyone has different motives for success. Maybe you’re doing it for personal satisfaction or to leave a legacy. Maybe you want to provide a great life for your family or to make a positive impact on the world. Maybe you want to follow in the footsteps of someone you admire or you want to reach new frontiers. No matter what the reason is, all business professionals yearn for success.

Many picture business as being a competitive, dog-eat-dog world. For many business-professionals, this is the world they live in. These people believe that there is only a limited amount of success to go around and will take any measure to get ahead of anyone who is in their way. But this is not the case. There is another type of business professional who understands there are plenty of opportunities for success and tries to help others succeed. These business professionals tend to be much more successful themselves.

The first type of business professional I mentioned is one with a scarcity mentality. A person with this mentality lives with the attitude that in order for one person to succeed, another person must fail. Having a scarcity mentality is destructive to one’s own success. It is no secret that people are most successful when working with others. Therefore, someone with a scarcity mentality is only limiting their growth potential by seeing everybody as competition.

Having a scarcity mentality is not only destructive to one’s growth in business, but also to one’s emotional health. People with a scarcity mentality see everybody as competition that they must somehow get ahead of. They believe that whenever someone else succeeds, this decreases their chance of doing so themselves. Theodore Roosevelt explained that “comparison is the thief of joy.” Comparing oneself to others will lead to professionals becoming obsessed with their competitors, leading to fear and anxiety. Since they will be focused on becoming better at what their competitors are doing, this mindset often leads people to miss out on potential opportunities.

The second type of business professional I mentioned, the one who believes there are opportunities for everybody to succeed, is one with an abundance mentality. The same people who the professional with a scarcity mentality saw as competitors, are seen by the professional with an abundance mentality as growth opportunities. The professional with an abundance mentality will observe others’ success and celebrate it. This will help them learn from others, discover new niches for their business and potentially develop partnerships and collaboration opportunities.

It is time that professionals abandon the idea that in order to become successful, you must knock someone else down. It is now truer than ever, with a growing global marketplace and the rapid emergence of extremely niche businesses, that there is more than enough success to go around. In order to be successful, it is mandatory that you create meaningful connections and have great centers of influence. Therefore, professionals must stop seeing people as competitors and start seeing them as opportunities for mutual growth.