Accepting Abundance

After a few years, I started looking for jobs to see if I could find an opportunity.  I wanted to progress my career, but I wasn’t really doing anything to make progress other than look for other jobs.  I kept just doing what was right in front of me.  A lot of the jobs I wanted required experience I didn’t have, and I couldn’t figure out how to get the experience because it wasn’t easy.  I was stuck, but once again, I was able to sort of stumble into some luck.  I have a weird quirk.  I love audiobooks.  I listen to a bunch.  Mostly non-fiction.  After some chaotic times at my job, I was at a very low point because I realized I wasn’t effective at anything I wanted to be.  I started reading the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  That book is amazing and I learned so many valuable lessons from it, but one thing, in particular, stuck with me.  Abundance.  “There is plenty out there and enough to spare for everybody.”

I wanted abundance so badly.  I wanted to have an abundant mindset and mentality.  I wanted abundance in all good things.  That’s all I talked about for a while. Looking back I can’t imagine my wife’s confusion.  I talked about abundance constantly, but our entire life together she’s seen me constantly shut out any abundance that had been offered to me.

I can pinpoint the moment when everything in my life changed.  My wife and I were driving down the highway and I was complaining about things not going my way and how I wasn’t getting any big projects or opportunities at work.  I was saying that I was open to these huge things, but wasn’t getting anything.  After years and years of seeing me shut out abundance in every aspect of my life, she blurted out “How can you expect to get abundance on a large scale when you’re not accepting abundance in all of the little things?”  It hit both of us like a ton of bricks.  She was completely right as usual and had said the same thing in different ways for most of our relationship.  It wasn’t until that moment that I was ready to hear and understand it.  Every day, I just stumbled through life and kept rejecting any form of abundance because it might take energy or put me in a position that might require me to do something I didn’t want to do.  I was rejecting abundance in every small way.  A friend would offer to pay for dinner…NOT HAPPENING. Someone would offer to help me with something…nah I got this on my own.  Maybe it was low self-esteem making me believe I didn’t deserve anything, maybe it was me being socially awkward and not wanting to get closer to people, maybe it was me not wanting to worry about owing anyone anything.  Regardless of why I was doing this, it doesn’t matter.

From that moment on I told myself I would accept abundance.  Much like Jim Carrey in “Yes Man”, I would force myself to say yes when abundance came by at any level.

I just remember driving down the highway with my wife right after she said that, and my life flashing before my eyes.  I saw nothing but me rejecting abundance on every scale throughout my entire life.  It made perfect sense.  If all I do is reject abundance on small-scale things, I’m decreasing the likelihood of receiving any abundance on a larger scale.  Even if I have a chance at abundance, how could I be prepared to recognize it?  I was so quiet and focused on my memories that my wife started panicking and thought I was mad at her.  I told her she was right, and what I was thinking, and that I needed to make a change.  From that moment on I told myself I would accept abundance.  Much like Jim Carrey in “Yes Man”, I would force myself to say yes when abundance came by at any level.  The first time I accepted abundance was when I hurt my back doing Judo.  I asked some friends if they had any experience with inversion tables. One of my friends reached out and said they had an old one they weren’t using.  I would have never accepted this before, but I told myself I had to.  It was uncomfortable and I wasn’t happy, but I accepted the abundance.  I used that inversion table every day for weeks to relieve my back pain.  There were many opportunities for abundance that I started taking.  It became less uncomfortable and more natural after a while.

My life changed a lot after that moment in the car. I went from having a closed-off negative attitude to being positive most of the time.  I looked at things differently.  Instead of looking at all of the bad things that happen, or the missed opportunities, I looked at all the positive things that happened and all of the potential opportunities.  Everything changed.  Or maybe everything stayed the same and I changed.

My professional life changed dramatically.  I was in a weird situation at work.  I had been at the same company for way too long, and I was in a position I really didn’t want to be in.  I was also surrounded by a bunch of self-absorbed, insecure, empathyless, narcissists.  I was surrounded by them both personally and professionally.  I realized this was a great opportunity.  I was at my job for way too long, but that also meant I had enough background knowledge that I could find opportunities.  I had tons of connections that would allow me to do everything I wanted.  I could leverage everything I had to try and push myself in a direction I wanted to go in.  Instead of waiting for things to come along, I actively hunted for good projects.  I also started creating my own projects.  I figured, why wait for abundance when I can create it.  I also started realizing the sociopaths I was surrounded by were very useful in their own way.

If I wanted to progress my career, I couldn’t just be technically good.  I needed to be able to lead teams, manage personalities, and get people excited to work with me.  Most psychologists and divorce lawyers will tell you that narcissists are the worst kind of person to deal with because they’ll never admit they are wrong and have no empathy for others.  I was surrounded by the worst people, but it was a great opportunity.  If I could work productively with these narcissists, I could work with anyone!

I started reading books about emotional progression and social linkages.  The “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” gave me a good foundation for how to work with negative people, but I wanted to learn more.  I read “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, “Emotional Intelligence 2.0”, “Never Split the Difference”, “How to be a Rainmaker”, “Disarming the Narcissist”, and some others.  Since I was surrounded by narcissists on a daily basis, I was able to try out the techniques I learned in the books.  Normally I’d be furious about the drama and negativity I had to deal with every day, but now I was excited to try out my newly learned skills.

Now I understand that in order to get abundance, you have to put in the effort early and for a long time, and eventually you’ll get the results because everything builds up.

Instead of looking at the negatives and complaining about what was wrong, I changed the way I looked at situations and figured out how I could capitalize on them and create my own abundance.  Basically every day, I had the opportunity to pressure test techniques I learned on the people I was surrounded by.  I was able to see what worked and what didn’t immediately.  In a few months, I was able to get the social and emotional intelligence it would take others years, if not a lifetime, to achieve.  It sounds silly and almost naive to think and act like I was.  The old version of me certainly would have thought so.  “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” and “Atomic Habits”  both emphasized the importance of having faith or trusting the process, or grinding or whatever you want to call it.  Normally I’d just give up once I didn’t see tangible results, but not anymore.  Now I understand that in order to get abundance, you have to put in the effort early and for a long time, and eventually you’ll get the results because everything builds up.  “Atomic Habits” makes a great analogy to a plane heading across the country changing its heading by a few degrees early on and ending up thousands of miles from where it was originally going.  I knew that abundance was coming my way eventually, and the harder I worked without abundance, the more would come later, and eventually, it did.

I am an infectious disease researcher living in a pandemic.  At the beginning of 2020, I was working on a project that I knew would give the world vital information about the current situation and make the world a better place.  When I started working on this project, no one cared about it.  People in my company and the world were just trying to survive and give the world what it needed right then and there.  My project was something people would need later.  Almost every door I tried to open was shut in my face.  Every week something happened that threatened to kill the project.  The resources I needed weren’t available because my project wasn’t a high priority.  People laughed at me and thought I was crazy for doing what I was doing.  I was putting in 10-18 hour days in my lab to come home and spend countless nights and weekends coding a brand new infrastructure that would allow me to do something no one else was doing.

Every single day for a year I would write in my planner, “Have faith you’re doing and working on the right things.”  I took 3 vacation days in 2020 and spent every weekend analyzing data and preparing presentations to show how important my work was.  My boss didn’t request that I work that hard, and many times he told me to relax, but I knew I was doing the right thing.  At the end of the year, my project was still a small-scale research project.  Along the way, I got help from some amazing people that saw how important the project could be, and I had a great team supporting me.  I convinced some people it was important, but it wasn’t utilized the way I thought it should be.  I was out of ideas and burnt out.  I told myself that I did everything I could and it wasn’t up to me now.  I would scale back and relax but keep working to produce a very small amount of helpful data.  I requested a few weeks off from work… and then it happened.  I had one day off when a news story about the virus exploded.  Suddenly, the work that I had done was being shared with and talked about by people that could do what I wanted to do for a year. Everyone saw that my project and the data I had produced was critical to ending the pandemic.  My abundance came, in a bigger way than I ever imagined.

When I was a kid I had some “sciencey” dreams about making the world a better place.  What the project I lead did and continues to do, was far beyond anything I ever dreamed of.  It was surreal.  I had some of the leading experts in the field saying the data my group was putting out was the best data they had and it was making the world a better and safer place.  It still doesn’t feel real.  I look at people I went to school with and people I’ve worked with and they have amazing careers and got promoted more often than I have, and have done cool things.  They deserved all those things, too.  They actually tried to develop their career.  Sometimes I would get jealous or compare myself to those people.  There was no comparison though.  I never tried to make myself better at my job. I got stronger in the weight room, I rescued more dogs, I fought better on the gym mats, I went on adventures, I did everything I thought was fun… except develop my career because it wasn’t fun and I was lazy.

I only started trying to develop my career a year or two ago, and seeing how things turned out, I can’t regret anything.  What if I had a better job?  I would have had this cool job, making more money or having this cool title, but I wouldn’t have been able to do what I did and it would have killed me.  The reason I was able to do this project no one else could was because of where I was, both in my career and in my life.  The company that I worked at was the only company in the US that had access to what I needed to get good information. If I was working anywhere else, I wouldn’t have been able to do what I did.   The project required that I sacrifice a large chunk of my life because of how much work needed to be done.  If I had already been working on my career I would not have been as thirsty for progress as I was and wouldn’t have put in the necessary time.  If I hadn’t dealt with a bunch of narcissists I would not have gone out of my way to develop all the social and emotional tools needed to lead and coordinate with all of the teams involved with the project.

I didn’t accept abundance for a very long time.  I’m still trying to understand if that was a good thing or a bad thing, and I can’t.  What I can understand is that I’m happy that I finally did start to accept abundance because I got more abundance than I ever dreamed possible. It’s not over yet.  I accept abundance in all the good things in life and at this point, I can’t begin to imagine what kind of abundance will come my way next.