Your worst fear: what happens if I lose everything? A striking scenario where you have nothing except for a couple of dollars in your pocket and the clothes on your back. What do you do? How do you survive? You have no job, no income, no support system. Only yourself. What do you do?
This is a harrowing scenario. Painful to think about and often a nightmare scenario for most, if not all, of the population. However, what if I told you that there was a way out. A way to survive even the darkest of situations, where there seems to be no hope, no light, and no way out. This way out is what I call the "One Pen Mindset".
Imaging that during your despair, you walk into a grocery store. Inside this grocery store, you find your way to the pen aisle. In the pen aisle you see a pack of pens for 50 cents. You pause, having come across a seemingly absurd idea. What if that pack of pens was not worth 50 cents, but one million dollars. Or even two million dollars.
As the reader, I'm sure this does seem absurd. If you have two dollars in your pocket why would you spend it on pens? Allow me to explain.
A pen has utility, in other words, it is universally useful. Now imagine if you could take that pen and trade it for something worth more money, say a school binder. Say you then sell that binder for 5 dollars. The pen cost you pennies and you have extracted 5 dollars worth of value from pennies worth of pen. You have grown value. Say you were to take this a step further and buy a pack of water bottles with that 5 dollars, and then sell each water individual bottle. You have then grown the value yet again.
Take another example:
In the US power grid there are a type of electrical power plant known as a black start plant. What most people do not know is that large power plants require electricity to start up. Ironic, right? Imagine that there is an event where the entire electric grid goes dark. No power at all. How do the power plants start back up if there is no electricity to start them? This is where the black start generators come in. Black start generators are designed to start up without electricity, and are often co-located with larger power plants. These generators can then parlay the necessary electricity to get the bigger plants online and restore power to the entire grid piece by piece.
The principle between the examples is the same. Taking one one tiny candle and lighting a roaring fire. Parlaying what you have into what you want. Turning nothing into something. This is the One Pen Mindset. When you are lost and don't know what to do, stop. Take inventory of what you CAN do. Look at what is in your control and what isn't. Look at what you have and forget the rest. Then, work with what you have. Mold it, shape it, parlay it into something better. Next, work within the bounds of the new situation you have created. Grow that. Shape that. Parlay that. Work within your means, quietly expanding what you have.
This is the One Pen Mindset.