Mining Scarcity for Purpose-Driven Seeds

As I’ve wrapped up each step in this process of Making the Best of YOUR Bad Situations, I’ve closed with five questions geared at challenging you to mine your similar experiences for the seeds of equal or greater benefit - and I’m about to do that here as well. Before that, though, I’ll detail one of the greatest professional benefits I can point to from living through the Wells Fargo shit-show.

I’ve worked with some amazing executives during my career. The best of those were always focused on providing opportunities for their team members to succeed over the long haul. In my last few full time roles, I reported directly to the owners of the companies and was routinely able to provide input on fiduciary decisions. Each of those companies offered 401(k) plans with substantial matching percentages. The owners genuinely cared about their team members’ long term financial well-being. Having human resources responsibility in each of those organizations, employees occasionally approached me about options for borrowing against or withdrawing money from their 401(k) accounts. When drafting the initial plan summary documents outlining how the 401(k) would be administered, the owners of each company had expressly prohibited either, with the exception of extreme hardship cases (which was very tightly defined).

I’ll never claim to be Dave Ramsey, Jr., but living through our near-foreclosure experience allowed me to relate to the scenarios many of those employees were facing in ways a lot of the executives I’ve worked for over the years just couldn’t connect with. I knew all too well what it was like to send a house payment check on the last possible day and pray we could get enough money in the account by the time it was processed. I also understood that an early withdrawal from a 401(k) had a 10% penalty, but that was still far less than the often well over 20% interest rate on a credit card or the risk of resorting to a pay-day loan. At least with the option to borrow from their account, they’d avoid the penalties and they’d be paying themselves back. I’m not making a case for or against how those owners had structured their plans, but having lived through similar experiences allowed me to show a kind of empathy with those employees when they needed it most.

As I’ve suggested repeatedly to this point, each minor adversity we experience early on can provide us with the experience we’ll need to effectively navigate more significant adversities later on - if we allow them to. That’s where mining for every possible seed comes into play. As we close this look at the grind of scarcity, here are five questions I’ll challenge you to work through in mining your scarcity for purpose-driven seeds:

1. What resource failure (financial, time, or material) still carries weight for you?
2. What blind spot or habit did it reveal, and what seed of greater purpose (e.g., mastery of detail) was hidden?
3. How could a decisive pivot strengthen your definiteness of plans or self-control?
4. In what ways might nurturing this seed improve your influence without title—at home or work?
5. What three small, immediate actions can you take this week to plant and nurture it?

As I’ve suggested previously, invest the time to detail your responses to each. Then share one immediate action step you can take with someone who will hold you accountable. If you can’t identify that person right away, reach out! I’ll help. Targeted reflection turns the grind of scarcity into leadership gold—start building purpose-driven strength now. The effort you put into this will make a tremendous difference when - not IF - you encounter professional setbacks, and we’ll pick up there soon.