There's a charge nobody quotes you upfront.
A person you keep talking to every month, for years, as if you are playing a role in a game that you signed up for long ago but it doesn't bring you any value.
I didn't notice the deduction for a long time. I kept thinking the drag was mine — a motivation problem, a focus problem, something a better morning routine would fix. It wasn't. It was a proximity problem.
Scarcity mindsets are a slow tax on your momentum, and you rarely see the receipt.
How it works
"You are the average of the five people closest to you" gets quoted as inspiration. Curate your circle. Raise your average.
The advice isn't wrong. But it frames the problem as an upgrade when the real issue is a leak.
A scarcity mindset — the belief that wins and luck are finite, that someone else's gain is your loss — doesn't stay with the person who holds it. It radiates. It sits in the half-second pause before someone responds to your good news. It's in "but what if it doesn't work?" landing three seconds after you describe something you're excited about. It's in how the conversation dies when you talk about expanding and comes alive when you talk about quitting.
You absorb more of it than you think.
Not because you're weak. Because you're wired to read the room — it kept us alive. The same calibration that makes you good at reading people makes you permeable to their worldview. Spend enough time with someone who believes the pie is fixed and you start cutting smaller slices for yourself without deciding to.
That's the tax. Not a lump sum. Recurring. A few percent off every week, compounding.
The other kind of room
The frame I keep coming back to is one I wrote down on a slow morning: life is a positive-sum expansion game.
Positive-sum means the pie grows. Your win doesn't shrink my slice — it might make it bigger. The expansion game means the point is to keep building, not protect what's on the table.
Spend time with people genuinely playing that game and something shifts. They ask "how do we make this work?" before "what could go wrong?" They celebrate your wins without the delay that tells you they're running the math. They pull you forward.
Many of us wished to find these mentors in our family, in a father or older brother perhaps — I didn't. My mentor came out of an unexpected working relationship and turned out to be the best pushing relationship ever. You know someone is with you the moment you tell them you want to change something for the better but you are afraid, and they simply say: "I think you should do it, you have it in you." And sometimes that's all we need, really. We think asking for permission is not what a real man does. However, sometimes what each of us needs is simply an encouraging word — whether fully meant or not, it can have a huge impact on us.
Once you've felt the difference, you start noticing the tax in real time. The slight heaviness after certain calls. Leaving some rooms quieter than you arrived.
Audit the recurring charges
I'm not saying cut everyone who carries fear. That's everyone, including you on a bad week. Scarcity thinking is a fear response, not a character flaw.
But some charges have been running longer than you noticed. The most expensive ones are with the people you see most often — a close friend, a business partner, a peer group you've never officially joined but effectively belong to. The weekly coffee that leaves you vaguely flat. The group chat where the reflex to good news is "yeah but."
Three questions worth sitting with:
After time with this person, do I have more energy or less?
Not excitement — the kind of energy you build things with.
Do I leave wanting to push harder, or wanting to be more careful?
Some caution is signal. If it's always caution, that's the tax.
Have I quietly stopped sharing certain things with this person?
You've already felt the charge. You're just routing around it.
You don't owe anyone proximity. How you allocate closeness shapes your output as much as how you allocate your hours.
The compounding problem
A small drag doesn't just cost you today. It costs you the compounded future of the projects that don't start, the risks that don't get taken, the conviction that never gets strong enough to act on.
A recurring -2% on your momentum doesn't look like much in a week. Over years it's the difference between the thing getting built and the thing staying in the notebook.
The people who build the most interesting things usually have this in common: at some point they found one or two people genuinely playing the expansion game. Not always mentors. Not investors. Just people whose worldview made more feel possible, not less.
For me it was meeting a friend who was running a startup in the meditation and wellness space while carrying a luggage of two failed startups. Before that I had only seen people with this expansion view in movies and such — never really in real life. Meeting him and being close to him expanded my view more than reading tens of books or listening to hundreds of podcasts might have ever done.
The positive-sum game isn't naive. It's not ignoring risk. It's believing the table can be bigger — and spending most of your time with people who believe that too.
Audit the recurring charges. Some are worth paying. Most have been running longer than you noticed.