There’s a kind of wrong belief that does more damage than the others, and it does it unseen.
It’s not a belief about yourself. Those you argue with. This one is a belief about the world, and it arrives sounding like a plain fact about how things are.
There are no good clients in my field. Nobody can do this to my standard. People like me don’t get those opportunities. There’s no time.
Say any of those out loud to a friend and they might push back. Say them silently, to yourself, in the shower, and they go straight through unchallenged. They don’t feel like opinions. They feel like the weather.
I’ve got very little patience for this belief, mostly because I’ve watched it cost good people years.
From the outside it never looks like fear. It looks like realism, even wisdom, and the person holding it usually thinks they’re the only one in the room seeing clearly. That’s what makes it so hard to talk anyone out of.
What is imaginary scarcity?
Imaginary scarcity is the belief that a resource you need is unavailable, held without evidence, and treated as settled.
The resource can be anything. Clients, talent, time, opportunity, publishers, attention, money. What makes it imaginary isn’t that the resource is abundant. Sometimes it’s scarce. What makes it imaginary is that you haven’t checked, and you’re behaving as though you have.
The key word in that definition is unavailable. Difficult, competitive and expensive all leave room to try. Unavailable means there’s no point in trying, and that’s the conclusion that ends the search before it starts.
This is a cousin of the sunk cost fallacy, which I covered in the last piece in this series. Sunk cost keeps you in something because of what you already spent.
Imaginary scarcity keeps you out of something because of what you assume you’d find. One traps you inside a bad decision and the other stops you making a decision at all, and the second is harder to notice because nothing is happening.
Why does scarcity feel like a fact instead of a fear?
Because fear doesn’t announce itself. It borrows the grammar of observation.
Compare two sentences. I’m afraid to look for better clients because I might find out I can’t get them. And: There are no good clients in this field.
They produce the same behavior. Only one of them is uncomfortable to say. So the mind supplies the second one, and it arrives fully formed, in the voice of someone who has considered the matter.
The same machinery sits behind most cognitive distortions. The belief that protects you from an unpleasant experiment presents itself as the reason the experiment is unnecessary.
And because it’s stated as a fact about the world instead of a feeling about yourself, there’s nothing in it to argue with. You would have to go and check. That’s the exact thing the belief exists to prevent.
How does imaginary scarcity make your decisions for you?
Unseen, and in the negative. That’s why it leaves no trace.
A decision you make shows up somewhere. You chose one thing over another and can point at the moment. A decision made by imaginary scarcity shows up as an absence. The email you didn’t send. The rate you didn’t quote. The person you didn’t hire because nobody would do it properly. The manuscript you didn’t submit anywhere after the third rejection, because clearly there’s no market.
Nothing happened, so there’s nothing to review. A year later the outcome looks like circumstance instead of choice.
What I can’t stand about imaginary scarcity is this. It never has to defend itself, because nothing it prevented ever shows up to testify. The writer who never queried an agent ends up with a manuscript in a drawer, a story about the market that nobody ever checked, and no rejection letter to be angry about.
And the belief is self-confirming in the most efficient way available. It stops you looking, so you gather no contrary evidence, so the belief goes unchallenged, so you keep not looking. Contact with reality eventually corrects most false beliefs. This one removes the contact.
Imaginary scarcity removes the contact with reality that would correct it, so the loop never breaks on its own.
The version that costs the most
The most expensive form I’ve seen, in my own work and in the businesses of people I write for, is the one about other people. Nobody can do this to my standard. It sounds like high standards. It’s often held by people who do have high standards. That’s what makes it so persuasive from the inside. And the consequence is that you keep doing everything, because delegating means accepting work that will be worse, and you’ve already established that it’ll be worse.
What’s missing is the check. Talented people obviously exist, so the question is how many you’ve looked at, how you looked, and what you offered them. I tell people who say nobody can meet their standard to count the candidates before they defend the standard. The number is almost always embarrassingly small.
Someone who has interviewed forty people and found nobody suitable has information. Someone who has interviewed two and concluded the pool is empty has a feeling with a sample size attached. Those look identical when stated as a sentence. The cost isn’t a bad hire avoided. The cost is years of doing work you shouldn’t be doing, at the price of the work only you can do.
How do you test for imaginary scarcity?
Three questions, and they’re deliberately boring, because the belief survives on drama and dies on specifics.
What have I done to prove this is true? Not what do I believe, and not what happened once. What did I do, when, and what came back. If the answer is nothing, the belief is a prediction and not a finding, and predictions can be wrong without anyone being at fault.
Where have I looked? Name the places. If the list is short, or is one place, or is a place you already suspected would be empty, the search didn’t test the claim. Looking for clients only among people who already contacted you tells you nothing about clients.
What have I tried more than once? This is the question that catches most people, myself included. One attempt is an anecdote. A thing tried once, poorly, while braced for failure, and abandoned, doesn’t constitute evidence about the world. It constitutes evidence about that afternoon.
Write the answers down instead of thinking them. Thinking them lets you skate. Written down, the gap between what you believe and what you’ve checked is visible in a way it never is in your head.
| Question | What to answer | Warning sign |
|---|---|---|
| What have I done to prove this is true? | What you did, when, and what came back | Answer is nothing: it’s a prediction, not a finding |
| Where have I looked? | Name the places | The list is short, one place, or one you expected empty |
| What have I tried more than once? | Count real repeated attempts | One try, braced for failure, is evidence about that afternoon |
Why is scarcity thinking hard to see in yourself?
Because the belief is doing its job.
Every other cognitive trap leaves something to notice. Sunk cost leaves the mounting cost. Confirmation bias leaves the contrary evidence you skipped past. Imaginary scarcity leaves nothing, because its entire function is to prevent the activity that would generate the evidence.
From inside, it doesn’t feel like avoidance. It feels like realism, like being one of the few people clear-eyed enough to see that the thing everyone else is chasing isn’t there.
That’s the sign, incidentally. If a belief about limited opportunity comes with a small feeling of superiority for having seen through the illusion, look harder at it. Honest assessments of a difficult market don’t usually feel good.
The person who can see it for you
The reliable fix is another person, and the right kind of person.
A thing tried once, poorly, while braced for failure, and abandoned, doesn’t constitute evidence about the world.
Find someone two or three years ahead of you in the same work. Not a mentor with a decade on you, whose situation is far enough from yours that the advice arrives as philosophy. Two or three years. Close enough to remember the specifics, far enough to have already crossed the thing you’re standing in front of. Tell them plainly what you think is holding you back. All of it, including the parts you wouldn’t say publicly. Then let them tell you which parts are made up. They’ll know immediately, because they held the same belief eighteen months ago and found out it was wrong. The trap is invisible from inside and obvious from two steps ahead, and the whole value of the conversation sits in that asymmetry. Most of what people are buying when they hire a coach is this, and it’s available free from anyone slightly ahead of you who will take the call.
How does imaginary scarcity hold writers back?
The forms it takes in this business are so common they read as conventional wisdom.
Nobody buys books in my genre. Agents aren’t taking on anyone new. There’s no audience for this. I don’t have time to write. Nobody would want to read about my career. Every one of these might be true in a specific case, and someone who has run no test at all usually asserts every one of them.
The book version is the one I meet most. A person with thirty years of hard-won expertise, certain that the market for what they know is empty, having never once described the book to a single potential reader. The market research consisted of imagining the market.
It’s also the thing I catch in manuscripts. That’s where this connects to the fallacies a ghostwriter watches for in nonfiction. An author states that something can’t be done, builds three chapters on it, and never establishes it. The reader feels the missing floor even when they can’t name it.
Using it deliberately in fiction
The reason this belongs in a fiction writer’s toolkit is that imaginary scarcity is a superb engine for a character who’s stuck without being passive.
A character who says I cannot is whining. A character who says there’s nothing out there is doing something more interesting, because they’re wrong in a way they can’t see, and the reader can see it. That gap is where dramatic irony lives.
It also gives you a clean structural turn. The character doesn’t need to become braver or better. They need one piece of contrary evidence, delivered by someone who has no reason to lie, and everything they built on the assumption collapses at once. That’s the same move Will McTighe describes when a founder he admired named the pattern over dinner, and it works in fiction for the same reason it works in life: the belief was never solid, it was just unexamined.
Give the correction to a character with standing, keep it to one line, and don’t have the protagonist accept it immediately. People don’t. They argue, go away, and change their behavior a week later.
My take
Most of the scarcity you believe in, you’ve never tested. Call somebody two or three years ahead of you and tell them what you think is stopping you, including the parts you wouldn’t say publicly. They’ll spot the made-up parts immediately. It’s free, and it’s most of what people pay a coach for. If you’re sitting on a book because you’re sure nobody wants it, describe it to one real reader first.
The question that ends it
When you catch yourself stating a limit as a fact, ask the smallest possible version of the test.
How would I know if I were wrong?
If you can’t describe the evidence that would change your mind, what you’re holding is a wall you built yourself, and calling it a conclusion doesn’t make it one. I think this belief has killed more books than bad reviews, rejection letters and slow sales put together, and every one of those books died without anyone finding out whether it would have sold.
The rest of this series covers the reasoning failures that show up in writing and in argument, and if the thing your scarcity belief is keeping you from is the book, that’s the work I do.
Walls you built yourself still stop you. Don’t Live in Fear is about seeing them and getting past them, starting with a job I lost to one.
