Living A Life of Abundance

Abundance is not something you hold; it is something you stand inside.
Photo: Jared Erondu

I want to make a case for a particular definition of abundance — not the accumulation of money or possessions, which is the definition most readily available, but a state arrived at by three commitments, each one harder than the last: acting on your highest passion, sustaining that action for as long as it takes, and trusting, without needing proof in advance, that the state itself is what produces the return.

Acting On One’s Passion

Most of us walk a road someone else chose. The first commitment is to notice there was ever a choice.
Photo: Niklas Hamann

The first commitment is to notice which passion is actually calling you, and to go far enough with it that the noticing turns into something real. This sounds almost too simple to be worth stating, and yet most people, spend their energy on passions borrowed from somewhere else — from what looks impressive, from what a parent or a culture rewarded, from whatever produced approval the last time it was tried. Alfred Adler’s teleological view of human motivation, as Kishimi and Koga present it in The Courage to be Disliked, is useful here: we are not pushed helplessly by our past causes, we are pulled by the purposes we choose. A passion that calls you to act is a purpose you have actually chosen, as opposed to one you have merely inherited.

There is a philosophical undercurrent to this that I think is worth surfacing rather than leaving implicit. Nietzsche’s polemic in the Genealogy of Morals is, at bottom, an argument that most people live by values they did not create; values handed down, absorbed, and never seriously interrogated. Whatever one makes of his conclusions, the underlying challenge survives them: create your own table of values, or spend your life enacting someone else’s. Acting on your highest passion is, in that sense, a moral act before it is a productivity one. It is the decision to let your own hierarchy of what matters actually govern your hours, rather than borrowing someone else’s hierarchy and calling it your own.

A passion becomes real at the edge where the work absorbs you completely.
Photo: Vitaly Gariev

None of this works, though, if the passion stays a feeling. Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow is the missing mechanism: a passion becomes real the moment it is matched against a task challenging enough to demand your full attention but not so hard that it produces only anxiety. Going far with a passion means finding, and then repeatedly re-finding, that exact edge — the place where the activity absorbs you completely because you have set its difficulty correctly. That absorption is not a bonus feeling that arrives if you are lucky. It is the signal that you are pointed at the right thing.

Sustaining It For as Long As It Actually Takes

The second commitment is the one that defeats most people who cleared the first: acting on the passion once is not the same as acting on it for the length of time required to matter. I have found that the size of the passion is almost never the limiting factor. The limiting factor is whether the acting on it survives an ordinary Tuesday, with no audience, no deadline, and no evidence yet that any of it is working.

The real test is an ordinary Tuesday: no audience, no deadline, no proof yet.
Photo: Tamas Tuzes-Katai

This is where James Clear’s argument in Atomic Habits earns its place in the discussion, because it reframes the problem correctly. You do not rise to the level of your ambition; you fall to the level of your systems. A passion sustained for a long period is not a triumph of willpower repeated indefinitely. I think willpower is a poor tool for anything that has to survive years rather than days. It is a passion that has been converted into an identity with an environment cultivated around it: something you do because of who you have decided you are, supported by a routine that removes the need to decide anew each morning whether today is a day for it. I would put it this way: the passion gets you to start; the identity is what gets you to return.

The Assurance that Changes Everything

The third commitment is the hardest to state carefully, because it borders on a claim I cannot fully prove, and I want to be honest about that rather than dress it up. My own experience, and the testimony of nearly everyone I have read on this subject, points to the same claim: remaining in the state of acting on your highest passion, sustained over time, tends to return more than the effort put in would seem to justify — not occasionally, but as a near-reliable feature of the state itself. I am wary of language like “manifestation,” because it is often used to smuggle in a mechanism — the universe rearranging itself on your behalf — that I have no actual evidence for and am not going to pretend to. What I can defend is a more modest and, I think, more interesting version of the same claim.

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Csikszentmihalyi observed that people who reliably enter flow states (what he called the autotelic personality), do not merely enjoy their work more; they become disproportionately capable across domains that had nothing to do with the original passion, because the same attentional discipline transfers. Kishimi and Koga’s account of contribution and “community feeling” points to a related mechanism from a different angle: when you commit fully to a life task, rather than performing it for approval, you become genuinely useful to other people in ways that create returns you did not plan for and could not have engineered directly. Neither of these is mysticism. Both are compounding — the same idea Clear applies to habits, applied here to the second-order effects of sustained, genuine engagement. The results arrive disproportionate to the visible input because most of the input is invisible: the trust built, the skill quietly compounding, the door that opens only because you happened to already be standing in the room it opened into.

You walk in the dark without proof. Then a door opens, larger, later and from an angle you had not anticipated.
Photo: Nikola Knezevic

So the assurance I actually hold is this: I cannot promise a hundredfold return on any specific timeline, and anyone who does is selling something. What I can say, having tested it against my own record rather than taking it on faith, is that the return has never once been proportional to the effort in the direction I expected — it has been larger, later, and from an angle I had not anticipated, often enough that I have stopped treating it as coincidence. And there the claim should stop, because anything more specific than that would be a promise I have not earned the right to make.

What This Actually Asks of You

To summarise, the three commitments describe something narrower and more demanding than the usual idea of abundance. Living every moment on your highest passion, sustaining that for however long it genuinely takes, and trusting the state itself rather than any particular outcome — this is not a formula for comfort. It is closer to what Adler meant by courage: the willingness to act according to your own chosen purpose without the guarantee of approval, and without the guarantee, on any given day, of visible proof that it is working.

Courage, as Adler meant it: acting on a purpose you chose, without proof on any given day that it is working.
Photo: Mehmet Bozgedik

To me, abundance is not the reward that arrives once the passion, the discipline, and the trust have done their work. It is the name for what it feels like to be inside all three at once. Mastery, stewardship, and the willingness to be accountable for the values you have chosen rather than inherited — these are not separate virtues stacked on top of the passion. They are what the passion looks like once it has been lived in, day after day, for long enough to stop being a feeling and start being a life.