Abundance vs Scarcity Mindset: How One Habit Made Wahei a Billionaire

Most advice on the abundance vs scarcity mindset misses the mechanism. Your unconscious is filtering "reality" 24/7, and most people never realise their filters were preset before they could choose.

Let's play a 30-second game first.

Spend 10 seconds identifying everything around you that is green.

Now find everything that is white for the next 10 seconds.

Finally, identify everything that is blue for the next 10 seconds.

Now pause. You'll notice some objects you had previously overlooked. Familiar things start to look different. Subtleties you'd never registered before begin to appear.

This is your unconscious filter at work — and the same mechanism is deciding whether you live in scarcity or abundance.

What is the scarcity mindset?

The scarcity mindset is the unconscious filter that treats resources, opportunities, and love as fundamentally limited. It was usually preset by environment — a household where money was tight, attention was conditional, or threat was constant. The filter persists long after the conditions change.

What is the abundance mindset?

The abundance mindset is the filter that treats resources, opportunities, and love as available — not always immediately, but available in principle. It isn't toxic positivity. It's an unconscious orientation that lets you actually see opportunity instead of editing it out.

Through the looking-glass

We do not perceive reality as it is.

Our unconscious is filtering the "reality" we see 24/7. It presets these filters to show us the reality we expect to see based on our past experiences.

If you grew up hearing "there's never enough money," your unconscious will set scarcity as the default filter. This becomes the primary lens through which you view life — resources feel limited and everything becomes a zero-sum game.

If you grew up in a traumatic environment where your unconscious was constantly scanning for danger, your mind will likely remain on high alert. Even when you are no longer in that environment, you might still scan for threats rather than joy and peace.

Similarly, if you have known love as something painful throughout your life, your unconscious will set this as the default filter and effectively block you from experiencing love as anything other than pain.

Like the colour-filter game, if you have filters for blue, you are more likely to see blue objects and overlook the rest of the world.

If you have filters for scarcity, danger, pain, or problems, you are more likely to see and experience those same things as a result.

Until you reset the filters, you cannot experience reality in any other way.

Why your unconscious filters keep you stuck

The primary job of the unconscious isn't to make you successful or happy. It's to keep you safe.

To the unconscious, "safe" means familiar.

This means keeping the filters on so you are protected from ever being hurt the same way again.

Just because a filter kept you safe in the past doesn't mean it's serving who you've become or who you want to become. It just means it's the only operating system your brain has ever known.

Imagine one day you touched something green and it burned you. Your unconscious made a note: green is dangerous. From that point on, it filtered green out of your reality.

Now you can no longer see the grass, the trees, the garden outside your window.

Entire dimensions of the world simply edited out — because something green hurt you once.

Is that really how you want to experience reality?

Wahei Takeda: the billionaire who talks to trees

Before he became the Warren Buffett of Japan, Wahei Takeda talked to trees, birds, and rocks. He even spoke to the cookies coming off the production line at his confectionery factory.

He played music singing Arigato — the Japanese word for thank you — while the cookies were being produced. Each cookie would have heard a million thank yous before it reached the hand of a child.

In 1943, Wahei was a ten-year-old boy who had been evacuated from Nagoya to rural Fukui Prefecture. While there, he was bullied and discriminated against as an outsider.

There was plenty of evidence from his environment growing up that could have preset his filters to see scarcity, cruelty, and the worst in people. He could have kept those lenses, and most people would have. But he looked at the same evidence and made a different decision.

He decided to see differently.

He chose to see abundance where the world had shown him scarcity, and gratitude where it had offered him grievance.

Wahei has one daily ritual.

Every morning, before breakfast, he says thank you hundreds of times — sometimes reaching as many as one thousand repetitions.

That daily practice, accumulated across a lifetime, made him one of the wealthiest investors in Japanese history.

Wahei did not become grateful because his life was abundant. His life became abundant because he practised gratitude before there was any obvious reason to feel it.

He reset the filters first. Reality followed.

What the research actually shows

Paul McKenna, one of the UK's top hypnotherapists, interviewed hundreds of the richest people globally. Ken Honda, a Japanese author and millionaire, interviewed over 12,000 millionaires and billionaires in Japan and abroad to understand the secrets of financial success and happiness.

They both found the same insight:

Not all rich people are happy. Most aren't.

But the ones who are both rich and happy share one thing in common:

They have an abundance mindset.

They've reset their filters to see reality as full of abundance — not just in wealth, but in all areas of life. They aren't stuck in a victim mindset, blaming their past, others, or the world for unconsciously presetting their filters.

They made the choice to change their filters, so they could experience reality differently.

They take control of their own reality.

And so can you. But first, you have to see the filters.

What colour have you been filtering out without knowing it?

How to shift from scarcity to abundance (the 7-day experiment)

Forget affirmations, vision boards, and manifestation worksheets. The fastest way to actually shift from scarcity to abundance is to give your unconscious new evidence — repeatedly, until the filter starts to update.

The experiment:

For the next seven days, say thank you to 100 things daily, ideally as soon as you wake up.

That's it.

Not 100 things you're grateful for in the abstract. 100 specific things, named out loud or written down. The pillow under your head. The hot water that comes out of the tap. The fact your phone charged overnight. The breath you just took.

The point isn't to feel grateful. The point is to give your unconscious 100 daily data points that abundance is real and locatable.

After a week, notice what's changed in what you see — not what you think.

FAQ

What is the difference between abundance and scarcity mindset?

A scarcity mindset treats resources, opportunities, and love as inherently limited. An abundance mindset treats them as available in principle, even when not immediately accessible. Both are unconscious filters, not personality traits — which means both can be changed.

Can you change a scarcity mindset?

Yes — but slowly, and through evidence rather than affirmations. Affirmations alone often fail because the unconscious dismisses them as wishful thinking. Repeated lived evidence (gratitude practices, noticing where abundance already exists, reframing past memories) updates the filter more reliably.

How long does it take to develop an abundance mindset?

Most people notice subtle shifts within 2–3 weeks of consistent gratitude practice. Deeper unconscious filters can take 60–90 days of repeated practice to update meaningfully. Wahei Takeda did it for 80+ years — and his fortune was the byproduct, not the goal.

Is the abundance mindset just toxic positivity?

No. Toxic positivity denies hardship and bypasses real emotion. The abundance mindset doesn't deny scarcity exists — it acknowledges it AND chooses to see what else is also true. Wahei wasn't pretending poverty wasn't real in 1943. He was choosing what to do with the evidence in front of him.

Why do most rich people lack an abundance mindset?

Because wealth alone doesn't update the filter. If your scarcity filter was installed at age six, no amount of money in your bank account at 50 will change what your unconscious lets you see. The wealthy-and-happy are wealthy because they updated the filter, not the other way around.

Continue the work

"We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are." — The Talmud

This piece is about the filter. The deeper work is understanding why your unconscious chose the filter in the first place.

• Tap into the Power of the Unconscious — the broader pillar this sits inside.
• Why High Achievers Self-Sabotage — when the abundance filter is fighting an older belief that success isn't safe.
• Self-Development & Personal Growth — for the reading list past the bookstore basics.

With love,

Ginny Wan