The Biology of Becoming, Part III: The Nervous System of Abundance

Just how the heck does one create psychological safety around a topic as loaded as wealth?

For many people, money – and its close cousins time, energy, and attention – arrives wrapped in emotion. Anxiety, guilt, confusion. Long-held family stories and fears we don’t even have the words for sometimes. Even the “everyone seems to be on vacation but me” comparison game is just part of life now. And in more cases than we like to admit, this stems from and even produces real trauma.

But when you strip the story down to its biological essentials, most of those emotions collapse into two forces:

Fear and goals.

In the language of wealth, those two forces show up as scarcity and abundance. And here’s the important part: while circumstances differ wildly, mindset can be trained. This is why so often I use the word Jedi in every day speak. Becoming a Jedi isn’t about positive thinking, rather it’s about understanding how the nervous system actually works – and then designing environments and goals that work with it, instead of against it.

Why fear feels louder than abundance

Left to its own devices, the human brain is not neutral. It is biased.

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky demonstrated this decades ago with what we now call loss aversion: we feel the pain of losses roughly TWO TIMES more than we feel the pleasure of equivalent gains. Lose $100, it hurts. Gain $100, it barely registers in the same way.

But as you may have guessed, this wasn’t a design flaw but an evolutionary advantage.

For most of human history, missing a threat could mean death, where missing an opportunity might mean inconvenience. So our nervous systems evolved to record negative events more deeply than positive ones, to scan for danger, and to avoid uncertainty. That wiring kept us alive when the threats were lions and bears.

But as Steven Kotler often reminds us, our brains are still running organic software designed thousands of years ago, now dropped into a modern economy that operates on very different rules. Instead of dodging predators, we are dodging attention traps, fear-inspiring headlines, algorithmic persuasion, and corporate incentives optimized for profit but which in no way do they give a hoot about our long-term wellbeing.

Modern humans must become something closer to Jedi – capable of recognizing and resisting mind tricks – because our biology didn’t evolve for a world of 24-hour news cycles, infinite scrolling, or constant financial signaling.

Before any growth can happen, the nervous system must feel safe enough to explore. It’s a physiological requirement. A system in chronic threat doesn’t learn, plan, gather, allocate, protect or build. It narrows. It conserves. It goes back into the cave until the threat passes.

That means if money, time, or attention have ever felt unsafe to you, your hesitation isn’t resistance – it’s intelligence. So this brings me to the statement that growth doesn’t begin with courage, rather it begins with nervous system regulation.

This is where I personally find fairy tales become unexpectedly useful – to me they are like a link to the past that shows us how to see through the noise and access the signal.

The Brave Little Tailor: acting before certainty

When I was thinking about the concept for this article, the only fable that came to mind came in the words “he killed seven giants in one blow!” After researching where that line came from, I was reminded it was the Grimm tale The Brave Little Tailor, about a humble tailor kills seven flies with one blow. He stitches the phrase – “Seven at one blow” – onto his belt. The village assumes he means giants.

Here’s the crucial detail: the tailor doesn’t correct them. Not because he’s deceitful, but because he acts anyway.

The giants he faces later are terrifying only because of the story projected onto them. The nervous system lesson is subtle but profound: fear inflates threats before evidence arrives. Scarcity tells us we must wait – wait for credentials, confidence, certainty, permission.

But abundance, like the mindset of the brave little tailor, it does something different. The abundance mindset says move first. Test. Adjust. Learn. It’s not binary, it’s iterative.

Neurochemically, this matters. When we commit to a meaningful direction – even before proof – dopamine doesn’t fire as pleasure, it fires as fuel. It signals this is worth pursuing. Norepinephrine sharpens focus. Attention narrows. The nervous system shifts from scanning for threats to acting with drive and intention.

See how this works: it’s backwards. The tailor doesn’t become powerful because he defeated giants. He defeats giants because his nervous system stopped treating uncertainty as danger.

The fact that you are wired for wealth lies in the Jedi-like management of your nervous system. Another wickedly amazing move in the Biology of Becoming.

Jack and the Beanstalk: defining “enough”

Before we tap out for today, I want to hit on another concept I have long carried as one of the principles of building wealth, because abundance has a second lesson – one that often gets missed. This is the one I call the concept of “enough.”

In Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack climbs into a world of extraordinary wealth. The giant at the top of that beanstalk hoards gold, livestock, and magic. Jack succeeds not simply because he accesses abundance – but because he takes what is needed and brings it back down the beanstalk into circulation.

The giant, by contrast, has no concept of enough. Do you know any people like that? Name one among them who is truly deeply happy? I’ll wait.

This is where many modern wealth stories quietly break down. Without a definition of “enough,” accumulation never settles the nervous system. Cortisol stays elevated. The goalpost keeps moving. There is nothing I loathe more than a goalpost that keeps moving. More becomes a stress response rather than a strategy.

Biologically, “enough” is a serotonin signal. Would you look at that – declaring something as enough produces feel good chemicals. It communicates sufficiency, safety, and status stability. When serotonin is chronically low, the system chases more – more money, more certainty, more protection – without relief.

So the next time you feel it or see it, remind yourself that hoarding is not greed. It is unresolved fear. Jack restores balance by returning resources home – back to relationship, community, purpose. This is abundance with boundaries. Wealth that moves instead of stagnates in the hands of someone or something that needs to do the work.

Scarcity, abundance, and psychological safety

So how do we create psychological safety around wealth? Well, first off I suggest we stop moralizing and start biologizing. I can’t tell you how many people I have advised and coached who get very wrapped up in the root of their scarcity mindset as if it was a character flaw. It’s not. It’s a nervous system state. Abundance is not reckless optimism it’s a trained pattern of attention, action, and restraint. Growth follows safety the way learning follows rest.

And importantly abundance is not the absence of struggle. Struggle is the activation code.

When a goal is intrinsically meaningful – aligned with autonomy, competence, and connection – the nervous system releases a very different chemical mix. Dopamine fuels pursuit. Stress becomes challenge instead of threat. Small wins build evidence: I can do hard things.

This is why goals work – not because they motivate, but because they organize biology regardless of what epoch you’re trying to get ahead in. It works for David, Neo, Jack and The Little Tailor.

But still, there is the modern Jedi problem

Here’s the uncomfortable truth Steven Kotler points toward again and again: our biology is ancient, but our environment is not. Advertisers, platforms, and corporations understand our dopamine loops better than most of us do. They profit when attention fragments, when fear spikes, when scarcity stories run unchecked.

So cracking the nervous system code and move towards abundance today requires something new. Not more information – but better filters for all the information we get whether we want it or not. And we don’t need bigger goals, we need ones that are actually ours. And finally we don’t have to grind 24/7 to become wealthy, we just need to get serious as a house on fire about being super intentional about the direction in which we are moving.

The Jedi skill is discernment: choosing where your 120-ish bits of conscious attention actually go. Naming what your money, time, energy, and attention are for. Deciding when to act like the tailor and when to be like Jack.

From Tailor to Beanstalk: the arc of becoming

The Biology of Becoming is not about arriving – heck I hope I never arrive. Once I learned how satisfying climbing and forward motion is with Jedi like command of your nervous system, this becomes a most enjoyable infinite game. It’s about sequencing, and each new challenge I take on, I follow this pattern:

1. First, cultivate Tailor energy: practice courage before certainty. Start moving before you feel ready, because abundance stems from forward motion.
2. Then, stay vigilant for that moment when Beanstalk wisdom strikes. You have to define enough. It’s not only important for your nervous system, but in my opinion, if more uber wealthy people and corporations allowed wealth to circulate, more people would have enough.

This arc builds psychological safety because it respects your biology. It doesn’t put the shame label on feelings of fear, it retrains the nervous system what to do with that fear. It designs around loss aversion, and instead of asking us to overpower ancient wiring, it says hey, I see you, but can we use our ancient wiring wisely.

And when we do, fear quiets, focus gets sharper, and things start to align. We feel good inside our nervous system, and that same nervous system has accumulated positive wealth. And all this didn’t happen because we changed the world or made it safer, but because we learned how to become resource-rich in a world that profits from our distraction.

That’s abundance. Created by a nervous system that knows when to act – and when it has enough.

P.S. If you’d like to go deeper into the ideas behind this essay, I highly recommend:

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. I like this one because it clearly explains
loss aversion, bias, and why our brains feel pain from losses far more intensely than joy from gains.

The Art of Impossible by Steven Kotler. The BEST book I have ever read about
how modern humans can refocus ancient biology for growth, purpose, and peak performance in a world that seems designed to derail. Yuge fan 😉

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Written by the granddaddy of flow this is all about how meaningful challenge, focus, and skill offer us deep engagement and long-term satisfaction.

Drive by Daniel H. Pink. An accessible synthesis of motivation science, showing why autonomy, mastery, and purpose matter more than external rewards.

The Brave Little Tailor and Jack and the Beanstalk. As you can see from my recent articles, I think in story. Movies, fables, TV series – you name it. In this case, read them not as children’s stories, but as psychological maps of fear, courage, abundance, and restraint.

Breadcumb recap: goals that are yours | breathe into the struggle | action leads the way | define enough.