The Secret to American Abundance

And how it can be lost in a generation

I’m in the final stages of editing my Little Book of Big Reasons to Love America; here’s a chapter about American Abundance with tons of fun stories. If you’d like to be added to the waitlist and be the first to know when the book is launched, click here.

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My previous post about my observations from coaching and mentoring Olympic Athletes was well received, so I created a video version with more stories.

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Back to the chapter: A Tapestry of Abundance

We Are The Stories We Tell

"The wealth of America isn't an inventory of goods; it's an organic, living entity, a fragile, pulsing fabric of ideas, expectations, loyalties, moral commitments, and people." - David Brooks

People come to the US for many reasons, but economic opportunity is undeniably at the top of the list. For those who live here, abundance is an expected baseline. Naturally, Americans still complain about financial problems, often forgetting that these are "rich people's problems" as they are most likely in the top 1% globally. It is an extraordinary achievement for a country with just 5% of the world's population to generate an astonishing 24% of the world's Gross Domestic Product.

The combination of favorable geography, lots of land, and ample mineral and agricultural resources is not enough to explain American prosperity. Plenty of countries have similar advantages and no prosperity for the average person to show for it. I believe the secret to American prosperity lies in the collective story told by Americans of who they are as a nation: a land of free markets, industrial strength, technological advances, and exceptional education fueled by an ethos that promotes hard work, innovation, and boundless optimism. These stories celebrate those who aspire to achieve more regardless of their starting point. I am optimistic about America because it has an optimistic cultural narrative.

While intense and complex, our immigration debates are a good problem to have, regardless of the proposed solutions. We are a nation of immigrants trying not to be overwhelmed by the sheer number of new immigrants. We are looking for ways to have fewer people come in while others look for ways to prevent more people from leaving. The many fair and unfair criticisms of America do little to dampen the enthusiasm of those of us who immigrated and know the harsh realities in our home countries pale compared to the downsides of life in the US. By taking the risk, making the move, and investing our talents here, our stories strengthen the American story.

What is Normalized Poverty?

Humans are built for survival; our resilient brains adapt to both poverty and prosperity, creating a familiar new normal. The term for this phenomenon, coined by psychologist Philip Brickman, is Hedonic Adaptation. I can confirm this phenomenon is true. Having experienced poverty, I felt perfectly content and happy in circumstances most people in the West would consider a nightmare scenario. While this survival mechanism is crucial, it becomes detrimental when scarcity is pervasive, stifling our drive for a better future.

I've seen the phenomenon of normalized poverty all over the world. In America, I've worked with the disadvantaged in places like Philadelphia and Los Angeles, where poverty is just a few blocks away from abundance. I've seen it in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, the slums of San Pedro Sula in Honduras, the settlements of Guatemala City, and poor barrios in Mexico City. Our environment dictates our limitations, which is especially terrible when outside forces artificially impose those limitations.

Growing up, it felt normal for me to live in a communal apartment in Soviet Russia. We didn't feel poor because everyone was poor. We shared the apartment with an elderly couple who had one room for the two of them, while we shared two rooms for our family of four. As humble as our circumstances were in the USSR, moving to Mozambique, one of the poorest countries on earth, exposed us to the harsh realities of extreme poverty while our personal fortunes improved.

My father was invited to work in Mozambique, a country in southern Africa that had just gained its independence from Portugal. Mozambique was run by a newly established Marxist government. Already one of the poorest countries in the world, the economy had screeched to a halt as most of the Portuguese who ran key institutions and businesses left. Some left out of fear, but most were just pushed out by the new government that followed the Marxist playbook of nationalizing private businesses. Nationalizing is another word for forcefully taking private property and putting it into the hands of bureaucrats who would then proceed to run into the ground. These companies now belonged to "the people," which is another word for belonging to no one. We moved into a nice duplex with a tropical fruit garden confiscated from some unfortunate family who had to start over somewhere else. The housing conditions and the company car we received were an upgrade from the communal apartment in Moscow.

My father, an engineer, was hired to help rebuild a newly nationalized transportation company with a large fleet of refrigerator trucks. When he got off the plane, the newly appointed head of the company took him to see the large operation. When my father asked where all the people were, the man answered, "Oh, it's just you, me, and the secretary. We have to start this from the ground up."

A year into our life there, a devastating civil war started in the north that lasted five years, costing the small country 1.5 million lives. Most of the violence happened in the north of the country with occasional bombings in the capital, including one across the street from my house. With food, things were complicated. We raised our chickens and got fresh fruit, vegetables, and fish at a local market, but we received food ration cards for bread and rice. All consumer goods had to be purchased abroad. I recently asked my dad why I didn't remember ever going to clothing stores. He told me there were none.

I had to repeat the question because the concept seemed unfathomable to me, and the answer was still the same: the capital city had no stores where we could buy clothing, consumer electronics, or appliances. Our family were avid readers, so we purchased boxes of books at a book fair that happened once a year. We didn't own a TV set for the first few years because there was no television station. Eventually, we bought a small TV set, and my father erected a massive antenna on our roof that would get a faint TV signal from South Africa and a small neighboring kingdom called Swaziland. Compared to most Mozambicans, we had it good. Living in the capital was generally safe and pleasant. Life in rural Mozambique outside of the cities looked as it did a thousand or ten thousand years ago: straw huts, dirt floors, and subsistence farming. The contrast was jarring.

Our social life mostly revolved around the expatriate community of Chilean exiles who came from all over to help build a new country. My mom taught nursing in medical school and later started a kindergarten from the ground up, literally helping architect the actual building, developing a curriculum, and importing furniture and toys for the children. Other members of our community ran gold and silver mines, commercial fisheries, and agricultural projects and taught at the local university. I discovered my love for music singing in a Chilean children's choir. I had a natural singing voice, and my music teacher started to give me solo parts in some of the songs. We performed for the first Mozambican president, Samora Machel, a charismatic who wore the signature Marxist rebel fighter military fatigues popularized by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Years later, he died in a mysterious plane crash over South Africa.

The low-quality TV signal we received might as well have come from a distant planet, not a country on the other side of the world. We watched shows about life in America, a parallel reality we never thought we would experience: cruise ships with smiling, well-dressed people drinking fancy cocktails, futuristic high-rises, beautiful shopping centers, and manicured neighborhoods. This glimpse into another world disrupted my acceptance of poverty as normal. I often wondered: if the people on the screen were just like us, why did they have such different lives? These reflections gradually shaped my decidedly anti-Marxist worldview, rejecting mass poverty imposed by an oppressive ideology and perpetuated by authoritarian governments. Today, what I once saw on TV is my reality. That old life seems as surreal and strange as this life once seemed to me.

De-Normalizing Poverty

We were told a story to maintain the status quo and bridge that gap in this glaring cognitive dissonance. This other life we saw on TV was merely propaganda of an exploitative capitalist system. We were told that capitalism would soon give way to a just and equitable system called socialism, which would inevitably lead to the utopia of Communism. Socialism was the way as it was based on dignity, equality, and prosperity for all people, not just a select few. The reality was that this bright future didn’t seem to be coming any time soon. It was also self-evident that the select few in collectivist countries were the only ones with any upward mobility, and the exploited masses in the West looked pretty well off, which made buying the story problematic. The story didn’t add up.

I carried this rebellious spirit into college after moving to the USSR. Years later, I married my American wife, and we visited my wife’s parents in the US for the Christmas holidays. Although I had visited the US before, being immersed in everyday life for a longer period came with moments of culture shock. Once, my wife Deb wanted to get something for our dog Mocha and took me to PetCo. I knew it was a pet store, but something came over me when I realized how huge that place was. I had an anxiety attack and had to leave the store. Deb followed me into the parking lot, puzzled by my behavior.

I was angry. "You have a supermarket for pets? Do you realize millions have nothing, and you have supermarkets for pets?" Deb nodded, empathizing. "Yep, there are several large chains all over the country. I'm sorry." We laugh at this episode of my adjusting to the reality of what a prosperous society can be.

I am happy to report I now go to PetCo all the time and experience zero anxiety.

Years later, we had already moved to the US. Deb took the family to the town where she grew up—Horicon, Wisconsin, population 3,500. Most people in Wisconsin don't know where Horicon is. Deb showed us around town, and we toured her high school. She was surprised to see me in awe of a town she couldn't wait to escape as a teenager. I was actually moved to tears of gratitude for a country that created prosperity on this level. This place in the middle of nowhere had good roads, beautiful houses, and a high school, which I could only see in movies growing up. These were ordinary people living on a level unfathomable to most people in the world.

I was not the only one both inspired by American prosperity and horrified by normalized poverty created by collectivist ideologies. In 1989,  Boris Yeltsin visited the US as a newly elected member of the Soviet Parliament. He made an unscheduled stop at a Randall's grocery store in Houston, TX, and was overwhelmed by the abundance he saw. He remarked to his entourage that even the Politburo and Mikhail Gorbachev did not have such a selection of food available to them. At first, he suspected this was a staged experience designed to impress him. After learning it was not, and that every American has access to what he saw, he was reportedly deeply troubled.  A simple visit to a grocery store in the US contributed to the market reforms he later introduced as President of Russia. He later wrote:

"When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons, and goods of every possible sort, for the first time, I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people."

Normalizing Abundance

Cuba mastered the playbook of keeping a population hostage in poverty through ideological brainwashing. A textbook example is the story of Orlando "El Duque" Hernández, a Cuban baseball player who helped his country get an Olympic gold medal in 1992. At the peak of his athletic career in Cuba, he was paid $105 a year. Members of the Cuban Olympic team report stuffing their bags with hotel shampoo bottles and soap to bring home to their families. Orlando's half-brother Liván Hernández, also a gifted baseball player, defected to the United States. In the free world, that would be called moving, not in a country that talks about the advantages of Socialism while turning itself into an island prison from which its citizens break out on rafts and makeshift boats with thousands losing their lives trying to get to freedom. To avoid the embarrassment of another potential defection, the Cuban government banned Orlando from playing baseball and launched a smear campaign against him in the press. An elite athlete at the peak of his abilities, he was limited to working as an assistant in a psych ward.

Orlando decided to flee Cuba by boat in December 1997 with several other companions, including his girlfriend and a cousin. They found themselves stranded on a small, uninhabited island in the Bahamas for several days and running out of food and water before being rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard. Orlando was signed by the New York Yankees to a $6 million contract for four years and helped them win three consecutive world titles (1998-2000). At the party celebrating the signing to the New York Yankees, the now major league player and millionaire, Orlando was reportedly so worried they would run out of beer as they often did in Cuba that the patrons had to reassure him by showing a fully stocked storage room. Orlando was taking his first steps into normalizing abundance. His new life may as well have been on another planet, not the mere 90 miles that separate Cuba from the United States.

Prosperity cannot be manufactured or taken for granted. We can see signs of this collective amnesia in America as the same ideologies that have kept millions in poverty in the USSR, China, and Orlando "El Duque" Hernández' beloved Cuba  have been weaponized to take over American Universities, penetrate mass media, and become mainstream in the political arena. A cultural shift away from common sense is more evident as, for the first time in history, the approval ratings of American presidents are not correlated with the American people's prosperity levels. With their worldview highjacked by distorted stories, Americans may eventually vote their way out of prosperity. Unless we collectively remember and protect the ideas and people that made this prosperity possible in the first place.

"The real source of wealth and capital in this new era is not material things... it is the human mind, the human spirit, the human imagination, and our faith in the future." - Steve Forbes, business magnate

"America is not just a country; it's an idea, a concept. It's the land where dreams come true, where hard work and creativity are rewarded." - Paulo Coelho, author

"America's wealth is not just in its material resources but in its diversity, innovation, and freedom of expression." - Maya Angelou, poet

"America's greatness is not just in its economic power but in its commitment to justice, equality, and opportunity for all." - Nelson Mandela, anti-apartheid revolutionary

"The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement." - James Truslow Adams

"America is a country of abundance. If you're willing to put in the effort, there's no limit to what you can achieve." - Tony Robbins

"America is the land of plenty. We have an abundance of resources, opportunities, and freedoms that are the envy of the world." - Warren Buffett

"The American Dream is not just about financial success; it's about living a fulfilling life and making a positive impact on others." - Sheryl Sandberg

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Let me know what you think of this chapter and if you’d recommend this book to your friends. If you missed our last live stream, here’s a recording of my conversation with Purdeep Sangha on unlocking high performance.

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