For the biggest, deepest and most fundamental questions we have and we all, rich or poor, old or young, man or woman would like an answer to, we need a big frame. What are those questions? Taking my cue from the religions of the world, from Joseph Campbell's work, from Abraham Maslow's work, and after talking with hundreds of people, my list of the five big questions of life is this: 1) Will I have enough to eat or will I starve? — Subsistence 2) Who am I? — Identity 3) How do I behave? — Relation 4) What am I here for? — Purpose 5) What do I leave behind? — Legacy. There are, of course, countless others, like “Does she love me?”, “Will I get promoted?”, “Should I eat this piece of chocolate?” but I suggest they are subsidiary to the five big ones – they matter less.

From physical assets to network assets
From linear connections to closed loops
From more is always better to what do you really need?
From being your function to who are you?
From adapting to learning to creating
From sustainability as productivity to sustainability as a framework
From nobody will find out to values based commerce

The focus on material exchanges leads to confrontational settlement schemes: money versus goods, legal action, turf fights, territorial claims, border skirmishes and war. Often thoughtlessly, we apply this mindset to any kind of dispute: marital, reputational, emotional – even spiritual – and commercial. One way to visualize this is to imagine these Russian souvenir dolls. – there always seems to be another one inside, seemingly regardless of which one you just looked inside. But frame we are constructing here – which I call abundance – does not replace the ones that came before, the heroic, the religious, the scientific and the economic ones, but is their extension, a slightly bigger 'doll'. It is capable both of containing the others as special cases, as well as explaining something more. In this case, the 'more' is a way of answering the five big questions when your material subsistence needs no longer dominate our lives.

Commerce, or When is enough, enough?
Connectedness, or Everybody knows everything about everyone, all the time
Redundancy, or From being part of the system to becoming the system
Leadership, governance and information
Walking the talk, or What’s a poor boy to do?

How do things change? Change often happens when you consistently, patiently and persistently do something – where each individual step by itself is often quite insignificant. That is how cells dividing lead to an embryo and then a human being, how nuclear fission turns small amounts of matter into pure energy, how a marriage falls apart, how trust is built, and a tree grows. But for everything you do, you need the right environment, the right support. Take a pregnancy: cells dividing without a womb, without the proper nutrition of the womb-owner does not lead to a life; a marriage by itself does not fall apart and trust building measures without a trust enhancing environment do not work. Several things need to come together, they need to converge.

I once worked for a few years with a colleague who would – just about now – lean back in her chair, frown ever so lightly and say: “This all sounds very well, but, concretely, what does it mean and what are we to do?” I’ve no idea, concretely, what you will do in a world of abundance, I do not even have an idea, vaguely, what I will do. Hence, I cannot give you a list of things to do. There may well be fifty ways to leave your lover, but there are no fifty was to live abundantly. What I can, and will do, is ask a good friend of mine, K, to sketch for you ten stories, ten vignettes of abundant lives.