From Scarcity to Sufficiency: Awakening the Soul of Entrepreneurship

In the winter of my final college semester, something in me shattered. I remember a cold dusk, sitting on the campus library steps, chest heaving, the icy air sharp in my lungs. Everything I thought I was—student leader, aspiring founder, “success story” in the making—suddenly felt like a flimsy costume. Until then, I had worn a mask of success, shaped by inherited ambitions and a quiet, gnawing fear: that if I ever stopped striving, I would become insignificant or unsafe. In retrospect, it was what Thomas Merton might call the “false self,” the construct “we commonly identify with the first person singular,” while the true self hides in “nothingness” beyond that façade.

That evening, under a dimming sky, I experienced what some might term a spiritual awakening, or perhaps an ego death. A part of me died: the part clinging to scarcity—the belief that I am not enough yet, that I do not have enough yet, and that life is a race to seize “enough” before someone else does.

What rushed in to fill that void was a perplexing peace. In the weeks that followed, I moved through campus as if in a lucid dream. I attended classes, met deadlines, smiled at friends; yet beneath the familiar routine, everything had changed. A profound stillness had taken root. I woke at dawn sensing being in a way I never had before: the stark winter trees outside my window shimmered with presence. I felt intensely alive, unbounded, as if the collapse of my identity had cleared space for something vast and sacred to emerge.

Philosopher Martin Heidegger described this kind of awakening. He warned that we often live as the “they-self,” conforming to social expectations, until an encounter with nothingness, through anxiety or crisis, jolts us into recognizing our authentic being. My encounter was just that: a freefall into emptiness, the scaffolding of egoic definitions stripped away. Yet in that emptiness, I found an unexpected sufficiency. Paradoxically, having nothing to stand on gave me a glimpse of what it means to simply be.

This was not a blissful process. It was a psychological death. “Ritual initiation radically reshapes our sense of self,” writes depth psychologist Francis Weller. “It is meant to break us open to the widest possible experience in identity.” In many cultures, such a collapse is understood as a sacred transformation. Though mine was not guided by formal ritual, it bore the hallmarks: disorientation, surrender, and the revelation of a deeper reality. The relentless anxiety that had driven me to create thorough plans evaporated. In its place came trust, even faith, that I didn’t have to become somebody according to the world’s terms. I was already and always somebody beneath the layers of striving and self-definition.

Exposing the Fear Behind the Mask

Only after this inner rupture could I fully confront what had been driving me for so long. Much of my entrepreneurial ambition, I now saw, was entangled with a fear-driven hunger: the need to prove my worth, to compete, to win, to secure safety through future success. This was the classic scarcity script so many of us inherit—one that insists we are not enough as we are, and that life is a zero-sum race for accolades, money, and influence.

Before my awakening, I had internalized this worldview completely. Like a fish unaware of water, I moved through what Charles Eisenstein calls the “old Story of the World,” a narrative shaped by separation, competition, and scarcity (Eisenstein, n.d.). I believed that success meant outpacing others, that growth and profit were unquestionable goods, and that time, money, and opportunity were inherently scarce, so I rushed constantly, afraid of falling behind.

Even my sense of self had been colonized by this scarcity mindset. I wore stress and exhaustion like badges of honor. If I was perpetually anxious, wasn’t that proof I was working hard enough? Yet beneath it all, a quiet dread haunted me: What happens if you fail? Who will you be then? It was, as Thomas Merton wrote, the voice of the false self—"sensing its fundamental unreality," it "clothes itself in myths and symbols of power," trying to become real through doing and achieving (Merton, as cited in Center for Action and Contemplation, n.d.). When I first read those words weeks after the night on the library steps, I realized I had been wrapping myself in accomplishments like bandages, hoping they might finally make me feel whole.

I hadn’t chased success out of greed. I was grasping for a sense of worth, hoping achievement might silence the existential fear of being nobody.

Michel Foucault once said, “I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning” (Foucault, as cited in Goodreads, n.d.). Identity, then, is not a fixed outcome, but an evolving dance of becoming. In hindsight, my crisis revealed this truth: that the “me” chasing someone else’s version of success was not fixed, and I was free to become someone new.

The authentic self that Søren Kierkegaard described, the one each of us must become “with God’s help,” had been buried under layers of social conditioning (Kierkegaard, as cited in Goodreads, n.d.). The collapse of my ambitions cleared the way for me to sense that deeper core. Kierkegaard speaks of the despair of not being one’s true self. I understood that despair not as failure, but as the necessary prelude to a more genuine life. My inherited ambitions had to fail so that my own calling could emerge.

The Sacred Shift: Scarcity to Sufficiency

What changed in me was fundamental: I underwent an ontological shift from scarcity to sufficiency. This was not merely about material conditions, but about a deep inner sense of enoughness: a trust that life, in each moment, is whole. Where I once saw life as a ladder to climb or a battlefield to win, I began to experience it as an unfolding mystery to engage with. I started to intuit what the Tao Te Ching taught: “He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough” (Tao Te Ching, as cited in Wussu, n.d.). I had long been familiar with the feeling of not enough—not enough time, not enough achievement, not enough certainty. But after my ego’s collapse, I began to feel what “enough” actually meant: waking without dread, being present in a moment without the need to earn it.

This shift was not only philosophical or spiritual. It was physical, too. Scarcity had felt like a contraction, a tightening in the gut. Sufficiency was spaciousness, breath. Martin Heidegger might have said I had moved from grasping beings (including myself) to dwelling with Being itself. I no longer viewed myself as a project in need of constant fixing. Sometimes, joy simply arose, unprovoked and unearned, just from the fact of being alive. Mystics like Meister Eckhart spoke of the soul’s divinity found not through striving but surrender. I began practicing gelassenheit, which is a releasing habitual judgments of good or bad, success or failure, and simply being present to what is.

This worldview was echoed in what I read and encountered. Charles Eisenstein helped me see that my personal awakening mirrored a broader cultural one. He writes that “if we can free ourselves from the artificial perception of scarcity, we could meet our real emotional and spiritual needs” (Eisenstein, n.d.-b). What I had felt as sufficiency, he names as stepping out of the dominant “Story of Separation”—a worldview rooted in isolation and competition—and into what he calls Interbeing, a paradigm of connection, cooperation, and trust (Eisenstein, n.d.-a). No wonder my old ambitions felt hollow. I had unconsciously left the old story behind.

Echoes of this shift came from many places. The Gospel of Thomas warns: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not... it will destroy you” (as cited in Goodreads, n.d.-a). That message struck me deeply. Holding back my inner truth, out of fear or conformity, was not safety. It was self-erasure. Conversely, expressing what was real in me was the path forward, no matter how uncertain. Parker Palmer offered a related insight: “Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am” (as cited in Goodreads, n.d.-b). Sufficiency, I realized, was a posture of listening and attuning to what life was already asking of me, rather than imposing what I thought it should be.

This transformation also redefined my relationship with time. Under the scarcity mindset, time had always been something to outrun. It was a relentless pressure. But now, moments feel expansive. Nigerian philosopher Bayo Akomolafe writes, “The times are urgent; let us slow down.” He explains that in rushing, “we often lose sight of the abundance of resources” and the hidden opportunities around us (Akomolafe, n.d.). Slowing down allowed me to notice insights and openings I would have otherwise missed. Ideas began to arise in long runs, in unhurried conversations. By releasing the tyranny of linear time, I began to align with a deeper rhythm, one that mirrored the organic flow of nature: cyclic, spacious, intuitive.

The writer and activist Adrienne Maree Brown offered a mantra that became foundational to me: “Small is good, small is all. (The large is a reflection of the small.)” and “There is always enough time for the right work” (brown, 2017). I no longer dreamed of scale for its own sake. Instead, I became absorbed in the quality of each small moment. Was I present? Was I in integrity? Each task, each conversation, became meaningful on its own terms. If I aligned myself with the right intention, I trusted the outcome would unfold accordingly. Presence, I realized, is not only enough—it is everything.

The Intimate Redefinition of Entrepreneurship

As this transformation unfolded, I began to question everything I thought I knew about entrepreneurship. I had long aspired to be the archetypal founder—relentlessly growth-oriented, sleepless in pursuit of the next milestone, and perhaps even a bit ruthless in the name of innovation. But with my perspective turned inside out, that model began to seem incomplete. Was it truly entrepreneurship I had been pursuing, or just a socially sanctioned form of self-validation?

I remembered the hackathons and networking events I had immersed myself in. The energy was electric, but also charged with a collective anxiety: Implicit in all of it was the belief that if you weren’t scaling fast, you were already behind. In contrast, I started to wonder: what if entrepreneurship could be more human, intimate, and sacred? What if the pace of a tree—rooted, patient, in tune with its ecosystem—were more instructive than the slogans of “fail fast” and “move fast and break things”?

Slowly, I came to believe it could. True entrepreneurship, I began to see, is not merely about doing; it’s an expression of being. It emerges from presence, clarity, and alignment with one’s soul, rather than from a manic hunt for the next opportunity. I envisioned a new path: I would create only from a place of integrity and service. The value of a venture would be measured not only in profit or reach, but in its contribution to wholeness—mine, others’, and the planet’s.

Progressive thinkers in business and leadership validated this shift. Frederic Laloux, in his work on organizational evolution, describes “teal” organizations—those that cultivate wholeness and operate from an evolutionary purpose. These organizations invite people to bring their full selves to work, fostering authenticity over conformity (Laloux, as cited in Conscious Entrepreneur, n.d.). This felt not only radical but obvious: if sufficiency is real, why should business require leaving our souls at the door?

Leadership scholar Bill Torbert echoes this evolution, describing how transformative leaders expand their consciousness and ego boundaries over time, learning to act with wisdom and care for the whole. My own journey felt like an accelerated dive into the kind of transformation that insisted on the integration of inner and outer worlds.

Otto Scharmer’s Theory U helped me articulate what I was undergoing. He emphasizes “presencing,” which is a deep sensing into the emerging future, as opposed to reacting from the past. He often cites entrepreneur Bill O’Brien: “The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener” (O’Brien, as cited in Management Innovations, n.d.). In other words, who we are when we act matters as much as what we do. A founder operating from fear and scarcity will inevitably shape a different world than one grounded in trust and alignment. This became a guiding principle: before launching anything outward, I must cultivate the quality of consciousness I bring to it. My new metric of success wasn’t speed or scale, but depth. How congruent is my work with my values, and what does the world genuinely need?

Poet-philosopher David Whyte captured the heart of this redefinition. “Our work is to make ourselves visible in the world,” he writes. “This is the soul’s individual journey, and the soul would much rather fail at its own life than succeed at someone else’s” (Whyte, as cited in QuoteFancy, n.d.). That line gave me permission to fail on my own terms, and demanded that I succeed only by my soul’s standards. I began to view this not just as a philosophy, but as a dare: dare to trust that sufficiency is real; dare to create from that trust. If I do, I might create something small, something unrecognizable by Silicon Valley’s metrics, but it will be mine. And that, as Whyte suggests, is the only success that truly matters.

Sovereignty and the Sacred Art of Creation

Stepping onto this path has meant learning to operate in what I call sacred time and sacred economy, rather than in clock time and market economy alone. In sacred time, the guiding question is not “How much can I do by when?” but “What is right to do now?” In sacred economy, the guiding question is not “How do I maximize gain?” but “How do I create value that is true to my soul and serves others lovingly?” The answers to these questions often defy linear planning or traditional ROI analysis. They require listening, intuition, and courage. In fact, living this way demands a certain sovereignty of the self: a capacity to stand in one’s truth even if it looks inefficient, strange, or naive to others. I’ve had to weather my own moments of doubt when I see peers achieving conventional success while I am carefully tilling the soil of a small, slow-growing idea. In those moments, I return to the wisdom traditions for strength.

There is a Lakota phrase I learned from a mentor: “mitákuye oyás’in,” meaning “all my relations,” expressing that we exist in an ecology of relationships with all beings. This worldview carries an implicit sufficiency: the earth provides enough for everyone’s need (but not everyone’s greed), as Gandhi famously said. These perspectives will guide how I design any enterprise; ensuring it’s not about exploitation or dominance, but about service and balance. If time is not a rushing river but a vast ocean we swim in, then we can move with greater patience and intentionality. The mass narrative of hustle and grind begins to look like a fever dream we can collectively wake up from.

Philosopher Peter Kingsley observes that Western civilization, in its “childishness,” lost touch with the sacred depths that once guided it, “throwing away the instructions” for the gift of consciousness we were given. The result has been a culture that endlessly does, but has forgotten how to be. In entrepreneurship, this forgetting manifests as a fixation on external metrics while neglecting the inner dimension of creation. My journey has been about reclaiming that inner dimension and treating it as equally real. Kingsley’s work encourages a return to stillness and receptivity: a mindset in which, as one of his quotes suggests, one becomes “empty enough to transmit the will of the gods,” i.e., to let inspiration beyond one’s ego guide the work. In a modern secular sense, we might say it’s about tuning into the immanent intelligence of life. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze spoke of a kind of ongoing creative flow that is not owned by us but moves through us. This is where I now locate the source of my entrepreneurial ideas: in the currents of being and becoming, rather than in market research alone. The process feels less like inventing and more like listening and midwifing something that wants to be born. The snail may be slow, but if it is alive, and it moves with purpose, it will leave a trail that glistens in the sunlight.

Toward a New Narrative of Creation

Challenging the conventional ethos of entrepreneurship is not a rejection of creating or building—far from it. It is an invitation to create from fullness, not from a void. The old narrative says: build something big to prove your worth. The new narrative says: know your worth, and from that overflow, create something beautiful, regardless of its size. Imagine businesses started from this mindset—how might their cultures and outcomes change?

Adrienne Maree Brown offers a guiding principle: “Move at the speed of trust. Focus on critical connections more than critical mass” (Brown, 2017). In a sufficiency paradigm, it’s not about conquering markets but connecting with communities. Not about being the best, but being real.

This shift may seem naive in a world that deifies metrics and speed, but it’s increasingly validated across disciplines. Philosopher Bayo Akomolafe argues that our frantic attempts to “save the world” often replicate the same separation and domination that caused the damage. He suggests we should “seek roots,” slow down, and tend to the unseen threads of the world’s fabric (Akomolafe, n.d.). Brown emphasizes that resilience is born from networks of trust, not just scale. Poet David Whyte reminds us that vulnerability invites the “larger self” to the table, where genuine creativity lives. Business scholar Bill Torbert’s research shows that introspective, later-stage “Alchemist” leaders perform better in the long run precisely because they are attuned to complexity, not driven by ego. And Charles Eisenstein underscores that many global problems persist because we approach them with the same scarcity mindset that created them, arguing that a shift in consciousness is not ancillary, but essential (Eisenstein, n.d.).

These voices point toward a soulful, sovereign, and slow path of creation. By sovereign, I mean guided by inner authority and alignment with lived wisdom, not cultural programming. By slow, I mean paced with care, allowing depth and relationship to emerge. By soulful, I mean work imbued with meaning and connected to something greater: community, ecology, spirit, or all three.

Following this path has meant letting go of familiar comforts. The ego craves clear plans and guaranteed outcomes; I have neither. Instead, I’ve begun practicing what Taoists call wu wei: effortless action in harmony with life. It often means doing less, or doing what seems insignificant, trusting that presence and rootedness will bear fruit in time. As Brown urges, I’ve learned to “trust the people,” starting with myself. This trust extends outward, into life itself: trusting that when I move with love and integrity, life moves with me.

The ego death I experienced was not an ongoing willingness to die from old forms and be reborn. In entrepreneurship, this means letting go of ideas when they no longer serve. It means listening not just to market data, but to inner guidance: Does this still feel alive? Does this still serve the good? Creation becomes sacred, like a spiritual or artistic journey. Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of becoming reminds us that there is no final identity; only continual unfolding. So too with ventures: they must be free to evolve as we evolve.

Looking back at my last semester at Western Colorado University, I feel kinship, for my world has cracked open. That rupture spared me years of climbing the wrong ladders. It returned me to the ground of being, where real growth begins. “Now, with God’s help, I shall become myself,” wrote Kierkegaard (as cited in Goodreads, n.d.). I see entrepreneurship now as a vehicle for becoming. It is more human, more real, and more aligned with what gives life. When approached in this spirit, building a business is not so different from tending a garden, raising a child, or composing music. It becomes an act of love: a collaboration with forces seen and unseen.

Conclusion: A New Story Begins

Today, I write from a place of both gratitude and provocation—gratitude for having glimpsed a different way of being, and provocation in the truest sense: to call forth this awareness in others, especially within business and innovation. We are living through the breakdown of dominant narratives: limitless growth, winner-takes-all competition, and work divorced from meaning. A new story is emerging, one that reunites entrepreneurship with presence, wholeness, and purpose.

This essay is both exposition and invitation. Though rooted in my personal experience, it speaks to a broader shift already underway. A quiet movement among those who are weary of the race and ready for the reunion.

Practically, this shift from scarcity to sufficiency could transform how we educate future founders, fund ventures (through trust- and community-based models), and define prosperity itself. Charles Eisenstein speaks of “the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible” (Eisenstein, n.d.), and sufficiency is about acting from that possibility, not from fear. Foucault’s challenge to “become someone else” (as cited in Goodreads, n.d.) is an invitation to grow beyond the anxious materialism of our collective adolescence. Frederic Laloux’s teal organizations prove this is not utopian fantasy; they are thriving workplaces where purpose and performance coexist (Laloux, as cited in Conscious Entrepreneur, n.d.). These lights illuminate the path.

Ultimately, the journey from scarcity to sufficiency is a return home. Home to the body. Home to the moment. Home to one another. I often return to Rumi’s question: “Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?” The prison of scarcity was always unlocked, though it rarely felt that way from inside. For me, it took a collapse to walk through that door. For others, the turning point might be quieter. If my story offers anything, I hope it is not a blueprint, but a lantern. Each liberation will take its own shape. But we may know each other by a shared light in the eyes. A light that says: I know enough. I have enough. I am enough.

From that place, the things we create will be different. They will be alive—responsive to real needs, rooted in care, supple and strong like living systems. They won’t be reactions to unhealed wounds but expressions of wholeness.

In a world strained by unsustainable habits, this reorientation may be the most vital innovation of all. It is a quiet revolution, beginning in the human heart and manifesting in the choices we make each day. I count myself among its participants, gratefully. My entrepreneurship now feels like a prayer in action—each step taken with reverence for life and a desire to serve. In this prayer, there is no failure—only learning, surrender, and continual becoming.

As the Gospel of Thomas reminds us: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you” (as cited in Goodreads, n.d.). So let us bring it forth. Let us create from sufficiency. Let us, each in our sacred and unruly way, become ourselves—and from there, offer the gifts we alone are here to give.

@misc{wisniewski2025from,
  author = {Wisniewski, Kyle},
  title = {From Scarcity to Sufficiency: Awakening the Soul of Entrepreneurship},
  year = {2025},
  month = {may},
  howpublished = {\url{https://www.kylewisniewski.com/library/from-scarcity-to-sufficiency}},
  note = {Course paper}
}