Subtitled: Transforming your relationship with money and life
This book is amazing! Despite reading many books on money mindset and working in the financial industry, this one has given me the most confidence and empowerment around money.
It’s not a how-to for budgets, planning, or investing, nor is it about manifesting or working harder. It’s a book that illuminates our relationship with money—globally and individually—and offers an insightful approach for empowerment: moving from scarcity to sufficiency.
Scarcity drives most money issues. When we feel we don’t have enough, we chase “more,” separating us from our core human desires to belong and love. Sufficiency, however, embraces our existing resources (external and internal), leading to freedom, integrity, and connection.
Lynne Twist, whose fundraising work with The Hunger Project, has taken her around the world – has collaborated with all sorts of people – from the poorest to the richest.
She has seen the power of people recognizing, then using, their existing resources to create lasting and meaningful change in third world villages.
Resources they didn’t even realize they had for decades. They had been living in learned helplessness, scarcity approach and a culture of ‘not enough’. But when they shifted from scarcity to sufficiency amazing transformations happened.
She has so many examples of how this sufficiency approach transformed third-world villages, empowered divorcees to create a life of prosperity and meaning and ended cycles of neglect and despair among the generationally wealthy. Yes – even those who we would usually think of as “having it all” are often dealing with consequences stemming from scarcity.
Twist shares three truths for building sufficiency:
1) Money is like water.
2) What you appreciate appreciates.
3) Collaboration creates prosperity.
Seeing money as a flow allows us to use it and direct it onward, rather than hoarding it.
Appreciating our resources makes them more valuable, reminding us to look for what’s working.
“Collaboration creates prosperity” highlights our interconnectedness, showing how using each person’s talents serves others.
One of my favorite passages is based on a Buddhist teaching. Buddha would often tell followers that our world is like a garden – a garden that has seeds of all sorts: compassion, forgiveness, love, hatred, vengeance, violence. Our attention is like water and sunshine, and the seeds we cultivate with that attention will grow and fill our garden. If we choose to invest our attention in the seeds of scarcity – acquisition, accumulation, greed and all that springs from those seeds – then scarcity is what will fill the space of our life and world. If we tend the seeds of sufficiency with our attention, and our money like water to nourish them with a soulful purpose, then we will enjoy that bountiful harvest.
If you are feeling like your life and career are lacking, read this book and you’ll soon discover that you have more than you will ever need.
You have enough.
You are enough.
Right here.
Right now.
