Boundary-breaking Resourcefulness
The way we frame a problem determines how we understand what resources are required and how we might procure them.
Back when I was first learning the ropes of making a living outside traditional employment, I learned that I'd developed a scarcity mindset. In this case, a scarcity mindset is a set of beliefs and heuristics that shape decision-making based on extreme caution and fear. It starts with the assumption that resources—money, time, attention, goodwill—are in short supply and that there's not enough to meet everyone's needs.
Think back to the beginning of the pandemic and our fears about running out of toilet paper. That was a scarcity mindset at work.
The opposite of a scarcity mindset, according to the gurus, is an abundance mindset, a set of beliefs and heuristics that shape decision-making based on confidence and optimism. An abundance mindset grows out of the assumption that there are enough resources to go around, that our needs can and will be lavishly met.
One old mentor of mine characterized a scarcity mindset as 'either/or' thinking and an abundance mindset as 'both/and' thinking. If we think with scarcity, we feel forced to choose between this and that. If we think with abundance, we believe we can have both. I still find this framework useful, but the way I think about scarcity and abundance have evolved over the last 15 years.
Today, I want to share how I think about this duality now and offer a related framework that can be useful for approaching our work or businesses with creativity while recognizing the real limits we might face.1
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Scarcity and abundance are frequently presented as a binary. But it's a false binary.
It can be true that there's not enough of a given resource to go around. And it can also be true that you feel optimistic and confident about your ability to make it work. It can be true that there's great risk (and with it, fear) involved in a decision. And it can also be true that the risk is worth it—or that even if the unthinkable happens, you'll be able to get on your feet again.
Accusing someone of having a 'scarcity mindset' is often a thought-terminating cliché, meaning it's used to overcome critical thinking and convince someone to do something they likely have legitimate concerns about. In some circles, especially those flavored with spiritual capitalism, a 'scarcity mindset' is one of the greatest insults a person can be subjected to. Ironically, it seems even the most 'both/and' among us require 'either/or' thinking when it comes to scarcity.
Scarcity and abundance are not mutually exclusive. They're not true opposites. They coexist and, in some ways, complement each other. And that's why a third way is needed.
Rethinking Scarcity
In an interview with Ezra Klein in 2021, economist Adam Tooze explained that we often misattribute scarcity. We look at problems like product shortages or funding constraints and assume we know where the scarcity exists.
For example, in the United States, we often hear that there isn't enough money for [fill in the blank with your favorite progressive program]. We know there's a giant national debt and a massive annual budget deficit. So that seems right. But what isn't reported so often is our 'tax gap,' the difference between the taxes owed and the taxes actually paid.
In recent years, the voluntary compliance rate has been about 85%, meaning that 85% of taxpayers file and pay on time. That leaves 15% who don't. Add enforcement actions into the mix, and you can get the compliance rate to just north of 86%. This leaves an estimated $625 billion uncollected. That's considerably more than a little snack bar money.
So, where exactly is the scarcity? Our stingier lawmakers would have us believe that the federal government just doesn't have enough money. But in reality, the federal government allows a $600 billion wealth transfer to those who avoid paying their fair share annually. The true scarcity is in the operational capacity of the IRS. After years of budget cuts, the IRS hasn't had the capacity to go after those unpaid taxes. Fully funding the IRS would be a boon to federal coffers—for every extra $1 that the IRS receives in funding, it returns $6 to the government.
Alright, I won't bore you with talk about the IRS or budget shortfalls anymore. Besides, we can't really talk about government funding and scarcity without talking about modern monetary theory, which I'll leave to the experts.
My point is not whether or not the US can afford certain policies. My point is that the way we frame a problem determines how we understand what resources are required and how we might procure them. Recasting the problem often reveals opportunities to tap into resources we didn’t recognize before.
What is scarcity in a world of never enough?
How much money is enough for you to feel stable? How many social media followers or email subscribers is enough for you to feel secure? How many square feet are enough for your house to seem the right size? How many books must you have read for you to feel like an expert?
There may be specific and reasonable answers to those questions. But even when we claim to know what 'enough' is, the target (almost) always moves farther away once we reach what we previously thought was enough. We might gain new knowledge that indicates that amount of money isn't enough for a stable future, or that house isn't big enough for the family you have now, or that with all the new books coming out, you still haven't read enough to feel like an expert. It turns out that we're pretty bad at guessing what 'enough' is going to be.
The media, marketing, and social information we encounter daily don't help. Our expectations and desires change, convincing us we need even more than we did before. In other words, we exist within a paradigm of scarcity—partially of our own making but largely due to our economic, cultural, and social systems.
If there's never enough, scarcity thinking is the only logical way to think.
We shift around different forms of debt to continue to climb toward stability. We run ourselves ragged, squeezing more into our schedules. We watch YouTube videos on morning routines and buy the expert-recommended gadgets to automate our days. More, more, more seems to leave us with less, less, less.
Scarcity convinces us to close ranks, hoard whatever we do have, and aggressively protect ourselves. And from that posture, we fear “not enough” even more viscerally.
The opposite of scarcity isn't abundance. The opposite of scarcity is enough. Unfortunately, enough never feels like enough within an economic and cultural milieu that insists on scarcity. Perhaps the question to ask then is:
Can I be satisfied with everything I need if I don't have everything I want?
Needs aren't super flexible. Needs do provide a framework for figuring out what's truly enough. They may change with age, health status, or location, but they are largely stable. Wants, on the other hand, are highly flexible. They're influenced by commercial, cultural, and social factors—not all of which are problematic. However, manipulating those factors is pretty much the basis of our economy today. Our ever-increasing appetite for wants justifies all manner of extraneous economic activity.
Try Resourcefulness
Since our economy and culture are hostile to the state of enough (i.e., having our needs met) and a sense of satisfaction, we need a way to assess and realign our relationship to enough regularly. Enough needs to be a strategy, an orientation that encourages abundant action. A better word for a strategy of enough is 'resourcefulness.'
If scarcity thinking leads to fear and anxiety while abundance thinking is often more like magical thinking, resourcefulness is a way of perceiving the world creatively. Resourcefulness recognizes the intrinsic limits of some resources and the remarkable flexibility of others.
Cultivating resourcefulness gives us the power to disrupt entrenched systems, creatively meet needs, and solve problems big and small. Meditation teacher and thinker Sharon Salzberg defines resourcefulness and its companion, inner abundance, as “the wellspring of energy within that allows us to serve, offer, create.”
Resourcefulness shouldn’t be confused with “making do.”
While that can certainly be a flavor of resourcefulness, it’s one that tastes like scarcity. "Making do" trades a concession on the goal to make up for a shortfall of resources. There’s certainly nothing wrong with making do, but it doesn’t often create leaps forward or break cycles of scarcity. It perpetuates status quo outcomes.
The resourcefulness I'm advocating as an alternative to the false binary of scarcity and abundance is much more creative and generative than making do. It looks closely at the resources available and asks: What else could these resources be? How else might they be used? What more could I do with a seemingly irrelevant resource? Who could I trade with? What could I trade for?
Researchers in the Journal of Business Venturing define entrepreneurial resourcefulness like this:
A boundary-breaking behavior of creatively bringing resources to bear and deploying them to generate and capture new or unexpected sources of value in the process of entrepreneurship.
'Boundary-breaking behavior' is such an alliteratively perfect way to define resourceful action. Scarcity imposes boundaries: how much you can spend, who you can be friends with, where you can live, what you spend your time on, etc. Resourcefulness asks what it will take to break through those boundaries.
What it will take is 'creatively bringing resources to bear.' Resources can be reconfigured, rearranged, and redeployed. Resourcefulness is a bit like adjusting a recipe based on what you have on hand—not so that you get something merely edible, but so that you create something new and potentially even more delicious.
Resourcefulness also encourages us to be open to 'new and unexpected sources of value.' In other words, what we thought was our goal or ideal outcome might not be our goal or ideal outcome in the end. The question of value is open-ended and how we answer it helps to reimagine what’s possible.
Jill Filipovic asks just such an open-ended question:
“What would we make if we had all the tools?”
When the question of value is open-ended, then what gets defined as a resource and how we might use it becomes open-ended, too. Resourcefulness promises to invent solutions without being constrained by a lack of resources that doesn’t yet exist. You can't be in short supply of something you don't know you need. It's not the resources that are lacking if our vision is lacking. It's our vision that determines what we need to source.
The Journal of Business Venturing identified six ways that entrepreneurial resourcefulness manifests, and I think each is instructive for how we can gather the tools we need once we’ve let our imaginations run wild.
Bricolage: Creating something new with what's already available
Narratives, identity, and storytelling: Reassessing what's available through messaging and meaning-making
Cognitive creativity: Finding ways to reimagine and repurpose resources to create unexpected solutions
Psychological & social adaptation: Leveraging individual and community power to create opportunity
Orchestration & mobilization: Structuring and organizing resources to achieve new outcomes
Social resilience: Tapping into cultural factors that support change across groups, communities, or nations
Each mode of resourcefulness can help us find ways to do more and better by creatively leveraging resources rather than making do. These various forms of resourcefulness also encourage interdependence—recognizing that the resources we already possess come from the community and that the community has many more resources we can tap into. Far from a neoliberal bootstraps narrative, we can understand resourcefulness as a way to tap into the generosity of the larger group and sustain our mutual flourishing.
Or, as Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass, “we make a grave error if we try to separate individual well-being from the health of the whole.” Resourcefulness creates its own network effect. We improve the value of what we create in unexpected ways when we engage more people and their resources in the project. Nurturing the connections within this network ensures that there is always enough to create new solutions and opportunities.
Finally, I return to the question of where scarcity is actually located. Assuming basic needs are met (which, granted, can be a big assumption), we might have a scarcity of network connections and mutually beneficial relationships rather than a scarcity of material resources. Perhaps our best bet for practicing resourcefulness is by practicing interdependence and mutuality.
As economic agents, we can be in the business of contributing to the health of the whole rather than simply individual benefit. And in doing so, we gain access to an abundance of resources for creating lasting value and making real change through our work.
This is a significant revision of a piece that was originally published in 2021.
This! So many times this. Thank you for putting it all together so beautifully. Enough is such a slippery concept, but resourcefulness is something we can all get behind!