Redefining Entrepreneurship

Toward a business rooted in sufficiency and collaboration

For a long time, entrepreneurship represented freedom to me, a way out of rigid institutions and toward a creative life. But over the past few years, my definition of entrepreneurship has quietly begun to shift. This essay is a story of capturing that change, from the promise I once believed in to the way I am now trying to practice business differently.

The first podcast I ever listened to was How I Built This by Guy Raz It made founders seem like real people, people with radical ideas who believed in themselves enough to build something that worked. The stories were imperfect and unique, yet they followed a familiar arc of the hero’s journey.

At the time, I had just graduated with an engineering degree and finished an internship working as an engineer at Disneyland. That job left me more confused than ever. At twenty three, working at the Happiest Place on Earth, I was completely miserable and finally coming to terms with the fact that living my life according to someone else’s dreams was unbearable.

After rejecting a conventional engineering job, I decided to experiment with a new city and a fresh start. Then the pandemic hit. Listening to How I Built This became my reprieve from both the state of the world and my own persistent question: what do I do with my life?

So I followed the startup path all the way through. I got my MBA, worked in venture capital, joined a startup, got laid off from that startup, and eventually came back to a quieter question: what do I actually care about? This led me toward my Marriage and Family Therapy license, a place where I could practice as an entrepreneur through private practice and do meaningful work through therapy.

For a long time, I believed entrepreneurship would answer my questions about purpose, that building something of my own would finally feel like arrival. But slowly, I realized the question was never simply what I was building. It was how. The shift began when I started asking whether entrepreneurship itself could be practiced differently.

Months into private practice, I began noticing how difficult it was to mentally clock out of work while also wanting to build a family and a life beyond productivity. I noticed the cultural addiction to more. More ingenuity, more income streams, more visibility, more competitive edge.

There are two pillars in my work that feel central to how I want to show up beyond the titles of therapist, podcaster, or consultant. The bigger picture rests on the foundation of sufficiency and collaboration.

Sufficiency rejects both the fear of scarcity and the endless pursuit of abundance. It is an orientation toward enough, toward the creative and responsible use of resources in service of quality, contribution, and community. When we trust there is enough, we move from competition toward collaboration.

Lynne Twist, a global visionary and activist whose work includes ending world hunger, writes in her book The Soul of Money, “Sufficiency as a way of being offers us enormous personal freedom and possibility. Rather than scarcity’s myths that tell us that the only way to perceive the world is there’s not enough, more is better, and that’s just the way it is, the truth of sufficiency asserts that there is enough for everyone. Knowing that there is enough inspires sharing, collaboration, and contribution.”

Sufficiency interrupts the reflex to build for the sake of building. It asks me to pause, question, and soften. I see it as both a practice and a quiet liberation from the neoliberal ideals that shape our modern business world.

From sufficiency, collaboration feels less like strategy and more like alignment. One case study of collaboration emerging from sufficiency is my work with my friend Shawna. Shawna is a web designer, and we have been exploring how she can build my web world without placing the cost of the project in tension with our friendship. Rather than defaulting to a rigid or purely transactional agreement, we chose to co-create a contract together. In doing so, we found ourselves questioning our assumptions about what a contract is meant to be. It shifted from a formal legal document into something more relational, an honoring of our friendship, a commitment to the project, and a shared understanding of how we will adapt if and when challenges arise.

I am increasingly interested in relational ways of working that challenge the exhausting norms shaping our industries, whether in therapy, entrepreneurship, storytelling, or personal relationships. Business, creativity, care, and relationships are not separate worlds. They are intertwined. The boundaries between them are blurrier than we often admit.

I used to think entrepreneurship meant building something of my own. Increasingly, I think it means learning how to build with: with community, with social responsibility, with enoughness, and with life itself.

I am still an entrepreneur, but the definition is in flux. That shift is showing up in how I practice therapy, how I collaborate, and how I imagine a life that includes work without being consumed by it.

If I were to map the shift simply, it might look like this:

Old Definition Emerging Definition

Independence Interdependence

Scaling Sufficiency

Personal success Relational sustainability

Escape from work Integration with life

Hero’s journey Communal practice

These are some of the Terms & Conditions I’m playing with and I invite you to consider what you may want to reform within your own business structures/ mindset.

Thanks for tuning in!

Molly