You don’t have to choose between doing good and doing well. Purpose-driven professionals have been told a lie: that meaningful work requires sacrifice and wanting to thrive means you don’t care enough about the cause. Stephanie Skryzowski believed it too. She spent years as a nonprofit CFO, flying between Afghanistan, Nepal, and Senegal, doing work she loved while her savings, health, and energy drained away. Then she rejected the belief that meaningful work requires martyrdom and built a thriving, mission-driven company of her own.
Do Good and Prosper introduces the 9 Types of Prosperity, a framework that brings together mindset, health, money, purpose, time, community, growth, creativity, and generosity to create holistic prosperity in your life. Discover your Prosperity Score™, then follow the stories, research, and actionable steps in each chapter to design a life that is spacious, abundant, and even more impactful than the exhausting one you’re living now.
Whether you’re a teacher, a nonprofit leader, a social worker, a social entrepreneur, or a corporate professional searching for more meaning, this book gives you permission to prosper and the plan to make it happen.
The world doesn’t need more burned-out changemakers. The world needs you thriving.
You don’t have to choose between doing good and doing well. Purpose-driven professionals have been told a lie: that meaningful work requires sacrifice and wanting to thrive means you don’t care enough about the cause. Stephanie Skryzowski believed it too. She spent years as a nonprofit CFO, flying between Afghanistan, Nepal, and Senegal, doing work she loved while her savings, health, and energy drained away. Then she rejected the belief that meaningful work requires martyrdom and built a thriving, mission-driven company of her own.
Do Good and Prosper introduces the 9 Types of Prosperity, a framework that brings together mindset, health, money, purpose, time, community, growth, creativity, and generosity to create holistic prosperity in your life. Discover your Prosperity Score™, then follow the stories, research, and actionable steps in each chapter to design a life that is spacious, abundant, and even more impactful than the exhausting one you’re living now.
Whether you’re a teacher, a nonprofit leader, a social worker, a social entrepreneur, or a corporate professional searching for more meaning, this book gives you permission to prosper and the plan to make it happen.
The world doesn’t need more burned-out changemakers. The world needs you thriving.
I stared at the photo on my phone: my husband and me standing in front of our newly purchased lake house, the water sparkling behind us, genuine joy on our faces. My finger hovered over the Instagram icon.
I can’t post this.
It feels too weird. Like I’m showing off.
I shouldn’t have this.
The thought hit me like a punch: I shouldn’t have this.
Here I was, having achieved a lifelong dream—a place where my daughters could spend summers swimming and stand-up paddleboarding, where my husband and I could escape on weekends, where we could create the kind of memories I’d dreamed about since childhood. We’d saved for years, planned carefully, and made it happen.
And I was ashamed.
Not because we’d done anything wrong or because we couldn’t afford it. But because somewhere along the way, I’d internalized a belief that was silently poisoning my life:
People who work to do good aren’t supposed to have nice things.
If you’ve ever felt guilty about wanting more—more money, more comfort, more time, more joy—while working in a purpose-driven career, this book is for you.
If you’ve ever wondered why you chose a path that requires you to sacrifice your own well-being while watching your college friends buy houses and take vacations and contribute to their retirement accounts, this book is for you.
If you’ve ever felt stuck between two impossible choices—do meaningful work or have a comfortable life—this book is for you.
Because here’s what I’ve learned after spending nearly twenty years in the nonprofit sector, starting my own purpose-driven business, and figuring out how to build a life that’s both impactful and prosperous:
The choice is false.
You don’t have to pick between doing good and doing well. Between purpose and prosperity. Between serving others and having a life that serves you.
In fact, I’d argue that you can’t create your greatest impact until you stop martyring yourself to the purpose or mission of your work or life.
Two Paths
Let me paint two familiar career paths (that both lead to their own unique forms of misery, in my experience).
Path One: You work for a nonprofit, as a teacher, or in public service. You’re passionate about the mission. Your work genuinely matters. But you make $45,000 a year in a city where rent alone is $2,000 per month. Your car has 200,000 miles on it and makes a concerning noise when you go over 60 mph. You can’t remember the last time you took a real vacation. Your friends from college are buying houses and going to nice restaurants, and you’re trying to figure out if you can afford both groceries and a nosebleed ticket to your favorite band’s concert.
You tell yourself it’s worth it. You’re making a difference. But you’re also exhausted, resentful, and starting to wonder how long you can keep this up.
Path Two: You have a corporate job. Good salary, solid benefits, maybe even equity. You can afford the nice apartment and the gym membership and the occasional splurge. But every Sunday evening, you feel that dread creeping in. The work feels empty. Meaningless. You’re making someone else rich while your soul slowly withers. You donate to charity when asked, but it feels like putting a Band-Aid on a gaping wound.
You tell yourself it’s practical. You’re being responsible. But you also feel like you’re wasting your precious life on work that doesn’t matter.
I’ve lived both paths. The prestigious Manhattan law firm where my biggest client was Playboy and where I spent twelve-hour days in a windowless conference room doing work that felt utterly soul-crushing. And the nonprofit work I loved, jetting between Afghanistan, Nepal, and Senegal, doing meaningful work while burning out, draining my savings, and realizing what my “dream job” was actually costing me.
Both paths led to the same place: depletion, resentment, and the sinking feeling that something was fundamentally broken.
The Third Path
But then I discovered something that changed everything for me: There’s a third path. And it’s both possible and essential.
Along this third path, your work matters deeply to you and creates real impact. Your work aligns with your values and uses your gifts, and you also have financial security, time freedom, energy to show up fully for your family and friends, and the resources to take care of yourself. Your life feels abundant, not scarce. You don’t have to be a martyr to make a difference.
In fact, the more prosperous you are, the greater impact you can create.
Let me show you what I mean.
After a couple of hours on the back of a small motorcycle, weaving between cars, cows, trucks, and bicycles through rural Nepal, we finally slowed on a bumpy dirt road. I climbed off, dusted off my jacket, and looked up. In front of me stood a brand-new brick school building. Two hundred children and adults filled the courtyard, their chatter and drumming filling the air.
A little girl, no more than five, placed a thick strand of bright yellow marigolds around my neck. I put my hands together and said “dhanyabad” (thank you) in Nepali. I continued through the reception line, more and more garlands piling around my neck and sweat dripping down my back in the warm sunshine.
The occasion was the official inauguration of a primary school that would serve three hundred children from this village and its neighbors. The school was funded by the organization I worked for, and it was built by the community. Everyone who had taken part in constructing it and those whose children would now attend it had come to celebrate. I was there simply as an onlooker. One of my frequent visits to my team, the finance department of our Nepal office, just happened to overlap with this beautiful school inauguration ceremony.
We sat for hours in the warm sunshine while women performed beautiful dances, children recited poems about their excitement for their new school, and the village elders gave speeches about the school’s generational impact. Because of this new school, children from local villages would have the opportunity to learn close to home, and their parents and grandparents could take literacy classes in the evenings. This new building brought limitless potential for the entire community.
As I watched families slowly shuffle toward home that evening, I was overwhelmed with contentment and gratitude that my work—even though it sometimes felt like drowning in spreadsheets as a chief financial officer (CFO)—could have such an impact on the world.
I realized the connection that day. That celebration, that school construction, was only possible because the organization had financial resources, operational systems, and talented people to make it happen. Someone had to manage the budgets. Someone had to ensure funds were used effectively. Someone had to run payroll. Someone had to coordinate the complex logistics of building a school in a remote village.
In other words: A well-resourced organization creates well-served communities. And the person doing that work deserved to thrive too.
Badge of Honor
When I worked for nonprofits, being broke was practically a badge of honor. The duct-taped laptop. The bicycle you rode because your car broke down and you couldn’t afford to fix it (not because you were saving the environment, though that was a nice side benefit). The joke about conference room leftovers being dinner . . . except it wasn’t a joke.
I never quite fit that mold. I dressed well, even if my clothes were from Target. My bag wasn’t held together with safety pins. I wanted to be able to afford more than PB&J for dinner. Yet I felt deeply ashamed of wanting those things.
As a junior finance staffer making a similar salary to others at my level, the difference was simple: I wanted more. But that made me feel like I didn’t care enough about the cause. Like I wasn’t cut out for impact work.
Now that I know what’s possible—what I’m about to share with you in these pages—it breaks my heart when I see people who’ve chosen careers in service running themselves ragged in the name of the cause. Never pausing to take care of themselves. Denouncing money, wealth, and prosperity as something for other people, the ones who chose a less selfless career path. Struggling to replace bald tires, missing yoga classes they love because they’re working, saying yes to everyone and everything except themselves.
I hate this because we’ve been fed a lie.
You don’t have to choose between doing good in the world or living a prosperous life. You can have both.
You can work in an impact-driven job doing good and serving your community, and you can design your life to be prosperous and thriving in so many ways.
There are way more than two options for picking a career path and roughly a bajillion ways to do good through your work.
What Is Prosperity?
When most people hear prosperity, they think of one thing: money, cash, a fat bank account. And yes, financial prosperity is part of it. But the multidimensional prosperity I’ll talk about in this book is so much bigger than that. The dictionary defines prosperity as “a successful, flourishing, or thriving condition, especially in financial respects; good fortune.” Notice the word especially. Not exclusively.
True prosperity is about creating a successful, flourishing, thriving condition throughout your life.
The secret to building a life that abounds with prosperity is creating an entire ecosystem of abundance that starts with you. Think about the last time you felt truly prosperous. Maybe it wasn’t when you got a bonus or a raise (though those are nice). Maybe it was more like once of these moments:
Closing your laptop at 3 p.m. on a Tuesday and feeling zero guilt
Arriving at a breakthrough because your mind finally had space to think
Eating with friends who understand you and your mission
Waking up energized instead of hitting snooze five times
Saying no to something that drained you
Invitation to Join Me
If you picked up this book, I have a feeling that maybe you’re doing work that lights you up but secretly wondering why it has to feel this hard. Maybe things are going well and you’re looking for ways to keep growing. Or maybe, honestly, you’re exhausted. Your motivation is running on fumes, and you’re not sure how much longer you can keep going at this pace. If that’s you, I’m sending a giant hug your way, and I want you to know that what you’ll find in these pages is a real path forward.
I invite you to come with me on this journey. The choice between doing good and doing well doesn’t need to be the standard from here on out. Taking extraordinary care of yourself unleashes the prosperity that is possible.
You deserve balance, rest, growth, and development. You no longer need to be a martyr to your work. We all deserve to make money and take care of ourselves while also helping others through our work.
I promise that you’ll walk away with renewed energy and at least a few steps to implement immediately.
You might wonder if you have what it takes to be a strong, confident leader ready to enter fully into your most prosperous life. I want to remind you that courage comes before confidence.
An opportunity to speak on the main stage at a large conference once came across my inbox. To be considered, I had to submit a two-minute video of what made me and my business unique. I had never done a keynote talk on a main stage before. I believed I had a slim chance of being selected because my story didn’t feel that inspiring or incredible or unique.
But I beat down my imposter syndrome and self-doubt and put courage first. I recorded the video from a hotel room because I happened to be traveling, filled out the application, and hit send anyway. The conditions weren’t perfect, and I wasn’t confident about my ability to create and deliver an inspirational talk in front of a thousand people, but I showed up for myself before I felt ready.
To my surprise, I was selected. When I received the email, I immediately thought, Yay! followed by, Oh no, what have I done?! I crafted the talk, rehearsed for a week straight, and despite my nerves, walked on that stage as if I owned it. The talk was almost an out-of-body experience. I remember only stepping into the bright lights and saying my first line, then walking off stage, taking a deep breath for the first time in hours, sipping the champagne handed to me, and realizing my hands were still shaking. I can’t recall anything in between.
But then, the confidence set in. I did it! I walked onto a brilliantly lit stage in front of all those people, including business leaders I admire and wanted to impress, and I slayed that talk. Courage came before confidence.
Picking up a book like this one takes a certain kind of bravery. It means admitting you have room to grow, and that’s not always easy. But you’re here, and you’ve read this far. That tells me something about who you are. By the time you finish these pages, you’ll feel more confident in yourself as a leader. You’ll have both the mindset shifts and the concrete actions to step more fully into your prosperity, and the ripple effects of that on your work and your world will be bigger than you can imagine right now.
I promise that there’s a version of your life and work that’s more spacious, prosperous, fulfilling, and impactful than you’ve yet allowed yourself to dream.
Let’s go!
Prosperity Mantra: I can do meaningful work and live a prosperous life.
People who want to make a difference in the world gravitate toward nonprofit careers for altruistic reasons. However, martyrdom runs rampant in the nonprofit sector, which can burn people out and drive them away from their life purpose. In “Do Good and Prosper,” Stephanie Skryzowski draws from her long career in nonprofits to share valuable lessons about pursuing different dimensions of prosperity as a nonprofit leader.
Blending personal reflections, anecdotes, and evidence from her own work and external research, Skryzowski encourages readers to reject self-sacrifice, embrace holistic prosperity, and recognize that thriving personally enhances their ability to do good in the world. Throughout the book, she identifies nine types of prosperity. Mindset prosperity refers to cultivating beliefs that support growth and abundance, while health prosperity calls for maintaining physical well-being to sustain impact. Practicing financial prosperity requires managing resources for security and opportunity, while being purposeful ensures that one aligns work with personal values and strengths.
According to Skryzowski, time prosperity can be achieved by gaining control over how time is spent, while social prosperity calls for building a supportive, aligned community. Skryzowski also emphasizes personal growth and discusses the benefits of investing in continual self-improvement. Another type of prosperity involves creativity or fostering imagination and innovation. Finally, she also discusses the importance of cultivating generosity by sharing resources from a place of abundance.
I have spent my career in mission-driven organizations in the nonprofit sector. Skryzowski’s lived experiences as a leader, entrepreneur, and coach for nonprofit leaders lend the book an authentic perspective. The book’s tone is warm, encouraging, and candid, blending personal storytelling with practical advice. I appreciate the author’s conversational yet insightful writing style.
Skryzowski's lived experience as a leader, entrepreneur, and coach for nonprofit professionals lends the book authentic credibility. Blending personal reflections, anecdotes, and external research, she writes with a warm, encouraging, and candid tone that feels conversational yet insightful. Thriving personally enhances your ability to do good in the world -- a message that is empowering and transformative. Rather than glorifying self-sacrifice, Skryzowski urges readers to embrace abundance and self-worth as pathways to greater impact.
“Do Good and Prosper” is essential reading for anyone in the nonprofit sector struggling to balance mission-driven work with personal well-being. It offers both permission and practical guidance to reject martyrdom and build a life of holistic prosperity.