Own Your One Thing

Let’s talk about owning vs. renting.

Owning your one thing is different than renting your one thing.

There are pros and cons to renting vs owning material objects. Many people find it is easier to lease a car rather than own it. Many people rent their home rather than own it. Some people buy a vacation house. Other people just go somewhere on vacation and rent a place. Someone else is responsible for maintenance - and ultimately, they will take back whatever it is you are renting. It is both their asset and their long term responsibility.

In some broad sense, every time you go out to eat in a restaurant, you are renting that kitchen and staff for the evening so you don’t have to prepare a meal at home.

In business, renting things is usually lumped under the bucket of “outsourcing”. Rather than focus on non-essential aspects of running the business, the logic is “we are going to rent those skills so we can focus on our main skill.” Sometimes this works out well for a business, and many times, it does not work well. It depends on who is providing the outsourced service, do they know what they’re doing - and if it is really something that should have been outsourced in the first place?

We will see this come up a lot with AI tools. How much work can we “rent out” to AI vs. owning the work ourselves? From a practical perspective, what if the AI can do most of our work better than we can? Will all human work start to look like.a quaint craft fair where we admire people for their little handmade efforts but still go home and buy factory made AI generated items for a fraction of the cost?

So what does all this have to do with “Owning your ONE Thing” ? To really own your one thing means that you are responsible for fixing it, improving it, understanding it, and caring about it more than anyone else. It is yours, and no one else can do it for you. Ownership in the legal sense of capitalism can confuse us about owning something in terms of responsibility. It’s been said that you can’t outsource six pack abs. Owning your ONE Thing is like that - you need to put in the concentrated effort over time to create something special. Owning in this sense of the word can apply to a skill, a business, or even a relationship.

There is no simple formula for deciding what things you really want to own, vs other things you will outsource and rent. In some sense, everything in life is on a “rental” basis, in that we die and pass on our things to other people. But, in the meantime, there are certain things along the way that as an individual, only you can own. Find those few things that only you can own, and then cherish them with all your energy and your whole heart and your daily dedication.