Your biggest mistake was thinking that any of this was yours. That’s a gruelling line from Your Friends & Neighbors, a series on Apple TV+ about a 48-year-old rockstar at work who gets sidelined by his manager after more than 20 years of service. Without spoiling it, he realises he has limited savings and few options after being sacked. The logical lesson might be that he should have diversified his income, saved and invested more, or the favourite: started his own venture years ago. But we’ve seen umpteen stories of markets tanking, wiping out people’s savings, and entrepreneurs building businesses only to be pushed out of them unceremoniously. The line rings true in all of these cases as well: your biggest mistake was thinking that any of this was yours. Then comes the existential question for high achievers: what is this all for if we never really own anything? Or if the illusion of what we build and own rests on a shaky foundation? Nothing exposed my vulnerability to life and challenged my illusion of ownership and control like facing the life-threatening experience of giving birth. It was days before the moment. I was flooded with anxiety. All my life, I had been used to being overprepared. This would be one of my biggest milestones, yet I couldn’t prepare enough to guarantee the outcome I wanted. I had never really understood the idea of stewardship, or thought of myself as a steward. Merriam-Webster defines a steward as “a person entrusted with the responsible care, management and protection of something that belongs to another.” Nine months in, my only source of peace came from realising that this baby was not mine to begin with. I was simply a steward. The verse where God says He knew Jeremiah before he was born and had already set him apart took on an entirely new meaning in that moment. I felt an immediate sense of relief. When I returned to work, I began to wonder whether the same principle could apply there as well. The results were profound once I realised that it could. Things that would have previously unsettled me or threatened my sense of control no longer did. I could let go of outcomes I had once tried to tightly manage. I came to realise that the joy of life is in stewarding well—in committing to the inputs, even when there is no guarantee of the outcome, and in caring for what and who has been entrusted to me. And surprisingly, that took care of the outcomes I had been trying to control, far beyond my expectations. I don’t always get it right. But I now return to that truth whenever I feel myself tightening around outcomes, titles or control: I was never meant to own any of this, only to steward it well. And that shift has been freeing. It allows me to work with intensity but not anxiety, to care deeply without being consumed, and to release outcomes without losing my sense of purpose. Because the work was never to secure permanence, but to be faithful with what has been placed in my hands, at least for this time.