The takeaway:
Those who do not take care of things lose control of things.
I was thinking as I laid awake late into the evening that these are really one in the same.
If you are taking care of a situation, you are asserting your relative ownership over it.
If you are taking care of yourself, you are owning yourself.
If you are taking care of your significant other and your family, you are taking ownership of that situation.
If you are taking care of your employees or your boss or your friends, you are exercising your personal power to take charge and own.
If you are taking care of and managing your investments, then you are owning them. If you are letting other people take care of your situation, you really aren’t owning them although you may be taking the residual of any success that is created. You can either own it yourself, delegate it to someone else, or just ignore that you even own anything (defer) — since you really can’t delete your wealth of other people’s time if you have it. Sure, you can burn it/gift it but for the sake of argument deleting is likely not the best way to take care of things, because once you do it you lose the ability to prevent the misuse and waste of limited resources, if you care to do that, or not.
Part of taking care of things is putting yourself in a situation where you can. Reliability, while it can be faked, is not something that you want to fake because the consequences of losing your credibility are increasingly bad. There are implicit assumptions that we all make about life and the way things will happen whenever we live (aka involve ourselves in something new). The trick is to base our assumptions on reasonable expectations of how reality might play out, knowing that full well reality is what you get away with.
Anyway, this is a concept that I like, because I feel like ownership always seems to imply some sort of aloofness, and that never really describes what I see when I see people take ownership and make the most of their lives. Not only does taking care of a situation imply that you have taken ownership of the world around you but further taking care when deciding what type of situations you want to exert yourself into implies that you are taking charge of your life and your future. And that is what this is about.
Taking — it is an act where you make something yours or take it under your control to the extent that you can, where you benefit from what happens.
Care — that which you care about and do nothing about is something that does not exist… actions speak and if you don’t care you may talk about it and act like you care but the measurement for caring is what you actually do.