Blog
I went back to the house I grew up in — the place my parents built a life inside, but never truly owned.
It sits on a small plot of leased land, the kind of arrangement that quietly tells a family where they stand. You can make memories there. You can plant gardens there. You can raise a family there.
The tiny house is actually twice the size it was when we lived in it. It now has running water. The new residents no longer have to carry water from the spring water spigot the way we did.
But you can’t belong to it — not fully.
Not in the way the land itself belongs to someone else.
Even as a child, the contradiction was clear, even if I couldn’t name it:
What you depend on doesn’t always belong to you — and what you belong to can be taken away.
That early tension — between connection and permission — became the backdrop for my life in work.
I’ve started six businesses.
Not to accumulate. Not to win. Not to plant a flag that said, this is mine.
I built each one because something new could exist, and I felt called to help bring it into the world.
It was never the ownership that pulled me forward. It was the spark — the energy of possibility, the joy of collaboration, the feeling of building something with others that none of us could do alone.
Ownership was part of the structure — yes.
But it was never the purpose.
And the truth is, I didn’t always get it right. I made mistakes. I confused responsibility with control. I said yes when I should have invited others in. I tried to carry things alone that were never meant to be held by one person. Even when I was trying to build something different, the Story Lens would pull me back into familiar patterns — patterns I didn’t yet see as stories.
Years later, Matt and Adrian Perez and I wrote Radical Companies because we believed co-ownership was the future of work — and I still do.
But believing in co-ownership and knowing how to live it are two very different things.
We were only beginning to understand what co-ownership really asks of us:
A shift from possession to relationship, from hierarchy to reciprocity, from control to contribution.
If anything, I spent years trying to work ownership out of my organizations — trying to build co-ownership, trying to create spaces where the work didn’t belong to me, but to the people shaping it.
Because the deepest form of ownership I’ve ever felt wasn’t about possession.
It was about relationship.
The Story Lens — the lens society asks us to see through, tells a different story:
Ownership is control.
Control is power.
Power is safety.
And safety is earned through exclusivity.
You own the company. Your name is on the corporate paperwork. Your idea is protected by law. Your share of the pie must be guarded.
Through this lens, ownership becomes a kind of fortification — a wall around what’s “yours.”
It promises freedom, but trades it for vigilance. It promises security, but trades it for competition. It promises status, but trades it for isolation.
And in the process, something essential is lost.
I saw this in my own companies, not because anyone intended harm, but because the story itself demanded separation. The sense that we are connected to the work because it lives through us — not because we have title over it.
Life doesn’t understand ownership the way story does.
A forest doesn’t own its trees.
A river doesn’t own its water.
A coral reef doesn’t own its fish.
But each of them is in relationship with everything around it. Humans are no different — but our stories often make us forget.
Life knows something we’ve forgotten:
Belonging isn’t a claim — it’s a connection.
It’s the feeling of being met by the work, not managing it.
When I look back on the companies, the moments that felt like ownership weren’t about equity or profit or control. They were about the feeling of being woven into the work.
The moment a team solved something impossible. The moment an idea caught fire between people. The moment a contribution rippled outward and shaped the whole.
That sense that you are part of something larger than yourself, that is ownership through the Life Lens.
Not the ownership of possession, but the ownership of relationship, responsibility, and impact.
Not the co-ownership of contracts, but the co-ownership of care.
When we view ownership through the Story Lens, we get:
It feels natural only because we’ve worn this lens for centuries.
But when we look through the Life Lens, ownership transforms:
These two lenses don’t describe two types of people.
They describe two ways of seeing.
It’s not idealistic. It’s biological. It’s reality.
The Story Lens isolates.
The Life Lens integrates.
The Story Lens encloses.
The Life Lens connects.
The Story Lens turns work into property.
The Life Lens turns work into relationship.
And the more I built, the more I realized:
We are starving for that kind of ownership — the kind rooted in connection, not possession.
Every one of us carries a unique purpose, not in the mystical sense, but in a living one. We feel it in our desire to shape the world around us. To contribute. To leave a mark. To belong through what we create.
The Life Lens sharpens that desire.
It reveals that ownership isn’t about holding anything.
It’s about expressing something.
Expression is how we make meaning.
Impact is how we belong.
Contribution is how we connect to the world.
And ownership, at its deepest level, is:
The feeling that our work is part of us, and that we are part of it.
It’s not about control.
It’s about resonance.
Not about having.
About harmonizing.
If the last essays asked what a job is, or what governance is, this one asks something quieter — and perhaps more radical:
What if ownership is not a thing to have, but a relationship to live inside of?
What if our work — our real, meaningful work — isn’t owned at all, but tended?
What if belonging is the natural state, and possession the distortion?
What if the world we are trying to build isn’t one of owners and outsiders, but one of contributors and co-creators?
We’re not there yet.
But we are already turning the corner.
Every time we choose collaboration over control. Every time we build for contribution instead of extraction. Every time we create something that can only exist through the many, not the one.
Ownership stops being a story of having.
And becomes a story of serving life — through connection, impact, and shared creation.
That is the ownership I now trust.
The ownership I’ve been trying to build.
It’s the kind of ownership I see emerging now — in the small, living networks of people choosing to build together rather than own alone.
A kind of ownership that doesn’t divide us from the world, but returns us to it.
The kind of ownership life has been demonstrating all along.
The same way I felt standing in front of that little house, connected to something I never had to own to belong to.