Our culture puts a hyperfocus on ambition and individual success.
We’re becoming more and more okay with sacrificing on the altar of self-improvement.
Personal growth and achievement aren’t inherently unhealthy. But as a society, we’ve taken ambition entirely too far.
True progress always requires yielding for others, not advancing past them.
When you’re driving down the road and you approach a red light, you stop.
You do that so people coming from other directions can get ahead of you on the road you’re on.
Even though you’re allowing those people to go in front of you, you’ve decided that it’s best for society for us to yield to them.
To stop our progress for theirs.
Is it frustrating? Absolutely. Especially when you have to be somewhere.
But imagine if every driver prioritized their progress over others.
Imagine the chaos that would ensue if everyone started doing what seemed best to them to get to their destination the quickest.
There would be people driving in the grass, driving off the road, and crashing at red lights.
Now compare that to the current state of society:
Does it seem as if maybe we started adopting that mindset a bit too much in our culture?
We’re in a chaotic environment that’s largely caused by an unhealthy amount of selfish ambition.
Ambition has always been, and is still today, best utilized with a healthy amount of submission to others.
We were created to serve, and we’re most fulfilled when we’re serving.
An 80-year Harvard study found that the number one key to happiness is found in giving your time and energy to others through relationships.
Deep down we all know it. That’s why we’re drawn to help one another even when we have nothing to gain.
If service is where you’ll be most fulfilled, then serving others is what will keep your ambition in check.
This service-first mindset is what keeps relationships healthy and families whole.
When you put aside what you want in order to do what’s best for the whole, you actually end up getting what you want – fulfillment and happiness.
It’s another one of those weird Jesus paradoxes.
But we’ve lost sight of that truth in our culture.
It should come as no surprise that both self-centeredness and mental health issues have been on the rise at the same time.
We’ve lost our sense of community.
And we’ve found that the lack of connection leaves us empty, no matter how much we achieve or attain.
So here’s my bet:
If we filter ambition through the lens of submission to others through service, I’m willing to bet that mental and emotional traffic jams will start to clear up.
Where there’s limited vision, there’s limited provision.
God will not provide where there’s no pursuit.
When Abraham called God “Jehovah Jireh” – which means “The LORD Who Provides” – the literal meaning of the Hebrew word for Jireh is “to see” (Genesis 22:14).
It’s the same word used to describe when God created the Earth and “saw” that it was good.
His vision led to his provision.
Prophets in the Old Testament were called “seers”. The Hebrew word for “seer” comes from the same word that was used to describe God as Jehovah Jireh.
What the prophet saw, God provided.
In order to get God’s provision, it was important to first seek God’s vision.
We’ve carried the same idea into our English language.
The English word for “provide” comes from two Latin words that literally mean:
“Pro-” – to come before, prepare, or make way for something
“Videre” – to see
Together, “provide” literally means “to make way” for “something that has been seen”.
If provision is stagnant, it’s worth asking yourself how resolute you are in the vision.
Is it vague? Is it hazy? Can you only sort of see it through a mental cloud?
Visions are outcomes, not detailed plans.
You don’t need all the facts, but you do need a destination.
If you can’t see it, it might be time to seek after it.
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Matthew reminds us to seek the Kingdom of God first, then provision comes. (Matthew 6:33)
The Kingdom of God is union with Jesus. (John 17:21, John 15:4)
And union with Jesus comes with revelation – which is vision. (John 14:21, John 10:27, John 16:13, James 1:5, Isaiah 30:21)
Union leads to vision which leads to provision.
It makes sense when you break it down.
Without vision, we’re wandering aimlessly.
And wandering aimlessly is unproductive and wasteful.
So why would a good God pour resources into aimless, wasteful wandering?
When the Israelites were wandering in the desert, he gave them very simple provisions – manna every day.
In fact, they complained about the provision so much that they missed the fact that they had rejected the vision.
If you remember, the vision was the Promised Land – which was flowing with milk and honey and fruit.
They reached the Promised Land within a couple of years of leaving Egypt, but because they failed to see the vision, they wandered.
And because of their wandering, their provision was limited.
Which leads us back to this:
Where there’s limited vision, there’s limited provision.
God doesn’t bless short-sightedness.
Proverbs 29:18 tells us where there is no vision, the people will cast off restraint.
The word for vision here means mental sight or revelation from God.
The word for “cast off restraint” means to let loose of the boundaries of an ordained covering.
When we stop seeking vision, we’re letting go of the intended provision.
We suffer from short-sightedness.
In 2 Peter 3, the apostle Peter addresses short-sighted people:
He says, ‘They will say, “Where is this ‘coming’ he [Jesus] promised? […]
Then he says, “But they deliberately forget […]’”
They abandoned the vision because they had forgotten God’s faithfulness to see them through what seemed unlikely.
And in doing so, they rejected the provision of hope, joy, and peace along with the tangible provisions needed to get them through to the destination.
So if you find yourself lacking, it might be worth asking if you’re still on track.
Are you seeking his voice?
And are you laying down selfish ambition?
If so, provision is coming.
If not, it might be waiting for you somewhere else.
The impact of your life is less dependent on what you’re willing to do and more dependent on what you’re willing to not do.
To achieve something, it’s natural for us to first think of what we can do to make it happen.
But when Jesus talked about the kingdom of God, he didn’t talk about what we needed to be willing to do.
Instead, he talked about what we needed to be willing to not do.
He challenged the disciples to leave everything they had to follow him.
When Jesus asked Peter, Andrew, James, and John to follow him, it was immediately after they had just caught so many fish it was sinking their boat. (Luke 5:7)
Imagine having the best day of sales you’ve ever had at your business, and deciding to walk away from it altogether on the same day.
If you consider the immediate requirements of discipleship, there wasn’t much for them to do.
But being willing to stop pursuing their business was a much bigger deal.
What Jesus was asking them to give up made no logical sense at the time.
Why would they give up the thing they had built – the thing he just blessed? Why give up their steady income?
We like to think that maybe Jesus would’ve played it safer.
Our version of Jesus would’ve asked them to give their extra time to him when they weren’t fishing.
He would’ve asked them to be part-time fishermen, maybe.
But he didn’t do that. He showed them what was possible, then he invited them to go all in.
In Luke 14, Jesus is talking about the value of counting the cost before you do something.
This parable has been used to justify playing it safe – to be as certain as you can before doing something. But that’s not exactly what Jesus was saying.
He basically says, wouldn’t it be dumb to endeavor to build a house or go to war without first thinking about what you’re going to have to give up in order to be successful?
If you think you can go into either of those things without giving up a great deal, you’re not going to be prepared to see it through.
Jesus ended that conversation by saying, “those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples.” (Luke 14:33)
That’s not a paraphrase. Go read it.
When a king decides to go to war, he’s also deciding to not focus on farming, harvesting, building towns, and improving infrastructure.
By deciding to go to war, he’s giving up everything else.
It’s a reckless endeavor, but one that must be committed to wholeheartedly. Anything short of that will end in failure.
We all have things that God has given us to do that require our full commitment.
And it’s easy to say that you’re willing to do whatever it takes to make it happen.
But the more difficult question is:
What are you willing to not do?
What are you willing to give up?
Your number one barrier is not your ability or inability. Your number one barrier is distraction.
What’s so important in your life that it’s going to require the elimination of all distractions?
Because in order to fulfill your purpose, you’ll find that you have to be willing to give up your potential.
Most people have doubts about their abilities, their future, their relationships, and about God.
Doubt gets a negative connotation, but it can actually be very constructive.
The Greek word in the New Testament for doubt is “diakrinó“, and it has both a positive and negative connotation.
So the negative use of the word means to waiver back and forth between ideas. It doesn’t simply mean to wonder in your mind if something will happen for certain. It implies an instability in beliefs and a lack of commitment. (See James 1:6)
The positive use of the word implies sifting through facts for the sake of discernment. (See Matthew 16:3 when Jesus rebukes for failing to “discern the signs of the times”.)
Positive doubt takes you out of your comfort zone while negative doubt leads you further into it.
When you take the time to separate two ideas for the sake of deciding between them, you’re taken outside of your comfort zone.
It’s comfortable to jump back and forth whenever it’s convenient.
But it’s only in the discomfort of doubt and discernment where we can effectively grow.
The key to healthy doubt is to understand its source.
Dr. Gary Habermas, a well known religious researcher and professor, identifies three types of doubt:
Factual (lack of information)
Emotional (rooted in pain)
Volitional (unwillingness to trust)
What’s interesting is, most doubts aren’t factual or volitional – they’re emotional.
Distrust and doubt stems from the heart, not the mind, and thus isn’t solved by information alone.
This is why a husband who doesn’t trust his wife is never satisfied with knowing where his wife is or what she’s doing at all times. He’ll always wonder, and he’ll always want more information.
It’s because the issue isn’t about information. It’s about the emotional damage of the person who’s unwilling to trust.
Emotional doubt arises when feelings overshadow facts, leading to “what if” questions without evidence.
Anxious or obsessive thinking often fuels emotional doubts and distrustful thinking.
This is what causes people to doubt their salvation or question God’s goodness even though they have the facts that reinforce those beliefs.
There will always be facts to the contrary of what you believe. The question isn’t which side has more facts. The question is, which side are you willing to trust?
To overcome emotional doubt, the brain has to be taught how to process information differently.
For example, instead of running with the first conclusion your mind produces, ask yourself why there’s resistance to trust. Does the idea of trusting hurt? If so, that’s a red flag that there’s pain beneath the surface to be dealt with.
It’s amazing what processing information from a neutral perspective can do. If you can train your brain to simply be an observer of facts, then the pain of trusting can be dealt with separately from the act of choosing a path.
You control your doubts and how you process them.
It isn’t the events in our lives that cause trauma – it’s our interpretation of events and our reaction to those events that causes the most impact.
Faith in anyone or anything should always be grounded in facts. Trust should, in essence, be a conscious decision to stop chasing alternate conclusions and lean on the facts you have.
It’s like the old chair that looks sturdy enough to hold your weight. You can’t know until you release your weight and try it.
In the same way, you can train the habit of faith by learning enough and letting go.
Self-confidence and relationships work the same way. Kick the tires, see if you think you can trust it, then let go and try it. If it holds weight, release more and see if it holds. Continue until trust is built.
You’ll never out-learn distrust and doubt. The only way forward is to learn enough and let go.
Growing mass amounts of crops in a short time produces low-quality and often dangerous results.
The reason is because farming (like influence) begins and ends with soil.
You have to be healthy soil before you can produce healthy fruit.
In farming, nutrient-rich topsoil is a product of ground that has been cultivated by the elements of nature through decomposition and soil regeneration for generations, sometimes for thousands of years.
In order to keep the ground from becoming infertile, farmers have to rotate their crops and periodically allow the ground to go unplanted for an extended period of time – typically one to five years to be exact.
If the farmer decides to take a short-term approach by planting in the soil repeatedly every season without allowing it to regenerate, the soil loses its nutrients, becomes infertile, and becomes a more inviting environment for pests.
This leads to the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, which, as we’re learning more and more, can cause long-term health issues in those who consume produce from these types of farms.
Do you see the correlation to the human heart?
In the same way fast farming produces bad results, striving to gain influence with large amounts of people in a short time produces low-quality impact and often dangerous results for both the “influencer” and the ones being influenced.
Real change takes time. There are no shortcuts.
And building large followings on digital platforms is a dangerous path for the human soul if the soil of the heart isn’t tended to properly.
Despite what the personal growth culture portrays, it’s the quite, slow, simple path that leads to the most abundant fruit.
Let’s say in any given decade of your life, you have a close relationship with approximately 25 people.
This includes friends, classmates, coworkers, or anyone else you spend a substantial amount of time around.
Now, for the sake of this exercise, let’s say that the majority of those 25 people are exchanged for another 25 people every 10 years.
Now, let’s say you live for 80 years, and 60 of those years are productive, impactful years.
With just some simple back of napkin math, we can see that the average person will have a significant influence on 150 people.
It’s no stretch to say that for every person you have influence with, you also have at least some influence on the people they interact with. In that way, your influence on them then has an exponential effect.
Let’s assume, then, that those 150 people will also have a significant impact on 150 people throughout their lifetime as well.
Conservatively speaking, of the 150 people you will influence throughout your life, you will also likely influence about half of their network indirectly.
So, throughout your life, let’s say you’ll have direct influence on 150 people and indirect influence on 11,250 people (150 people in your network times 75, which is half of each person’s 150-person network).
This is where it gets interesting.
If every one of your 150 people that you influence turn around and then have an influence on 75 people, and those 75 people turn around and have an influence on 75 more people, then the number of lives you have had a substantial influence on would be 843,750.
That’s in just three generations beyond yours.
Carry that out to the fourth generation and you’ve impacted 63,281,250 people. Carry that out to the fifth generation, and you’ve impacted 4.7 billion people.
Apple is easily one of the most influential brands in history. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook is listed as one of Time Magazine’s most influential people in the world. And even at the apex of influence in the world, there are still only around 2 billion Apple customers in the world.
Within just a few generations, you can have a much more substantial and long-lasting impact on the world than even the most influential people and brands, and you can do it without slaving away at work.
If you are intentional about the relationships you build and the seeds you sow into other people, and you’re willing to wait for a return over time, then the impact you can have on the world is truly limitless.
What’s even more amazing is that influencing billions of people over the course of a few generations doesn’t take a substantial amount of effort. It’s actually a conservative goal.
To have a substantial influence on 150 people over the course of 60 years of your adult life, you would only need to impact 2 to 3 people each year.
Said another way, if you spent every few years cultivating meaningful relationships with 5 to 10 people, you would be well on your way to having an exponential impact on countless lives.
I get that the numbers aren’t sexy. It doesn’t scratch the itch of significance that we all have.
For some reason, telling you that you could impact millions of lives in a positive way if you diligently cultivated 20 to 30 relationships every decade doesn’t make you feel as important or as valuable as the idea of building something big and flashy that captures the attention of 1 million people in a single generation.
What’s truly sad is if you spend your time trying to impact 1 million people in one generation, the longevity of that impact is inevitably low.
Having a short term impact on 1 million people in one generation pales in comparison to the long-term positive influence you can have on the world by having a deep impact on only a handful of people in your lifetime.
We’ve gotten this twisted in the age of social media, and it’s evident by the rise of the term “influencer”.
By definition, an influencer in the digital world is someone who has the ability to influence the purchase behavior of consumers online, primarily through social media.
We’ve effectively turned influence into a commercialized product.
As such, influence is seen as something to be maximized to produce the most return in the shortest amount of time.
What we fail to realize, though, is that by reducing influence to an asset to be profited from, we end up gaining influence that is cheap, shallow, and valueless.
You probably won’t change the lives of a million people in your lifetime. And that’s okay. In fact, it’s preferable that you don’t.
It’s much more beneficial to everyone if you spend your life focusing on having a positive influence on a handful of people in a long-term, profound way.
Those people will not only be the ones telling stories at your funeral about the moments you created that mattered deeply to them, but the actions, values, and stories you left imprinted on their hearts will also tell countless generations to come about the legacy you left behind.
And that is the only kind of influence worth living for.
Of everything you’re doing right now, what will matter in a thousand years?
Jesus says in Revelation 1:8 that he is the one who is, who was, and who is to come.
His legacy is timeless, surviving all changes in the earth and all historical shifts in society.
If Jesus’ legacy is timeless, and Scripture says in 1 John that “in this world we are like Jesus” (1 John 4:17) then what are we doing that will stand the test of time?
Think of it this way: who can you name from a thousand years ago?
(I’ll give you a hint. It was the Middle Ages.)
Here are a few names you might know:
Joan of Arc
Charlemagne
Johannes Gutenberg
Marco Polo
Leonardo da Vinci
Genghis Khan
Unless you paid especially close attention in history class, you’d probably be hard-pressed to give any amount of detail about what any of those people did.
You probably know they were important. But were they impactful?
Important means “of great significance or value and likely to have a profound effect on success, survival, or well-being.”
Impactful means “to have a strong effect on someone or something.”
Importance is something we think is valuable. Impactful is something that changes things.
A City Council approving a new park to be built in your community is important. A father taking his son to that park every Saturday is impactful.
Do you see the difference?
Important things include:
Work
Projects
Household chores
Finances
Impactful things include:
Faith
Marriage
Parenting
Friendships
Important things are typically not people-centered. Impactful things always are.
And the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
You can do things that are both important and impactful. You can do work that changes people’s lives.
But important things tend to have a wide and shallow impact.
That’s because important work tends to be about providing something valuable to as many people as possible. In other words, it prioritizes reach over depth.
Impactful things, on the other hand, are all about depth and therefore tend to be more narrowly focused.
To have a genuine impact, it’s very difficult to spread out your efforts. Like drilling a well, impact tends to be an art of focused, consistent effort.
Now, here’s the important distinction:
Important work has the potential to be remembered for generations. But impactful work has the potential of being felt for generations.
There was a survey that asked teenagers to identify the person they admired most as a role model besides their parents.
(David Kinnaman, who directed the study, noted that parents were left out of the potential answers because so many teenagers either have high regard for their parents or feel otherwise compelled to list their parents as role models. To quote the study, “Previous research shows that mentioning parents is almost an automatic response for many.”)
In this survey, the respondents could have chosen musicians, athletes, community leaders, historical figures or any of the many, many, influential people kids learn to admire in popular culture and history classes.
But here were the most common answers:
37% answered a relative, such as a grandparent, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, cousin, etc.
11% answered teachers and coaches
9% said friends
6% said a pastor or other religious leader they know personally
In total, nearly two-thirds of teenagers said their closest relationships within their communities were the most influential on their lives.
Entertainers came in at 6%, followed by athletes at 5%, political leaders at 4%, faith leaders at 4%, business leaders at 1%, authors at 1%, science and medical professionals at 1%, other artists at 1%, and members of the military at 1%.
That’s only about a quarter of the total responses that included people outside of close communities (although some of the answers, such as athletes and leaders, could have been local role models).
What’s noteworthy from this study is that pastors and even Jesus were listed less than 10% of the time. That means if you want your kids to learn about Jesus, you have to model it. That’s what they’re going to retain. And that’s what’s going to have the greatest impact.
You might be wondering, “But how? What does being an impactful person or role model look like?”
Well, the study asked the same thing.
And when asked why the participants identified the role models they selected, here were the top reasons:
26% listed personality traits like caring about others, being loving and polite, being courageous, and being fun
11% said they were encouraging, which included helping them be a better person, always being there for them, or being most interested in their future.
In other words, a huge chunk – 36% – of why someone made the “most influential” list in a young person’s life was simply because they were kind and compassionate.
Here were some other answers for why they selected who they did:
22% said they wanted to emulate them or follow in their footsteps
13% said that he or she accomplished their goals
9% said this person overcame adversity
7% said he or she works hard
That’s 51% of the reasons falling in the category of simply being respectable.
If we break all of those reasons down, here are the three things that matter most when it comes to impacting people’s lives:
Having a close personal relationship
Showing people you care
Giving them something to respect by setting goals and following through
You don’t have to be a superstar. You don’t have to be wealthy. You don’t have to be well known. You don’t have to be intelligent or successful in the eyes of the world.
To have a significant positive impact on someone, you just have to care about people, be there for them, and show them what living a respectable life looks like by doing whatever you do with excellence.
This study shows us what we all inherently know is true.
Make a quick mental list of the people you have looked up to most in your life. This list usually includes at least one parent or guardian, probably a sibling, maybe an aunt or uncle, definitely your close friends, and maybe a pastor, coach or teacher.
These are impactful relationships. And impact equals influence.
But that’s not how our culture typically thinks of influence. We think that importance equals influence.
Time Magazine has what’s called the Time100, which is a list of the 100 most influential people in the world. This list includes innovators, musicians, actors, athletes, politicians, and other major public figures. It’s a list of important people.
For example, Patrick Mahomes made this list. He’s important because he’s done something that society deems important – he’s an elite athlete.
But whose life will be changed by Patrick Mahomes?
Kids will certainly be inspired by him to strive to achieve more in their own lives, but if you had to place a percentage on it, whose lives will Patrick Mahomes have a major impact on?
It will be his wife, his kids, his close friends, the kids he coaches and mentors on local sports teams – those are the lives that will be impacted by him. Not the countless people who are entertained by him on Sundays.
But here’s the tough part:
We love important work.
It makes us feel good because we long to build things, and today’s culture tells us that what we should be building is something important.
Important work will always fade away. Impactful work – pouring your life into the people closest to you – is what will matter when you’re gone.
Bonnie Ware, a nurse who provided care for dying patients, wrote a book titled, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. These are the top 5 regrets she listed:
“I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
“I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”
“I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.”
“I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”
“I wish I had let myself be happier”
These are all relationship-focused regrets.
When we focus on what feels important, we’ll chase things that we think other people will respect us for (the #1 regret) and we’ll de-prioritize margin, rest, emotional health, connection to friends, and happiness (numbers 2-5 on the list).
Harvard’s 80-year study on what makes for a happy life found that, “Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives.”
Maybe that’s why the most common regrets are things that hinder close, real relationships.
Notice what’s not on the list of regrets, though. It doesn’t say, “I wish I had achieved more.”
Stop and acknowledge that.
Deep down, we all know what’s important. And yet we get blinded by what feels important.
Don’t get me wrong, important work needs to be done. We need people doing important work to advance our culture and create a better future for the world. The technological and medical breakthroughs we’ve had allow us to live the lives we enjoy today.
But we have to stop confusing importance for impactful. Don’t get sucked into the allure of important work. Yes, it must be done, but it’s not what matters most.
Focus on impact, first and foremost.
Focus on cultivating the relationships and resources that are closest to us. You’ll often find that important work stems from an impact-first mentality.
Then, in a thousand years, when no one knows your name and your memory is long gone, your legacy will be alive and well, replicating exponentially in the lives of the children’s children’s children of the people you poured your life into impacting.
Somewhere along the way, we started wearing burnout like it’s a badge of honor.
Letting someone know that we’re busy feels validating.
Busyness feels like progress.
Take parenting for example. It’s very easy to sign yourself up for everything you think you’re “supposed” to be doing, because saying no to the cultural norms feels like rejection.
Maybe that’s why a survey found that 60% of parents feel overwhelmed by the mental load of parenting.
I think most of that is self-inflicted…being unwilling to sit in the emptiness of boredom.
Busy has become our baseline. And without it, we feel unproductive and unimportant.
Doing things you deem productive can cause your brain to release dopamine. Which is potentially part of the reason busyness feels like a drug.
It can be addicting, but overwhelm isn’t a sign of importance. It’s a sign that something needs to change.
A burned-out person is an ineffective person.
You can’t pour out if you’re empty. And you can’t fake being present for long.
Rest isn’t indulgent. Rest is essential.
One study found that regular leisure activities like quiet time, time in nature, hobbies, even just unwinding are linked to lower stress, lower blood pressure, better health, and better mood.
This isn’t just about having a hobby or taking a vacation. It’s about fostering a lifestyle that includes being comfortable with boredom.
But most of us ignore the invitation. We call it lazy or selfish or just plain impossible.
But what if your health and peace was part of the job?
What if letting go is what helps you show up better?
Most people don’t waste time, money, or opportunities on purpose.
They usually just don’t realize how valuable they are.
We naturally think impact comes from big plans and important goals. And when we can’t see progress towards the big “important” things in life, we feel like we’re wasting time.
But impact usually comes the unnoticed moments, like a distracted look, a harsh word, or a missed chance to engage, that shape the people closest to us.
And we mismanage these moments because we’ve undervalued simplicity.
We overestimate the weight of our intentions and underestimate the power of our presence.
If you want to steward time, relationships, or money better, remember:
You only steward what you cherish, and you only cherish what you see as valuable.
So here are three of the most valuable things you have that get overlooked:
1. Insecurities. Insecurities provide insight. They show what you care about and where you long to grow. When you hide insecurities, they turn into shame. When you expose and share them, they become fertile ground for vulnerability. And vulnerability is the doorway to trust.
2. Frustration. Frustration points to what matters and where unity is needed. It’s not the enemy. It’s a signpost. The goal isn’t to eliminate or avoid frustration, but to let it inform the adjustments needed for unity to happen. Avoid it, and you’ll drift. Face it, and you’ll grow in a way very few are willing to.
3. Presence. The present is the only place you can actually affect change. Everything else – regret from the past and dreams for the future – is an illusion. Who you want to become isn’t found in tomorrow. It’s in the next word, the next moment, the next small step you choose right now.
You don’t need more time.
You just need to value the time you already have.
And when you start to cherish it, you’ll steward it well.