TL;DR: Learning to resist the urge to jump to solve a problem is one of the highest value, yet among the costliest & most difficult-to-imbibe disciplines one can cultivate (personally, professionally, & epistemically). Easter eggs at the end.
Frodo needed Strider’s (and many others’) protection from the ring wraiths in his journey. Gondor needed its King. And for a thousand years of the interregnum, the Stewards nurtured & protected Gondor, Rohan & the Rohirrim.
Middle Earth needed the Ranger, the Steward, and the King to usher in the Age of Men.
The Ranger
Solving & Fixing is necessary and important. We live highly privileged lives because countless people fixed countless small and big problems for us. Driven by a desire to be useful, coming from a place of wanting to do good, almost the entirety of all human material progress has come from there.
I used to think of solving or fixing problems as a means to helping others and contributing to human progress, and also as my core competence.
However, quite contrary & counter intuitive to this belief, I’ve learned that Fixing, is primarily an ego trip. At best, it inflates our sense of self, and at worst it stifles others & enables their destructive tendencies. It perpetuates the same problem cycles (possibly inadvertently, because one constantly needs something to solve/fix) we purportedly want to fix.
And it comes at immense cost – to self, to others, and to posterity, blinding us to far higher forms of leverage. And it may be worthwhile incurring the cost. When done intentionally, it has the potential to bring immense fulfillment to self and real time benefit to others.
However, done as a default, without understanding the alternatives, being stuck as a solver / fixer can be immensely frustrating & disempowering, leaving one constantly embroiled in other people’s wars and perpetually hyper-vigilant & braced for where the next shot is going to be fired from.
The Steward
How else may or should we conduct ourselves then, you may ask. If not of use, then what?
Be a Steward. Approach from a place of Curiosity, Awareness, Devotion, and Play I would suggest.
The Fixer jumps to solve the problem. He loves the thrill & high of being capable of taking the blow, the pain, and solving the problem. He is compensated through his agency growing and is validated through his indispensability.
The Steward (Think Cirion & Faramir, not Denethor) on the other hand, is curious about what allowed & enabled the problem. He holds boundaries, relies more on levers & fulcrums than tactics & brute force. He is motivated by the beauty of the problem and the structural elegance that can eliminate or make it irrelevant, rather than the solution. His payoff comes in the quiet satisfaction of having distributed his agency, not being needed, and the freedom to explore other realms of interest.
Embracing stewardship comes from a place of immense empowerment, accompanied with serendipitous benefits. One starts seeing everything & every one through that lens. Seeing our own agency through the trust others have put in us can be life changing.
Are my actions worthy of the trust reposed in me? Am I raising my children to be self assured and self reliant individuals, or just teaching them to chase the next achievement or fulfill my next expectation? Am I coaching my team to be the best version of themselves, in a way where they will be able to thrive without me, or only demanding the deliverable? Am I treating my body & mind with the utmost care and respect that I can? Am I giving the Universe the best experience of itself through the life it has endowed me with?
The Trade-Off
The first and the highest cost of Stewardship is our own ego, what we perceive as our relevance & utility. Removing dysfunction when our worth depends on the presence of the dysfunction can be catastrophic for the ego.
The second is material progress. Non-intervention costs delays, resources, discomfort, & failure. It is painful in the short term.
On the other hand, jumping to fix something is a vote of no-confidence in others’ ability. It denies them the struggle, exploration, & hard knocks that will forge their capability.
The third is conflict & relationships. If you don’t douse an active fire, it burns down the house. But if you spend your life running from room to room with a bucket, you never step outside to design the water main or clear the brush.
On the other hand, if you douse one, in the absence of proper stewarding, you will be expected to douse the next one, and the next one, and the next one. And if you refuse, because the water main was never designed and the brush never cleared, you will be seen as no better than a perpetrator, past fires doused not withstanding.
When we stop enabling bad behavior and let others face the consequences of their actions or inaction, we become inconvenient and no longer useful.
I’ve seen marriages break like biscuits, friendships end, and working relationships collapse when one person decided to protect their sanity & health and stopped being the fixer.
As I mentioned earlier, Solving & Fixing is important & necessary. It is where material progress lives. But Stewarding is what enables and nurtures the conditions to birth that progress & nurture it.
Kingship:
The Ranger is capable, but solitary excellence hits an inevitable ceiling. He cannot save the world one orc at a time.
The Steward, wise & humble, nurtures & preserves. He builds moats & ramparts & impregnable citadels while keeping a sharp sword and a taut bowstring.
The King has the hard won grit of the Ranger, the disciplined humility of the Steward, & transcends both. He operates at the intersection and interstice of creation & courage. Without the Ranger’s lived experience, the King is an empty theorist. Without the Steward’s wisdom, humility, & restraint, he is a castle-in-the-air visionary at best, a tyrant at worst.
Coming full circle, I would now rephrase my original proposition as follows – Mastering the art of seamlessly integrating and channeling the Ranger, Steward, and King is one of the highest value, yet among the costliest & most difficult-to-imbibe skills that one can cultivate.
Note 1: This essay started as an exploration of how responsible stewarding is essential for every effective & sustainable endeavor (charity, social movements, business), else it degenerates into the corrupted opposite of what it wants to be. That led to a realization of how things transform when we view our actions and lives through the lens of Stewardship. It then evolved into understanding the barriers to being a Steward, which then led to a realization that beyond Stewardship is transformation and Stewarding allows for the nurturing & sustenance that creates the conditions for transformation.
Note 2: The LOTR construct made it simpler for me to understand and helped reshape my view from Fixer vs. Steward to the Integration of Ranger, Steward, & King as the key premise.
Note 3: While this feels like a leadership essay, it is more an attempt to understand & articulate different aspects of being human, agency, & beauty. More about our lives than about business or leadership.
Note 4: I asked Gemini to review the Essay, and used some of the edits it recommended. It also helped with a ready reckoner on the 3 archetypes that I’m pasting below.
| Dimension | The Ranger (The Fixer) | Stewardship (The Cultivator) | Kingship (The Sovereign) |
| Core Stance | Interventional: “How do I eliminate this threat?” | Custodial & Observational: “What conditions and structures sustain this realm?” | Generative & Architectural: “What new reality must be called into being?” |
| Locus of Agency | Centered in self (Heroic, direct, solitary) | Distributed to the system (Delegated, autonomous, institutional) | Embodied in the whole (Catalytic, inspirational, systemic) |
| Response to Friction | Absorbs the blow directly; shields others from the wild | Holds the frame; lets natural feedback loops instruct and stabilize | Transforms the friction; redefines the territory and resolves systemic rifts |
| Primary Currency | Immediate relief, localized control, tactical skill | Continuity, institutional integrity, capacity building | Paradigm shifts, enduring peace, foundational renewal |
| Relationship to Power | Subordinate to the crisis; bound by endless tactical reaction | Custodial over an existing trust; bound by duty and tradition | Sovereign over the horizon; establishes new laws, alliances, and epochs |
| Hidden Payoff | Validation through indispensability and quiet sacrifice | The quiet satisfaction of order, preservation, and being unnecessary | The fulfillment of witnessing the flourishing, self-sovereignty of the kingdom |
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