Greed
The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs
Before sunup the shed smells of iron and wet straw. On the scarred table a bird lies slack, neck long, wings fallen open. Your right hand lifts a cleaver; the little hole near the spine winks in the tin light. Beside your elbow, a single egg sits heavy in a ring of straw, warm and impossible. You prize the ribs apart and lean into the steam for the cache you pictured all week. Only gristle, a slick of dark, your breath coming back at you. The egg does not move.
Greed imagines a hoard inside the thing that makes the hoard. It trades a steady stream for one imagined lump and reaches for the knife. But value lives in the living mechanism — the field with its soil, the cow that calves, the customer who still opens your emails, the team that sleeps on Fridays. When you pull tomorrow’s yield into today, you salt the ground: unsubscribe lists, burned-out crews, machines run dry to make the quarter. The cleaver delivers one glittering moment and a long silence.
Therefore
Protect the engine that produces value. Take the flow; do not eat the seed.
Newfoundland, 1992
In July 1992, Canada’s fisheries minister John Crosbie stood in St. John’s and declared a moratorium on Northern cod. For four centuries the fish had come like a season. In the 1970s and 1980s, sonar and factory trawlers pushed catches to records; fleets hauled spawning fish before they could replace themselves. Scientists warned. Boats kept sailing. The payoff was wonderful until it stopped. The stock crashed to a fraction of historic levels, and thirty thousand people lost their work almost overnight. Decades later, the cod have not truly returned. The goose was a cold ocean; the cleaver was ours.
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A small reminder, on the shop till or the laptop lid, that guarding the maker beats gutting it for one gleam.
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