The Lanterns You Let Go: Why Investing in People Means Being Ready to Lose Them

For a few minutes, the sky belonged to everyone willing to let go.

In 2016, I took my family to a lantern festival in San Antonio.

Thousands of people stood in the dark, each holding a small lantern.

Then we lit them and let them fly.

As they rose, a strange thought hit me: we had paid for something we had no intention of keeping.

The moment we released it, it was gone forever.

The lantern was never meant to stay in our hands.

Think about our children. We invest years of money, attention, worry, and love in them.

And if we do our job well, eventually we let them go too.

I see building a company the same way.

The people you invest in most are the people you must support as they grow into bigger roles, their own ideas, and sometimes their next chapter.

If you only invest in what you can keep, you’ll never invest in anything that matters.

That festival was almost ten years ago. Every lantern is long gone.

But I still remember watching them rise.