The Fondue Pot Principle — Or, Just How Harshly Is the World Judging You?
One day I needed a fondue pot. A fondue pot is not something one wants to buy. I have lived over 18,000 days now, and on exactly ONE of those days have I wished I had a fondue pot. But the day in question was that day. So I went to Facebook and put out an all-call for a fondue pot.
Within minutes, my friend Matthew Sullivan had offered to make his fondue pot available. Within a couple of hours, cubes of gruyere cheese were melting in my borrowed fondue pot, and my kids were spearing bread chunks to toast over a Sterno flame.
Matthew Sullivan brought great joy to the Rogers house that day because a) he had what we needed, and b) he was willing to offer it. And I’m pretty sure Matthew got some joy too. (I don’t have any data to support this, but I suspect that at least 2/3 of the pleasure of owning a fondue pot derives from letting other people borrow it; after the first couple of months of ownership, nobody has ever eaten enough fondue to justify the storage space for all those accoutrements.)
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