Part 4 of my series on the book “The Art of Spending Money” by Morgan Housel.
In life, there are different virtues you can attain over time.
According to columnist David Brooks, we can sort them into two buckets:
Things like our salary, job title, net worth and the (fancy) material goods we own belong to the resume virtues.
The other ones belong to the eulogy virtues – things we’d want to be mentioned in our eulogy: How much people truly respect and admire us. No one would wish their eulogy to mention the huge house they live in or the sports car they own.
I like this quote from Morgan because it’s equally funny and true:
When we struggle to earn respect and admiration through intelligence, humor, empathy, or the ability to love, we may resort to the only remaining — and least effective — tool: material goods. Admire my car, beep beep, vroom vroom.
But whose attention do these material goods really attract and how lasting is the impact?
The problem gets even worse when you hear that psychologist Tim Kasser found out that “those who craved extrinsic pride the most had less mental capacity left to nourish their intrinsic pride.”
So by valuing material over immaterial things during your lifetime, you actually leave yourself less room to cultivate the latter.
Morgan shares a good rule of thumb of how this tug-of-war between the two poles works:
I tend to view my desire for material things as inversely proportional to what I have to offer the world.
That’s why your reputation is actually the most valuable thing you own. When “your name speaks louder than anything that you could buy – that’s your worth”.
There’s also this quote by Warren Buffett, who put it like this:
At my age, you measure success in life by how many of the people you want to love you actually do.
So, in short, the thing to do is pretty simple. Morgan again:
Invest in the interior of your house, not the exterior.