This is as much a reminder to myself as it is to others.
This past weekend my friends rented a charter fishing boat for their son’s birthday party. Four hours trapped on a boat with two dozen eight year old’s is a far cry from the relaxing football Sunday I’d hoped to have, but you do it for the kids, right?
It was an unseasonably hot October day, with temperatures hitting 80 degrees. What’s more, you don’t just sit and relax on these boats, you spend most of your day baiting hooks and reeling in lines. It’s hot, sweaty, smelly work even if you don’t catch anything. And if you do, which we did, there’s a lot of touching and filleting of fish.
There were a lot of parents, mostly dads, on the boat. Some I knew, some I didn’t, but our kids are all the same age and we see each other at events all the time. That is to say, everyone there was at least familiar to me. As we were leaving the harbor, many of the dads were together on the back of the boat. This was when I noticed one was wearing a Rolex Daytona.
Normally I wouldn’t even register something like that, but given the hot, sweaty, smelly situation I described, it struck me as odd that someone would choose to wear a $16,000 watch to that event. When I got home that night, I told my wife about it and the first thing she asked was who was wearing it. This was when I realized…I had no idea. At the time, I registered that it was one of the men I know by sight, but I don’t know who his kid is, and I don’t know him at all. In fact, I couldn’t even describe him in relation to the other people who I did know there. In my memory, he was just “guy wearing Daytona.” If I saw him tomorrow and he wasn’t wearing the same watch, I wouldn’t piece it together.
Now this is where we get to the crux of the matter. In his amazing book, The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel tells the story of being a valet when he was younger. To be concise, Housel describes seeing people pull in with these amazing super cars, and realizing that he always remembered the car, but never the driver. The lesson Housel derives from this is that nobody is thinking about you as much as you are, and that when you buy something flashy that you think will make people look at you, they’re looking at the thing and imagining themselves with it. You are at best an afterthought.
I recognize that I could be in the wrong here. This gentleman may wear his Rolex everywhere, all the time. It could be as much his daily watch as my Seiko 5 is for me. However, in my experience, you don’t generally wear a $16k watch, even as a knockaround, unless you want someone to notice it. And to be fair, I did notice it. I just didn’t particularly care who was wearing it, just that it was present in a situation that did not seem to call for it.
In my own case, when I bought a BMW last year I couldn’t care less what others thought. An annoying truth about me is that I like nice cars that are fun to drive. When I test drove the X5, I knew it was the right car, and when I got to customize it just the way I wanted, I was sold. I don’t often think of what it makes people think of me when I show up driving it, I’m sure it happens, but I got that car for me (and my wife) and no one else. At first I made a joke that I prefer the anonymity of driving my beat up old Honda Civic, but after a year of driving the BMW I can tell you this for sure: Nobody is paying attention to me.
Freed by 50 