Go Ahead, Covet Your Neighbor’s Wife.

A note before you read this.

This essay is an excerpt from my book, Soul in the Game, which I wrote a few years ago. 

If you enjoy it, you can pick up a copy of the book here. And if you have already read it, I would be truly grateful for a review on Amazon.

Thank you for reading.

Go Ahead, Covet Your Neighbor’s Wife

I had a deep, existential, meaning-of-life type of conversation with a friend of mine, another value investor. I asked him, do you want Warren Buffett’s success?

He was somewhat stunned by the question, and asked: “Is that a rhetorical question?”

It was not.

I told him about a nugget of Jewish wisdom my wife shared with me. But first, let’s revisit one of the Ten Commandments: Don’t covet. Or more precisely, don’t covet your neighbor’s wife. To be even more precise, I am not talking about outright adultery here, but rather about thoughts you may have about the desirability of your neighbor’s wife. And to make it even clearer: not my neighbor’s wife (I don’t want my neighbor reading this and getting any ideas).

Here is that practical Jewish wisdom (severely paraphrased by me). Go ahead and covet your neighbor’s wife, but don’t just covet her beautiful eyes, her soft voice, and her stunning figure. Covet her in her entirety. Don’t forget about her mother who would insist you kiss her on the lips every time you see her and who loves to dispense unlimited quantities of unsolicited advice. Or her brother who needs to get bailed out of jail every other week. Don’t forget about the hours that neighbor’s wife spends in front of the mirror (forgetting about her hubby and the kids).

Covet away! But covet the whole package. The antidote to coveting is holistic coveting.

So when you covet Buffett’s success, do it holistically, too. Not just the empire he built and the billions he accumulated (that he’ll give away anyway), but also the life he led. When I read Alice Schroeder’s The Snowball, the main point I got out of the book was not to be like Buffett. I was lucky I read it when my kids were still young. Buffett’s obsession with the stock market was anything but healthy. He got tomorrow’s newspaper delivered to him the evening before. He spent every living moment in his study, completely neglecting his wife and children. His wife, the love of his life, could not take this anymore and left him. So, do you still covet what Buffett has?

Would Buffett have achieved the degree of financial success that he has without sacrificing his marriage or neglecting his children? We will never have an answer to this question. Maybe he could have, but he would have been a billionaire with a small b and would not have the global adulation that came with his capital B wealth.

My gut sense tells me (though I could be completely wrong) that if he was given a do-over and could make some changes to his earlier life, Buffett would not choose to change something about his investing approach, for example embracing investing in tech companies earlier in his career (he only made his first significant investment in a tech company when he was in his 80s), but he would tweak how much attention he paid to his wife and kids.

We have a lot of power within us to get rid of suffering if we make the decision not to want the wrong things. This message constantly resonates through Stoic philosophy and Seneca explained it perfectly: “No person has the power to have everything they want, but it is in their power not to want what they don’t have, and to cheerfully put to good use what they do have.”

The bright side of coveting

Coveting is a lot less interesting to me than its more toxic cousin, envy. Envy is coveting (desiring) what another person has and then resenting the person for that. Envy poisons people’s lives. But if we learn how not to covet, we may be able to kill envy in its tracks.

Buffett nailed it when he said, “As an investor, you get something out of all the deadly sins – except for envy. Being envious of someone else is pretty stupid. Wishing them badly, or wishing you did as well as they did – all it does is ruin your day. Doesn’t hurt them at all, and there’s zero upside to it.”

Charlie Munger made an interesting contribution on the topic of envy:

Mozart … here’s the greatest musical talent maybe that ever lived. And what was his life like? It was bitterly unhappy, and he died young. That’s the life of Mozart. What the hell did Mozart do to screw it up? Two things that are guaranteed to create a lot of misery – he overspent his income scrupulously – that’s number one. That is really stupid. And that other thing was, his life was full of jealousies and resentments. If you overspend your income and be full of jealousy and resentments, you can have a lousy, unhappy life and die young. All you’ve got to do is learn from Mozart.

Stoics have an interesting approach to coveting (and thus envy). They apply Epictetus’ dichotomy of control to it. The neighbor’s wife and Buffett’s wealth are externals (actually, Buffett’s wealth would fall into positive preference: nice to have but not necessary).

But this is where things get interesting. Stoics would recommend that you look at Buffett and desire his virtues that you admire. Make them internal. I just talked about what I have learned from Buffett’s mistakes, but there is so much more I’ve learned from him.

Here are just a few examples.

The newspaper test. How would you feel about any given action if you knew it was going to be written up the next day in the newspaper? Reputation takes a lifetime to build and five minutes to lose. In other words, always behave honorably. Always!

Buffett’s definition of success (he probably came to it later in life). Behave in a way that makes people you care about love you. He said, “If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster.”

Buffett has a friend who survived the Holocaust. When she looks at people, she only asks one question: Would they hide me? Buffett said, “When you are 70 and you look back at your life, and you have a lot of people who would hide you, then you’ll have had a very successful life.”

“Praise by name, criticize by category.” You’ll never hear Buffett speak negatively about anyone in public, and at the same time he is generous with his public praise of specific individuals.

Buffett had a tremendous impact on me as a writer. And of course, he had an immense impact on me and millions of others as an investor.

Seneca was a big believer in internalizing qualities of people you respect: “Choose someone whose way of life as well as words, and whose very face as mirroring the character that lies behind it, have won your approval. Be always pointing him out to yourself either as your guardian or as your model. This is a need, in my view, for someone as a standard against which our characters can measure themselves. Without a ruler to do it against you won’t make the crooked straight.”