The Price of a Treasure

“I wonder if a lion (or a cannibal) would pay a high premium for free-range humans.”

— The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (Incerto Book 4) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I once had a wise old neighbor.

He was an extremely wealthy man but you would have never known it.

For example, on his property was a run down old building that housed dozens of vintage cars in prestige condition. After earning his trust and promising to not mention it around town, he invited me in to see his cars.

It was amazing. Inside that very unpretentious building were millions of dollar’s worth of vintage cars carefully housed in a climate controlled environment.

That very ordinary looking building was actually a vault!

I asked him how he came about to develop such a marvelous hobby and he replied: “Oh this is not a hobby, this is a tax haven.”

He assured me that if the price was right everyone of the cars were for sell. In the meantime, they sat there growing in value while the taxes on them remained extremely cheap – much less than normal property taxes.

My purpose in sharing this is not to encourage you to become a vintage car collector. My purpose is to highlight the importance of knowing the difference between something of value and something that is a treasure.

Everything has value at some price. (Ask the gardener who just brought a truck load of “fertilizer” from the local chicken or pig farmer.)

A savvy person will learn the art of determining the value of something and leveraging it wisely to get the maximum return on investment.

My wife’s grandmother was a good example. She would buy a doll at a yard sale for pennies, clean it up, and take it to a local flea market and sell it as a “collector’s doll” for several dollars!

But like my wise old neighbor, she never once confused that “collector’s doll” with one of her treasures. And that is an important lesson to learn.

Jesus cautioned us to be careful what we treasure, for where our treasure is there our heart will also be (Matthew 6:19:21).

Very good advice.

The ONE THING for today: A good rule of thumb in telling the difference between something of value and something that is a treasure is: If you can put a price on it, it is not a treasure.