What's the best investment during high inflation? A library card

While speaking at the 2022 annual shareholders meeting, Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett was asked how someone ought to invest during periods of high inflation.

“The best thing you can do is to be exceptionally good at something,” he observed. “Whatever abilities you have can’t be taken away from you. They can’t actually be inflated away from you… the best investment by far is anything that develops yourself, and it’s not taxed at all.”

The idea is quite simple: if you’re the best lawyer, if you’re the best doctor, or heck, even if you’re the best lemonade maker at the neighborhood stand, inflation is likely to affect you less than if you were just average in your role. That’s because people will still buy what you’re selling if you’re the very best at what you do.

It’s wonderful advice and got me thinking about the kind of skills required to be successful in today’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it economy. It’s relatively easy to home in on what it means to be the best lemonade maker or the best heart surgeon. But what about those of us who work in transferrable industry roles? In other words, what about the professional manager who manufactures nothing but who has held leadership positions at a diverse array of companies; who trades not in manufactured goods or technical knowledge but in abstract services? How can they be the best at what they do and on what skills should they focus developing?

It turns out, there’s a clear answer to this question.

About five years ago, researchers at the University of Southern California crisscrossed the globe asking business leaders what skills future executives must have to succeed in our high-tech, globalized economy. Over and over again, with no prompting or collaboration, the executive community identified a number of qualitative attributes like adaptability, cultural competence, intellectual curiosity, and 360-degree thinking. But, chief among these was the skill the research team coined as the “attribute-prime” of successful leaders: empathy.

Working with an executive coach can be a great starting point to both identify qualitative skillset gaps and strategize next steps to close those gaps. But if you don’t have the budget to work with a coach 1-on-1, a good zero-cost investment is getting yourself a library card.

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. It’s having the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and understand where they are coming from; not where they literally geographically originated from (though sometimes this helps), but gain perspective. Scientists have another name for this skill, they refer to it as Theory of Mind.

Not unlike the term “empathy,” Theory of Mind means something along the lines of mind reading. It’s our capacity to infer and represent other people’s thoughts and emotions, and it should come as no surprise that this matters in a professional setting. Enhancing one’s Theory of Mind means:

  • having the ability to form a more accurate and comprehensive understanding of what is driving the behaviors others;

  • acquiring a deeper and fuller understanding of one’s own needs, desires, and vulnerabilities;

  • having the ability to understand more fully the deep and complex dynamics of human interactions and relationships;

  • having the ability to understand complex causes and effects of economic conditions, political conditions, and individual or group behaviors; and,

  • having the ability to understand the causal relations between human behavior and other situational factors.

These skills are important, but need nourishment.

Neuroscientists at The New School for Social Research conducted a number of experiments to determine what fosters Theory of Mind and published their results in Science Magazine. The answer? Reading.

They found that when exposed to “literary fiction,” that is compared to popular fiction or non-fiction (i.e., Shakespeare vs. supermarket novels/this article), subjects performed better on Theory of Mind tests.

It makes sense if you think about it. Libraries are a collection of human thought. Books are our record of intellectual interaction. They are one giant case study. But instead of the case studies we are familiar with from business school, these case studies concern human events and actions, and they are constructed by some of the greatest minds in history—poets, playwrights, novelists, philosophers, and historians.

Flourish in periods of high inflation, broaden your skillset, and do it all for free? Perhaps a fanciful story to find at your local library.

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Co-authored by David Brendel and Ryan Stelzer, Think Talk Create: Building Workplaces Fit for Humans was published by the Hachette Book Group under the PublicAffairs imprint on September 21, 2021. Now available to order!

Ryan Stelzer