Was it Worth It, Esau?

When Esau stumbled home from the fields, famished, he made what must rank among history's most regrettable transactions. For a bowl of lentil stew, he sold his birthright to his brother Jacob. The text tells us he "despised his birthright" – not because he was foolish, but because he was hungry. Right now.

Any CFO will recognize this scenario immediately (though presumably with less dramatic consequences than losing one's inheritance). It's the eternal tension between the urgent and the important, between what we can measure today and what we can only hope to preserve for tomorrow.

The human brain, when confronted with genuine hunger, performs an astonishing feat of rationalization. To the despair of rationalists everywhere, Esau's calculation made perfect sense in the moment: "I am about to die; what use is a birthright to me?" The numbers were clear. Hunger: 10 out of 10. Future inheritance: impossible to quantify, and crucially, impossible to eat.

But I think it’s important to point out that what Esau was wrong about wasn’t his hunger. It was about how much it cost.

In business, I witness this transaction repeat itself with bewildering frequency.

A company facing quarterly pressures will slash the budget for brand building, for research and development, for customer service training (for anything whose value cannot be immediately demonstrated on a spreadsheet).

The lentil stew of short-term results sits steaming before us, impossible to ignore. The birthright of long-term value creation remains frustratingly abstract.

I believe there to be an increasing human instinct (and an entirely understandable if highly dangerous one) to overvalue that which we can measure and to undervalue that which we cannot.

I help people make more money with their businesses. I help them save on taxes and find leaks. This requires me to work with a lot of numbers. I love numbers. And numbers are great. Numbers give us comfort; they provide certainty in an otherwise chaotic world. But when your stomach is growling, a bowl of stew is indisputably real. A future inheritance is merely conceptual.

Perhaps the most important decision any business owner makes is recognizing which expenditures are lentil stew and which are birthrights.

Marketing that builds brand equity rather than merely activating immediate sales. Birthright.

Systems that prevent problems rather than merely solving them. Birthright.

Training that develops judgment rather than merely transferring information. Birthright.

But these investments share an unfortunate characteristic: they're infuriatingly hard to measure, at least in the immediate term.

The birthright had real value  (enormous value)  but only to someone willing to think past dinner. Jacob understood this; Esau, in that moment of hunger, did not. And therein lies a skill that seems to be in ever-shorter supply: the ability to see through the tyranny of the urgent to the importance of the enduring.

It costs no more to make decisions that serve both the short-term and the long-term. It simply demands diligence and wisdom. The kind of wisdom that recognizes that not everything valuable can be consumed immediately, and that some assets only reveal their worth across generations, and that the most catastrophic trades are often the ones that made perfect sense at the time.

What my brother Lenny finds interesting about all this is that the Torah never tells us if the stew was particularly good. I suspect, therefore, that it wasn't worth it.