Not long ago I crashed my truck. I won’t tell the whole story here, but I came closer to dying than I ever care to again. Suffice it to say, it was my fault, and it was divine intervention that saved me. The truck, my old 2013 F-250, which I loved and which carried me more than 330,000 miles, was a total loss. I walked away.
In the quiet days afterward, one word kept coming back to me: precious. I have spent most of my working life around gold and silver, metals the world has called precious for as long as there has been a world. But sitting there, grateful to be sitting anywhere, gold was not what I am thinking about.
I am thinking about my wife, who loves me. My children, who love me, one of whom is about to make me a grandfather. My mother. My brothers and sisters. My dad, who has passed and who I think about every single day. Aunts, uncles and cousins who are as close as family gets.
And I am thinking about the people I work with. Notice I didn’t say the people who work for me. That is a very different relationship. At our shop, each of us tries to make the others’ lives better before our own, and over time that has built something that is precious all by itself.
The truck can be replaced. I’m already shopping for one. None of the rest of it can.
That got me asking a simple question: what actually makes something precious?
What the word means
Precious comes to us from the Latin pretium, meaning price or worth. Something precious is, quite literally, something of great price.
That same root gives us price, praise, and appreciate. To appreciate something originally meant to set a value on it. Today we use the word two ways: to be grateful for something, and for something to grow in value over time.
I don’t think that’s an accident. The things we appreciate, appreciate.
Why gold and silver earned the name
Gold shows up early in the oldest book I know. In the second chapter of Genesis, describing the land around Eden, the writer pauses to say simply, “the gold of that land is good.” Silver and gold have been treasured in nearly every culture and century since. That kind of agreement across so many people and so much time doesn’t happen by chance. A few qualities earned it.
They are rare. If you gathered every ounce of gold ever mined in human history, it would fit inside a cube a little over 70 feet on each side. That’s all of it. Precious things are never in endless supply.
They last. Gold does not rust, rot or corrode. Coins pulled from shipwrecks after centuries on the ocean floor come up shining. Silver is a little different. Left alone and exposed, it tarnishes. But tarnish only lives on the surface. Underneath, silver is still silver, and a little attention brings the shine right back.
They are refined by fire. Gold and silver usually come out of the ground mixed with other things. The refiner heats the metal until the impurities separate and can be drawn away. The prophet Malachi describes a refiner who “shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver.” There’s an old story that the refiner knows the silver is finished when he can look into it and see his own reflection. Whether or not it’s true of every refiner, it’s true of people. Hard seasons have a way of burning off what doesn’t matter.
They are strong, but they yield. Gold is the most malleable metal there is. It can be hammered so thin that light passes through it, and it still doesn’t break. It bends without cracking.
Their value doesn’t depend on who is watching. A gold coin is worth the same in a vault, in a pocket, or in a drawer nobody has opened in twenty years. It doesn’t need applause to be valuable.
Now read that list again: rare, lasting, refined by hard times, strong enough to bend without breaking, and valuable whether or not anyone notices. Tell me it doesn’t describe the best relationships in your life.
What the evidence says
I don’t want to preach, so let me share a few things that people far smarter than me have found.
Harvard has been following the same group of people, and later their children, since 1938. It’s one of the longest studies of adult life ever done. Its current director, Robert Waldinger, has said the clearest lesson from more than eight decades of data is that good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Not money. Not fame. Relationships.
A large review led by researcher Julianne Holt-Lunstad pulled together 148 studies covering more than 300,000 people. Those with strong social relationships had about a 50 percent greater likelihood of survival over the study periods than those with weak ones, an effect the researchers compared to quitting smoking. In 2023 the U.S. Surgeon General issued a national advisory on loneliness for many of the same reasons.
And one more that I find encouraging. A researcher at the University of Kansas, Jeffrey Hall, estimated it takes roughly 50 hours together to go from acquaintance to casual friend, about 90 hours to become real friends, and more than 200 hours to become close friends. Precious relationships aren’t found sitting on the ground. They are mined, a few hours at a time.
Hall found something else that made me smile: hours spent working together don’t count nearly as much toward friendship as “time spent hanging out, joking around, playing video games, and the like.” That tells me the bond I have with the people I work with didn’t come from time on the clock. It came from choosing, day after day, to look out for each other first.
Stewardship: keeping what is precious
Our family has been in the precious metals business since 1973. In that time we’ve learned a few things about helping people protect what matters to them. It turns out most of it applies to people, too.
Know what you have. Every good dealer counts inventory. Take a few minutes and actually write down the names of the precious people in your life. You may be surprised how long the list is, or how short. Either way, now you know.
Hold for the long term. We tell our clients that metals are a long-term hold, not something to sell in a panic on a bad day. The same goes for a marriage, a brother, an old friend. Don’t trade away something of great price over one hard conversation.
Polish the tarnish. If a relationship has dulled from neglect, it isn’t ruined. It’s tarnished. A phone call, a handwritten note, or a sincere apology usually brings the shine back faster than we expect.
Keep it safe. People store their metals carefully because they’re worth protecting. Protect your people the same way. Keep their confidences. Speak well of them when they aren’t in the room.
Add a little at a time. Most of our clients didn’t build their holdings in a day. They added an ounce here and an ounce there. Relationships grow the same way: a short call on the drive home, a lunch, showing up when it counts.
If you feel like you don’t have much that’s precious
Maybe you read my list and felt the distance between it and your own life. If so, I want you to hear this clearly: that isn’t the end of the story.
Gold is rarely lying on top of the ground. It’s found by people who go looking and keep digging, often in very ordinary places. And raw ore doesn’t look like much. It looks like rock until someone takes the time to see what’s inside.
The precious people in your future might be a neighbor you wave to, someone at church, a coworker, or the person who rings you up every week. I truly believe most people wake up each day wanting to be good. Start with one. Ask a real question and listen to the answer. Show up again next week. Be the kind of person you’re hoping to find.
The real treasure
I believe in gold and silver. I’ve seen them protect families through some very uncertain times, and I’ll keep helping people own them for as long as I’m able.
But I have never once seen a family held together by a coin. The coin is a tool. The family is the treasure.
There’s a proverb I find myself coming back to, and it’s a funny one for a gold dealer to love: “A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, and loving favour rather than silver and gold.”
Someday someone will hold the coins I’ve kept. I hope what they really inherit is the memory of how we treated each other.
Take care of what’s precious. All of it.
Johnny on the Spot is a no-nonsense article series about precious metal investing by Johnny Estes, CEO of CMI Gold & Silver.
