The Scorecard

Omega Speedmaster Automatic "Reduced" 3510.50.00

The lume doesn't glow anymore, and that's the first thing you're supposed to notice. Tritium wasn't made to last thirty-three years, and true to form, it hasn't. By every objective measure, it failed.

So why can't I stop looking at it?

Because somewhere along the way, the failure became the watch's most beautiful feature. Bright white indices mellowed into cream. The dial softened. The watch became more beautiful precisely because it stopped doing what it was designed to do.

I know why that resonates with me.

For years I thought everything, not just watches, was about collecting the best. The best movement. The best investment. The best story. I was keeping score. Not my score. Everyone else's.

Warren Buffett said the most important scorecard you'll ever have is the one inside you. The outer scorecard is what everyone else thinks of your choices. The inner scorecard is whether you can live with them yourself.

I ignored mine for a very long time.

I spent twenty-four years building companies and selling companies, chasing work that looked impressive from the outside. Some of it worked. Some of it didn't. The last stretch I spent serving other people's visions, and twice I was shown the door. The second time, I was sitting in a boardroom in New York when I realized the man across the table was my replacement. Nobody had told me. I'd figured it out weeks earlier, from a text message that was never meant for me. That's what the outer scorecard buys you. A seat at a table where everyone knows the score but you.

The people closest to you don't care about your outer scorecard. They're just hoping you'll come home.

I don't regret being ambitious. I regret confusing ambition with approval.

Maybe that's why this watch arrived when it did.

The Speedmaster Reduced has always carried someone else's scorecard. It isn't the Moonwatch. In its early days, some collectors said it wasn't a real Speedmaster at all. Smaller case. Automatic instead of hand-wound. And a movement the purists loved to sneer at: an ETA base with a Dubois-Dépraz chronograph module stacked on top. A borrowed heart. Not even its engine was its own.

Even the name feels like an apology.

Reduced.

Imagine introducing someone that way.

Collectors have spent decades describing this watch by what it isn't, which is a strange way to evaluate anything worth loving. Because that's not what I see. I see a dial with room to breathe. No day, no date, nothing interrupting it. Hesalite that catches the afternoon light instead of eliminating it. A 38.5mm case that sits exactly where I want it on my wrist. And those hour markers, the wonderful little indices that no longer glow and have never looked better.

None of it is objectively superior. It's simply what catches my eye and holds it.

That's different.

There was a time I wanted my watches to say something about me before I ever opened my mouth. I didn't care about the watch. I wanted the reassurance. Now I'm drawn to watches that ask nothing of the people around them. They don't need applause, or a forum declaring them a legend or “the one to buy.” They make me glance at my wrist and smile.

Call it maturity. Call it relief.

The older I get, the less interested I am in objects that demand admiration and the more interested I am in objects that quietly reward attention. I used to call that settling. It isn't. It's taste. Not borrowed taste. Not inherited taste. Earned taste. Mine.

That's all collecting was ever supposed to be. Not acquiring the things everyone agrees are important. Learning to recognize the things that speak to you despite the noise.

The Speedmaster Reduced isn't my favorite Speedmaster, but it's one of them, because history got it wrong. Somewhere along the way, I stopped asking a watch to impress anyone, and without realizing it, I started listening to what impressed me.

The tritium no longer glows.

Neither do I.