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This past week I visited a friends ranch where he’d invited some guys to go fishing. It’s a sprawling, 65-thousand acre ranch in Central Oregon with several lakes stocked with trout and one lake stocked with Bass. There are elk, deer, and we even saw a couple black bear.

My friend is very successful, and attributes his success to the consistent reading of the book of Proverbs. He says the wisdom he’s gleaned from the book has helped him decide who to invest with, who to hire, and how to make general decisions. And not unlike Solomon, he is always looking for wisdom.

It happened to be only men on the trip because we were looking for some good guy time. All of the men on the trip had succeeded in business to some degree (I was there because of my charm, I’m supposing) and at the end of our stay we rode horses up to a lookout over the ranch, got off our horses (In case this is sounding like my normal routine, I should clarify I hadn’t ridden a horse in thirty years) and grouped up for a glass of wine (one of the businessmen had operated a winery) and to share what we’d learned from each other and from our time on the ranch. I dismounted Lightning (the guys on the ranch called my horse “Pokey” but he seemed more like a Lightning to me) and joined the guys.

You’d think they would have talked about the stock market (they’d done a bit of that, to be sure) or potential investments, but when my friend asked them what they wanted to share about their lives, about the decisions they’d made, most of the guys talked about their wives. No kidding. Guys who’d flown  in on private Jets and drove nice cars and had given hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, to amazing causes, wanted to talk about their wives.

Guys don’t express vulnerability very often, especially with a group that doesn’t know each other well. But to listen to these men talk about their wives was one of the more inspiring moments of the last few years. They talked about their beauty, their humility, and how much they wanted to be better husbands. My friend who owned the ranch talked about a time, many years ago, when he was in a hotel room after a business meeting and had to call his wife to tell her it looked like they were going bankrupt. She told him to read the book of Ecclesiastes, and stop worrying, that their eternal future was fine. He did what she said, and said he slept in peace.

The book of Proverbs weaves business advice and relational advice together like threads of a rope. It’s fitting, then, that our final conversation with each other was about the beauty and brilliance of a woman, because that’s exactly how Proverbs ends. After all that advice about honesty and integrity and not getting into business deals with liars and cheats, Solomon closes with a sighing finale about a great spouse.

As we stood on top of a mountain, after having seen bear and elk and deer and caught fish and ridden horses, the guys wanted to talk about their wives. They were truly successful men.

Do you think of your spouse as your most important business partner?