How to manage a collection - part I
This morning I took a couple pics for the Friday thread. I felt artistic so decided to play a bit with photo-editing. During this process I understood IMO an important core principle that I´ve been unconsciously following for the last year or so in managing my small collection.
I guess there is a time of flipping frenzy in almost every WISses journey. - A quest for finding that ultimate watch to bring you peace within the form of the perfect watch. The sort of a "holy grail" if you will. However, as all matured flippers know, such a thing exists only in the imagination of the every-moving mind of the WIS and therefore the quest is doomed to fail from the very moment it begins. So, is there no peace to be found and no Zen like transition from a flipper to a keeper to be experienced after traveling the murky path of the logistics man, the man in charge of the incoming and outcoming on a such magnitude that its nearing to the borders of compulsive behaviour, to the borders where something that should be fun turns to a time and money consuming beast robbing you from the very things which should be important in every mans life - family, friends, nature, exercise, movement? - All those things except sitting on front on the computer which you have to do too much anyway to get your paycheck?
Yes. There are two ways. First one is to join the Anonymous WISses, suffer the cold turkey of not punching in to the Elite Deal Seeker and quit completely. The second is what I understood this morning and which has given me a degree of peace and freedom from the quest of finding the perfect watch. It crossed my mind that I have noticed an increasing trend of frentic flippers turning to less manic ways. I began to wonder this phenomenon and what I realized was that that those in the community who seem to have reached some kind of inner peace have a keeper or two they dont move. The meaning of this is, that:
Everybody should have a hub.
A centerpiece that stays the same while others around it revolve. - Collecting is not different from life. It is a part of life. So what is true in life should also be true in collecting. We all need strong bases to jump from if we want to reach our goals in life. - For most of us in life that base is home and family. Another base is work. With two strong bases you have a lot to go for you. Collecting is IMO a bit like orienteering. - For an orienteer the base is the knowledge where he is at a given time. It should be so with a WIS also.
Just think about it for a minute: if you dont know where you are at how can you make smart decision regarding how to reach your destination? - You cannot. Its the same thing with a collection: if you dont have a base and everything is changing how can you know where to go? - You cant. So you need a hub; that one watch that forms the base of your collection and which is the centerpiece that all future acquisitions should somehow complement. - That is the map with the start point and end point clearly marked. You now do less mistakes and are less prone to write "I´ll take it´s" that will not stay as you have a clear plan. This will ultimately bring you peace of mind and the ability to enjoy the pieces that you have. This is where the Zen like transition from a flipper to a keeper is to be experienced after traveling first the murky path of the logistics man for finding the hub.
The hub needs not to be a perfect piece as there is no such thing. It yet needs to be "almost perfect" so that you can "make it perfect" by acquiring the other watches around it which all should have something that the hub misses.
It makes it easier if you also decide that all watches should be clearly different from each other (on your own criteria). This allows you to cut down the numbers making your collection more manageable.
IMO less is best and therefore I do not posses more than three watches at the moment that I know I will have for some time. It is only because I unconsciously began to complement what I found lacking on the IWC 3536 (the hub of my collection) that I was able to relax and actually start enjoying this hobby after a long period of frustration for not finding what I was looking for. As, indeed, such a thing does not exist and it is not before you realize that, that you can find it.
A collection should be more than a sum of it´s parts and you are never able to get to that point unless you have a clear roadmap from where you are at to where you want to be. You have to be rooted. This does not mean that you cannot change the course. It means you have to have a course. All good things in life take time and dedication. - Why should collecting watches be any different?
The collection at the time of writing
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