The Golden Rule of Watch Collecting Is Total Bullsh*t

It’s reckless. Love is irrational by definition. Yeah, I might love that Patek Philippe 1518 in steel, but it’d also be wildly irresponsible (for me) to spend $20 million pursuing that love. Building a collection purely on emotion is a recipe for disaster: bad decisions driven by emotional impulses.

This advice shuts down analysis and self-reflection. If you “love” a watch, there’s no need to understand the movement, the history, the market. But examining how all of these forces come together to form our taste—and the watches we want—is vital to becoming a thoughtful collector.

Watches are this beautiful combination of history, engineering, status, craft, mechanics, and human ingenuity (to name a few). I think a lot about the platforms we use, and which I even like, and how they often push us to love the same few watches, like the Patek Philippe Nautilus or Cartier Crash. Sometimes, “love” feels like code for something we’ve simply seen over and over again, or perhaps something we’ve been told to love over and over again. I’m after advice that demands us to be more inquisitive, more curious, more patient. So often, it seems to stop at: Sees watch, “loves” watch, buys watch.

Better Advice

Instead of “buy what you love,” try: “Buy what you understand.” Sure, I mean this literally: If you’re buying an early vintage Rolex Daytona, you’d better understand if it has the correct millerighe pushers. But it’s also deeper than that. Understand the motivations behind what you want.

The most satisfying acquisitions come from this kind of honest self-assessment, not from chasing some mythical, emotional connection to a hunk of metal. Some collectors want the engineering, some want the story, and others the social signaling. Most want some combination. That’s not shallow, it’s honest.

The collections I admire most have an individual coherence: you can look at someone’s watch box and instantly recognize it as theirs. That coherence doesn’t come from buying what you love in the moment. It comes from understanding what you actually want, why you want it, and how it fits together. And here’s the kicker: once you build a collection this way, you might find yourself actually loving it—not just the individual pieces, but the story they tell together.

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