So what happened? If you havnt read part 1, you can check it out here.
Again: WHAT HAPPENED? I just purchased an awesome book, had exactly ONE noble customer since (or shall I say: visitor?) and now everything seems to be upside down.
I searched everything. Of course, the book had to be picked up by this gentleman and just been put somewhere else. Even though the back of the brown binding was kinda unimpressive, I was sure I’d spot it out immediately if I just kept going through the shelves.
Bye, bye early closing time, I’m not going to leave until the book is back at its place!
However, and spoiler alert: I couldn’t find it! Neither that day, nor the next day. I went through every corner, looked behind the first lines of books and examined every corner. I was even questioning my own self if I maybe had not mistakenly thrown it away with other papers? That’s why I even went to the paper container down the street. But the book was gone! And so was our gentleman.
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Remember that he said he wanted to come back to pick up the books he handed me on his last visiting day? Well, he did not come back! I was fully experiencing the 5 stages of grief:
Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.
Well, did I really accept it? Not quite. Because I still had one weapon: The network of antiquarian booksellers.
Ok, I was sure that the guy had been stolen my book, but why? What was his motive? There are very few occasions within the art market, that the thieves keep their treasures. The reason is obvious: they can not show them off anyways (but this is one excitement that comes with collecting: to show and share with other and like-minded people). Many objects are unique so that they are being recognized easily sooner or later in someone’s collection. Would you hang your stolen Mona Lisa into your living room? I doubt it.
The other motive is, of course, sell it and run before the shit hits the fan. That’s what I believed the guy was planning to do and the only person to who he was going to sell was a colleague, of course.
So I started to scan the internet for the book. Fortunately, there was no second copy on the market yet by the time it was missing. And then it happened: around four days later, a colleague from a town around 200km away put up the book for sale. I immediately called him. I asked him about some facts of the book, about some minor flaws he didn’t put into his description which only a previous owner could know. Finally, I asked him, if an elderly man had offered him the book. Then I shocked him with my claim that the book had been stolen by that guy.
Then my colleague said something that I’ll never forget and that taught me a lesson: Yes, unfortunately I bought these books from this man – ALONG WITH SOME OTHERS!
Then it dawned to me. I was so focused on my No. 1 book that I completely forgot about the possibility that the damage could be much higher. And it turned out to be that it was much higher.
In the end, the guy had stolen around 9-10 books from me which, combined, exceeded the value of the one single title easily. My colleague and I set up a trap together with the police and they eventually captured the guy. I don’t know what happened to him. But luckily, I received all my books back from my colleague. It was an awesome collaboration in the end.
Conclusion – What I learned
Now, what is the quintessence of all that? It often happens that we have one particular position in our portfolio we put all our focus on. And then we miss out that the main damage (or value) may be caused by completely other parts. My mistake happened because I got too emotional about this one particular book. I could have realized the scam sooner, if I had recognized from day one that ten books were missing instead of one. It would have saved me a lot of unnecessary stress and could have gotten me into strategic mode sooner.
So, how thorough are you with your assets? Do you have stocks of Tesla (cause you loooove the company) and mainly focus on how they perform? How thorough are you with your overall strategy? Are you a solid investor but miss out the fact that you throw money away in other areas of your life?
Where focus goes, energy flows. Releasing the focus because of emotional reasons and tapping into rationality is, however, the superior strategy to not get intimidated by the highs and lows.