There was a funny time in history, when you could pay for your house with a single flower.
Flash back to 1636 in the Netherlands.
The Dutch Golden Age.
With the Dutch East India Company printing money, the economy is on FIRE.
Merchants are getting wealthy, and everyone's got cash to spend on the finer things in life.
(Like blinged out wooden shoes…)
Now enter the tulip.
This exotic flower from the Ottoman Empire shows up in Dutch gardens and everyone loses their gotdamn minds.
The price of tulips SKYROCKETS.
but like, if it was a flower
At first, it's just wealthy collectors buying these flowers to show off.
A tulip bulb might cost you 1,000 guilders.
(That’s old Dutch money.)
Expensive, but if you're a successful merchant, you can afford it.
Then something shifts.
People start realizing they can flip these bulbs for profit.
Buy one today, sell it next week for more.
Suddenly everyone wants in.
Brewers, bakers, even candle-stick makers.
People who have no business speculating are mortgaging their homes to buy tulip bulbs.
By early 1637, a single bulb of Semper Augustus (a tulip with distinctive red and white stripes) is selling for 10,000 guilders.
To put that in perspective, that's enough money to buy a grand house on an Amsterdam canal, complete with a garden and a coach.
We're talking $750,000 in today's money.
For a flower bulb.
According to historical records (that I found on Wikipedia) some rare varieties were trading for more than five times the cost of an average house.
Here’s the kicker:
Most of the trading wasn't even for actual bulbs.
It was for futures contracts.
The bulbs were still in the ground.
People were buying and selling promises of tulips they'd never seen, at prices that made no rational sense.
And then in February 1637, someone finally asked the obvious question: "Wait, they're just flowers, right?"
The market collapsed pretty much overnight.
People who'd paid house-prices for tulip bulbs were suddenly holding contracts worth a fraction of what they'd paid.
The bulbs that cost 1,500 guilders in January were worth 150 by March.
And some weren't worth anything at all because the people who'd agreed to buy them simply walked away from their promises.
Now, before you laugh at how stupid people were in the 1600s, let me ask you something:
What's in your portfolio right now?
Because I'm willing to bet you've done the exact same thing.
Maybe it wasn't tulips.
Maybe it was crypto at $60,000.
Maybe it was NFTs that are now worth zero.
Maybe it was GameStop stock because Reddit told you to.
Maybe it's whatever the next hype thing is that "everyone's getting rich on."
You saw prices going up.
Everyone around you was making money.
Your timeline was full of people posting their gains.
And you couldn't take it anymore.
So you jumped in.
Right at the top.
Just like those Dutch merchants in 1637.
Here’s why I’m writing about this in the first place: Tulip Mania was among the first recorded speculative bubbles in history.
It happened almost 400 years ago.
And we've learned absolutely nothing.
We just found new tulips to overpay for.
South Sea Company in 1720.
Railway stocks in the 1840s.
The dot-com bubble in 2000.
The housing crisis in 2008.
Crypto. NFTs.
Whatever's coming next.
Different assets, same stupid behavior.
The names change but the pattern never does: prices go up, everyone piles in, someone asks "but what's this actually worth?" and the whole thing collapses.
You're not smarter than those Dutch merchants.
And I'm not either.
That's the uncomfortable truth.
Being intelligent doesn't protect you from being stupid with money.
So here's what I want you to do: Stop chasing tulips.
Whatever the current tulip is: crypto, penny stocks, the next meme investment — just stop.
Because real wealth isn't built by gambling on the next hot thing.
It's built through boring, proven strategies that work over decades.
