Although I usually write about investing in stocks or other asset classes, there is a lot more to invest in.
Probably the most important form of investing is investing in yourself because no matter what happens, you’re the person you’re going to have to live with for the rest of your life.
Because we’re stuck with ourselves, we might as well make sure that we enjoy being ourselves.
In this article, I’ve gathered the best and most widely applicable ways to invest in yourself. And, for the record, ways that I’ve found to be highly effective myself.
I tried to keep these as non-self-help-bull as I possibly could and focus on the things that truly make a difference and can help you achieve your goals.
Start Investing – Literally
Investing is one of the only ways to get truly wealthy. If you think about it, our economic system is built so that the money always flows from consumers to the corporates and their owners. Investing is a way to become an owner and thus be on the winning side.
In addition to purely monetary benefits, financial stability is a major part of your overall well-being.
The way I see it, you can’t have one without the other. If you’re financially ruined, there will probably be some problems with other areas in your life also.
When you’re financially stable, you have the mental energy and time to focus on other areas of your life.
Another thing to consider is that investing offers us a way to leverage your input. What I mean by this is that when you work for a wage, your returns are tied to the hours you put in.
So, if you wish to earn more, you have to work more. The problem here is that there’s a limit to how many hours we can spend working.
What we’d want to do instead is to leverage our input so that the output we get is not tied to our input. When you think about it, that is exactly what investing is all about.
For example, if you invest $1000 and let it compound year after year, you’ve gained a much larger output (return) for your input (investment).
Leverage and compounding are extremely hard to achieve for an employee. In most jobs, your effort does not compound. You do a task, spend your time and start again with another task.
Entrepreneurs usually get their leverage by employing workers who rent their time to the employer. What happens is that the business owners gain leverage from employees.
Investing offers you the chance to become a business owner and thus achieve leverage and compounding.
Develop Personal Finance Skills
Although personal finance is close to investing, it covers a lot more as a concept.
When we think about investing, we usually think of stocks, bonds, and (unfortunately) nowadays cryptocurrencies and such.
Personal finance, on the other hand, is about everything that has something to do with your finances. This includes loans, saving, budgeting, planning for retirement, home purchase, and so on.
I believe it’s important to separate the two. If you’re a great investor it doesn’t necessarily mean you have great personal finance skills and vice versa.
Sometimes investors have too much debt, live beyond their means, or make other bad decisions outside of investing.
Then again, some people know a lot about saving and budgeting, but they don’t really have a clue what to do with the money they’ve saved.
Having personal finance skills makes life a lot easier and brings you confidence alongside peace of mind. It helps you to get and stay wealthy. It’s one of the essential life skills and helps you understand how our current society works.
If you’re struggling with your personal finance skills, you can always consult a professional financial advisor to help you.
Mind Your Health
Get Physical
All right, enough of the money talk for now. Let’s focus on something even more important. The truth is that when it comes down to it, we choose our physical health over money. Luckily, in most cases, we can choose both.
Physical and mental health go hand-in-hand with financial well-being. Taking care of your body and your mind is the most important investment you will ever make.
If you think about it, what’s the point of having everything you ever wanted if you can’t do anything with it?
I think that the best downtime for doing mental work is physical exercise.
For example, I like to lift weights because it gives me a solid hour or so of complete mental rest. While I lift, I don’t think. In the process, I feel I get to challenge myself and also make my mind stronger.
Now, you might do yoga or play basketball instead, but the idea is the same. There’s a lot more to exercising than meets the eye.
Mind Your Mind
There are a lot of ways to take care of your mind and mental well-being. Some meditate, some take nature walks, and some binge-watch Netflix while scrolling TikTok.
I think the best way to invest in your mental health is to simply find out the things that can make a person feel bad and stop doing them.
One of the easiest ways to invest in your mental health is to buy books.
My best choices would be to start with philosophy and psychology. The way I see it, most of our mind-related issues start with our thoughts. This is where philosophy and psychology come in.
Reading philosophy offers you different points of view that can have a major effect on your thinking. One of the best ways to reduce stress, for example, is to apply stoic principles in your life.
Also, when you have a general idea about how the human brain works, you can more easily pay attention and evaluate what habits harm you the most.
Reading
As you might’ve guessed, I read quite a lot. If there is one thing that has affected my own life the most, it’s reading.
I like to think about reading as a window to the writer’s mind. To have the opportunity to read what Warren Buffett or Marcus Aurelius have said is a gift beyond comprehension.
When you learn by reading, you don’t have to learn everything the hard way. Especially in finance, it’s a lot easier and a lot less expensive to learn from others than make your own mistakes.
One way to think about books is that if a book costs $30 and may change your life, it’s probably the most profitable investment ever made. Of all the possible ways to invest in yourself, this one’s probably the most effective.
For example, if you read a book about value investing and learn how to find an undervalued stock that makes you a fortune, the book itself was a pretty good investment.
What’s also amazing is how reading affects your mind and overall health. According to Healthline, reading improves brain connectivity, lowers blood pressure, and even helps you sleep better, and live longer.
Develop General Skills
The way I see it, the problem in most jobs is that the skills you learn don’t apply to other jobs.
For example, if you learn how to use a certain software or system that is only used in the company you work for, you don’t have a lot of skills you can transfer to another job.
Now, obviously, this is not career advice. If you wish to advance your career as much as possible, it’s probably wise to find a mentor. Personally, I haven’t (yet), which is why I can’t really tell you much about it.
Overall, the most useful skills are the ones that you can use everywhere. These can be called general skills, and they include communication and people skills, writing, decision-making skills, information skills, and so on.
If you think about the example skill set listed above, you can see that none of them can be pinpointed to a certain job description. Instead, they can be applied to any job.
No matter where you work, you will most likely gain an advantage if you get along with people, know how to express yourself in writing, and have the capability to search and absorb earn new information.
I believe the best way to secure your success in life is to develop skills that help you survive in any situation.
Not to mention that learning a new skill has a positive effect on your brain too.
Summary
So, the best way to invest in yourself is to ensure your physical, mental, and financial well-being.
As you’ve seen, I aimed for general ways to invest in yourself that would give you the most benefit.
I browsed through a lot of articles about the subject, and quite often they advise you to start a side hustle of some sort or learn a new language or a skill just for the sake of it.
Now, I’m not saying you absolutely shouldn’t do any of those things. There’s nothing wrong with learning new skills. What I would recommend is to prioritize how you spend your time and energy and focus on long-term solutions.
As a term, “side hustle” doesn’t really imply something you’re devoted to in long term. Neither does a casual idea to just learn an entire language. These things are usually temporary flings.
The ways to invest that I’ve listed are the kind you do your entire life. These are the best kinds of investments.
