Sunny Lei
- Oct 2, 2020
- 5 min read

Why Should You Invest In Yourself?

Where Do I Start with Investing?

Before investing a single penny, we should be clear on our investment goals. Why are you investing? What is your ultimate return? What do you value? We can use our assets which is money, time, energy, relationships and mind to generate and save more assets. But at the end of the day, what is it exactly that you want? What would you do if you had all the assets in the world? What kind of lifestyle do you want to live? What kind of impact do you want to have?

These questions might seem pointless, but it’s the inner work we need to do to gain the clarity to our why because investing is simply a strategy to deploy your assets to generate more of what you are looking for.

Do an Asset-Audit

The next thing we should do before investing is an assessment of our current assets. This helps us know what we already have and what we would like to acquire more of. As mentioned, here are our major asset categories…

1. Time: The time you have left on earth. The amount of free time you have per day, month, year.

2. Energy: The amount of energy you have throughout the day. Your physical, emotional, spiritual and mental energy.

3. Your mind (Knowledge / Skills / Experiences / Mindset): The intelligence you have within. What you know. What you can do. The unique values you can create.

4. Relationships: Your network. People you know, like and trust. People you can partner with. Peers you can learn with. Mentors you can learn from.

5. Money: Amount of money you have saved. The money you are earning and saving per month.

Doing this assessment helps us understand which areas are already abundant and which areas need more attention. You are always able to utilise the area that you are already abundant to acquire more of what you are searching for. For example, you can use your time to acquire more money, energy to upgrade your mind, time to save more energy, so far and so on.

Okay, what’s next?

So by now, you should have a better sense of your overall net-worth. In the remainder of the article, we will discuss if you are starting with investing, why it is smarter to invest in ourselves, what it means to invest in ourselves and in part 2 of the article how you can successfully do so.

Why invest in ourselves?

There are lots of various reasons why this should be the case and it boils down to the fact that you are your greatest asset. You are the ultimate driver and source for your wealth. Everything starts with you. Every value you create comes from your ideas, knowledge, skills, energy, time, network, personal brand and more. So it’s important to ensure you have a solid foundation to your personal, spiritual, financial growth before looking to invest outside of yourself.

“Ultimately, there’s one investment that supersedes all others: Invest in yourself.” Warren Buffet

Monetarily this makes sense as well. If you do not have a large sum of capital to start with the most important thing to do is to start creating income-generating avenues which can come in the form of employment, business, or side hustles. For you to generate consistent cash flow from these avenues it will require you to attain specialised knowledge, skills, network, experience as well as the discipline to manage your time and energy to manifest your vision.

Once you can to generate a consistent income stream and after expense, you have an extra $100 a month to set aside, then it will make sense to start allocating your funds into other asset classes such as stocks, precious metals, real estate, art, collectables and more.

In another perspective, investing in yourself is financially astute because it pays life-long dividends. It’s sometimes hard to justify investing in yourself because you don’t see immediate monetary returns, but imagine if you invested in a personal development coaching and were able to stop procrastinating which saves you an hour a day, that’s 240 working day hours you’ll save per year. Even if you are valuing your time at only $10/hour. You will save yourself $2,400 / per year.

A good coach will charge you anything from $500 and above to work with them. Let’s say it was at $1000 for 3 months, your returns will be 240% for the first year and it will continue to pay dividends for life. You are rarely able to make investments in the financial markets that give you a consistent 240% returns per year.

One more example, let’s say as a young professional, you are not generating much cash flow. Instead of putting your savings of $3000 into the S&P 500 ETF that will generate you a historical average of 9.8% return per year, you put that money to attend a coding boot camp. After acquiring specialized knowledge from the camp alongside your sweat equity (time + energy), you got employed or started providing a service or product. If you are a dedicated and growth-oriented person, you will be able to make your $3000 principal back and generate at least half of what you invested within 12 months. If you do the math, that’s $4,500 per year which comes down to $375 per month, or a 50% return. With the examples I have given above, in addition to the higher returns compared to traditional financial markets, the great benefit with investing in yourself is that you are able to heavily influence the returns compared to when you invest outside yourself, you are relying 100% on someone else to drive your returns. So the first key takeaway here is to invest in your greatest wealth driver which is you until you generate enough extra cash flow to put your extra capital into other asset classes.

Just remember this, if you do not have much income coming at the moment, you are one skill away from generating an income stream from anywhere in the world.

Ideas

Hairdressing
Consulting
Coaching
Graphic design
Photography
Videography
Product Design
User Interface Design
Cooking
Baking
Trading
Coding
Writing
Editing
Sales
DJing
Gymming
Podcasting
Farming
Gardening

*Keep it simple. Think of anything that you like, and go explore, become great at it and you can mould your expertise into a service or product to become your foundational income stream. Marco Chak

Juice summary

1. Investing is simply a strategy to deploy your assets to generate more of what you are looking for. So be clear on what you want before investing.

2. You are always able to utilise the area that you are already abundant to acquire more of what you are searching for.

3. You are the ultimate driver and source for your wealth.

4. The great benefit of investing in yourself is that you are able to heavily influence the returns.

5. Focus on investing in yourself and creating a cash flow before investing outside of yourself.

Action Steps

So before you click away, remember to do the inner work and figure out the following…

1. What is your ultimate return? What is it you exactly want? What kind of lifestyle do you want to live?

2. Do your assets assessment

3. Read part 2 of the article (coming soon)

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