The Best Investment of Your Life

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is failing to invest in yourself. You fail when you don’t invest money, time, and energy on growing personally and professionally.

An investment means that you put money, time, and resources into something, and you get more value back than you originally put in. If you never put in the money, the time, or the resources, you aren’t able to capture the greater value that would have accrued to you had you done so.

• Read Blogs and such: Let’s start with what seems cheap. You can read blog posts and watch YouTube videos without making any financial investment. You need only to invest your time (your most scarce and most valuable resource). For a few minutes time, you can acquire ideas that have helped others generate tremendous results. There is no reason not to subscribe to some content that will help you improve in some area of your life. Your time is your most expensive resource, so you need to take action on what you read to gain a return.
• Read Books: I can’t believe how many people don’t read books. I’m already into my second book this year, and I’ve slowed my reading to go deeper. For $9.99 and six hours, you can acquire the information that someone else learned over a lifetime. For a ten spot, you skip the decades of learning and the many potential mistakes the author made while she was acquiring the knowledge and experience captured between the covers of her book. What’s that worth?
• Programs: I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on my personal and professional development. I have paid for courses that cost thousands of dollars. Some people balk at the idea of spending their money on their development, suffering from the belief that their growth is someone else’s problem. But the price for these programs is astonishingly low because it compresses the time it takes to produce better results. And the very people who lead and succeed do so because they invest in themselves instead of waiting for someone else to pay for them.

I have never lost money invested in my personal growth. I have never left a program without one big idea that improved my results and my life. In fact, I’ve attended some programs where my investment was returned ten-fold in the first hour, like the first hour of a negotiation course I took at Harvard Business School. I could have left after the first hour, and it would have been worth the massive investment I made in the program.

There is no greater return on investment than the investment you make in yourself. You invest money for your future so that it will grow, and so you will have security later in life. The investment you make in yourself increases what you are worth now and in the future, and it does even more to secure your future.

Is your number one asset becoming more valuable over time?