How to Invest in Yourself to Get the Best Out of You

5 legit ways to invest in yourself for great long-term returns.

Investing in “material” things is risky, we all might be familiar with the bursting of the housing bubble and the stock market crash, new technologies can rise and shine like anything as if there’s no tomorrow and can crash in a matter of weeks.

If you aren’t familiar with technology rising and crashing case, you must definitely check out the Dot-com bubble case.

That’s the nature of “material” investing.

But one investment that you can make and can guarantee no crash, is in yourself. No one can take it away from you. It doesn’t matter what happens around the world, your investment in yourself will definitely pay you back.

Listen to any great personality and you will understand what I mean. We often talk about investing in stocks, gold, real estate, etc, but seldom do we talk about investing in ourselves. Do you know what was Warren Buffett’s greatest investment? No, it wasn’t in Coca-Cola or Washington Post; it was the communication skill.

We often talk about investing in stocks, gold, real estate, etc, but seldom do we talk about investing in ourselves.

“There is no more profitable investment than investing in yourself. It is the best investment you can make; you can never go wrong with it. It is the best way to improve yourself, to be the best version of you and let you be able to best serve those around you.” ― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

So, let’s find out how can you invest in yourself and how I used the below-given advice in my life so that we can keep ourselves ahead of our peers in this competitive world.

Start a small business

You won’t find a better way to invest in yourself than trying to build a business. You can’t imagine how much you are going to grow in the process if you haven’t started one yet.

Running a business is a challenging task. You need to be good at many things. You need to be good at communicating with others, managing your time better, understanding finance, and most importantly, managing stress.

You don’t need to start anything big if you don’t have enough resources, but one resource that is available to almost everyone in today’s world is the internet, and that’s enough to start an online business.

You can start blogging, making YouTube videos, and many more things with very little money. Anything that can be monetized for providing value can be called a business.

When the pandemic hit the world and I was left with a lot of free time, I started blogging. Started writing on Blogger, soon got to know about Medium from one of my friends, and once I started writing on Medium and reading its stories with no ads, I was just hooked to this website.

Blogging challenged me to search stories within me and mold them in such a way that they can benefit people reading them. Moreover, it helped me meet new people like Terry Mansfield, Neeramitra Reddy, Julian Basić, and many more, and generate a new source of income.

Anything that can be monetized for providing value can be called a business.

Let’s say you are good at web development, so what are the things you need?

* A laptop or a PC, that you might already have if you are a web developer. * A camera and a microphone which you can easily buy, right? And you are all set to sell an online course on Udemy.

You don’t even need a camera or a microphone if you decide to go for freelance web development on Fiverr or any other freelancing website.

In fact, you can even choose both, because the course needs just a one-time investment in a year, and you can focus on your freelancing in the remaining time.

We are lucky to be alive in this age of the internet, and it would be our foolishness if we don’t use its power to at least half of its fullest.

Learn a valuable skill

I love to learn new things, no matter whether the information comes from a book, a video, a podcast, or anything. Even so, I would say skills are far more important than knowledge.

Just think about how much information we consume every day. A lot, right? With every new article, YouTube video, or even social media feed, we gain knowledge. But how much of that knowledge do we actually use, not much, right?

It’s good to know what would be the consequence of the collision between Jupiter and Saturn, the two giants of our Solar System, but do you use that knowledge to improve your life?

Now consider this. How many skills do you have? A few, right? But you use them almost every single day. And in my opinion, this reason is enough to develop new skills, and most importantly, to hone the skills we have up our sleeves.

Every new skill acquired can be turned into a source of income if you can find the right opportunity at the right time.

I am currently learning to write impressive blogs and analyzing stocks. Within the tech field, I am learning Android apps development, doing competitive programming, which is definitely going to help me with my resume and interview. And in the future, I can even turn them into a freelance business.

If you can learn to effectively place ads on Instagram or Facebook, you can generate money. Or you can learn web designing, graphic designing, copywriting, and much more things. The list can go on and on.

Invest in your productivity

Waste your money and you are only out of money, but waste your time and you’ve lost a part of your life. — Michael LeBoeuf

Money can be earned back, but time, once gone, never returns. If you’re a teenager, your childhood is gone and will never return, once you’re an adult your most energetic teenage days are gone, and once you’re old, your almost life is gone.

Even the rich can’t have more time on their clock than the poorest person on the planet. So use your time as much as you can. Invest in anything that can save your time, be it developing a new habit, or buying a new app.

Lying on your bed for two hours, just to fall asleep, means two hours wasted. And more importantly, it also means that you didn’t use the entire day properly. I mean, if you’ve been, you would be tired and have fallen asleep quickly.

Lying on your bed for two hours, just to fall asleep, means two hours wasted.

This one simple thing made me realize something that can be of huge importance.

Look at this, 2 hours wasted every single day can translate into 60 hours a month and 720 hours a year. Imagine if you give that much time to hone a skill. I don’t need to tell you how much improvement you can make. Those two hours, which otherwise would have been wasted, can generate a new source of income for you.

Now, every night before going to bed, I analyze the day and set a target for the next day. Analyzing the day helps me feel satisfied before bed or tells me the weak points I need to address the next day and setting the target in advance helps me stay productive all day.

Setting targets in advance helped me avoid procrastination. Earlier every time I finished a task, I used to hang out on Instagram, or YouTube as I didn’t know what to do next. And the next thing I see is an hour wasted. Knowing what all things to do in advance helped me avoid killing my precious time on these social media apps.

If you find out that you are more productive in the morning than evening, start waking up and going to bed early. Vice versa is also possible. The point is, invest in making yourself as productive as you can.

The more productive you can be, the more time you can save.

Invest in knowledge

Definitely, skills are more important than knowledge, but how the heck would you know which skill to master if you don’t have enough knowledge? The more you know, the more is the possibility of spotting an opportunity. That’s where my love for learning new things comes from.

A lot of opportunities passed by in the last two decades, but why were you not able to spot them? The answer is simple, lack of knowledge. Those who understood that Medium is going to be the next big thing for the writers got in early, and the ones who stayed till now are sitting on the top and making a good living from it.

Those who knew how cryptocurrencies work and invested heavily in Bitcoin are now millionaires and even billionaires. Those who knew the future of transportation invested heavily in Tesla, and I don’t need to tell you about its stock price, I think.

Thanks to my knowledge about blockchain and a lot of knowledge I gained about the stock market from reading books on money and watching YouTube videos, I too enjoyed the rise of Bitcoin.

I started investing in Bitcoin in January 2020, and my knowledge about the stock market helped me stay calm during the heavy fluctuations of Bitcoin’s price.

Not just that, with the news breaking about banning cryptocurrencies, the tension raised too much, and under that situation, my blockchain and cryptocurrency knowledge was shouting in my head “Bitcoin is going to be the future.” And with Elon Musk taking it to Twitter, I was very confident of holding the crypto assets.

If you won’t know that something new is about to come or is in the market, how are you going to know which skill to master?

Skills are definitely very important, but lack of knowledge will deplete your sack of skills.

So invest your time in acquiring “useful” knowledge. Now, what do I mean by useful knowledge? The knowledge that can make you wiser or help you figure out which skill to learn. The lessons that can be implemented in your actual life.

Invest in your health

I have suffered a fracture and break on the same joint of the same hand. A guy who was once a patient of Asthma (though I still face some problems in regaining my stamina after a long break), who was once even told by a doctor, “You won’t be able to play sports like football again.”

And currently, guess what, I am a football team member of our college, playing the role of a winger, one of the most stamina-intensive positions in football. I don’t have the mobile number of that doctor, or else I’d have definitely called him.

Not just that, I am one of the fastest runners of my college too, and a calisthenics practitioner who has even unlocked some strength-demanding skills.

None of the above could have been possible if I would have given up on my body. Though they all required a lot of practice, it’s my healthy eating and physical habits that resulted in what you read above.

With healthy eating and physical habit, I don’t mean calculating macros and vitamins every time I ate. No, not at all. Just knowing what’s good for the body and knowing what you’re eating is all it needs for a healthy eating habit. And that’s what I did with being physically active, and now my body thanks me every day for that.

During our teenage, our immune system stays strong. But that’s not the case for the entire life. People often neglect their health during their teenage as they don’t see any significant issue with their body despite eating junk and staying shiftless.

When you are a teenager, your immune system is at its peak. But when you grow older, you fall sick often and the reason being, you not living a healthy lifestyle when you should have. What does it mean? Now, you’ll stay in hospital more often, killing most of your valuable time.

Don’t make these mistakes, don’t destroy your health for some short-term pleasure. Think about the long term. Is that junk food going to help you in the long run, or is it going to destroy you?

So, eat healthy foods, exercise regularly, live a healthy lifestyle so that when you grow older your body will thank you for what you’ve done to it in its early days.

To keep the body in good health is a duty… otherwise we shall not be able to keep the mind strong and clear. — Buddha

The Takeaway

• Starting a new business will challenge you to be good at communicating with others, managing your time better, understanding finance, and stress management.
• Every new skill acquired can be turned into a source of income if you can find the right opportunity at the right time.
• Taking rest is fine, but make sure you work upon yourself as much as you can. Spend your time on your productivity.
• The more you know, the more is the possibility of spotting an opportunity. So invest some time in acquiring useful knowledge.
• To keep the body in good health is a duty. Eat healthy foods, exercise regularly, live a healthy lifestyle so that when you grow older your body will thank you.

To thrive in your future, you must survive the cut-throat competition in your present.

So those were the five simple and most effective ways in which you can invest in yourself and see better returns than any other investment options out there.

Thanks for reading!!