The Best Way to Invest In Yourself

You have probably heard this before but it’s worth hearing again. Jim Rohn said

Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune

No matter where you are in life right now, regardless of your age, gender, or career, it’s never too late or too early to discover how to invest in yourself. You can invest in stocks, bonds, and real estate and you may get great dividends or returns on your investment.

However, the investment that gives you the best bang for your buck is the one you make in yourself. It’s a self-improvement strategy that pays dividends both now and in the future. You can learn how to invest in yourself as a woman or as a teenager, a career person, or a homemaker, and have fun doing it. Before we go further, we need to understand the meaning of investing in yourself.

To invest in yourself means you’re personally taking practical steps by doing tasks and activities that are proven to make you a better version of yourself. My son calls it the GOAT (greatest of all time) of himself.

Knowing how to invest in yourself is a great start. However, you need to know exactly what you have to do and how to accomplish it. In this article, we have researched the best real ways to invest in yourself and we practice these too.

Invest in Your Health

Let’s begin with your health in learning how to invest in yourself. Without your sound physical health, nothing else really matters. You could have a great family and relationships, a career, or lots of money and investments, but without a healthy life, all the above don’t mean a lot. Here’s how to invest in your health.

1. Understand how to actually build health in your life.

People neglect to invest in their health when they are young because they don’t understand the following: Health neglect is an invoice coming your way in the future. Take steps now to ensure that when the invoice comes, there’s little to zero to pay.

Your diet

Feed your body with good nutritious food. Increase fruit and vegetable intake daily. Drink lots of water to keep your body hydrated all the time.

Reduce sugar intake as much as possible. Read this article for more info:

How to Reduce Sugar Intake: 10 Tips That Helped Me

Supplement your nutrition with the best vitamins and mineral supplements you can find and afford.

Exercise

It’s been said that sitting is the new smoking. A sedentary lifestyle is an invitation for serious health issues such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and a whole lot of other health issues. Have an exercise routine you follow regularly; it doesn’t have to be something grandiose.

Go for a 30-minute walk daily, or run on the treadmill for 30 minutes every other day. You can do weight training at home or join a gym if it’s not possible to exercise at home.

Get a good night’s sleep

If it’s not possible to get a night’s rest because you work a night schedule get as much sleep during the day. The effects of sleep deprivation are always detrimental to your health.

Effects of sleep deprivation on weight loss and overall health

It may not be possible to always get the recommended 7 to 9 hours of sleep nightly but get as much of it as possible as in the appropriate amount of sleep. Check the article below from the Sleep Foundation for more information.

How to Invest in Yourself Mentally

2. Read for growth

Honestly, the most accessible thing to do for long-term growth and investment in yourself is to learn how to read for growth. People don’t read books because their teachers forced them to read boring books and they got turned off by them. There’s an association with homework and truth be told most of us dreaded having to do homework.

School actually made you hate the most valuable self-investment tool out there. What if you don’t like reading and you want to know how to invest in yourself in your 20s, 30s, or whatever?

Here’s the best strategy to pick that all-important reading habit:

Read what you love until you love to read.

If you don’t like physical books, there are many other ways to read digitally. You can get a kindle for reading. You can subscribe to reading apps such as Blinklist or even subscribe to Audible where you can listen to books being narrated to you.

3. Talk to people – find a mentor

Talk to a lot of people from different backgrounds and ideologies. The more you expose yourself to different types of thinking the more you get to understand the world around you. More often than not people live in what we call ideological bubbles.

If you hang out only with people who are very similar to you, you’re not investing in yourself mentally. Find people who think differently than you do, and who have a different profession compared to you.

If you’re an accountant, talk to people who are in a different field. Growth happens only when you expose yourself to new concepts. Growth happens when you either assimilate new-found knowledge or the old one gets replaced by better ones.

In your quest to talk to interesting people, some will become guiding lights for your future. Pick one of them to become your mentor. If you’re looking to invest in yourself, finding a mentor that’s open to guiding you through life is one of the best investments that you can make.

If you can connect with them physically, that’s great, it’s the best. However, with information readily available on the Internet and on your smartphone, you can pick, follow, and be mentored online.

4. Learn a New Language

Learning a new language has immediate marketplace-added value. You’ll get better jobs (if you still love doing 9-5) or better deals because of it and that’s not all. When you’re learning a new language your brain is expanding, you’re learning culture and new structures which will all have reoccurring results over time.

Besides the improved cognitive abilities that come with learning a new language, being able to speak Italian or French is a great way to make new friends and expose yourself to new cultures and ideas.

How to Invest in Yourself Professionally

5. Make friends and build your network

Your friends and network are your own personal and professional safety net. We’ve said before your net worth is directly correlated to your network. The higher the quality of your network, the wealthier you are in life.

I think it’s Grant Cardone who said that

If your net worth isn’t changing (improving), change your network

Outside of professional and financial reasons to network, what kind of life is it where you go through it all without sharing it with the people you care about? Other people’s happiness becomes your happiness and the person who doesn’t have friends lacks a big piece of the puzzle we call life.

Invest in quality friendships. Sometimes, this will mean calling them. Sometimes it means investing money or other resources. Keeping friendships alive requires work. If your friendships have faded away, it’s because none of the parties made it a priority to invest in the relationship and both parties are worse off because of it.

6. Take courses to build new skills and improve on existing ones

When it comes to how to invest in yourself, the best investment you can make in yourself is to acquire new skills in your career and life. Skills are like upgrades to the quality of the potential outcome of your life.

Getting new skills will help you get a new job that pays more or get a promotion in your current role. When you get a new skill, no one can take it away from you.

You do not need to go into debt to get a new education. You can do online school which is much cheaper in most cases compared to in-person learning.

7. Acquire Experience

If want to know how to invest in yourself as a teenager or you don’t have any experience, this is for you. It is much easier to get employed if you have the right education and experience. When you come out of university or college, you may not have any experience. Any experience is better than none, so try any or combination of these to gain experience:

• Volunteer
• Do a part-time job
• Apply for internship

Invest in Yourself Financially

I have come to learn that these are the best 5 ways to invest in yourself financially. Your finances are your now and your future.

8. Build a Separate Income Stream That’s Not Dependent on You

This is the only purely financial point on this list although everything we mention is indirectly correlated to money and leads you to make more money in the long run. Here’s the truth: you’ll never be wealthy unless you have multiple income streams.

You can make some money with a really good and high-paying day job or by working hard in your business but wealth comes from outside of work. How much are you making if you’re not working?

Really answer for yourself. The realization you’re probably not earning much outside of your immediate efforts should hit you like a bag of bricks. You’re here because you want to know how to invest in yourself. Invest your money so you don’t have to work for money. The oldest advice in the book: let money work for you.

The moment you’re able to generate a second income stream that’s independent of you, your life changes. It might not be a lot but if you do it right it’s here to stay. Here are a few ways to start investing in your finances:

• Start a blog or a YouTube channel teaching people what you know. For example, you start by teaching people who want to get into your field.
• There are many other side hustles you can start such as freelancing on websites like Fiverr or Upwork.

Three of the most inspirational entrepreneurial books you can read on this topic are: The Four-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, The One Hundred Dollar Startup, and The Parable of the Pipeline. Read all three to figure out how to build something for yourself without having to shellout a lot of money in the beginning.

9.

Eleven – Clean up Your Image

Investing in yourself means giving you access to the highest number of opportunities. To get there you need to sacrifice the handstand keg chugs you and the boys did last summer that are all over the Internet. We all judge people by their appearances, we can’t help it and your social media profiles are the New Emperor’s clothes.

You’re probably lying to yourself if you think it doesn’t affect you. Clean up your Facebook, your LinkedIn do some press and opportunities will start coming your way. Now start taking better care of yourself learn about fitness grooming, personal hygiene and the snowball will keep rolling downhill in your favor.

12. Expose Yourself to Art and Creative Ideas Regularly

Most people don’t see just how valuable art is. They think paintings are overpriced and who has the time to look at statues of buildings or print anyway? We’ve got a TV celebrity to bash on Twitter.

Creativity breeds value and the only way to be creative is to exercise your creative muscle. Think of it like a light in a room. The more you expose yourself to others the brighter yours shines. You connect the dots differently. You learn about different approaches.

Outside of family, art and beauty is probably our favorite thing to be surrounded by. Art should inspire you, it should make you think, it should make you question things. It will tell you more about yourself that’s why you should make a habit out of coming face to face with creativity at every opportunity you get.

There are two great shows on Netflix which you should definitely watch if this sparked some interest in you. One is Abstract The Art of Design. A phenomenal show which speaks to our creative side and the second one is Chef’s Table. We’re big foodies but their take on creativity and storytelling through food is what really got us where else are you getting this kind of homework.

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14 – Better equipment and tools.

Out of everything on this list this is the most straightforward one. Buy better tools that allow you to either increase the quality of your work or do your work faster.

Early on in your journey at least 70 percent of your residual income should be reinvested in equipment that’s directly correlated to bringing in more money. Why? Because these are things you need to buy once and then you’re good to go. At one point you’ll have everything you need and these tools will pay for themselves in the short to medium term. Don’t be afraid to spend some more on things that make money not only are they our deductible expense but you can’t afford to be wasting time fixing issues that can be solved by simply throwing money at them.

15. Practice introspection and stop saying yes to everything.

This one is about investing time into yourself. Here’s why introspection is one of the most valued skills we’ve developed over the years. It ties in with meditation but not only that. We’re all carrying a bunch of baggage with us.

The goal of introspection is for you to solve the issues of the past one by one until one day when all you have to worry or stress about are the issues at hand. This is a fundamental step toward happiness. Not having to worry about the anchors of the past is Illuminating and freeing.

Can you imagine getting to a point in your life where all of your worries boil down to simple and trivial things? You should the additional step to this is not bringing in new issues. Some of you and we’re calling you out on this, say yes to things that you know you don’t want to do and people take advantage of that leading you to a more miserable life than you deserve.

Stop doing this. Stop living for other people and start thinking about what you want out of life yourself. Investing in yourself means taking all of these things we we’ve mentioned seriously and pursuing them because you understand and can see that they have a direct benefit and impact on your existence.

So, which of these 15 do you actively pursue? Let us know in the comments