Investing is a core principle of wealth building. But the term is more than just about putting your money to work in stocks, bonds, property or any other investment vehicles. It’s also about investing in yourself.
It’s about ensuring your skills are relevant to the marketplace in which you wish to compete; it’s about ensuring you have the right knowledge and talents required to make the most of other resources available to you.
Many successful people have had setbacks, going from hero to zero with their business ventures. We all know the highs and lows of Donald Trump, Steve Jobs and so on.
But the fact that a number of these individuals have been able to rebuild themselves to ever greater propositions could also reflect the fact that there had been continued investment in themselves.
Yes, luck is sometimes important, but often it’s more than that. It’s investment in your personal network, your soft skills, your technical knowledge, your strategy, ‘yourself’, your infrastructure and so on.
Let’s face it, the world of investment works with probability rather than certainty, so there’s no guarantee that the money we’ve committed will get the return that we are expecting. But how well positioned we are for both the successes and the failures will determine our financial fortunes going forward.
So think about investment in the context of yourself. Financial success, in other words, isn’t just down to finance.