When we think about the smartest ways to invest money, it isn’t stocks, real estate, or gold. The best investment for your 20s is yourself.
You can lose money when stock prices go down, or when the bubble of real estate explodes, or the government restricts the laws related to gold.
But nobody can take away what you invest in yourself.
As Warren Buffet says:
“The best investment you can make is an investment in yourself…The more you learn, the more you will earn”.
When you put the right methods and amount of time to improve yourself, the right track will come easier and faster for you to be successful.
This is a great life skill that I learned after 27 years of experience in this life.
After all, I believe that each of us, if we can make the right move with these 5 ways to invest our money at a young age. The grateful results will totally come.
1. The first smart way to invest your money is: Invest in your health seriously
“If you have a lot of money, you can ask for the best doctor to take care of your sickness. But you can’t ask cancer to leave you.
But if you have a healthy body, you can earn a lot of money later.”
People don’t want to work on the bed in the hospital. They work when they are healthy and perform the best when they have the best physical health.
As in the letter Samsung’s Lee Kun-hee sent to young generations before he died, he said that
“The most valuable thing in life is health. If you have it, you can get anything, if you don’t care for it, things don’t matter to you”.
After reading this letter last month, it makes me think a lot about the health of young generations nowadays.
In my hometown, I can see a lot of people go to the gym in the morning to do exercises (as I do too). But I also can see the trend of overnight parties and the use of too much alcohol in restaurants.
Before, I felt it was normal when to see people drink a lot of alcohol in my hometown, as I think it is the local culture.
Until recent years, when I see people around me who used to drink a lot in the last couple of years (at a young age). And now, they are facing many serious illnesses and even some people have already died because of health problems.
I know that a healthy life is far more important than fun nights with friends and alcohol.
And learning how to say “NO” with an unhealthy lifestyle is a very important life skill that each person needs to learn at a young age. In the real-life, we actually don’t need to use alcohol to have a fun party. If you are healthy and positive from the inside, you already can make the party time to be a good time without any bottle of wine.
2. The second smart way to invest your money is: Invest in books to gain more knowledge
Reading books is one of the best ways to absorb the intelligence of successful people in the world from ancient to the present.
But only trying to read a lot of books doesn’t really make a difference.
What actually can make the difference is what you choose to read. And how you can apply it in your life to make you a better life.
If someone tells me that he can read 100 books a year, but doesn’t remember what he learns from them, and never apply them to real life. I don’t value him that much as a person who only reads 20 books a year but can apply what he learns to improve his quality of life.
The value of books doesn’t stay at the quantity, it is about the quality.
The quality to improve your life from what you learned when reading these books.
As if you want to perform as the best marketer in the market, you can’t just read the history books and expect to be the top one in the marketing field.
What you need to read are more marketing books. It is the sources of information will help you to perform a marketing campaign better and understand more about the trend of marketing in the future.
This is the way you should invest when you approach the aspect of learning from books.
And this is also the way I did for myself in the last 3 years when I started to spend more time learning from the experts in my fields by reading the contents from them.
By doing this, now, I have a better understanding of the digital marketing market and perform great in my field.
So if you really want to invest your money in a more thoughtful way, decide carefully what kind of books you will buy and read as well; don’t just read everything you can grasp.
3. The third smart way to invest your money is: Invest in positive relationships
Broadening the relationships is a great way to build more valuable connections and grow yourself as you can learn many valuable life skills from others.
But having positive relationships is what you should actually focus on.
If you have more kinds of relationships who only want to ask you to join in the late-night parties, hang out for alcohol and drugs. Who do you think you can be?
This is the question that I ask myself anytime I want to start to build a strong connection with someone.
Do we make each other better or will we ruin each other?
If this is a positive relationship, I will try my best to maintain and grow it, but if it is not. I will consider again, even if this is a classmate or a neighbor who lives nearby.
As I believe, the most important is the quality of the relationship, not the quantity one.
Because if you want to be a positive and enthusiastic person, but what you choose is to spend most of the time in negative relationships, do you think it is possible for you to be the person you want to be?
Probably not!
Don’t let your relationships be toxic.
Choose based on what you want to learn from them, not from the distance alone.
Work hard and seriously on relationships as the way you work on your own business.
Because if you have the right connections, you will achieve a massive level of success that you never can imagine before.
4. The fourth smart way to invest your money is: Travelling
Life experience is a very important part of life. And traveling can let you gain more life experiences
It helps you to know more about the world you live in, understand different cultures, have a higher EQ as you have a chance to experience, and discover many aspects of life.
As I still remember when I was a kid, even though my family is just a lower-middle-class family, my parents always try to give me and my brother a chance to travel every year as a way to encourage us to discover new things in life.
At that time, I just felt happy when I had a chance to travel, but now, when I grow up, I understand that the value of traveling for me is even far more than just enjoyment.
Because when you have a chance to go to many different places and learn a lot of useful sources of experience. You have a tendency to be a more reasonable person, smarter but also be more sympathetic.
These are the things that if you just stay at home all the time, you will never feel and experience it
5. The fifth smart way to invest your money is: Your degree
Getting your degree, not compulsory but will make your life easier.
We can see a lot of examples from the media of people who quit college and become very successful.
But actually, it is not the case for everyone, and the chance for you to win the life game without a degree in today’s society is just 0,00000001%.
Because everywhere you want to apply for, especially the big corporations, all of them need to qualify your degree before giving you a chance to join their team (Except if you are the top performers in this field or have a very good relationship with the Chairman before.)
And if you want to be a person like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates who quit University and still being the top billionaires in the world, let ask yourself these questions first before going to quit college/University:
- Do you already have in your mind an idea that can value millions of dollars and is already an executive part of this (AND ALREADY GAINS A PART OF SUCCESS) before you are going to quit your university degree yet?
- If you fail, can your parents support you to live for a couple of months (or even years) before you really can get the level of success that you want?
- Do you have the background to invest and earn money when you are a kid? Or if you want to start-up in the tech industry, did you learn about machine learning or computers for years in your childhood?
- Do you enjoy the self-learning process in your life and are happy to spend hours reading the books related to the field you want to chase for years as a teenager?
- If you quit college, will you quit from an Ivy League University or not?
These are 5 very common but valuable questions that you need to figure out for yourself if you have an idea to quit your degree and start your own track of success.
The reason is the majority of successful billionaires who quit college/University have these things in common.
Most of them come from mid-high class families where they don’t really need to worry too much about money if they fail. And they have a good education about self-learning and are given a chance to executive what they love to do from a young age.
Warren Buffet started to buy stocks at the age of 11 with the help of his father — a famous American businessman, investor, and politician.
Or Mark Zuckerberg learned about programming from the age of 10 from his father.
These are some examples but present how normally these successful billionaires start their success.
All come from a very early period of their life with a good education, hard-working and the right track to work on.
But if you don’t have that luck to be guided effectively from a young age, as for me too. A degree is a thing you should have, it will help you to have a chance to work in large companies and learn experiences from the top performance people who you admire.
And during the time you learn in colleges, it also gives opportunities for you to improve your social skills when working with others; learning the foundation of the field you want to work in later on in your career.
So don’t think a degree is just a paper, actually, it is a door for you to open the new world of a professional working environment and a place where you have “a free couple of years” to try and test yourself and your ideals before going to school life.
To sum up
To invest in yourself, we have dozens of methods and a lot of aspects to work on.
But for me, I believe that the list of 5 ways is the best because personally, it helps me to change the way I think and work on my life effectively and plays the majority role to lead me to the feeling of success.
You may find more than 5 ways to invest in yourself. Maybe your list can be 10, 20, 30 things that you think will bring the best outcome for you.
It is totally fine.
But if you are a person like me, who follows the minimalist trend, a list of 5 is enough for us if we can work well on it.
And when you approach these 5 smart ways in this list, it equals you are trying to apply investment in 5 different super important aspects in life.
It is not easy to make everything come true, but when you do it, you will see yourself as a different better version.
A version that can make you feel proud!
When you finish this blog, if you want to know more about your personal finance and things you didn’t learn from the school/University, this is the extra mile you must read “5 Basic Money Lessons Schools Don’t Teach You That Ruin Your Personal Finance”. I will see you there!
Vocabulary
- Invest in your health seriously: Đầu tư cho sức khỏe của bạn một cách nghiêm túc
- Reading the selective books: Đọc sách có sự chọn lọc
- Invest in positive relationships: Đầu tư vào những mối quan hệ tích cực
- Travelling more and let gain more life experiences: Đi du lịch nhiều hơn và để có thêm kinh nghiệm sống
- Get your degree, not compulsory but will make your life easier: Lấy bằng cấp đầy đủ, không bắt buộc nhưng sẽ giúp cuộc sống của bạn dễ dàng hơn.
- “The best investment you can make is an investment in yourself…The more you learn, the more you will earn”: “Khoản đầu tư tốt nhất mà bạn có thể thực hiện là đầu tư vào bản thân… Bạn càng học hỏi nhiều, bạn càng kiếm được nhiều tiền”.
- Ivy League University: Những trường đại học Top đầu của Mỹ