The best investment you can ever make is to invest in yourself. Although many know about this idea of self investment, but not many know exactly things that could be considered investment in oneself. The common idea is to get a degree education. Even though that’s good, there are more ways to do that more better.
Getting a degree is a great idea if your ultimate goal is to be better employable. But if the goal is to invest in yourself, a degree can’t give you the best. So, in determining the right ways to invest in yourself should be by defining your reason for the investment.
Think of it this way, why would you want to live? It may surprise you that a lot of people don’t even know why they want to live. Of course, that’s the reason some commit suicide because they don’t understand why they should live.
However, your primary drive in wanting to invest in yourself should be your reason for the investment. Why do you want to have your own house? Why do you want to have a car? Why do you even want to get up this morning?
Do you know why? Find the reason the suits your desire to invest in yourself. If you don’t have a reason, you will not be committed to ensuring that the investment is worth your effort. Also, you will not value the price you may have to pay for it.
How To Invest In Yourself
And if you have your compelling reasons to start investing in yourself, then I will guiding you on simple ways to achieve that effortlessly. Remember, it’s an investment to improve in yourself for a reason best known to you.
But whatever the reason might be, I believe its because you really need to be better so you can achieve more for yourself. Just like you buy a house so that you can have shelter and save on high recurrent cost of rental fees.
The primary reason is high recurrent rent fees, because you can rent a house without buying one. The same way you can get a degree to be employable without actually improving on yourself.
So, I’m going to guide you in these 12 ways you can invest in yourself this year.
{1} Read Books
Books contain more knowledge than you can ever imagine. However, reading every book you find may not be a proper way to Invest in yourself. An investment should have a focus. Your focus should be the reason you are investing in yourself. That should also help you form the choice of books to read.
For example, if your investment is to improve the essence of your life, then a book on life itself should be what fits better. The best book ever written on life is the Holy Bible. Although, you can find several other literatures derived from the Bible but this book remains the first choice when you want to discover the essence of life.
And this example guides every choice you have to make. Focus on your reason and pick the books that helps to address it.
However, the idea of what a book is may also need explanation here. We have left the age of paper books. And most of what you find online may not be in book format. So, the definition of a book will be a body of knowledge in a particular field that addresses a particular need or issue.
A blog is an example of a book. In fact, it’s a more comprehensive and freshly shared body of knowledge. What you are learning here from this blog post is coming fresh to you and tomorrow you will also find a new knowledge or thoughts that would help your startup business ideas.
{2} Take Up Courses
But not everyone may like the idea of reading or get enough motivation to read. That’s where taking Up Courses may come in. A course helps you learn under a kind of supervision. This way you can invest in yourself under the rightful supervision of qualified instructors.
It helps you keep pace with timelines, learn faster and get the opportunity to also test your knowledge on the course.
And in today’s global village, you can take any course from the comfort of your home or office at your own pace. That could also give you the advantage to cover many courses within a short period of time.
There are many online learning sites where you can buy courses of interest, like Udemy, Udacity, MIT, Cousera, etcetera.
{3} Watch YouTube
What is there to watch on YouTube? The power of YouTube has been expanded over the years. It will amaze you to realize that most of the course people pay hundreds of dollars to study are available for free on YouTube. Yes, completely free of charge (FOC).
The question is why would someone make those courses available for free on YouTube? YouTube users enjoys a different kind of monetization that warrants them to offer video courses for free and still earn money.
I have also explained this in one of the blog post: 5 Ways To Make Money In Your Sleep. You will find this very interesting. But the concept is even better than charging for the course. And while they may not even brand them free courses, so much is being taught for free on YouTube.
If you love watching videos, you can explore the free video course Contents on YouTube to invest in yourself.
{4} Watch Educational Shows
You can also expand your love for videos to watching educational shows. If you are on Amazon prime or you subscribe to Netflix or other on-demand video streaming channels, you can take advantage of that to also invest in yourself.
There are many educational shows on TV that will address your kind of skill acquisition or training. Once you know what you want to learn, search for shows that are packaged in that direction.
{5} Find A Mentor
A mentor is a guide with the kind of experience you require. Finding one might be very helpful for you to scale up your learning process. However, the challenge used to be how to find the right mentors who are also willing and available to help.
But in today’s digital age you can approach a mentor online. The barriers that made it difficult to reach them has been bridged by the internet. You can find your mentor on LinkedIn by following them or contacting them for mentoring. You can also find a mentor on Quora platform.
Moreover, picking a mentor should be guided by the kind of investment you seek to make in yourself. For example, if you seek to understand better ways to sell, then, you need a mentor who is a sales expert. Someone with good track record and successful selling career.
The whole idea of investing in yourself is to acquire better skills or knowledge in areas of your business or life that you want to improve.
Really, the best way to describe mentorship is with the idea of apprenticeship. Another way is pastoral relationship with church members. By choosing a mentor you become his or her apprentice. You are there to learn and your mentor is there to teach.
{6} Choose Your Circle Wisely
Now that brings me to the choice of people you keep around you. What you may not know is that those around you are either directly or directly mentoring and shaping your life choices, decisions and actions.
So, the right kind of circle would mean the right kind of investment in yourself. But the wrong crowd could be very dangerous to what you invest in yourself.
Think about this, Jesus taught his disciples , that it’s not what goes into a man that defiles him but what comes out of him. In essence, if something didn’t go in, something wouldn’t come out. Even though you have a choice to determine what you do with what you learn, if you learn the wrong things, you will produce only the wrong results.
Think about what you could be investing in yourself when you hang around some people. What’s coming out of them? Good or bad is going into you. And that could be what next you bring out of you.
{7} Start A Side Hustle
I can’t help but laugh about this one. How could a side hustle help you to invest in yourself? Well, let’s look at side hustle as a kind of mentoring program.
Imagine you are thinking of quitting your job to start a business. Starting a side hustle could mean practicing on your business idea while you are still employed on a job. This gives you the needed time to learn on the business before you finally quit to run the business full time.
{8} Look For A New Hobby
What if you are the type that likes challenges, then, a new hobby could help you a lot. Learning a new hobby would require you to make changes even in your regular routine. Maybe you are dealing with some habits you would like to change.
A new hobby might take you off a particular path to a whole new path.
Think of a new hobby as a child learning to walk. At first everything may seem so strange and unachievable. But you have to keep trying till you could get along much easier.
Even you will be amazed by so much you could learn from trying a new hobby. But it’s even more interesting when the reason is to replace a habit you want to stop. Try this idea to invest in yourself this period.
{9} Workout
A lot of you like the idea of workout. It’s one investment you must give yourself. The benefits of working out is both for the soul and the body. It rejuvenates your entire being in a way nothing else could.
Think of a workout as a bonus investment on yourself. While you could learn how to improve your skills and be a better entrepreneur or team player in your workplace, workout gives you some deep inside you experience nothing else would.
However, the challenge most people have with workout is the consistency it demands. It’s not a one-off investment. You have to create a workout routine, probably your entire life.
{10} Eat Healthy
Food is as important as the air you breath. You should plan your meal in the same way you plan your schedule each day. Something as easily overlooked as breakfast meal can affect the result you can achieve each day.
Take your meals seriously. But importantly eat healthy meals. The reason is that meals helps to power organs in your body. And when they are healthy it impacts on your overall wellbeing, which in turn affect your overall output each day.
The primary function of food is to give you energy. And you need energy to power your brain to think, in your body to lift your hands, legs, open your mouth and even blink your eyes. The lack of energy may affect the function of any or all parts of your body.
{11} Fasting
That’s not to conclude that there won’t be room for fasting. The best art of life is balance. You need to know how to balance everything. Too much or too little of anything is bad. So, in order to find a balance you require at sometimes to go in either directions.
How do you invest in yourself through fasting? It’s by abstaining from food or substances that could give you energy. The big benefit is that when you deny your body required energy for sometime, it turn on its defense mechanism to protect itself. And it increases your brain power to think, analyses and assimilate things.
However, the real essence of fasting it not just to increase your brain power but to unleashed you hidden power which is the power of your human spirit. The Hunan spirit in unlimited. When you unleashed this power, you are exposing your mind to information that’s not within the purview of the physical senses.
{12} Sleep Early And Wake Up Earlier
The natural tendency for humans to sleep and wake is in itself an advantage you can explore to invest in yourself. Even though we can all sleep and wake up, it’s important how early you do that.
Sleeping and waking can be an asset in your success story. I know the norm is for you to wake up early. That’s because most of these mentors who emphasis on waking up early don’t sleep early. They believe so much in hard work.
However, the trends for hard work is giving up for smart work. Most of what we do today are automated. And nothing is really new in today’s world. What makes the difference is how you do what you do from how everyone else does theirs.
So, if you want to get ahead of others, think of working more when your body, soul and spirit are fully rejuvenated. And that’s possible earlier in the mornings. But to even get that kind of rejuvenation would require that you also sleep early.
Conclusion
There is so much to share on everyone of the subhead in this blog post. An investment is a conscious plan to improve the value of yourself or venture for a return on the investment. So, if you invest in yourself it’s for your good.
You need to have a plan on how to you intend to invest in yourself this year. In the same way you plan your business, or new year resolution or even having a meal plan. You also need to have a properly laid out plan on how you are going to invest in yourself.