Word count:3682
this is Leo from actualized org and today I'm going to do a little video blog on the idea of investing investing in yourself investing in life and even investigate money because it's all the same it's all investment and the question I really have is are you a short or you a long-term investor why is this important well I tend to think of short-term investing as being something that's flaky and not something that pans out really well whereas long-term investing can be very lucrative and very valuable to you and I don't just mean investing in stocks although that can certainly apply to that domain and I'm by no means a stock investment expert so I don't feel qualified to give advice there but I'm more mostly talking about investing in yourself and investing in life I find that a lot of times people have short attention spans and they tend to jump on stuff and then get out of it and jump on new stuff they tend to dabble and jump from one thing to another that leads to kind of short-term investment mindset which is not very good towards building lasting success and whatever kind of success that might be financial personal fitness relationship any of that kind of stuff it's usually great and very very valuable to be able to invest in something over the long term so a great you know a great example of this is is investing in your career because with career what you're doing really and this is talked really well about a book by Cal Newport called what is it called it's called so good they can't ignore you and there he really talks about building career capital and really in order to become happy and successful in your career what you need to do is you need to start investing in it and building up the skill that makes you valuable relative to others in the field so that when you go to your employer's your ask them for a raise or even if you're running your own business if you go and you start charging anyone charge clients more money or you want to move moving on into a different domain and expand your business what's preventing you from doing that ultimately is skill and knowledge and know-how and so building that up to be able to be valuable to other people because whether you're in a career or you're running the business yourself the reason you're making money on it is because you're providing value to others and it's a value exchange and you're usually offering more value than you're receiving at least that's the ideal way that you want to be running your business that's the most sustainable way so to do that to provide a kind of value you need to you need to have value in yourself you have value to give and do that you need to build your skills so you know let's say you're a graphic artist and you want to advance in your career well the best way to do that is to really get good at doing graphic design and graphic arts it's not so much about hobnobbing with other people although that can be useful in its own rights and in its own you know in different types of jobs there's varying degrees as to how useful that is but generally if you're doing something skillful like you're a writer you're an artist you're a designer whatever it is that you're doing it's good to become better and better skilled at it then you'll have more leverage in the value that you're willing to provide others and so others will give you more in return so if you want the company car and you want the four week vacation and you want the great health insurance that somebody might provide you when they employ you well you better provide a lot in return that means you're providing awesome writing or awesome graphic design or awesome you know art if that's your thing whatever it is so that's a great you know a great starting point for long and short term investment because with a career usually to build skills that is something that you need to invest a lot of time into and to do that you need to have some discipline and you need to also kind of understand the process of mastery I have other video blogs on mastery to deep topic you can research that so that's that's a that's another good shooting off point for a tangent but I won't go in that into that here what I really want to focus is more on the investing in yourself so you know thinking about how to invest in yourself and that that is the most valuable use of your time it's not I'm matter of going and you know asking for a raise per say that's going to get you the big bucks it's not a matter of saving money that's going to get you the big bucks so stop thinking in terms of of that it's not like winning the lottery it's not you know saving on your groceries that kind of stuff is not really what makes you rich and successful what makes you rich is successful is building is building your brain because what are skills what is knowledge it's building your brain so the more you can build your brain the more knowledge and experience you can have that's valuable to other people that is what's going to make you sustainably rich because when you have that experience that's something that you know very few people can take away from you and yet at the same time everybody wants from you so that's something you can use to trade with especially in in modern American society where most business and work is done as a service now it's not we're not doing manufacturing anymore we're not doing farming it's more about you know what kind of services can you provide to other people and a lot of it is about information services marketing services that kind of stuff and and that all requires massive amounts of skill and you know as society advances it's just going to get more and more skill is going to need to be required to do that stuff well so think about that they go out when you're trying to optimize your time and make the most efficient use of your time and your day and your week and you're playing that stuff out try to plan more time for improving your skills improving your experience with with whatever it is that you're working in because as you're doing that that's making you a better more valuable asset to others in the long run and for sure this is not something that will immediately pay off it might not and on the other hand it also might so you have to take a look at it and and and weigh the pros and cons of getting a short-term gain versus a long-term gain but you know this is a classic classic problem that I'm sure you know you've heard of before is that you want to be focused more towards the long term than the short term immediate gratification because as you're building yourself up to be a valuable asset to there's that's that's where the big bucks are going to come for you that's where your your biggest success is going to come and there's multiple levels on which you can do this so one way I just talked about was just like pure skills like you can just become you know let's say a better let's say a better artist if that's what you do that's one thing but then there's another level you can do it on an even higher level where you're really focusing more on abstract in your game than you are on specific skills so for an artist specific skills would be you know learning to paint better maybe learning Photoshop that kind of stuff if you're a traditional artist that those would be kind of skills that you want to develop to get more value there the soft skills you might want to develop though are also important and they might in fact be more important which I'll make the case for that they actually are and that's stuff like you know what do I mean by soft skills soft skills I mean let's say people skills let's say your business involves selling art so not only do you have to paint the art you also have to be able to hobnob with you know with clients and you have to be you have to be funny you have to be entertaining you have to be likable you have to also be political you have to be savvy you have to be a little bit witty you have to be maybe a little bit conniving at times to get to get what you want to get the kind of success there so it's not that you just you know paint a painting and all the sudden you're you're Picasso and you're you know you're wealthy and famous there's marketing involved with that so you have to manage public expectations to be successful there so what kind of soft skills do you need to get there and another way to ask that question is to say who do you have to be how do you have to change yourself to get to that position where you see also yourself being as that like successful artist that also is loved by clients and gets a lot of business well in that case you know the soft skills like we've said are probably like people skills maybe a humor develop a sense of humor develop some business acumen so what are all the ways that you could do that you know well you can maybe take some improv classes maybe read some books on comedy maybe start practicing that stuff with with your friends start bringing it into your work start going to networking events that's still a little bit of not like full inter game when I'm talking about full in our game and this is like the really deep but also abstract stuff is like what's holding you back as an artist you know where's your creativity coming from because I would assume that as an artist creativity and originality innovation would be something that would be very valuable to you beyond all the other stuff probably more so than everything else and that everything else that you do kind of hinges on that so if that's the case you know how do you reconnect with your creativity how do you heighten your creativity so you start thinking about you know ways that that you can become more creative what kind of what kind of things do you have to think about to start putting yourself into creative modes of thinking so you're feeling creative throughout the day so you start structuring your life around that so you have more creativity also you know if you're an artist maybe you have blocks what's blocking you from from achieving that kind of success that you want maybe it's some sort of issues in the past where you know you've painted great stuff and it hasn't sold and so that has become like a limiting belief or a block on how successful you think you can be and that that's holding you back so maybe if that's the case then really to be successful to really be that the top level artist which you're going to have to do is you have to work through that stuff right you're going to find your sense of confidence again you have to have find a sense of confidence in in your creative expression this is now getting into really abstract territory you know how do you help someone find their confidence and their sense of expression actually that's not that hard the trick is just figuring it figuring out what the challenges are first so you start there you also need to have a vision of where you're going and then you start breaking you down to small bite-size pieces and there's there's steps you can take there's always concrete steps you can take to take to develop an abstract aspect of yourself so if you want more confidence there's so many different ways that you can do it you know you can start painting painting or types of art maybe 10% of the stuff you paint now is going to be less mainstream and more quirky and you're going to be showing that more to other to patrons and to clients and you're going to start getting their feedback and you're going to mentally start telling yourself that each time that you're stepping out of your comfort zone and you're doing this quirkier type of work maybe it's work that's a little bit offensive a little bit on the edge that you're not going to care what other people think and it might be hard at first but after a while you know you start to do that and so you you move yourself closer to be comfortable expressing who you really are and and then maybe you take that from 10% to 20% and then from 20 to 30 and you kind of inch your way up and you test the waters and you see and over time usually if it's something abstract it takes time to develop you sort of develop that confidence in your creative expression and that's just one example you know I've just I've been talking about artists this could apply virtually to anything weight loss nutrition your business any sort of other career that you that you might be in besides art any sort of personal development goals that you have relationship goals whatever it is making those kinds of long-term investments developing your inner game so that you're changing who you are to become who you want to be that's how you're getting sustainable change it's not about a behavioral change behavioral change you can make behavioral changes a lot of times you'll backslide you'll lapse back into old behaviors because the underlying problem has been fixed none of my palm is how you're thinking about stuff so that's another example of long-term investment and also about how you think about stuff how you think about what you're doing and how much is contributing to your overall success I think this is really critical and this is kind of the crux of this distinction between long and short term and I'll give you an example of when I was starting my internet business I used to be an internet marketer I still have to some extent but really I used to focus a lot on SEO and I did that for four years and I had some websites when we were launching our first website the way to launch it and I knew that all my success and all my money from that website would come from the fact that I'm doing SEO on it and that I'm building backlinks and so you know to have your site show up high on search engines what you need to do is you need to get other websites to link to it so I knew that everything that I was getting was going to be valuable and in my mind getting these links can be tedious and it can be very just very mundane and grindy work and the way that I kind of tricked myself into making these links I made a lot of them by hand myself was that I started to think about what each link was worth and instead of thinking of this oh this is just a link you know was this is just a link instead of thinking about it like that you know how valuable is one like oh it's not worth anything I started thinking of every link as golden as like a diamond in my collection because I knew that if I got enough of them the value of those links could literally be infinite and here's how the math kind of worked on that you know if I can get let's say I need let's say I need two thousand links to get my site to start ranking really well on Google and that with those two thousand links my website is going to start to bring in two hundred thousand dollars a year our website actually started to bring in more than that and just from one website from building links and and if you do the math and you start to think you know well if you're earning $200,000 a year and you have two thousand links and all you need to do is build two thousand links to start earning $200,000 a year how much is each link worth at that point well you can do the division and you'll see you know how much it's worth it can be worth a ton but then actually in reality that website will be making you money for more than one year I'll be making you money for years maybe for the rest of your life so at that point how how much are those links you know how much are 2,000 links to achieve that worth to you that's yeah I'm simplifying it but that's a good way to think about it because literally I started thinking of every link is worth like hundreds of dollars so if I can get one link that's like $100 in my pocket it's like $1,000 in my pocket is it's pretty can be priceless you know the sky this guy can be the limit depending on you know how I'm monetizing the website and all that kind of stuff and that gave me a lot of motion in motivation to create every link because think of the difference on the one hand here I am thinking about every link is worth a thousand dollars and then on the other hand there's my competitor and he's thinking and seeing every link as being you know worth a dollar who's going to make more links obviously I am because I'm valuing it much higher and so this is the kind of mindset that is is good to apply to let's say your career or any sort of investment in yourself you know how valuable is it for you for example to read a book that's going to make that's going to help you deal with your emotions so you're more emotionally stable well immediately it might not be that valuable but over the long run calculate how much value you get from that in your whole life that can be a staggering amount because think about what that gets you more emotional stability maybe you'll be better at work you'll be able to communicate with colleagues better without getting angry at them or pissing them off you'll be able to manage social situations better so maybe you'll get promoted at work you'll be put in project management positions that's going to give you more prestige more visibility more connections with other people it's going to give you bigger paychecks raises all that kind of stuff just from that and that's just one facet of your life that's your that's just your work what about the emotional stuff what emotional stability for example will get you in your relationships well much less heartache now these are kind of a less tangible list you can't put a money or a dollar amounts or to put a dollar amount up for example having less fights with the with your significant other but you can also you can also see how valuable it can be to to get that result you know what if you can reduce the amount of the amount of fights you have by 50% what if you're able to to form deeper connections with your friends what if you're less you become less folk you become more focused so you're less easily distracted by other people from getting off your path because you're emotionally stable so you're less insecure right if you're insecure it's very easy to knock you off your path someone says one thing all of a sudden you're up in your head about it you start to doubt yourself if you're very secure then you're going to be going down the same route you're going to be plowing and you're going to most likely inevitably get success because if you plow it something hard enough you're going to learn you're you're going to take your knocks you're going to fail enough times you're going to learn your lessons and so that's a good way to think about what it means to invest in yourself you know how to develop those more abstract qualities of you all that stuff that I call self-actualization how to develop those stuff like emotional stability security maybe creativity more more peace in your life and think about all the stuff that that gets you and how valuable those soft intangible kind of things actually are because they are super valuable in fact I'm going to be doing more video blogs making my case about really the need for outer game but also the incredible value of inner game and how coaching can help with that all right so I'm going to pause it there and wrap this one up my name is Leo and I'm coming at you from actualized org peace out you