Be invested, and become invested
We receive this common advice: if your money does not start working for you, you will have to work till you die. This trick is to take your money into their pocket with their get-rich-quick motivations. It is their business model, and you are their client. Instead of investing in them, become the investor.
As a young middle-class earner, I have been the victim of different investments that greatly hurt me. To be honest with you, I can boldly say that success is more about avoiding pitfalls than multiplying what you have. To be successful, you should avoid multiplying by zero, and this is exactly what premature investment does to your savings. A number of people have been brought down by this early retirement mindset investment to make their money work for them while asleep. What a catchy line from motivational speakers! Men and brethren, avoid this malicious motivation.
For the sake of clarification, I am not talking about the Ponzi scheme. I believe everybody who reads my articles has a higher level of belief than to key to such schemes without investigation, but as a warning, avoid quick money schemes. By investments, I am referring to genuine practices that siphon off your earnings, like stock or fixed deposit banking, that you would naturally treat as sustainable investments. My advice is to treat all these investments the same way you would treat crypto and even Ponzi schemes. In fact, treat all investment ideas as high-risk.
Reallocate your resources toward building yourself and your products. Good things take time but they last a long time. I understand that when you build anything yourself, you may have to keep working on it till you even die or retire. This is the actual secret to living a purposeful life.
What do you think others are doing with the money you are giving them? What do you think Apple is doing with the money you used to buy their stock? To be clear to you, they are using the money to pay people like you to build various products and continue to iterate until they succeed, in turn fulfilling their purpose and life destiny. In fact, they are passing the risk of failure to you and using your money to build themselves.
Going back to my suggestion on building yourself or your product, you could build yourself to be able to deliver exceptional services, or you could build a product that would solve a problem or render a service to other people who have it as a pain point. Work to make money, build yourself to render exceptional service to people, and make more money. Build your business to continuously help people and make even more money.
On investment, if you must invest, treat every investment that is external to you as volatile, meaning you should invest what you can lose and forgo, not as a means for making money work for you and, in the end, lose everything for which you have worked. If you are so keen on investing, then invest internally. That is investing in things that are totally within your control—I mean, completely within your reach. If you lose, you know what to do next and could even trace back toward recovering your investment because it is mostly physical.
Work for your money now and keep working. In the later days, you can confidently trade a chunk of another person’s time for an insignificant amount of your net worth. Remove the mindset that your money is working for you and invest safely.
