One of the most important and rewarding things to do in life is investing in yourself. You can invest in crypto, stocks, and almost anything else – but all your financial wins could be taken from you at any time. When you invest in yourself and build up skills and knowledge, nobody can ever take that away from you.

The problem with a lot of gurus is that they’re incentivized to use “investing in yourself” as an excuse to rip you off.

In this post, I’ll talk about the “DO”s and “DON’T”s of investing in yourself so you can maximize your chances of being successful while not falling for traps that can cost you a ton of money.

And unlike most blog posts, my lists are generally much shorter but are slightly more in depth. Reason’s because it’s not realistic for me to give you a list of 20 different things for you to keep on the top of your mind every time you want to do something to invest in yourself. You’ll only be overwhelmed and ineffective.

So, here’s a short list of the most important Dos and DON’Ts of investing in yourself.

DO: Think For Yourself!

Things that work for others might not work for you.

• Timing of the advice could be completely wrong. For example, dropshipping was great advice back in 2015 but now it’s not. Maybe NFTs are a great play now but not 2023, and will be a great play again in 2025.
• You are you. Your skills, talents, and temperament are different than others. That’s what makes you, you. As a result, something that’s a great idea for someone with a different skillset and temperament could end up costing you a lot of money. And vice versa.

As a result, you must think critically about all the advice that’s given to you and whether or not it applies to you. More in this later in the “Don’t listen to everything you hear on the internet” section.

DO: Have Intrinsic Motivation

There’s 2 types of motivation:

• Intrinsic motivation where the motivation comes from within yourself.
• Extrinsic motivation where motivation comes from external factors, like others liking your Instagram posts or how you’re being perceived.

You should “hype yourself up” with intrinsic motivation, and not extrinsic motivation.

Extrinsic motivators are unhealthy, and are generally short-lived.

• This is mainly due to the ever-changing opinions of others. You’ll have to reinvent yourself every time your group of friends changes their mind about something. Thus, any social status might not last long. Your Rolls-Royce might garner praise from your friends the first few months but later on they might hate it and say it’s an ugly car.
• The wide breadth of opinions also makes it physically impossible to please everyone. Why play a game that you can’t win? You’ll easily lose motivation as soon as you don’t please everyone. Which is all the time. So you’ll never be motivated if you rely on external factors to be motivated.
• External factors change constantly, and thus is an unreliable source of motivation.
• External praise “feels empty” at the end of the day and a “pat on the back” feels more shallow than ever, especially in the 21^st century. A “like” is just a dopamine rush, but doesn’t mean anything. Your boss patting you on the back means nothing if there’s no enormous raise or promotion that comes along with it.

Intrinsic motivators are the opposite. Instead of seeking approval from others, you seek approval from the most important person in the world: you.

• Since your values are more or less “evergreen,” your source of motivation will be constant. As long as you’re pursuing your own ideals, you’ll feel good about yourself and that self-approval will fuel your motivation.
• Self-approval is impactful because it builds confidence and inoculates you against others’ disapproval. As a result, it’s longer-lasting. As an example, imagine you’ve done everything you set out to do and hit all the goals you’ve set for yourself. Would it matter if some homeless person, or even if your family members disapprove of all your success? Absolutely not. You’ve won and there’s no one that can take away that good feeling from you. Ever.

How do you psyche yourself up and build intrinsic motivation? Here’s a couple examples:

• If you want the motivation to invest in yourself and build a skill, focus on how cool it’d be if you had a permanent skill to make money any time you want.
• Hone in on how good it feels to attack a bunch of tasks, and actually finishing them every single day.
• Think about how good it’d feel to make the most out of each day while you’re still alive. Most people don’t do this, so everyday that’s used well is an incredible achievement.
• Feel good about yourself each day as you learn something new and useful. Every new thing you learn is a step closer to your goals.

DO: Keep Investing In Yourself And Let Your Skills Compound

Linear growth is slow, and parabolic (hockey stick) growth is good. The former is like trading a unit of time for a unit of money. The latter is like letting your money compound over time, where you’ll reap more and more rewards as time goes by.

If you’re familiar with hockey stick growth, then you’ll also know to be patient with the results. This is because with a hockey stick curve, most of your results will be concentrated in the later stages of your journey.

Here’s a personal but small example of mine: Photoshop.

• Each new website I build for my e-commerce business, I try to pick up 1-3 new Photoshop tricks.
• Each of these few things isn’t all that useful when used in a vacuum.
• Even though I’m linearly learning 1-3 things per project, my productivity increases parabolically.
• Main reason for this is because my skills compound on itself. If I only have a bucket of 3 tricks, there’s not much I can do. But if I have a bucket of 9 tricks, I can be more than 3 times as effective than only having 3 tricks. I can do this because with 9 Photoshop tricks, I can string together a bunch of tricks that’ll help me get the desired effect I want within 5 minutes, as opposed to the 2 hours it’d take if I only knew 3 tricks.
  • Other words: Photoshop tricks compound on each other because I can string them together and make them all interact with each other.
• To illustrate it in a hypothetical math example: Let’s say I know 5 Photoshop tricks only. The 6^th trick might add 1% to my overall productivity. But the 7^th trick I learn will add 2%, and so on.

You can think of your bucket of skills as having a network effect. Each new thing you learn that you add to your repertoire will contribute more to your effectiveness than the previous thing you learned.

As such, never stop investing in yourself and learning new things. So many people hit some small amount of success and think it’s time to let go of the gas and stop learning.

Wrong.

DON’T: Fall For Gurus’ Marketing Tricks Of “You Have To Spend Money When Investing In Yourself”

Some of the best education I’ve had is free. And the worst education I’ve had was not.

You don’t have to spend money to seriously invest in your own education. That’s just a stupid marketing trick.

Truly motivated people don’t have to “burn their [financial] boats” in order to psyche themselves up to learn.

• If you have to burn money to get the motivation to succeed, then you have a much more entry-level problem. You should already be motivated (see the intrinsic motivation section above).
• If you don’t even have the motivation to turn your wildest dreams into reality, then burning money into an overpriced course won’t make your already-doomed business successful.

Also, if you feel like you have to spend money to get a good education or great advice, you’re 100% wrong.

Advice you need to pay money for is generally much worse than free advice.

• Gurus don’t actually know much about the thing they’re teaching. This is why they need to sell a course as their main source of income instead of providing it for free.
  • Example: Y-combinator mentors their startups for free because they know they’ll milk those startups for way more money in the long-run if they were to do well. Y-combinator is motivated to eliminate the money bottleneck from startups because whatever they could charge a startup would pale in comparison as what they could be making if they only had 2% equity in the next Airbnb.
  • Gurus force you to pay them upfront because they know you’re not likely to succeed, so they have to capture as much value as they can upfront. They’d make much less money if they made tuition free but instead got equity from their students’ companies should they succeed. This is because what they’re teaching won’t work. Period.
    • Note that being paid upfront is a conflict of interest and means the gurus have no skin in the game. Note that “capturing value upfront” is also opposite of where the big money is: the parabolic curve where most value is captured on the backend.

DON’T: Listen To Everything You Hear On The Internet

One way to learn this lesson is simple: just gamble your money on WallStreetBets picks and you’ll lose all your money very quickly.

Hopefully, you can learn this lesson without going bankrupt though.

At the end of the day, there’s tons of advice and the vast majority of it is useless. You must think for yourself. Consider:

• Does the logic behind the advice make sense?
• Is this idea even worth testing and investing the time in? And if so, how can I validate it or debunk it as quickly as humanly possible?
• Does this sound too good to be true?
• Does something sound “good enough” logically, but emotionally doesn’t sit well with your gut? These are the most dangerous since your gut is generally right but you can’t rationally explain why.
  • This is a delicate balance between “analysis paralysis” where you take too much time to make a decision and “I should just do what’s rational” where you take too much action without pausing enough.
  • My recommendation:  if something doesn’t sit well with your gut, don’t do it. What often happens is bad ideas seem logical upfront, but you’ll only understand the reasons why they’re bad ideas once it’s too late. Better to not FOMO than to lose a lot of money.

How Do I Start Investing In Myself?

Youtube is a great resource for any entrepreneur that’s wanting to start investing in themselves.

If you really want to pay some money to learn skills, you can just pay $10-$20 for a Udemy course instead of some guru charging $100+ for a course.

Likewise, Coursera is a great paid resource as well if you’re looking to get a certificate so you can transition from your job to another and stay in wage slavery a bit longer.

I’ll leave with a fun example. I wanted to learn Poker. So I went on Youtube and found a free MIT course teaching how to best play Texas Hold ‘Em. After I did all the homework for the course and went through it, I got a lot better at Poker. Instead of just playing randomly, I’d play very close to GTO and would win most cash games.

It was a free course.

PS: If you found this article helpful, or know someone that could benefit from this, please share it with them. This blog is quite new and I’d be super duper grateful if you’d help spread the word.