You know there's a lot of things that one could talk about as far as the things that you need to know to excel in business and in life, but what I want to talk about today is by far, number one and that is the concept of investing in yourself. Now the first time I was advised by someone to invest in myself, my thinking was, "Yeah, right. What do you have to sell me?" But what I've learned over time is that that really is a critical component of your success for one reason and one reason only- you are your best investment.
There is no company that you can invest in. No business. There's nothing else that you could put your money into that will bring you better returns than what you learn yourself. What you put up here that can pay you over and over and over and over. I know that for years at a personal level I lived way below my means working a corporate job simply because every time I got a commission check or got a little bit of a bonus for anything, it always went into investing into me because you know a lot of people put their future into things outside of them.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't invest in companies that have a portfolio. That's not what I'm saying at all because I have those things, however at the same time, when you look at a situation like Enron, you have people that had invested in that company for their entire lives. Almost everything of value that they had outside of probably the home that they owned was invested in that company but they could not control what that company did. Well, once again as I always said, you can always control what you do.
The biggest lesson that I got on investing in yourself; a couple of them actually came from a few friends of mine that I actually talk about on The Multi-Million Dollar Mindset website. One of which is Craig Valentine, a good friend of mine, a mentor of mine. He is probably the number one role model that I have for going into speaking. He told me about spending $4,000 a couple of times for some training sessions that have made him hundreds of thousands of dollars in bookings over the years since then.
Another good friend of mine, Craig Duswalt from the Rock Star System of Success, I watched this guy build a business that went almost from nothing to seven figures in like a year or less than a year. I was very candid with him and I was asking him, "What allowed you to move so fast?"
He said that, "I just simply increased the rate that I invested in myself in finding the right mentors." Then lastly, a very close friend of mine, Kim, we've masterminded in business for years.
She does very well, she's very modest about it, but she's been very successful in business and she is a person who has invested somewhere between $80,000-$100,000 in herself. Recently I was talking to a good buddy of mine, Tom Haut and we were going back and critiquing each other's websites and some things in the other person's businesses.
He was giving me some compliments on some copy that I had written and he asked me, "How many weeks did it take you to write this?" I told him actually it took me a couple of days but I was only able to say that because I spent the money and the time investing in myself over the years. So, always know that no matter what anyone tells you, a company, a person, your advisor, your financial planner, investing outside of yourself is good. It's smart to do that in organizations that you believe in. I do it.
But you can never make a single, solitary investment that will give you more dividends than investing in yourself because whatever you invest in yourself, no one can ever take away from you and only you can disappoint yourself if you don't follow through with it and apply it to your life. So, take every opportunity that you can to invest in yourself and learn as much as humanly possible because it will add to your life in more ways than you could ever imagine.
Lawrence Cole is the creator of the Multi-Million Dollar Mindset, which can be visited at http://www.multimilliondollarmindset.com
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