Like anything in life, investing is a multi-levelled game.
I believe one needs to master every level before moving to the next level.
In this post, I lay out my hierarchy for investing. Starting with the fundamentals of investing in yourself.
Level 1: Invest in your health first
Consumables: 90% of calories should be clean whole food calories. Never drink anything else but water and drink a minimum of 2 litres a day. Movement: At a minimum of twice a week, try to get your heart rate up significantly.
Rest: Meditate daily and take rest just as serious as performance.
Sleep: Sleep is a no brainer. Invest in great sleep, and it will change the game for you.
Level 2: Invest in your environment
People: Cut out bloodsuckers and energy wasters. It doesn’t matter if you only have a few friends. We arent all mister chippy chatty. The key here is quality over quantity.
Comfort: Your environment should enable you to feel relaxed, in the groove, and perform at your best level.
Distractions: You need to create an environment for yourself where distractions can’t occur because you’ve engineered them out; It’s all about focus here.
Support: Next to people, you need to find the right actors to support you. You want people around you that are critical but supportive in your final decisions. They should stick with you no matter what. That’s steadfast support.
Level 3: Invest in your mind
Your body carries the mind, and your environment is what your mind sees and hears, it’s the input for your mind. Taming or mastering the mind is an unobtainable task, so we won’t shoot for that, but we will try to manage it.
The mind is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master
Robin Sharma
Dealing with yourself: Know your strengths and your weaknesses. Know what triggers you. Know what drains you. Know what stresses you out and try to find ways to deal with that. Before you can own the outside world, you need to control your inner world.
Investing in yourself is the scaffolding needed to build out the rest. So now it’s time to use our well-taken care mind and body to support us in the outer world.
If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place.
Eckhart Tolle
Level 4: Invest in your skills
You want to use your free time to learn a single ‘hard skill’ and a few critical ‘soft skills.’
For acquiring a hard skill, pick a path that fits best with who you are, for instance:
- The path of Hustling, e.g., Sales or Marketing.
- The path of Creation/Manipulation, e.g., Design, Finance, Content or Code.
Pick a skill that feels like play to you but looks like work to others and make that into your job.
Naval Ravikant
For soft skills, there are many, but I specifically want to focus on three important ones:
Influence: You can’t do it alone. You will need others to help you in your journey. Your influence will help you to convince others into joining the race. A subskill of influence is clear communication. Learn how to speak, and you will move mountains.
Patience: Most success stories look like an overnight achievements, but they were years in the making. The game is long. Stick with it, and good things will come.
Focus: Don’t fall for the shiny object syndrome. Keep your head down, and you will win in the end.
For me, selling feels like play. So I’ve doubled down on that.
I leverage the hard skill of sales into building all my companies and I used it to bring in 60k plus of revenue for BreachLock in my first 6 weeks of working there since this part of my life I’ve taken a break from building for myself. Which loops back to the soft skill of patience.
At this time in my life, I need to be patient and focus on the lessons that I can learn from others instead of going out there and trying to figure out the lessons for myself.
Level 5: Building a Wealth Machine
Level 5 is about leveraging your hard and soft skills into building a wealth machine with profits that you can re-invest.
Hopefully, in a later post within a few weeks, I will have the time to get deeper into lever 5 because I think it’s one of the most critical levels and a level where most people go wrong since it’s vague and can feel like something only done by the elite. People who have found the cheat code. I’m here to tell you there is no cheat code.
Outro
Follow the steps and you will see and understand the fact that life is a simple game.
A game you play with just one true adversary and that is yourself.
You don’t want to conquer yourself, you want to put yourself in the right place, time and environment and that what you want will always come your way.
And finally, when you don’t like the current game you’re participating in, you can always reset and start over, but only when you have the guts for it.