When I was a child, the world was confusing. I didn’t understand what people wanted and why they were doing what they were doing. I hated that nobody was there to help me understand the world.
In college, I picked up the philosophical view of the world — where I learned to analyze people’s arguments and question their beliefs. I also learned how to direct my belief formation, enabling me to think independently.
After two years of full-time employment in the corporate world, I started to think more about money. I couldn’t understand the math. How does one make it with a salary? How does one run a family, support parents, and prepare for retirement?
I asked the question what do people do with their money? I quickly discovered that people invest their money to make the most of it. Everything you do with your money is an investment. Buying a table is an investment. An egg. A car. So is buying a stock, which is a company’s share that can either grow or fall.
My First Experience Investing Money
After dabbling a bit into investment in the stock market, the first lesson I learned is that money loses value over time unless it is bet on something in the form of real estate, stock, gold or any other asset.
The best way to grow money is just sitting on it! When he sees $50, the investing mind thinks what this money will be 30 years later. He looks at his money’s growth potential instead of short-term potential, which is to buy a lunch, a bag or a train ticket.
Seeing how much a small amount of money can grow over a long time blew my mind away! It fundamentally changed how I see the world. I realized that everything we do can be either an investment or a one-time spending.
What Is an Investment?
But what is an investment? The simplest definition I could think of is:
Investment is any acquisition done for growth in value over time.
I use the word ‘acquisition’ to broadly include the concepts of ownership and possession. But ‘growth’ is the most important part of the definition. That is the goal of investment. To grow assets.
Not all investments will end up growing; in fact, there’s no guarantee that any investment will be a growth investment. But for an investment to be an investment, it must have been intended for growth.
Investment Mindset: Everything Around You Is an Investment
When I understood what investment really is, I saw that everything around me is an investment of one kind or another.
Never before did I see everything around me through the lens of an investor!
Relationships are an investment.
Friendship capital is one of the most important assets for anyone to have a fulfilling life. Thus, friendships are investments. My partner is an investment, and so is my family.
I spent most of my life not believing in any temporary relationships; now, I finally understand why it never made sense to me. I only saw value in relationships that last. I was right by dumb luck!
I always preferred to give time and effort only to those relationships whose value, depth and meaning grew over time and not those for temporary flings. This is also why having a girlfriend never made sense to me! (Culturally, a girlfriend is temporary; at least, that’s how I grew up to associate) When it comes to relationships, if they’re not permanent, they’re not worth my time.
Health is an investment.
Most men don’t want to see a doctor unless they have no choice. As a man, I am no different. In the last eight years, I have been adulting alone; I have never visited a doctor once to do a general health checkup. I never saw the point.
But now that I’ve started to adopt the investment mindset. I realize now that the greatest wealth I have is my health. If my health drops, no money or thing or person can make up for it. :/
I scheduled a general health checkup next week. It’s my first time doing something like that. The only thing that convinced me to do so was that I started seeing my health as an investment. When it comes to health, the investment is to preserve your health because when you’re young, you’re generally healthy. When you reach 30, the bolts start to lose, and the quality of health starts to decline.
Community is an investment.
A well-rounded individual doesn’t just work for his own well-being but also the well-being of the community to which he happens to belong.
If your community is weak, doesn’t have a voice, or faces marginalization from external groups, investing in your community so that it grows stronger over time is your prerogative.
This happens to be the case for me as a Muslim. Muslims are thrown around in Europe because it costs nothing to be Islamophobic; Muslims have little to no leverage in the continent as most of the Muslim population there happen to be refugees and low-skilled workers from North Africa.
Humans will exploit and belittle each other if and when the opportunity arises. Thus, we are forced to create incentive structures that stop us from doing so. Creating those structures is a worthwhile investment for the world’s benefit, particularly your community.
Time is an investment.
Besides health, the next most valuable thing anyone has is time. You can use your time to build every other kind of investment.
The cool thing about time is everyone gets the same amount of time. This is perhaps the only thing at which literally all humans are equals.
We all have the same number of hours in our days and nights, and we all have the exact basic needs to sleep, feed, clean and shit.
Is there a way to invest in time?
Yes! I think so. It is impossible to increase time literally. But it is possible to make some time either by doing what you do more efficiently (i.e. it takes less time to do something) or by deprioritizing unimportant things.
For example, as you become more experienced in any skill in general, you take less time to do that. I clearly remember the time it took me to do simple software tasks when I started out as a junior programmer. Over time, that time has been reduced.
Another example is with this blog. I spent two months last year (2023) making a blog from scratch. As a software engineer, I thought it was the natural thing to do. But I figured out after finishing making the website that I spent so much time solving a problem that already has readymade solutions. My solution was time-consuming and had fewer features! Instead, the simplest thing would have been to use WordPress, which comes with many complex features out of the box that will take me many months, if not years, to build to perfection.
Though I wasted two months, I saved so much time in the future by simply choosing a shortcut. That, I can safely say, created some time.
