The Best Investment Is You

This one comes from some recent introspection — on who I've become, and what it took to get here.

I've always been competitive — sports, studies, video games, all of it. That competitiveness pushed me to seek guidance — self-help books and guides, seniors, elders. It's been a long run of asking questions and chasing answers.

And after all these years of competing and searching, I've unknowingly levelled up.

What I am today is the sum of the consequences of my past actions. And if you view a human life as a video game, every side quest has built me up.

That macro view led me to a realisation: a man's best investment is in himself. All you have is you. Your parents, grandparents, siblings, partner, friends — they'll all, sadly, come and go in due time. In some situations you can trust them; in others you can't. Sometimes you'll have their support; sometimes you won't.

You are the only person you can leverage with full trust — so you have to spend the time building yourself up.

And some of that building is literal. While reading books like Psychology of Money, Let's Talk Money, and The 5 AM Club, one idea kept surfacing: put your money where you can directly reap the returns. And the highest-return asset you can buy is a better version of yourself.

So since I started earning, I've always set aside money to invest in myself. Courses, books, cohorts, premium subscriptions — anything with a real shot at making my life easier or better. The lesson distilled down to one rule: spend money on things that improve me, or my life.

Buy that expensive course on system design. Buy that book that teaches you Golang. Buy that ticket into a cohort where you build alongside like-minded people. Trust me — the returns compound.

But money only buys you the door. Walking through it starts with an uncomfortable admission. As karpathy sensei says:

the general point is that you have to recognize that you are dumb, accept it, come to terms with it, and forgive yourself. only then can you trick yourself into becoming smarter.

And once you've made peace with that, learn from the best. With the internet drowning you in information, filtering for the right content is the equivalent of sharpening the axe before you swing at the tree.

So — invest in yourself. Have faith in yourself. Buy that course, join that cohort, buy that book, get that subscription. You're the one asset that keeps paying out for the rest of your life.