First, a funny story about the article: I knew it was going to be published today, but I had absolutely no freakin’ idea how it was gonna turn out because I hadn’t seen the full text. Last night, I dreamt that the newspaper folks lost my photo, so they had to dig through my old Facebook photos to find a replacement one. I dreamt that they took an old photo from when I was in the army, publishing my skinny-ass face with my bald head and thick, black framed glasses on the front page.

I woke up at 6am in a cold sweat, ran to check out the article, saw that it was a relatively “normal” photo, and collapsed back into bed in relief.

Anyways, if you’re in Singapore, check out the Invest section of the Sunday Times on page 30. There’s a profile of 4 young investors, and I was blessed enough to be one of ‘em. If you’ve got an ST subscription, you can check it out online here.

You’ll be able to read about my strategy for investing in ETFs, how I started investing, and some personal finance books I recommend. You’ll also be able to make fun of the fact that I was wearing the EXACT SAME SHIRT as another guy in the article. I don’t know how that happened.

Have a good rest of the weekend!

“Well,” I said, “Maybe you could apply for a scholarship?” He just stared at me like I just said the most ridiculous thing in the world, like “Hey, maybe you could rob a couple of old ladies?”

He backed away slowly and muttered, “No, I don’t think so.” And I was like, “Why?” And he said, “I don’t think I could ever qualify for a scholarship.” And then he left.

Here was someone who was presented with an opportunity to get hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding, and then subsequently disqualified himself from it. All because he just assumed that he wasn’t a “scholarship kind of guy”.

How many of us hold certain assumptions that are so deeply-entrenched that we’d never think of challenging them? Think about some of the conventional beliefs that so many of us have today:

1. Everyone should get a college degree
2. The MRT is more reliable than the bus
3. A diamond ring is a good investment
4. There is only one perfect person for everyone
5. McDonald’s only serves breakfast till 11am*
6. Investing in real estate is a good idea for everyone
7. I could never ask my boss for a raise
8. All online courses are scams
9. To be successful, I need to have a job, a house, a car, and 2.5 kids
10. Renting is just throwing money away

* In Singapore, it serves breakfast till noon on weekends. You can thank me later.

These assumptions are so amazingly powerful that they can influence our lives. Think about decisions like “I could never afford to study overseas, so I won’t even bother to apply.” Or “It’s good to get a 30-year mortgage, because everyone is doing it.” These are important decisions. Serious decisions. Change-your-life-forever decisions.

Yet, it’s pretty scary how we let our assumptions influence our decisions without questioning and testing them first.

I can think of one assumption that could mean the difference between retiring 10-20 years earlier, or busting your ass in a job you hate until you’re old and frail.

The assumption: “Investing in stocks will never work for me.”

You’d be surprised at just how many of us Gen Yers hold this assumption. According to a Wells Fargo survey, twenty-somethings are the least confident among all age groups that stocks are the best place for investment gains. They’re also the most likely to choose a bank CD over stocks for retirement savings.

Sure, keeping your money in bank CDs is a brilliant strategy – if your idea of retirement is clipping NTUC coupons to save 20 cents on toilet paper.

As I’ve argued before, keeping everything in a safe cash account is almost definitely a bad idea. If you’re a young, sexy, twenty-something, investing is probably the only way to prevent inflation from screwing you over.

So… why aren’t your friends investing yet?

It’s because most of them have deep-seated assumptions, which prevent them from even thinking about investing in stocks. Some of them are:

1. I don’t know how to pick stocks
2. I don’t have time to invest
3. I’m not rich enough to invest
4. Investing is way too confusing

Whenever I hear assumptions like these, I just sigh. It’s much easier to come up with excuses on why you shouldn’t do something, instead of taking the time to actually test those assumptions out. It’s like an overweight person claiming that he’s just “big-boned”, or an unemployed person blaming “the economy”.

Let’s test those assumptions out, shall we?

“I don’t know how to pick stocks”

A lot of people don’t know this, but investing isn’t about picking stocks. Why bother to pick specific stocks when you can buy the whole stock market, which has beaten out the vast majority of professional money managers in the long run?

Wikipedia states that more than 90% of a portfolio’s performance comes from your asset allocation. That means that it doesn’t matter which individual stocks you pick, but how much money you allocate to stocks as a group.

And yeah, I just quoted Wikipedia. It’s more reliable than your money manager.

“I don’t have time to invest”

Most people assume that if they start investing, they’ll need to constantly read the Wall Street Journal, tune in to CNBC, and stare at squiggly stock charts on their phones. (Whenever I see anyone on a subway studying a complicated chart on their phones, I have this irresistible urge to tap them on the shoulder and go, “If you stare at it hard enough, it kind of looks like a unicorn!”)

It probably stems from the assumption that if it’s important, it must take up a lot of time.

Not true. I check my portfolio once a month at most, spending no longer than one hour each time. Then I close my browser, and move on to other awesome things like blogging for cheerfulegg and watching Jurassic Park in 3D (HOW COOL IS THAT?!).

“I’m not rich enough to invest”

When you mention the word “investor”, the first thing that most people think of is some old white-haired dude hobbling around in his mansion holding his cane and a gin and tonic.

That’s probably why most people believe they’ll need tens of thousands of dollars stashed up before they start investing. While it’s good to have a small emergency fund saved up first, you really don’t need to wait till you’re swimming in a pool full of cash with two scantily-clad ladies fanning you with banana leaves before you start investing.

You could literally start your portfolio by investing in just ONE share of a stock market ETF for less than US$50, and build it up from there. Check out the ETFs from Vanguard for starters.

In fact, it’s in your interest to start investing as soon as possible, even if it’s just a tiny amount. The longer you spend invested in the stock market, the higher your chances of coming out on top and the lower your risk. And then you can start to think about hiring your own scantily-clad ladies.

“Investing is way too confusing”

I often get emails from people who say they don’t know what to do with the extra money in their bank account. They’ll then get into a detailed technical discussion about “yield” and “volatility”, before complaining that everything is way too confusing.

Dude, chill. It’s not as complicated as you think. All the information you’ll ever need is right in front of you. Most of it is free.

Look – No one is asking you to figure out the difference between a municipal bond and a corporate bond here. Just take 3 hours and read one good personal finance book to understand some basic investing principles. Start with any book from the “Personal Finance” category under my Reads page. You’ll realize that investing is actually really simple. Really.

You know what else is free? Information right here on cheerfulegg. I spend countless hours writing new material on investing, and people STILL ask what they should do with the extra money in their bank account. It makes me want to smear sambal chili all over myself and roll all over a nest of fire ants.

The Takeaway:

Start testing your assumptions to see if they’re valid. If you don’t, you’ll get screwed, especially when it comes to important life decisions like investing. If your friends haven’t started investing yet, ask them about their assumptions. Are they valid reasons, or simply excuses?

Agree / disagree with the above assumptions? Are there any others that I missed out? Leave me a comment to let me know what you think. I read every one.

“I don’t have enough time.”

We spend 8-12 hours a day working at the office. When we get home, we barely have enough time to shower, shove dinner into our mouths, catch up on Facebook, before we crawl into bed like a dying worm.

Maybe, if you’re a weirdo like I am, you might find the time to squeeze in a blogpost, a run, or maybe an ebook or two. But I’m not gonna lie – it’s exhausting. Sometimes, when I get home, I totally feel like zoning out on the sofa, watching contestants on The Final One butcher Justin Timberlake songs, rather than do some serious work.

To me, that’s a terribly vicious cycle to be in – There’s gotta be more to life than shuttling between the office in the day and awful reality TV shows at night. There’s gotta be something we can do to make the Pursuit of Awesomeness easier.

Maybe it’s not that we need to do something, but it’s that we need to set aside some time.

Why Mornings Are the Perfect Time to Pursue Your Awesome

I’m starting to wonder if mornings might be the perfect time to do great work. Many CEOs start their days off by “leaping off their beds” as early as 4 or 5am. Hack the System blogger Maneesh Sethi claims that his morning ritual has skyrocketed his productivity. Laura Vanderkam, author of What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, declares that “before the rest of the world is eating breakfast, the most successful people have already scored daily victories that are advancing them toward the lives they want.”

Instead of relegating our personal capital pursuits to the evenings after we’ve already spent our best energy, it might be a better idea to carve out a part of the morning for the most important things in our lives.

Why are mornings the best time to do great things?

First, it ties into the whole concept of “paying yourself first”. If we can focus on our Most Important Tasks (MITs) the first thing in the morning, it’s more likely that we’ll complete it. It’s also a helluva lot easier to get through the rest of the day knowing that you’ve already taken care of the important stuff. Everything else is a bonus.

Next, you’re less likely to get interrupted in the mornings. The world hasn’t woken up yet, so that leaves you with a huge chunk of time to focus entirely on what you wanna accomplish.

Third, I personally have way more energy in the mornings than later in the day. I know of some people who’re more productive late at night, but not me. In the office, I often get 70% of my daily work done before lunch (and after lunch, I basically become a zombie). If I could apply that principle to my personal projects, maybe I could engineer a boost in productivity.

The Challenge

So with that in mind, I’ve decided to launch my third LifeTest – consistently waking up one hour earlier than I usually do in the mornings. I’m not the easiest person to wake up in the mornings, so here’s how it’s gonna go down:

The Goal: To consistently wake up at 5.50am, for 5 consecutive weekdays

The Process: I usually wake up around 6.50am on weekdays. Starting tomorrow, I’ll be setting my alarm to go off 5 minutes earlier every weekday morning for 2 weeks, until I hit my target time of 5.50am.

The Rules: I have to be out of bed and headed straight to the shower. No switching off the alarm and diving back to bed. I’m not imposing any rule that says that I must do something productive in the mornings, but I simply have to stay awake. I can start weaving in some productive projects once I start getting used to waking up early, but for now I’m simply focusing on the first step.

LifeTest Log #3

You can follow my progress here.

Once, he gave me the most stressful multiple-choice exam ever. Here’s what went through my mind while I was doing it:

1. Question 1: The answer is B. Easy peasy.
2. Question 2: The answer is B. No problem.
3. Question 3: B again. I’d better double check that just in case.
4. Question 4: THE ANSWERS ARE ALL LINING UP. FOUR Bs IN A ROW. THAT’S TOO MANY Bs. ABORT.
5. Question 5: Another B will probably unlock some ANCIENT BABYLONIAN HEX THAT WILL CURSE ME AND MY DESCENDENTS WITH SWEATY ARMPITS FOREVER
6. Question 6: Maybe my professor is some sort of weird Amazonian witch doctor
7. Question 7: Maybe I’m in an alternate universe where all choices are answered with a “B”. My GongCha server will ask me “How sweet do you want your tea? B) 20%, B) 40%, B) 60%, B) 80%, or B) All of the above?” Just like how “Aladeen” is used for everything in The Dictator.

And so it went on. It didn’t matter that I studied my butt off for the exam, the fact that every answer was a “B” completely threw me off. I kept second-guessing myself: I’d go back, rub off an answer, and scribble in a C. Then I’d change it to an A. This happened like 27 times during the exam.

And yep, that mischievous son of a bitch actually did set “B” as the right answer. For all 50 questions.

How to Stress Out A Nobel Prize Winner

You know what else is stressful? Trying to beat the market, that’s what.

Imagine you’re the most brilliant money manager ever. You’ve won four Nobel Prizes. You’ve created the ultimate active investing strategy that’s guaranteed to beat the market and make you very, very rich. Kind of like Bradley Cooper in Limitless.

Now try executing it. You’ll probably make a lot of money in the good times, and hit some occasional rough spots. That’s expected – No strategy works all the time. Heck, even the legendary Warren Buffet has some bad days.

But what if you hit a really long dry spell? What if you found yourself not making money for 1, 2, 5 years, while seeing all your rivals surge ahead of you? You know your strategy is sound – you’ve done all the research – yet you can’t help but wonder if market conditions have changed.

That’s when most people will start to second-guess themselves and cave in. They’ll change their answer from B to C. And they’ll get screwed. Especially when the right answer was B all along.

It doesn’t matter what that strategy is – value investing, technical analysis, arbitrage, whatever. If you’re trying to beat the market, you’ll always be stressed out during the bad times. Why? Because you’ll always have that nagging fear that maybe, just maybe, your well-thought out strategy just doesn’t work anymore.

Why Passive Investing Eliminates Stress

There’s a less stressful way to invest: It’s called passive investing. When you invest passively, you stop trying to beat the market. Instead, you’re trying to mimic it, at the lowest possible cost. (New readers – I previously wrote a couple of articles on passive investing. If you want to find out more, you can check them out here, here and here. There’s also a great introductory video on passive investing you can watch here)

When the market skyrockets, so does your portfolio. But here’s the cool part – even when the market dives and takes your stocks along with it… your strategy is still working perfectly.

Why? Because, by design, you weren’t trying to beat the market in the first place. As long as your portfolio closely mimics the market, everything is going according to plan (Try saying that while sitting in a poofy leather chair and stroking a white cat, followed with a mandatory “muhahahahaha”).

As long as your portfolio follows the market, you shouldn’t worry about where the market is going tomorrow. That makes investing a heckuva lot less stressful.

Over the very long run (think 20-30 years), the stock market remains the undisputed champion of all assets. It’s literally walloped the performance of everything else. Follow it closely, and you’ll get those returns as well in the long-run.

Your No-Stress Financial Life

Look – you’re young, and sexy, and awesome. You shouldn’t be wasting your life staring at squiggly charts on your phone, mentally willing your stocks to move in the way you want them to.

You should be focusing on giving your best self to your loved ones, your career, and your life. You should get out there and start a business. Cure cancer. Consult for nonprofits. Help people. And on weekends, post hilarious tweets about #gameofthrones.

What you shouldn’t be doing is stressing out over the stock market. Do yourself a favor, and kick stress out of your financial life by investing passively. You only live once.

So Spain was friggin’ awesome. Other than the Dali museum and the Sagrada Familia, I noticed a couple of other things that the Spanish have gotten right:

1. Siesta
2. Lunch at 3pm and dinner at 10pm
3. Pre-meal beers
4. Cafes that serve alcohol and bars that serve coffee
5. Churros con chocolate…mmmmm
6. Dogs (there were dogs like literally everywhere. Huge impressive ones, not the wussy puny ones we have in Singapore)
7. Reading real books (remember those?) on the subway instead of playing Candy Crush
8. And of course… tapas

The joy of tapas

Cool story about tapas: Back in the day, Spanish laborers had beer for lunch because they couldn’t afford a full meal. The trouble was, they couldn’t do any work after that because they kept getting drunk from drinking on an empty stomach. (I totally need to test this theory out in the office). So King Alfonso the Wise decreed that inns could only serve alcohol if it was accompanied by something to eat. And so the concept of tapas was born.

In Granada (a city in the south of Spain) – they still practice the tradition of giving you a free plate of tapas with every drink you order. If you go there, you literally never have to pay for lunch, as long as you keep drinking. Awesome.

Tapas totally rock because you never, ever, have to worry about getting a bad meal. Not just because they’re delicious, but also because each meal is made up of several mini-dishes. There’s a very low probability that your entire meal will suck, and a pretty high chance that at least one dish will turn out to be amazing.

So while I was wolfing down a delicious meal of croquetas de jamón, chorizo, and patatas bravas and washing it all down with a glass of vino blanco (white wine), I had a revelation: investing should be just like tapas.

Why investing ISN’T like a full meal

Many stock markets around the world are at or near all-time highs, and everyone is getting excited about investing all over again. Plenty of people are asking, “Should I invest now?” and “What should I invest in?” However, some people are getting pretty jittery: “Is the market too high? Is it due for a correction? What if I invest right now and it suddenly tanks and I lose all my money? Zomg there are too many decisions I’m just gonna crawl back in my hole and play Candy Crush.”

Most people think of investing like it’s a full, giant, expensive, meal. They think that they have to choose from a menu of two entrees:

1. Invest everything now
2. Don’t invest anything now

They believe that depending on what they choose, they’ll either get deliciously wealthy, or live a tasteless life clipping supermarket coupons.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Who says that you have to go all-in and throw a couple of hundred thousand grand into your huge investment entree all at once?  Instead, why don’t you invest like you’re eating a leisurely meal of… tapas?

How to invest like you’re ordering tapas

When you order tapas, you go slow. You only order one or two dishes at a time. If it sucks, you simply order a different one. Each dish is a risk, but it’s such a small risk that it almost doesn’t matter to your overall meal.

Similarly, you don’t have to devour your entire investment meal all at once. Instead, try investing a fixed, small amount – maybe a couple of hundred dollars – every month.

That way, you never have to worry about whether this is the “right time” to invest. You don’t have to worry about whether the market is going up, down, sideways, diagonally, or into a corkscrew. What’s the worst that could happen? That you lose 20% of your $300 investment? That’s like, 60 bucks, which is cheaper than the pair of shoes I bought last week.

Because in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter what the stock market does in the short run. If you invest in little bits every month, you’d be buying when the market is high, and buying when the market is low. Over time, this smoothes out your purchase price, while letting you accumulate a large stash of stocks. This is going to pay off in the long-term.

History has shown us that over the very long run (think 20 – 30 years), being invested in the market has always, always, paid off. As the old personal finance adage goes: it’s not about timing the market, it’s time IN the market.

Ooching into investing

If you haven’t made your first investment, then tapas-style investing is a great, low-risk way to get started. Instead of staying up all night worrying about when the “right time” is, you can slowly ooch into investing while accumulating small blocks of shares at a time. What’s the hurry? You’ve got like 30 years of investing ahead of you.

I started this tapas-style of investing a couple of years ago – and it’s one of the best financial decisions I’ve made. I invested when everyone was panicking in August 2011, and I’m still investing when everyone is scrambling towards stocks today.

Don’t spend your time worrying about what the market will do tomorrow. Instead, try to enjoy investing like a delicious, homemade, tapas meal. Between investments, drink copious amounts of wine, enjoy leisurely conversations, and have a good night’s sleep.

Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for my siesta…zzzzzzzz

“Yo tengo una fiesta en mis pantalones”

(Go Google Translate it if you don’t know what it means)

Needless to say, that was a totally worthless line, though it did almost get me beat up a couple of times. Good memories.

Anyways, I’m never one to let a memorized phrase from another language go to waste, which is why I’m flying to SPAIN tonight! I’ll be traveling through Barcelona, Madrid, Seville and Granada for 2 weeks, devouring tapas and sangria along the way. Watch out, Spain.

The blog might be a little quiet for these 2 weeks, while I take a much needed-break from work. I’ll see you guys in 2 weeks, hopefully feeling refreshed and ready to deliver a whole bunch of new, awesome, cheerfulegg material to you.

Till then, take care, God bless, and yo tengo una fiesta en mis pantalones!!

Image credit: ETFTrends

Enjoy your break from work, and go dominate that shizz when you get back tomorrow.

I conducted my second LifeTest to see if consistently sleeping 7 hours a night would dramatically increase my mood, productivity, and overall awesomeness. (The original challenge was for 7 nights, but I later increased it to 10 just because I’m awesome like that). You can check out the full objectives of the LifeTest here, and the detailed log here.

I got pretty surprised by the outcome of this LifeTest – it totally didn’t turn out the way I expected, but I did get some cool perspectives:

Sleep Isn’t a Panacea

Here’s the biggie: Sufficient sleep might prevent your day from being crappy by default, but it doesn’t automatically change your day from crappy to awesome.

I was totally expecting sleep to automatically boost my productivity and mood… except that it didn’t. On most days, I was functioning at a pretty “normal” level of productivity. I’m not saying that having more sleep was completely useless though:

• Having more sleep helped me not to feel like killing myself every time the alarm clock went off in the morning
• Having more sleep minimized the instances of me dozing off in front of the computer, re-reading the same Excel spreadsheet for 20 minutes.
• Having more sleep reduced the deep dark eyebags that were so deeply etched into my face for the past couple of months.

But having more sleep also didn’t automatically transform me into the Super Amazingly Efficient Knowledge Worker that I thought I’d become. I did feel a lot less stressed, though I can’t be sure if it’s because I was having more sleep, or simply because I’ve been trying to engineer a new perspective on stress (more on that in a later post).

From my last 2 LifeTests, I’m beginning to see productivity as a function of many different factors: what my mood’s like, what I ate for lunch, how inspired I am with my work, etc. Sleep probably doesn’t hurt productivity, but I can’t conclusively say that it definitely boosts it either.

Quality Matters a Whole Lot more Than Quantity.

The nights where I’ve slept the best are those where I gave myself enough time to ease into sleep. That means getting into bed at least 20 minutes before my scheduled bedtime, and doing some easy reading with the lights dimmed low. Sleep quality was also great on those nights when I simply chilled – and didn’t have 1,001 things to accomplish on my to-do list.

Conversely, there were some nights when I worked till the last minute, hastily punching out a blog post and publishing it before jumping into bed with 2 minutes to spare. My quality of sleep sucked ass on those nights.

The body needs time to phase-shift from working mode into sleeping mode. Shutting down your computer early, dimming the lights and not thinking about work will help it shift phases. Being stressed will result in a lot of tossing and turning, as well as crazy dreams nightmares where an ugly monster tricks you into signing up for reservist.

Official Cut-Off times Are Key.

I’ve been trying to unofficially sleep 6.5 hours a night for months now, and it never worked. Why? Because I didn’t have an solid threat like I did in the past 10 days: Sleep 7 Hours A Night Or Risk Humiliation From Your Blog Readers.

I did have a self-imposed, unofficial Facebook ban after 11pm, but I’d sometimes still find myself surfing it after 11 because of some lame excuse like checking whether my blogpost got published.

With this LifeTest, I was forced to set an ironclad, no-exceptions rule of having no social media (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter) after 11pm. That pretty much worked, because I managed to completely eliminate the distractions that were preventing me from sleeping on time.

I think that making a rule official is key here. By official, I mean that you should be held accountable every time you break it. To help me stick to my no-social-media-after-11 rule in the future, I might experiment with a service like Stickk , or an app like Freedom or SelfControl. We’ll see how effective they are to get me off surfing stupid videos of sneezing pandas.

The Young Person’s Sleep Conundrum

It’s obviously a good thing to get more sleep, but I’m not sure if it’s completely possible for a young, twenty-something person to regularly sleep 7 hours a night. At least, not with my lifestyle.

So on one hand, I’ve got a pressing desire to get my sleep on, and on the other hand, I feel like getting more sleep might eat into time for my personal projects and my social life.

So what’s an active twenty-something dude like me to do? Two things I can do to try to balance these two needs:

1. Keep the “default” option to sleeping more. That means adhering to the 7-hour rule (together with the social media ban) as much as possible on regular, weekday nights.
2. Schedule my social life and personal projects each week. That way, I can plan in advance when I’ll allow myself to have slightly less sleep and not feel all guilty about it.

Seeya in A Couple of Weeks!

I won’t be doing another LifeTest for at least the next couple of weeks, because I’ll be heading to Spain this Friday night! I’m expecting to take a lot of siestas during my trip – so I’ll let you know how it goes

Image credit: epsos

So last week, I went shopping on Qoo10 (an online marketplace) for a new iPhone cover. I figured I’d take like 10 minutes to browse, choose a cover, place my order, and be done with it. But they had such an unbelievable array of choices that I literally spent two hours just trying to pick one. I think I spent more time trying to pick my iPhone cover than I did picking my medical insurance policy.

We’re faced with a really strange problem today: the problem of having way too many CHOICES. And it’s affecting how we invest in ourselves.

Analysis Paralysis

Last week, I wrote a blogpost on why you should invest in yourself. That post generated a tremendous number of views, with plenty of great responses and feedback. But you know what? Most people will read it, feel pretty inspired for a couple of hours, and then never take any action whatsoever.

Why? Because, like how I took two hours to pick an iPhone cover, it’s easy to get paralyzed by choices. Think about the multitude of choices you’re faced with when it comes to personal capital: You could learn how to invest, design, code, paint, get fitter, become healthier, earn a side income, launch a business, improve your memory, be more productive, improve your social skills, speak more confidently, etc.

How will you know which ones to focus on, which ones will pay off, and which ones will be a waste of time and money? How will you know which ones will fit into the Great Grand Scheme of Life and the Universe?

At this point, most people will simply throw up their hands, and choose not do anything about it. They’ll mutter something about “not having enough time/passion/money”, and carry on coasting through their lives, never really improving.

But you’re not going to fall into that trap. If you really want to start investing in yourself, then try following these three steps:

1. Identify

Think about your awesome, ideal self that you’d like to become. He/she could be confident, richer, more capable, more skilled, more employable, whatever. Write out all the attributes of that perfect, ideal, self that you want to transform yourself into.

Now make a list of everything you need to improve on in order to get there.

Don’t spend too much time worrying about whether this somehow fits into some hypothetical, overarching, grand scheme. There isn’t one. If it sounds interesting, and if you see a possible benefit to yourself at this point in your life, and then go do it.

2. Test

Resist the urge to pursue every single area at once. Instead, pick just ONE area to focus on at a time, and then test it by following the 3-2-1 method:

• Read three blogs and/or articles to get a quick overview
• Talk to two people about what you want to do
• Read one good book on the subject (check out my Reads section for some ideas)

The whole point of testing is to get some quick feedback on whether it’s good fit for you, and if you can see yourself spending more time on it.

Spend 2-3 weeks testing just one area. If it doesn’t work out, or if you find yourself losing interest, simply strike that off your list, and move on to the next one. For now, keep testing until you find something that can sustain your interest for the next couple of months.

For example, I decided that I really wanted to learn how to count cards after watching the movie 21. So I bought Beat the Dealer, talked to some friends who knew how to count cards, and tried it out myself. It was pretty interesting on an intellectual basis, but after spending a couple of days on it I realized that I simply didn’t have the discipline to keep on practicing it. So I crossed it off my list and moved on to my next area of interest.

3. Dive Deep

Once you’ve identified an area that you’re comfortable with focusing on for the next couple of months, it’s time to dive deep.

This is the time to start looking for courses, mentors, and teachers that could help you explore your personal capital a little more deeply.

Want to work in Finance but you don’t have any experience? Figure out how you can learn financial modeling or take part-time Finance classes. Want to learn how to code? Sign up for classes at Codeacademy. Want to learn how to start your own business? Start contacting start-ups to see if you can intern for them.

First, look for free, high-quality, material you can find on the web – sites like Coursera or Creative Live are good places to start. Once you’re ready for more premium, in-depth material, you can start evaluating the paid classes that are available. These could be pricey, but go for it if you think that they’ll add value (I’ll write another blogpost on how to fund these self-investments in the future).

In short…

You’re never gonna get anywhere by sitting in your room and “figuring it out”. I guarantee that you’ll learn a lot more by getting off your ass and actually DOING stuff. Try things out. There are plenty of free, easily available, resources out there that can help you to do so.

And no matter which areas you choose to pursue, I doubt that any of them will be a complete waste of time, even if you never get to the “dive deep” stage. You can still pick up lots of valuable skills and knowledge while you’re testing things out.

And while most of your friends will remain passively coasting through life, you’ll be constantly learning, developing, and becoming one heck of a kickass human being. Good luck.

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