The Best Investment You Can Make (And No, It's Not Real Estate)

What’s the absolute best investment you can make?

It’s actually not real estate! In fact, it’s a hundred times better than investing in real estate.

This might seem like an odd statement for a real estate guy. But it’s true. And this is definitely not a pitch for a stocks, gold, or a putting money into a tech startup. I can guarantee you that it will be a more reliable and far more valuable investment than any of those.

What I’m talking about is an investment in yourself.

What Successful People Have in Common

Talk to any truly successful person, and they will tell you the same thing. Ask Tony Robbins, Earl Nightingale, or Grant Cardone.

Investing in yourself — your knowledge, health, and skills — can deliver the best returns you could ever hope for. Not only can this deliver exponentially growing returns for your lifetime (and perhaps even for generations to come), but unlike stocks, gold, or even real estate, it is really hard to lose. You can make a mistake and lose all of your wealth, but if you’ve still got the knowledge, you can rebuild everything again — bigger, better, and faster.

Sadly, we often neglect this investment.

Why Investors Fail in This Area

Often, we are in such a rush to get to the results, we kick investing in ourselves to the curb. That is putting the cart before the horse, so to speak, and it’s often very counterproductive. At a minimum, it starves us of really hitting our full potential. In many cases, it means expensive and painful detours and possibly having to start back from the beginning (without the personal tools we really need).

This isn’t just a problem for new investors. Even those seeing good progress and results, even real estate teachers and trainers can suffer from this to an even greater extent. Oftentimes we get bogged down in our day to day and fail to take time to further grow ourselves. This is especially true when things seem to be going really good. It’s like, “I’ve got this, I’m so great, I’m so busy.” Then bam! It catches up with you. Self investment is a constant process. You are never done.

Transform Your Business — And Life

When you do consistently invest in yourself, just this one idea can transform not only your business and financial investment performance, but your life, too. I can personally attest to this.

My life changed when I heard the strangest secret by Earl Nightingale. Six words ultimately changed my whole outlook on life.

The real key here is making a plan to constantly invest in yourself. When you sit down to plan your year and lay out your annual goals, make sure you carve out the time and budget to do this. Have a plan for weekly growth. This may include attending seminars, taking new courses, reading books, and listening to audiobooks.

What are you doing to invest in yourself?

Let me know with a comment!

Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.