Once you’ve taken the first steps we discussed in How to get started in investing, here comes the second part. Investing, like business, calls for following some very similar guidelines:
1. Look for mentors. Look for people both in investing and in the business world. If where you live there’s no chance of finding people like this, because nobody around you actually invests, turn the characters in your finance books into your mentors. I never met my two mentors, Robert Kiyosaki and Donald Trump, one for investing and the other for business, although it’s true that later on I did get to know other people working in both fields.
2. Look for role models. Who better to teach you than someone who invests for a living?
3. Look for negative examples. Learning what not to do is the best way to learn how to do the right thing. You won’t have much trouble finding people like this. You see them every day. They’re among your friends: some of them dream of finding a poorly paid job or working as a civil servant; others are business owners who decided to get rich and started businesses that not only don’t make them any money but also leave them no time for anything. Remember a very wise saying: to be different from everyone else, you have to do the opposite of what they do.
4. Your first exercise. Write down on a piece of paper the 10 people you spend the most time with during the day. Next to each name, write how that person gets their income: from a job, from their company, from the government, from unemployment benefits, from investments, and so on.
That is your first exercise for making progress as an investor and learning the first positive lessons. On that list of the 10 people who spend the most time with you, I’m assuming all of them get their income from a job or from businesses that aren’t very profitable, either financially or because they leave no free time.
You need to find a way to bring onto that list two people who work either in investing or in business. It won’t be easy, I know, but in investing you’ll often have to move into circles of friends that aren’t your own in order to get information about changes in the market.
Even if it seems like an absurd plan for getting started in investing, over time you’ll realize how important it is. I also thought it was absurd back then, and I didn’t start getting results until I began to spend time with people like this.
Remember: the success of everything you undertake is tied to the quality of the people you surround yourself with.
Further reading
- Getting started in investing, part 1
- Company mergers: the best time to invest
- Ways to invest in real estate in times of crisis
- Investing in currencies and forex
- How to start a business with no money
Featured image: Phil Slattery, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
