How to Make Good Investments
When I say the word, “investments”, what comes to mind?
Mutual funds, gold/silver, rental apartments, bitcoin?
Investing is generally thought of as depositing money and growing it over time in order to maximize your bank balance in the future. I.e. For retirement, or at death to leave as an inheritance for your kids.
However, there’s a major problem with this approach to investing.
Money is important, but it’s only 1 of 3 resources we must invest. Looking at it in isolation as your only investment is like a country only looking at GDP as a measure of population well-being. What if the country destroyed its environment and made all its people sick to hit those GDP numbers? What if you destroyed your relationships and made yourself sick to grow your wealth?
So, what are the 3 primary resources we must invest?
- Money
- Time
- Energy
How do we invest them synergistically such that we get the life outcomes we want (which includes but is not limited only to growing wealth)?
The life outcomes you want will certainly be different than mine. However, if we broadly categorize well-being, we can probably break it into 4 interlinked categories.
- Health
- Wealth
- Relationships
- Happiness
Essentially, instead of only trying to grow money over time, we are broadening our definition of investing to create a synergistic equation where our 3 resources are the inputs and maximizing our 4 desired life outcomes are our outputs.
I’ve done this graphically for my own life, below. Try using it as a template and creating your own. Especially try to customize what you consider to be desirable life outcomes and then work backwards to define how you’ll invest with your inputs.
Remember:
This investment model operates over our 80-year long human life and will be optimized differently based on our age and living situation. You probably have more energy when you’re young and more money when you’re old to invest with.
The goal is really to just get the best return you can on your investment for the full cycle. I.e. Have a good life.
Questions for you.
After thinking about this, evaluate your own investment strategy:
- Time: How many hours per week do I spend on what I’ve defined as important? How many am I wasting? Am I tracking my hours every week?
- Energy: Is my focus and energy in a good place?
- Money: How am I spending and investing my money?
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