Money is only a small part of any investment strategy or business idea. It takes a wealth of knowledge and research to invest wisely and make your product a success.

In this article we’ll explore why learning is the most important part of investing and what you should be doing to maximise your income potential.

“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest”!Image

Benjamin Franklin Founding Father of the United States

You may have heard this quote before, but it's one of the best because it's so concise. I know you’re keen to learn, yet you probably still have the mindset that lessons are what come before you start investing.

No doubt you too think that the “real work” starts when you begin to invest your money, your time, and your energy in to actually building something that can generate wealth.

Sure, all of these things matter, but it's all too easy to think “I’ll learn some stuff, then apply it during the actual investment phase”.

This is not how life actually works. 

The reality is that your learning experience is much more fluid and interconnected with the actions you take in your business or investment strategies.

So let's dive in and see just why you should be investing more of your time and money into the pursuit of knowledge.

Apply the knowledge

The power comes from your capability to apply the knowledge you’ve gained, and that’s entirely down to you.

Whether you deem something “right up my alley” or “Way too complex for my feeble brain”, this is the lens through which you view life and its many challenges.

Many people aren’t fully aware that this is what's happening, blaming the author or the podcast presenter for overcomplicating things. The truth is much more personal to you.

Knowledge doesn’t empower you directly. In fact, some knowledge won't even be of use to you, but ironically that is just as useful. I’ll explain more about this topic in a later chapter.

For now, I just want you to be consciously aware that you are constantly interpreting the knowledge you can understand, while unconsciously filtering it through your own personal lens.

Once you know this, it’ll help you be much more efficient with the methods through which you learn.

Fitting “knowledge-gaining” into your routine

They say “Rome wasn’t built in a day”. Well, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t built on a Friday afternoon either!

There are times and days that no matter how much you love to learn, it's just not gonna happen as effectively as you’d like it to.

Building your “Rome” and gaining the knowledge you need will require 3 main elements.

   ✅ Motivation    ✅ Consistency    ✅ Knowing when to take a break

Let’s explore each of these to understand why they’re so important.

Gaining new knowledge is like eating sushi. Consuming information little and often rather than a huge plate load of it is the key to keeping your learning rate consistent.

This is all the more important when you take into consideration things like burnout and feeling of being overwhelmed.

There’s so much you can learn and if you’re really engaged with the subject, your thirst for knowledge will far outweigh your available time and mental capacity.

Finding the right balance where you can consistently learn without overwhelming yourself will keep you motivated and help you process the knowledge you’ve gained.

Try to learn smarter, not faster. Remember the Tortoise beat the Hare by being smart, not fast. You get no prize for overloading yourself with too much knowledge too quickly.

The biggest problem you’ll face is finding the style of information that works best for you.

There are various formats you can digest knowledge in and some will work better for you than others.

To give you a head start I’ve put together the pros and cons of each format to see which you feel best suits you.

The human connection of listening to someone talk can really connect you to the knowledge you seek to learn, giving it an authentic and relatable feel.

This not only conveys the lessons you want to learn but is far more likely to have an impact on you than the written word. When another human tells you something, it can stick with a force that just isn’t there when you read alone.

I highly recommend setting your playback speed to 1.5x or even 2x speed, as I find this is much more representative of the speed people actually talk to each other.

It also means you can complete a book in half the time - if you can keep up.

When people think of how to invest in their knowledge, they often think of books first. They’ve been around for millennia and are still one of the best ways to learn from experts and develop your knowledge and perspective on seemingly unachievable goals.

You can’t beat a good book. Taking the time to read every word and soak in the meaning is incredibly helpful.

Page after page of wonderful reference material that you can easily bookmark and refer back to whenever you like.!Are books the best way to learn?

Of course there are downsides which are important to acknowledge too.

Travelling with books is cumbersome. Travelling with a few of them can soon add a sizeable amount of extra weight to your luggage. Finding the book you want in your language while in other countries can prove difficult too.

There are always options like virtual copies from the Apple Books app, Kindle and other e-readers.

But you may struggle to find the time to read if your day is filled with parenting duties, pet walking duties and a full day of work. Many people choose to read before bed, but I would not recommend this for non-fiction books, as you’ll struggle to retain the knowledge since your brain begins to shut down at night.

The key here is that if books really work for you, then run with it.

I recommend buying the books you want while you can, especially if a life less ordinary is your calling and getting hold of the books you like becomes more of a challenge in the future.

There’s no need to wait for a new edition of a well-known book, you can find podcasts published TODAY containing proof that the lessons you’re learning can actually work for you.

The content is usually highly topical, with advice based on the latest trends, market conditions and up-to-date case studies. Books just can’t compete with this.

It's worth browsing through the archives of podcasts to find episodes that relate to what you’re currently learning about.

You don’t just have to listen to the latest episode. You can browse the podcaster’s archives for knowledge that relates to where you’re currently at in your journey.

It's a great way to see if your opinions of the knowledge you’ve recently gained tally with those of the guests on the podcasts too.

Not all knowledge must be used

It’s a common misconception that the knowledge you gain now must be put to good use.

People put too much pressure on themselves to perform every task an author tells them.

They think that success comes from following all of the processes, strategies and targets.

Even with the best will in the world, it's more than likely you won't do this and you’ll often feel like a failure, just another book you didn’t fully make use of.

Let’s squish that bug right now. While investing in knowledge is fundamental to your journey towards a bliss filled life, you cannot and will not do it all.

This is not failure, this is successfully understanding what applies to you and your goals.

The great thing here is that you’re banking all those other actions for future situations. You’re arming yourself with the knowledge to push your business, finances, startup ideas, passive income options and life to the next level.

When we talk about investing in knowledge, remember that means understanding and collecting perspectives and options for your future. So just because you don’t act on everything right away doesn’t mean it wasn’t still a wise investment.

It's all too easy to finish one book and find another. Some people even start multiple books or audiobooks and often don’t finish them all.

There’s clearly a disconnect between being inspired and taking action.

So let's explore why this is and what you can do about it.

Set your own goals

For all of what you read, hear, interact with and witness, in whatever form your knowledge is delivered to you, you should regularly take time to process just how this applies to your story and plan. Some of the knowledge will influence what plan you want to achieve, some will give you a strategy to follow and some will merely inspire you to keep going.

All of this must be interpreted by you and only you. This is where the struggle comes in.

I hope the chapters above have given you food for thought on your Bliss Investor Journey and cast a bright spotlight on why gaining knowledge and getting educated is fundamental to your success.

The price of this knowledge is incomparable to the change it can have in your life and the financial reward it can bring you.

Yet still, it seems as though everyone expects a quantifiable return on their investment, even if it's just education. This starts from an early age when the cost of university is compared to the salary a career as a graduate professional can generate.!Image

After all, these books, courses and podcasts often throw an onslaught of impressive numbers at you. How many extra sales you’ll make, how quickly you’ll make a million, how many followers, or how many assets.

My advice is to ignore these numbers. They are often anecdotal rather than statistical evidence that something works.

When they are based on a data set of results, the pool of data is often small and positively biased.

If you compare your experience to these numbers, you’re almost certain to come up short, feel defeated by someone else’s experience and severely dent that positive mindset you’ve been working so hard to establish and maintain.

Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not what others are doing

This is an important approach to your business, life and successes. You can achieve great things if only you compare yourself to each step you’ve taken.

Expect mistakes, expect failures, and expect to learn some harsh lessons. These are all part of your education. Failures are just another lesson successfully learnt.

So with all this in mind, you might still be thinking “Yes but still, how do I justify the cost of gaining knowledge?!” And I don’t blame you.

I’ve been there and done that. When you hand over your credit card and buy an expensive course, or endlessly purchase books that you think will boost your income quickly and easily.

Here’s the kicker, you can definitely quantify the positive impact your education will have on your business and life goals. You just can’t do it yet.

‘You can have everything in life, just not all at once”!Image

Oprah Winfrey Television Presenter & Author

Don’t expect to read a book, tick off a few tasks from your to-do list and easily make a profit on the investment in your knowledge.

While it's entirely possible to boost your earnings with clever strategies and inspirational case studies, it's only after hard work, determination and a good amount of time that you can look back and see what a difference these things make.

And here’s kicker number 2.

By the time you can look back and analyse if those audiobooks, podcasts and seminars made a difference, you will have accumulated so much knowledge from so many sources that you’ll have a hard time picking out which of them actually made a difference.

The truth is they all did. Every cog in the machine makes it turn. Every stepping stone leads you to your destination.!4262A061-DEDA-441A-8D85-7BA9C8C9396F