中EN
Why Invest
A job trades time for money, and time is limited. Investing trades money for money, and money never sleeps. To change your situation, you have to put your money to work.
1. Money's most important use is investing, not spending
Spend money, and you get enjoyment now. Invest it, and you get more money later. If you only know how to spend and never learn to invest, you spend everything you earn, and it's hard to ever change your fate.
2. A job is selling your time
At its core, a job means trading your own time for money. But over a whole lifetime, the time we actually spend working isn't much:
Live 78 years, sleep away 28 of them, and only about 10.5 are spent working. Time is fixed, so your pay has a ceiling too — however hard you try, a day still has only 24 hours.
3. Effort is the least of the three
The economist Frank Knight once said:
Three things determine whether a person becomes rich: birth, luck, and effort. Of the three, effort is the least significant.
You can't change your birth, you can't count on luck, and hard work alone runs into the limits of time. So what's left?
4. Use money to make money
At its core, investing is using money to make money. That's completely different from making money with your time: people have to eat and sleep; money doesn't. As long as it's pointed in the right direction, money never sleeps — it works for us 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
The key here is "the right direction." Get the direction wrong, and your money will lose money for you just as tirelessly.