How to Succeed in Life: Invest Your Time, Focus and Tools Wisely

What do successful people do that everyone else doesn’t? The most important thing: they manage their investments wisely. And I don’t only mean money.

Your assets are more than money

You have time, focus and attention. You probably have a phone and a laptop. Most of us use the phone to scroll mindlessly and the laptop for games and series. Nothing wrong with that, but the same laptop could be how you earn a living online and leave your nine-to-five. The same phone could take beautiful photos.

When your own tools stand between you and success, instead of carrying you towards it, that’s an investment problem.

Grow the idea you were given

We’re made to be creative. An idea clicks, “this would be amazing if someone built it”, and we don’t realise we’re the someone. We open a game and the idea fades.

Invest time in it instead, and it grows: from small and simple to bigger and more complex, solving a bigger problem. It doesn’t have to change the world. Imagine where we’d be if Tesla or Einstein had let distractions win. You wouldn’t even be reading this, because it all runs on electricity.

Or build a skill

No idea yet? Build a skill. I practised speaking to a camera for a long time before I ever published a video. Photoshop, photography, video editing, a new language: when an employer sees one candidate who speaks English and another who speaks Spanish and is learning Italian, who do you think they choose?

Even if you’re in a low-paid job right now, there’s no shame in it. But what are you doing with your free time?

Plant the tree now

In the video I talk about what you’re really paying for with Netflix and games, why “the trouble is, we think we have time”, and why a seed planted today feeds you for the rest of your life in ten years. Luck doesn’t exist. There are only actions and consequences.