I was reading Finance Twitter and saw someone ask a well-known Twitter user the same tired “what should I invest in” question, clarifying he was young, to which he replied it was better not to think about that and “invest in yourself” instead.

Lain at the computer

I’ll explain why this idea is absurd on multiple levels.

I’m quite pessimistic about recommendations in general because they don’t really exist as such. “Should I invest in this or that?”, “what’s safer, Android or iOS?”, “are apps better than websites?”, “should I use a VPN?” All these questions are impossible to answer by themselves; the answer is always IT DEPENDS. Each person is unique, and for each individual, the answer is different. And for the same person, the answer might change tomorrow. That’s why in CS we don’t learn answers, but rather the art of understanding requirements and reaching possible solutions.

I’ll start questioning the idea of “investing in yourself” with a very basic concept: the amount of free knowledge on the internet is literally infinite. What’s stopping you from using it? Knowing how to find it and actually use it, and the fact that you only have one brain and 24 hours in a day. How much money can you really invest in yourself? Very little.

Let’s take this to the absurd: if I give a 15-year-old one million dollars, how do they invest it in themselves? Do they look for the most expensive universities in the world and enroll in several degrees simultaneously? What would be the point of that? There’s always a point where what you’re paying for is no longer education, nor do you have the capacity to retain so much. Besides, the benefit of meeting people isn’t for everyone; maybe it is for you, but not for many others. I mean, it’s all nice, but don’t let them take you for an idiot either.

In several countries, there’s a problem with many people who “invested in themselves” too much and the return on investment wasn’t what they expected, and now they’re in debt. I believe in studying what you want and what interests you, but you should always know that nothing guarantees it will “serve” for something, nor should anyone guarantee such a thing. The most important thing for making money isn’t learning a million things, but sticking with one thing and iterating on it.

The most valuable thing a person has is their time; what you need to “invest in yourself” is, above all, time, not money.

Keeping a young person away from investing is criminal, because the time advantage they have is insane. It’s so true that ideally, BABIES should invest.

For example, if when someone is born you donate 100 dollars every month, putting everything in stocks and Bitcoin, when they turn 18, thanks to compound interest, they’ll have their own house. Imagine the edge a kid has when their only expenses for the rest of their life are food and internet.

The best thing a young person with no money can do is hit the wall, but on purpose. Throwing money at problems without thinking isn’t the best idea. Just as recommending “playing it safe” is a bad idea, so is blowing it all for no reason.

The values of saving and investment are useful even without having anything. If you don’t think about it before having something, when you have it you won’t know how to manage it (research how most lottery winners end up, or countries sitting on infinite natural resources that still manage to blow it). If you know nothing about investment and have no experience, it’s even questionable whether working will do you any good. That’s how you see people who worked for 45 years, retire and feel they got fucked over.

Lain on the train

At 13, I became very interested in economics and understanding why we had inflation. I was surprised to see that the problem was quite stupid. Looking for something that had stable emission and demand, I learned about gold and from that moment started buying gold, but then realized it was stupid for me to invest in that if I was only 13 and earning 50 dollars a month. I had no capital to protect. That’s when I realized that the best thing was to bet everything on something risky, and put everything into Bitcoin. From that moment, every penny I earned I used to buy more Bitcoin, and it didn’t matter if it went to 0, I just understood my advantage: I’m 13, who cares.

During that time, I also got into gambling and online betting, and won and lost a lot of money. That’s when I understood the wonderful thing that had happened to me: I had the feeling of a 50-year-old man who bet his house at the casino, but 40 years earlier and without blowing his brains out, which gave me a different ability to understand risks compared to my friends, invaluable knowledge, obtained much earlier and at an infinitely lower price.

Don’t ask someone who’s already won what to do, your advantages are different. Experimenting has the highest return in life, and now is when it’s cheapest for you.

Buy low, sell high.

People learn things by experiencing them firsthand. In societies where capital accumulation isn’t protected, capital doesn’t exist, not because people lose it, but because they don’t even try to accumulate it. If you don’t understand how the market works, you won’t be able to see your way to what you actually want, and you won’t even know what that is.

This applies to everything, for example with the body it’s the same, it’s not about which routine is better, it’s literally understanding the principle of progressive overload and being able to visualize the projection over time in your mind. If not, you won’t understand what the fuck you’re even doing it for.

Neo in his cubicle