The most important asset you have isn't your car, your house, or your investment portfolio. It's your time and attention.
It's the one resource we all have that 99% of us don't know how to use effectively.
But here's the thing - you can turn that time and attention into millions of dollars if you know how to invest in yourself through strategic self-education.
In this guide, I'm going to break down why self-education is your path to freedom, why college might be a total scam for your specific goals, and how you can start investing in your own success by finding online mentors who've already walked the path you want to take.
Stick around until the end where I'll share the top three investments that helped me go from being laid off to making over six figures as a freelance designer in under two years.
The Power of Self-Education: Your Fastest Path to Freedom
I believe self-education is the most important form of investing in yourself that exists today.
Let's get real about why it's so powerful and how you can use self-education to turn your time and attention into potentially millions of dollars over your lifetime.
The most valuable education isn't the one you get from a university - it's the one you allow yourself to have.
This means you need to go out and actively seek what you want to learn in a way that matches your personal learning style.
And that's going to be important to know because everybody learns differently.
For myself, I'm a visual learner. I have to see stuff written out or explained in a video. If I'm just sitting there reading from a textbook, it's going to go over my head. But if I watch a YouTube video on the same topic, I'm going to comprehend it a lot quicker.
So for me, platforms like YouTube and Skillshare have been invaluable for my own self-education journey. I can invest my time and money to learn exactly the skills I need to leverage in my business - no fluff, or outdated theory.
Now for you, your going to have to figure out what your learning style is. Maybe it's:
- Watching YouTube videos
- Reading books like the 4-Hour Work Week
- Taking in-person classes
- Finding a mentor
- Being part of cohort learning with a group of people
Once you've defined this, effective self-education starts with reverse engineering your goals.
Reverse Engineer Your Success Through Online Mentors
I always tell people: go out and find people who've been successful and have accomplished the exact goals you want to achieve.
Whether you want to:
- Start a business
- Build a personal brand
- Make a million dollars
- Create time freedom
Find somebody who's done it the way you want to do it (or similar to how you want to do it) and start reverse engineering how they did it. This will give you a framework for your self-education path that's proven to work.
This will also depend on your current lifestyle and how you want to incorporate learning into your daily routine.
Self-education is going to look different for everybody. For me, I can do it all day because I run my own business and don't have a ton of other responsibilities.
But if you're a parent or work a demanding job, you might only have an hour or two a day for self-education - whether it's through YouTube during your lunch break or reading a book after the kids go to bed.
You need to figure out how to work self-education into your current lifestyle because right now, your time and attention are being rented out to other people.
Whether you're working a 9-to-5 job or handling other responsibilities, any time that isn't being used for learning and growing your own wealth is essentially being rented out to someone else's benefit.
Overcoming the Fear of Failure: The First Step in Investing in Yourself
Most importantly, self-education starts when you give yourself permission to begin and leave behind the fear of looking stupid.
Because truly, there's nothing to fear but fear itself when it comes to learning something new. If you have anxiety about looking dumb when trying to learn something unfamiliar, know that feeling that way is completely normal for everybody.
But the primary thing is you're taking actions to better your life, so focus on pushing through that fear and getting excited about applying new knowledge to your everyday life.
My Self-Education Journey: From Laid Off to Six Figures
To give you a bit about my journey in self-education:
Self-education has helped me completely escape the 9-to-5 grind. Before running my own design and digital marketing agency, I worked briefly at a print design shop, and then at a car dealership.
Then COVID hit, and I got laid off from both jobs.
So inherently, I now have a deep mistrust of traditional employment. Because of all these things happening, I was forced to self-educate - I had to go on YouTube, figure out how to run a business, how to create better design portfolio, how to market myself, how to run paid ads, all skills that I did not learn in college
My journey of self-education hasn't just helped me start a business. It's also helped me create genuine-time freedom and the ability to do what I want, when I want, and shift my life in different directions whenever I choose.
One week I might be focused on my digital marketing agency and client work. The next week, I might pivot to creating YouTube content and building my personal brand.
Through the power of teaching myself new skills, frameworks, and ways to make money, I can guide my life in ways that unlock real freedom.
If I never took the journey of self-education, I'd probably be stuck in some job I hated, slaving away and renting my time to somebody else for pennies on the dollar of what I'm worth.
The True Cost of Education vs. The Cost of Not Learning
If you're sitting there saying, "Well, I don't have the time, I don't have the money, I can't afford education" - I'm gonna tell you straight up: you're wrong.
The true cost of education isn't money - it's your time and your attention. You can break up education into small time chunks.
If you're working a 9-to-5 and have 15-minute breaks, you can watch a 10-minute video. Or on your lunch break, or in the evening, you can sit down for 30 minutes and start learning something new.
But here's the real mind-shift: the true cost of education is what it's costing you NOT to learn the thing you need to know.
If you want to start your own business and you need to learn sales, marketing, and client communication - the cost of NOT learning those skills is everything you could have earned by running and scaling that business over your lifetime.
So it's not just the cost of your time and attention if you buy a course or take a class. It's the opportunity cost of what you're NOT doing and the potential you're wasting by not learning those critical skills. That is the true cost of education.
Once you realize that NOT learning is putting off a better life and a better outcome for you in the long run, you'll understand that whatever it costs to buy that course or learn that thing - whether it's a few hours or a few hundred dollars - it's nothing compared to wasting years of your life in a situation you hate.
Why College Might Be a Scam for You: The Self-Education Alternative
This brings me to my next point: college may be a complete scam for you, depending on your goals.
If you're a doctor, lawyer, or a accountant, please go to college. I don't want somebody operating on me who learned surgery on YouTube in the back of a white van. That's not gonna end well for anyone.
But if you want to be a content creator, graphic designer, someone who runs paid ads, or does any kind of digital work online in a freelance capacity - you absolutely do NOT need a college degree.
If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn't have gone to college. It put me $26,000 in debt. I could have saved all that money if I had known I could self-teach everything I needed online.
Depending on what you want to learn or leverage, college can be 100% a scam. The education you receive is often outdated and doesn't teach you the practical skills you need to build something for yourself.
Colleges turn out employees. They rarely produce people with great critical thinking skills, problem-solving abilities, or the agency to advocate for themselves effectively.
I say this because most college degrees train you to be an employee dependent on a job market. If your goal is to start a business, become a content creator, or build something online, you're better off learning by doing.
This was exactly my problem. I got a four-year degree, then had two jobs. The first lasted three months, the second six months, and I got laid off from both during COVID.
Instead of competing for a third job in 2020 when everyone else was also job hunting, I decided to take a different path and start a business.
I had to start from zero and learn everything from scratch. And it was the best decision I ever made because it forced me to figure out what skills actually matter.
My college degree didn't teach me how to:
- Start a business
- Handle taxes
- Create an invoice
- Make sales
- Talk to clients and develop a brief
It didn't teach any of the core things I needed to build a successful business. My degree only taught me how to design something, give it to a boss, and go through a critique process.
Most college degrees prepare you to be an employee working for someone else, not how to build and run your own business.
How to Start Investing in Yourself Through Skill Acquisition
So how do you actually start investing in yourself?
It begins with setting aside dedicated time and money to learn skills that you can turn into services or products.
This could be digital marketing, graphic design, content creation, coding, or anything else you can find people offering on platforms like Fiverr or Upwork.
First, think about how much time you can realistically allocate to learning based on your current lifestyle. Can you sit on YouTube for an hour every evening after work to learn new skills?
If you have more time and want to accelerate your learning, apply money to it by buying courses from your favorite content creators or getting a Skillshare membership.
You can combine both your time and money to invest in skill acquisition, which will be the greatest investment you'll ever make.
It's like teaching someone to fish instead of giving them a fish - once you learn how to do graphic design, digital marketing, video editing, or create YouTube thumbnails, you can use those skills to start a business, work with other creators, and generate income for years to come.
Finding Your Online Mentors: The Self-Education Shortcut
When investing in yourself, your path will be defined by your specific goals. To find a system that works for you, you need to find online mentors who can teach you for free or for a fraction of what college would cost.
YouTube is an incredible platform for this - just search for whatever you want to learn, and you'll find people teaching it for free.
Find one to three different creators that resonate with you. Follow their frameworks, break apart their content, and study how they're being successful.
By doing this, you start investing in yourself through free YouTube videos that teach you specific skills. Then, depending on what you're learning, you can start investing in equipment or software to launch a service-based business or product.
If you still need more structured education after that, you can take online courses or buy digital guides that walk you step-by-step through the process.
Avoid Education Paralysis: Taking Action on What You Learn
Your investments in yourself will only pay off if you put what you learn into action. You need to avoid education paralysis.
This is the person who watches 100 YouTube videos and says, "I'm so smart now, I've watched 100 videos on how to run a business, I should be able to run a business now" - but they never actually do anything with that knowledge.
They get so wrapped up in consuming education and feeling smart that they don't take the crucial step of implementation.
Action is the only way to convert what you've learned into money. If you just watch videos without applying the knowledge, it's going to sit and rot in your brain, and you'll start resenting yourself.
You'll say, "I know what I need to do, but I'm not doing it." That's the worst feeling - when you've invested in self-education but haven't taken the steps to implement what you've learned.
The Compounding Returns of Self-Education
Once you start taking action on what you're learning, you'll experience compounding returns on your knowledge. You'll see rewards once you put your learning into practice.
Here's how it works: If you learn a service skill and start offering it, you'll get paid based on what you charge. But you'll also start building a network of clients and other business owners who can help you grow further.
As you make more money, you can reinvest it by hiring freelancers or employees, growing your marketing, or expanding your business offerings.
Eventually, that investment turns into time freedom because you can pay others to handle the work while you spend just a few hours a day managing everything.
No matter what skills you learn, they compound over time as long as you keep reinvesting your returns into learning new things.
Self-education and investing in yourself never ends. Always focus on taking your success and reinvesting it back into your education for continued growth.
Why Investing in Yourself Beats Traditional Investments When You're Starting Out
As I mentioned earlier, investing in stocks, index funds, or bonds when you don't have much money will not give you a good return.
Let's use the S&P 500 as an example. It averages between 5% and 7% annual return. If you invest $1,000 and let it sit for a year, you'll only get $50-70 back. Not exactly life-changing.
But if you take that same $1,000 and invest it in camera gear, a website, or an online course that teaches you marketable skills, you could make 10, 20, or even 30 times your initial investment by offering services.
Case in point: before starting my business, I invested $5,000 in a MacBook Pro. If I had put that money in stocks, after four years I'd have made maybe $1,000-1,400 in returns.
Instead, I used that computer to start a design business that's generated over $350,000 in four years. That $5,000 investment in equipment and skills made WAY more sense than putting it in the stock market.
If you have $100,000 sitting around, sure - invest it traditionally. But if you're starting with little money, you don't have much to lose. Invest in yourself, your skills, and your equipment because the return will be significantly higher.
My Top Three Self-Education Investments That Paid Off Big Time
Now, I'll share my top three investments that have given me the biggest returns. And no, they're not stocks or bonds - they're education, equipment, and software.
- My MacBook Pro - In 2020, I spent about $5,000 on a fully spec'd out MacBook Pro. In just 3-4 years, that computer has helped me generate over $350,000 through my digital design business and freelance work. I turned $5,000 into $350,000 by investing in the right tool for my skills.
- Online Courses - My second major investment was in online courses for Facebook ads, marketing, blogging, and social media. I've spent between $6,000-$10,000 on courses that have continuously increased my skill set and allowed me to charge more for my services. Today, my effective hourly rate is between $150-$200 because of these specialized skills.
- Software Subscriptions - My third investment is ongoing - Adobe Creative Suite, AI tools, and scheduling software. I spend $200-300 monthly, but since I charge $150-$200 per hour, it takes just 1-2 hours of work to cover these costs. These tools save me hundreds of hours on projects and help me deliver higher quality work more efficiently.
Final Thoughts: Invest in Yourself or Be Stuck in Someone Else's Dream
All these investments have led to more money, more time freedom, and skills that continue to increase my personal wealth and lifestyle options.
If there's one thing you take away from this guide: invest in yourself and your self-education. Without intentional self-education, you'll remain dependent on others for your livelihood.
When you don't deliberately assign your time, attention, and money to things that benefit you, someone else will find a way to use those resources for their own gain.
The choice is simple: invest in yourself or spend your life investing in someone else's success.
Your time and attention are your most valuable assets. Start treating them that way.
