You might be wondering, what is this “investing in myself” thing I am talking about? You see, I have been working for close to 7 years now, as an investment analyst and economist for various big companies. Truth be told, I don’t make much at all. I am 31 years old now and I am only earning the halfway mark of a five-figure monthly salary.

Throughout my 7 years career, I have been working like a dog, trying to climb up the ladder and earning a ridiculously high salary. Guess what? Anxiety and panic attacks hit. I worked for close to 70 hours a week, trying to deliver unrealistic expectations and prove that I am a work machine and I can deliver on anything. Months and years of trying to recover from this set me back instead in my career where I reflected and thought hard about this. And the conclusion I came to changed my viewpoint on the world.

“At the end of the day, I am just a replaceable employee for most of the companies out there. Bosses will always dangle that meat of promotion in front of you and get you to work harder by 2 or 3 times for only 1.5 times the reward. They can just easily fire you or put you in cold storage if you don’t toe the party line or you are deemed replaceable.”

No matter how perfect or good you try to become as an employee, bosses or higher management will always find fault with you if you don’t play the corporate politics game. That is actually the lesson I am learning now. So I am as the Gen Zs are saying now, quiet quitting (just doing what my job entails) or like what Tim Denning said, “You exploit and milk your employer because that is what they are doing too”.

I did not come up with the wording of “investing in myself”, others did. I just came to appreciate what it meant more in my context. It is taking that 1 or 2 hours a day, to obsessively learn and work on the craft that you know will bring value to others … and for which, they are willing to pay for it.

My journey started off with my interest in writing and teaching. I was already teaching my fellow students in my university in mathematics and economics as a way to make some side income — and also things were expensive in the U.S. From there, when I was studying for my Masters, I gave tuition to students in secondary and tertiary education in economics and found the work rewarding. Even today, I am still tutoring and giving tuition when I can amid my busy work schedule because I just find it so rewarding. I spent a lot of time reading up on the various syllabuses and learning about the most effective ways of teaching, so that my students can get the best education out of me. I see this as investing in myself.

For my career in writing, I started off writing just about anything on my own personal blog, EPIHMSIA as a way to express what I was feeling and thinking about certain topics in the market. The more I wrote, the more obsessed I got with it. From there, I even took up freelance writing for other companies, on a myriad of topics which include finance, investment, economics, politics, mergers & acquisitions, and commodity markets. The process was rewarding as I felt like I was providing something of value to other people, and not just working as an employee stuck analysing things that nobody wants to know, just because my bosses wanted them.

Here’s where my mindset regarding working for others and investing in markets changed. Investing in myself in the skills of writing and teaching (and data science, fingers crossed) inevitably provides me with a higher sense of meaning and I get paid for my services. I even have my own freedom in my freelance work where I don’t deal with stupid bosses and higher management (maybe stupid clients, but that’s very rare).

Working for others or corporate, is just demoralising. Bosses (of course not all) have a very ancient way of thinking “I am the boss, I am always right, follow my way” and then when things go sideways, you are the first one under the bus … and the bus is not even here yet. At the end of the day, you don’t even know whether what you did is of value or rather, do you even care at that point.

Many people have said investing in the market, is so important to ensure your financial security. I agree to a certain extent, but I have a totally different perspective on this. It’s always good to invest and make money from the market but believe it or not, retail investors like you and me always lose money to the big boys in the market. It is an established fact that most of the bigger players in the market make money off of us as they have better resources and hindsight to catch trends and profit. They are also always pumping and dumping, where they will say a stock is good and buy, encouraging other retail investors to do also, and then dumping and selling when the price is at the highest to other retail investors. By then, most retail investors would have lost a lot of money while the big boys are laughing themselves to the bank.

This is why I want to invest in myself more compared to working for others or corporate and investing in the market. From the skillsets I acquired, I can diversify my sources of income from working a regular job and investments, and it is actually a stable source of income. You can always get fired from a job or get cold storage until you eventually quit, and lose your money to bigger players in the market, but the skillsets that you have acquired are always there with you. I am not asking you to quit your job ( I haven’t quit mine) but give yourself options and the outlet to not be stressed by corporate and bosses. If one day, you can’t take it anymore, you have the option of relying on your side income and turning it into your real one.