What is Your Budget for Investing in Yourself?

“Ultimately, there's one investment that supersedes all others: Invest in yourself,” Buffett says in a recent interview with Forbes. “Nobody can take away what you've got in yourself, and everybody has potential they haven't used yet.”

With returns of 25%-1000% or more, investing in yourself has proven to be far and away one of the best investments you can make. Once you've made the investment in improving your earning potential, you can reap the dividends for a lifetime.

Why is it then that so many people invest every extra penny they have in either “assets” that rapidly decrease in value like cars, or low return vehicles such as houses, stocks, bonds, or money market accounts yet fail to invest in themselves? If you can make a relatively small investment in coaching or a few courses that allow you to make significant leaps forward in your life, why would you not make that investment?

Certainly investing in yourself follows the law of diminishing returns as there is a limit on how much employers or clients will be willing to pay for your services, but the ceiling is much higher than most people realize. If you can guarantee that you will earn someone more money than they pay you, there are people out there who will pay you virtually any amount.

It's like an IQ test. If I pay you $100k and you make me $200k, that's a good deal. Millionaires understand that. Business owners understand that. The broke guy scrambling to come up with the money to pay for coffee doesn't get it.

That's why I didn't hesitate when I decided to invest $100 in a funnel building class the other day after reading tons of success stories, and another several hundred on software and creative material. I was trying to figure out the best way to promote our Workout Challenge which is designed to help people get healthy to ultimately save lives and knew I needed help. It's one of the best courses I've ever taken on marketing, and it is already well on the way to paying for itself in the first two weeks, and I'm not even done. That's not an expense, it's an investment.

It's why people still go to college even though costs are skyrocketing. They know that the average college graduate makes nearly $30k a year more than a high school graduate. If you got through elementary math, you could figure out that 40 years times an extra $30k each year is about $1.2 million difference over an average career lifespan. That'll pay for a lot of education.

What is your budget for investing in your own growth?