My current mental model can not accept investing & money-making as co-existing efforts.
I believe for someone in their 20s, you’re either investing money, or making money.
But you can’t be doing both in parallel!
Under normal circumstances, resources are so much limited for someone in their 20s to do both in parallel; be an investor AND a money maker. I believe 20s (& even 30s) should be solely focused on constructing the money making machine, and it doesn’t make any sense to focus on that and focus on implementing a good investing strategy with whatever little money you got at the same time.
Many would find it hard to believe. Not that they shouldn’t though!
Investing is not a job, nor that it could be, for someone in their 20s.
At best, investing is a hobby.
Why?
Let’s take stocks.
The average annual return for many of the top market indexes over the last 10 years is between 10 & 20% – Not like it’s 5000x, so I can not see any point of someone optimizing efforts through their 20s for investing in stocks per se.
Two scenarios for someone who can say they “made it” during their 20s while investing in stocks:
- Top 0.001% – Privilege/Luck/etc
- Con Artists
I believe people interested in investing from early on in their careers show extreme lack of direction. If anything, it’s a mechanism for over-compensation.
Like the fact that I could say I’m “self-employed” or “freelancing”, whenever I don’t have a clear path that I can call a career.
It’s paradoxical: You’re either learning about investing, picking up bit by bit, or have waited long enough (normally years) to have reaped dividends of your seeds – Both cases you don’t have anything to show for it at the moment.
So to claim “I invest in stocks/crypto” during the time you’re supposed to invest in yourself is extremely absurd.
20s (& maybe early 30s) is the exact time you should keep your head down at all times.
For someone in their 20s to claim that they figured it out, it reveals a lot.
It’s true that the more we know, the more we know we don’t know.
So take someone who doesn’t know they don’t know altogether, what does it say about them?