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Put in the Upfront Hard Effort in your Wealth Building or Career to reap a Easier Future

Behind every successful business man, career man or investor they always talk about the challenges in the early days.

Some of them lament about the tough life that they have to suffer.

When I was a junior staff at work, you end up doing all sorts of tasks, some you understand some you do not. Usually the thought going through your head is: “Why do I, a degree holder, needs to do things like this?” Whatever things your seniors do not want to do, its up to you to do them.

Looking back, you realize that all these difficult things becomes easier over time as you became familiar with them, develop better ways of doing things.

Even after you take on a different scope of responsibility and these tasks are not carried out by you, you somehow have a vague and good idea how to do them, because you have an unconscious competence.

Whether I am in the army or at work or investing, I am in awe of the accomplishments of my seniors. For them, things are usually tougher because the tough things have not been smoothed out.

In army, there was less regulatory measures to guard against tougher trainee punishments and that the tasks are less about technology more about physical and mental prowess.

At work, the systems and software are not abstracted to such a high level and they have to do all the low level work.

In investing, they didn’t have the internet. They have to really find mentors, and honestly only those lucky ones manage to find them. They didn’t have portals that aggregate financial data, don’t have blogs that provide some of the simple fundamentally sound wealth building principals, or to interact with like minded peers.

I always thought that these tough environment set them up to make their understanding of things, their reactions to better work or investing decisions.

The Willingness to Put in Effort Upfront

In this fast pace age, we were pampered by what the millennials developed that give us what we want, at the comfort of our smartphones. Software as a service provided services that make our lives much better then without these services.

What happens is that, we expected things to be effortless.

This is so when we come out to work from university or polytechnic, progression at work and also how we make money.

20160409 Effort over Time

I believe we will get there when it comes to investing.

I do envision a future where smart ETFs based on some fundamentally sound allocation that shifts between cash, bonds and equities ensuring that your money is low volatile, rather passive and reasonable costs.

Till that day happen, investing in various wealth machines require knowledge, wisdom, execution, reflecting on what works and what doesn’t work and then doing more.

I haven’t been doing much prospecting lately, and I can feel I am getting rusty at it.

However, if I  encounter a potential business to look into, I know what to watch out for because I have put in the initial upfront effort.

Just like the above graph, your initial effort would be higher to comprehend and kick start, then when the knowledge and execution becomes unconscious competence, things become smoother, you can evaluate what used to be challenging for you in a much faster manner.

This is how we have the time to look at things from multi facets. We did the initial hard work and now the recurring effort we can make use of our unconscious competence and slowly learn new conscious incompetent stuff.

In all things you learn you realize there are usually: Upfront Effort + Recurring Effort.

Usually, different things have varying degree of these 2 kinds of effort.

In some of the wealth machines shown in this table, some of them requires high competence or relatively low competence. Before you get to the recurring maintenance stage, you need to put in the high effort, unless you are dealing with fixed deposits

In creating a cash flowing business

When I listened or speak to people that have build an online businesses, who is able to earn cash flows monthly with relatively less upkeep, the idea is still the same.

Not many see the effort that they have to endure, carrying out a 9 to 5 job then going home and doing a second job from 6 to 8.

Even if you have a good mentor, or go on a course that ironed out your mistakes, you also need to put in the time to comprehend and execute. With the competition nowadays, it is difficult to stand out. Even with good guidance, you still need hard work.

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Kyith

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