Investors

Investors are individuals, who have put their money into a company in hope of better returns than their initial investment.

In order to achieve their aim, an affirmative answer is required to this question: “Will the company be worth more tomorrow than it is today?”

If the answer is in the affirmative, a diligent investor goes further and asks:

  1. “Is the company moving in the right direction?”
  2. “If it is moving in the right direction, with the velocity it is moving in that direction, where will it rank relative to its competitors who are also moving in that right direction in time X?”

So that if an investor concludes that a company is moving in the right direction but its peers are moving in that direction at a greater velocity than it is, then they would likely be better off putting their money with the competitors to achieve better returns.

 

Shares

Investors buy shares in companies. A share is the smallest financial unit of a company.

Though companies have real assets and humans working in them, they are in sum, represented by the price of their shares, the value of the share serving as a proxy for the value of the company. Though it is not the company, the share price is the means through which an investor expresses their views about a company, so that the price an investor is willing to buy or sell a company’s share contains significant information about their view of the present and likely future of the company.

Hence, the present price of a company’s share at any point in time is a financial reflection of the cumulative view of all investors about the underlying company at that point in time.

 

You

Although there are no shares being sold as proxies for individuals, consider these questions:
  1. “Do you think you will be more valuable tomorrow than today?”
  2. “Do you think your life is headed in a good direction?”
  3. “Do you think you are heading in that good direction at a significant velocity? ”

In short, “With the way you are living your life, will you invest all your savings in yourself or someone else?”

Come rain or sunshine, you cannot escape from you, you are stuck with you for life, you came to this life with you and you will go to the grave with you. Others might extend a helping hand, might assist in several areas, but in the final analysis, no one else but you is responsible for you. You are both a man and a god – you are a mini-Jesus. You have to chart the course of the life you will live - God presumably setting the course of the universe, and you also have to live out that direction like a subject to yourself – Man.

Here is Steven Pressfield in The Art of War:

“When I first moved to Los Angeles and made the acquaintance of working screenwriters, I learned that many had their own corporations. They provided their writing services not as themselves but as “loan-outs” from their one-man businesses. Their writing contracts were f/s/o —“for services of ”—themselves.”

You are the founder-CEO and the first investor in your one man corporation, others might believe and invest in you, but you remain, now and forever, the foundational investor. One major implication of this is that at no point in time are you allowed to lose faith in yourself, for if the foundation be destroyed, what can the righteous do?

Irrespective of your answer to the questions that opened this section, it is on you to live and continue living your life in a way that you will be the ‘company’ that you will want to invest all your savings in, and this can only truly be done by placing significant treasure on each second of your life, for if a share is the smallest financial unit of a company, a second is the smallest investable unit of your life - Be wary of whatever takes your seconds, for those are what cumulatively determine the value of your life.

 

What then?

Invest your seconds in valuable activities, make yourself valuable, make yourself the ‘company’ you want all your savings in, if you don’t do it, who will?

Happy new year and thank you for reading.