BR22: Deciding the right investment

Sometimes, the right investment is simply the one that you can make right now.

And when I say “investment”, I don’t just mean the financial sort. Everything we do is an investment in a future outcome. 

We can invest money, targeting a future outcome of financial growth. We can also invest time, targeting all kinds of future outcomes, including financial growth.

As a longtime freelancer, I’ve always believed that it’s important to invest at least a little bit of time into personal branding. I think of knowledge sharing and of being vocal about my principles and experience as key part of personal branding. It helps the right readers and listeners, and it also helps me by enabling me to “show up”, to be visible in circles that I’m interested in.

This newsletter naturally ties into that. And so far, the investment that I’ve been able to commit to it has been rather minimal.

I have a background in marketing, so I have no shortage of ideas about what I could be doing to promote it and improve its visibility.

But doing those things takes time and resources that I can’t currently expend. So I could stop writing this newsletter altogether because I don’t have the time to promote it, or I could do the “bare minimum”, which is to write a new issue each week, so that people who signed up and like it stay engaged.

When I can free up a bit more time, I may also do some of the other things from my list of ideas. And when that time should come, I’ll be glad that my starting point is a newsletter that’s been running for a few months, rather than one that I’m starting over.

This is then my personal example of how the right investment is the one that I can make right now.

We don’t have to go all in every time we start something new. Sometimes, even the bare minimum can be enough to advance your objectives.

I’ll end with a quote that stuck with me from Obama, on something he used to tell people when he was president: “Better is good”.

He mentioned in an interview how he kept needing to remind his staff of that, when they were frustrated that they couldn’t get the precise solutions they wanted.

If what you can do now is enough to move things in the right direction, even if it can’t land you your grand objective, just remember... better is good.