CAREER & MONEY
INVEST IN YOURSELF
INVEST IN OTHERS
By DONALD BROUGHTON
As chief market srategist, managing director, and
senior transportation analyst for Avondale Partners,
Donald is a frequent guest on CNBC and Fox. He has
been recognized as a top stock picker by The W
all
Street Journal, Fortune, Zacks and StarMine.
“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”
– Benjamin Franklin
Though I have an undergraduate degree in accounting, truth be
known, I hated studying it. In practice, the use of accounting and
finance skills can be very interesting and highly lucrative, but studying
accounting is painfully dry, gruelingly boring. So why study it?
Because without studying it, without understanding the intricacies of
what double entry accounting is capable of, you can’t fully appreciate
the financial implications of your decisions (business or otherwise).
Each time you study a new field or expand your knowledge in a field,
you increase your ability to positively change the world around you.
What’s more, each field of study complements, in some way, your
other fields of study. I could be a financial genius, which I’m not, but
without the ability to compose a sentence, I would not be writing
this article. Conversely, most writers die penniless.
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I’ve been blessed. I am privileged to work with colleagues that I’ve
worked with for years, some of them decades. Many of them I first
hired, then trained, and now proudly call them my peers. We should
all invest in ourselves, but should quickly try to teach others what we
are learning, too.
was tutoring my fraternity brothers who were struggling through the
basic accounting classes. You can’t teach a subject unless you really
understand it, but it’s more profound than that. In teaching or coaching
someone, you will expand your insight and understanding of that topic.
The people you are trying to teach will inevitably ask questions that
force you to consider the subject anew, take a fresh approach to that
which you thought you already understood. They will challenge you
and send you back to the textbook to more thoroughly relearn the
subject matter. And then, things start to get interesting.
Point being - if you want to build wealth, start by making yourself
more valuable. Take a class, read a book, listen to an online lecture,
attend a seminar, watch a Ted.com speech online. Expand your
understanding of a field of knowledge you already know something
about, and expand your knowledge about something you don’t
already understand. You and everyone around you will be richer as a
result. Which leads me to my next point…
“T me and I forget.
ell
T
each me and I remember.
Involve me and I learn.”
– Benjamin Franklin
GAZELLE WEST
I first began to completely understand higher level accounting when I
My most trusted colleagues know my flaws and shortcomings. I
know theirs. We trust each other, we respect each other, but we
test each other’s ideas. “How do you know?” “Are you sure?” are
the most common lines of questioning. For instance, when trying
to predict the future of the economy and the financial markets, we
often quickly establish what we agree and disagree on and then
spend most of our time asking ourselves “What are we missing?”
“How could we be wrong?” Net result, we make each other smarter,
hold each other accountable, and have an intellectually stimulating
and entertaining time doing it.
Bottom line – educate yourself and never stop expanding your
fields of knowledge and interest. Build a group of people, surround
yourself with people that you can do this with, and your life will be
more productive and more enjoyable.