From personal finance to living life, these five pieces of advice can guide anyone to live a fulfilling life-letter to my younger self

Albert Einstein was once asked what mankind’s greatest invention was. He replied: “Compound interest.” He was quoted as saying —

“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it … he who doesn’t … pays it.”

Despite being a business student, I didn’t comprehend the power of compounding. I understood the concept — but didn’t know how to use it. Imagine that my younger self understood this and started investing 10 years ago. He invested $100 every month at an average 10% rate of return. By today, he would have $19,384.28 against an investment of $12,100. That extra $7,384.28 would be his profit in 10 years.

If he continued investing from the age of 25 till the age of 60, he’d have $328,039.49. Compared to that, if he starts at the age of 35 and goes on for the next 25 years, he’d get $119,099.94. Starting 10 years earlier would almost triple his next 25 years of investment.

$42,100 investment turns into $328,000 over this period — A whopping 679% growth!

My advice, if I could share with my younger self, would be —

Start investing early and keep on making consistent monthly payments. Not only with money but also with your knowledge by learning regularly and your initiatives by working consistently

I have been using this advice for the last 3.5 years. This has helped me increase my savings through monthly deposit schemes. I also have a target to invest at least 10% every month. That has allowed me to buy stocks cheaply when the market was down, invest in other assets like farms, etc. This mindset has helped me to get rid of my student loan 3 years before the agreed term.

He might then ask me — “What would be the goal of the investment? Building a retirement fund?”

Not exactly. The goal should be financial freedom. What is financial freedom? It is about having enough money to cover your necessities. So that you can do whatever you truly want to do. It is a sneaky way of buying free time.

Robert Kiyosaki, in his book Rich Dad Poor Dad, asked us to purchase assets that would generate income. I’d show my younger self the formula derived from the book. This formula calculates how long we can survive if we stop working today. It demonstrates how we can increase our wealth.

My 2nd advice to my younger self would be —

Invest in income-generating assets — so that you can be financially free to do more of what you love

I created a wealth calculator to understand my wealth score. The wealth score answers how many days I can survive if I stop earning today. I could increase my wealth score significantly- although I am nowhere close to being financially free.

But it is also important to remember that no activity or investment is risk-free. We are talking about financial freedom but nothing is certain in life. That is how life is — unpredictable. Investments can yield nothing in years. Initiatives can completely fail. Relationships may turn sour. Bad things may happen along the way.

And that is more than ok. In fact, that’s a good thing. Morning is beautiful because of the dark night that came before. We enjoy summer in the cold lands of Canada yet look for air-conditioned places in sunny Singapore. Life is beautiful because of its extremes.

We will probably always seek something that we don’t have. That is how we are. We’ll set goals, achieve them, and set another goal. But there’s something crucial I’d want my younger self to know —

Don’t postpone your happiness. Don’t equate happiness with goal achievement. Be grateful for what you have. And trust me, you will always have enough to be grateful for

I learned this trick when I was doing my MBA at INSEAD. Initially, it took me a while to start practicing gratitude. But over time, I created a habit using James Clear’s Habit Stacking method to practice gratitude at least once per day. I have noticed that I have become more positive and way less stressed.

There are three negatives of equating goal achievement with happiness. Firstly, we’d then always postpone our happiness. We often say to ourselves I will be happy if I buy that or get that promotion or make that trip! Maybe we will have short-lived happiness. But then that feeling will get old. We’ll seek the next high. That kind of lifestyle may make us successful yet extremely miserable.

The second problem with equating happiness with goals is —what happens when you don’t achieve your goal. You’d then become disappointed, depressed, and bitter. And I can guarantee that every one of us will taste failure. Life is not going to be a bed of roses.

In the mid-1980s, Steve Jobs had to leave Apple — the company he co-founded. Imagine that. Apple was his whole life’s work and they forced him out of it. That could have been the end of his story. But that’s not who Jobs was. He founded Next and continued building it. Almost a decade later, Apple acquired Next for $429 million. Steve Jobs eventually became the CEO of Apple and led it to become a giant.

The third negative is regarding devaluing time and neglecting well-being.

When we live from goal to goal, we tend to neglect what happens in between. I’ll work hard so that I make a partner in my firm in two years. I will be happy when I buy the new Tesla in two years. Then we stop everything else for 2 years to get to that goal.

Should life stop for two years? The average lifespan of humans is 72.9 years. If we had $72.9, would we just throw away $2 here and there? Or would we count and utilize every cent? Why don’t we do the same with time?

We get time without asking for it. Maybe because of that, we don’t understand that it’s the most important resource we have.

My fourth advice to my young self would be —

Life is a journey, not a destination. We are not living so that we can reach our death. Do what you want to do — but enjoy the ride along the way

I am guilty of doing this for a long time. I kept on chasing and realizing dreams but I was never happy. Over the last years, I changed my mindset and now I push myself to live more in the present. As Andy Bernard from The Office mentioned, “I wish there was a way to know you were in the good old days before you actually left them”. My trick is to always assume I am in the good old days.

Throughout his career, Edison obtained 1,093 patents. And while many of these inventions — such as the light bulb, stock printer, phonograph, and alkaline battery — were groundbreaking, even more of them were unsuccessful. Edison is famous for saying that genius is “1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”

One of Edison’s greatest stories of perseverance occurred after he was already wildly successful. After inventing the light bulb, Edison began a quest to find an inexpensive light bulb filament. At the time, ore was mined in the Midwest, and shipping costs were incredibly high. To combat this, Edison opened his own ore-mining plant in Ogdensburg, New Jersey. For roughly a decade, Edison devoted all his time and money to the plant. He also obtained 47 patents for inventions designed to make the plant run more smoothly. And after all of that, Edison’s project still failed thanks to the low-quality ore on the East Coast.

But as it turned out, one of the aforementioned 47 inventions (the newly-designed crushing machine) revolutionized the cement industry and earned Edison back nearly all of the money he lost.

We may have our plans but there’s no guarantee those will be fulfilled. Better things might happen if we keep our eyes open. When we become too focused on the end goal, we miss out on the by-products of our hard work.

Whatever you start, you should give it at least six months to see where it goes. There’s nothing called overnight success. And nothing can trump consistent hard work

If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time — Steve Jobs

Recently, I have started a couple of YouTube channels. Although I feel I am a bit late in getting into the YouTube game, I still wanted to understand how it works. I published consistently for the last 5 months. On its first day, the channel reached 143 people. Now it’s reaching close to 10 thousand people per day. However, if you see the graph below, you can see that I was still getting very few views (roughly 500 per day) even on August 20th. I started on June 14th and I could conclude by August 20th (2+ months later) that the channel was not working.

However, after 3 months the channel started picking up. I didn’t do anything extra but I kept on doing the same activities. My persistent efforts started showing results.

When I was younger, I used to start new projects that I stopped pursuing after a month or so. Then I got interested in something else. In the end, I didn’t achieve much in long spans of time. Over time, I realized that consistency and hard work can’t be replaced with any magic idea.

Letter to my younger self

I see money as a means to buy things we want & need. But more importantly, I feel money’s biggest purpose is to buy us time. If we have enough, we can hire people to work for us and we can focus on what we can want to do. If we have enough money, we can spend time doing what we want from wherever we are. Financial freedom is nothing but buying time. Starting early and investing in income-generating assets are the way to go for that. In addition, creating solid processes and persisting with them will help.

But, life is not only about chasing things. It’s also about stopping and being grateful for what we have. It is about seeking happiness every day. Happiness is not a distant future that happens with one occasion, it should be what we experience every day.