A personal road map - Part 2

2. You are your own best investment

These days, many people ask, “What can I do to protect myself from possible inflation?”

The short and quick answer: Be great at what you do. If you’re the best builder, accountant, mechanic, engineer, teacher, or dentist in town, you’ll do just fine. The key here is to become a lifelong learner. Two ways to instil this in your kids:

• Read about and research stuff you love. It could be trucks or toads, video games or televisions. My 8-year-old daughter just taught me that hares have longer legs and ears that rabbits, and she was excited to learn it. The best way to light a fire is to actually experience and learn about things that kids are interested in. The best gift you can give someone is the love of learning. That curiosity can lay the foundation to a world-class education.
• Learn to love maths. The most difficult problems tend to be multidisciplinary, and they typically aren’t solved quickly. It’s more important for younger children to emphasise spending 30 minutes on a single problem than doing 30 easy problems in 30 minutes. Of course, there’s value in repetition as well, but we’ve created a society of instant-gratification-seekers. Maths teaches us to be patient, organise our thoughts, and think logically.

3. Build a self-reflective portfolio

We don’t come predisposed to be great investors. We have all kinds of psychological baggage that prevents us from earning great returns. In short, we form conclusions prematurely, and we’re overconfident in our own abilities, prone to action in times of stress and fear, and often unable to correctly recall past behaviour — let alone learn from our mistakes.

To counteract these flaws, here are my simple rules to guide your investment decisions:

• Be patient. Don’t buy any shares spontaneously. Wait at least one month before making a purchase. Only buy one-third of what a full position would be. This allows you to average into great businesses. It also nullifies your emotional impulses.
• Be committed. Hold every share you buy for at least two years before you sell. This commitment will likely cause you to carefully consider and research each purchase, instead of buying that hot cocktail-party tip you got from Uncle Les.
• Portfolio DNA. I should know something about you when I look at your portfolio. A great place to start looking for investments is to analyse where you choose to spend your discretionary dollars.

 4. Find something you love doing, and master it

A common adage holds that it takes four hours a day, seven days a week, for 10 years to become great at something, to achieve mastery at it — and that assumes you actually spend those hours wisely, get feedback, and track your performance.

If you’re doing something you don’t love, you’re swimming against the tide. Find something you care about and do it. Work for the best, and don’t settle for anything less.

Work for free if you have to. The most important part is that you surround yourself with those who are great at what you want to become great at. As they say, it’s hard to soar like an eagle when you hang with a bunch of turkeys.

5. Invest in experiences, not stuff

Our goal shouldn’t be to die with the biggest pile of money. Life is precious, and we want to live it, and live it well.

That doesn’t mean having the biggest house or the fastest car. He who dies with the most toys doesn’t win — he who dies with the most meaningful experiences does. The shine and feel of that brand new Aston Martin diminishes with age. However, that once-in-a-lifetime African safari and your memories of it will get sweeter with age.

Time is much more valuable than money. Don’t delude yourself into thinking that you’re working an extra 10 hours for your family.

No matter how young your loved ones are, they intuitively know that time is more valuable than money. Where you spend your time, it tells them what you value. An hour spent reading, playing tag, or going to the park is not only costless — it’s priceless.

One final piece of advice from a master

Charlie Munger is famous for many quotes.

Here’s one of my favourites: “The best way to get what you want, is to deserve what you want.”

By following the steps above, you’ll be well down the path of deserving whatever it is that you want to achieve in 2011 … and beyond.

So what are you waiting for? Go get it! And if you find this advice at all valuable, pass it along, tweet it, link to it on Facebook, and share it with those who you believe will benefit from it.

This roadmap was written by Buck Hartzell and reprinted from the Motley Fool.