Invest in Yourself

We hope you enjoy this guest post by Kyle Ryan, Intern Extraordinaire at SOS!

We think he’s wise beyond his years with this one! Plus…his mom trains at SOS and we love her too so we know where he gets his smarts and strength from! 🙂

Invest In Yourself Every Day.

You’re likely familiar with the concept of investing money. You spend a little bit of your money now hoping that in the future, that little bit you spent will end up making you even more money. Investing makes sense in other environments, too. Personally, I like to think of my training as investing in myself. By training, I invest my time and effort during the session knowing that in the future it will make me a stronger, faster, better athlete.

Whenever I need motivation or a reminder to stay disciplined, I remember a story from the Bible (I know. Religion. So controversial. Stick with me.). You definitely do not have to be religious to apply the lesson from this story to your training and lifestyle.

Matthew 25:14-30 tells the Parable of the Talents. It describes a man who gave his three servants each a number of talents. (Back in the days of the Bible, the word “talents” meant goods. For now, I’m going to use talents in the literal sense of the word.) One servant received five talents, one received two, and the last received just one.

After a long journey, the man returned to see what the servants had done with the talents.

• The servant who received five had invested those five, yielded five more, and returned the ten talents to the man.
• The servant who received two had also invested and doubled his talents. The man was pleased and rewarded them.
• The servant who received one talent had buried it, and had just the one to return back to the man. The man was disappointed that the servant had played it safe and had nothing to show for it, and punished him.

You were born with talents. Whether you believe that they were given to you by a god or not is irrelevant. Everyone is born with talents that are unique to them.

Explore different hobbies and find out exactly what your talents are. Maybe you are an incredible athlete pursuing a professional career. Maybe you can sing so well you bring people to tears. Maybe you write so well you bring people to tears. Maybe you cook so well that people eat entirely too much of your food then look at themselves in the mirror and are brought to tears.

Invest in your talents!

Every single day, do something to invest in your talents. It doesn’t have to be something huge, it just has to be something that makes you better. It is much more beneficial to consistently do small things that make you better than it is to try and sporadically take huge steps.

Think of it like creating a college fund: do parents start early and consistently invest smaller portions of their money to reach their goal, or do they randomly deposit massive amounts of money that immediately plunge them into crippling debt? (I hope we both come up with the same answer.)

Daily investments are definitely not easy. Some days you just want to relax and take a break and other days you find yourself so busy that you don’t even realize the sun has gone down and the day is almost over.

When you find this happening to you and you don’t feel like making an investment, think again of the Parable of the Talents. You are both the man and a servant: at the end of your life, you will have to answer to yourself. When you ask yourself what you did with your talents, what will be your answer?

You can either bury your talents and have nothing to show for it, or you can invest in your talents now and yield something great for your future self.

Invest now, and have no regrets in the future.