Why the Smartest Investment Isn't Stocks or Real Estate

By John Salkowski

The JRS Realty Group, founded by high-producing Real Estate Broker & Author John Salkowski was built on the notion that the secret to achieving incredible goals and getting true results is to dominate real estate with a team approach.

I have a question for you: What’s the best investment you’ve ever made? I hear the usual answers all the time. Real estate is the best investment. Retirement accounts are the best investment. Stocks, bonds, and treasuries are the best investments. Maybe putting your money into a business is the best investment.

After 56 years on this earth, though, my answer has landed somewhere different. The best investment you can make is in yourself. For me, that journey started at 37, when I left one career to begin this one.

Investing in your mind keeps you moving forward. This is where it begins for a lot of people, and it never really ends. When you read books, listen to podcasts, and watch the kind of videos that teach you something or fire you up, you’re compounding what you know the same way money compounds in an account.

Investing in your character is one most people skip. Be a man of your word. Be someone others can trust, someone people know they can count on.

Investing in your health protects everything else you’re building. Take the walk. Get to the gym. Eat whole foods, and yes, you’ve heard me say that phrase plenty of times, because it matters. As you get older, lifting weights becomes less optional and more essential, and deadlifting in particular is about the best exercise you can do for a body that has to carry you through the rest of your life. The other investments don’t mean much if you haven’t taken care of the one thing that makes them possible.

Investing in relationships is the one you can’t get back. Spend your time with the people who mean the most to you, and tell them what they mean while they can still hear it. Too often, someone passes, and only at the service do we hear how much they mattered, what a difference they made, how they shaped a life. The question worth sitting with is whether we ever said any of that to them directly.

A couple of weeks ago, I put that question to the test. I went to visit a friend I’ve known since I was 13 or 14 years old, a woman who was like a second mom to me, whose children were some of my closest friends growing up. She had just come out of the hospital, and she wasn’t doing well. Sitting with her, I told her plainly how much I cared about her, how much I loved her, and how much she had impacted my life, all of it while she was still here to receive it. That is what more of us need to start doing, and it’s the part of this message I hope stays with you longest.

So think about the last time you told someone that they impacted your life, or thanked them for something they did for you, or simply told them they look great and that they matter to you. Most of us could stand to hand out more compliments, treat people with a little more kindness, and say out loud what someone truly means to us before the chance is gone. I hope this one resonates with you.

Let me leave you with the question I opened with: what has been your best investment, and do you agree that it can be the one you make in yourself? I believe it is, because formal education will make you a living, while self-education can make you a fortune. If this landed with you, I’d love to hear from you. Call or text me at 610-709-5147, email me at john@jrsrealtygroup.com, or visit thejrsrealtygroup.com. Thank you for spending these few minutes with me today.