The Gutman Group

Dear reader, we hope you are enjoying mooching off of all our hard work, because we are certainly not having much fun providing it to you. If you like the content on this site then to subscribe to our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter...or risk being poor forever. Consider it like insurance or something...

Okay, so you could be happier

Every time I hear someone complaining about how they don’t make enough money, that they want more money, about their lousy job, about how they can’t find a job, about how no one appreciates them or what they have makes me more frustrated than scraping ice off of my car in the middle of a snowstorm (we can all relate).

Now, after I recommend these people a book, a seminar or even someone to talk to, and they give me an excuse in exchange ranging from not having enough time to simply being too lazy, that’s when I feel like taking my sledgehammer forged out of diamonds and introducing it to someone’s skull – thankfully there are laws that prevent me from doing so.

You see, it’s one thing to want something and it’s a completely different thing to actually get it.

Sure anyone can sit down and say they want $7 million dollars in three years, a job that they love which doesn’t require too much work, to have a body that would make Brad Pitt cower in shame and to be able to charm a woman’s pants off in under thirty seconds. Only to find them loading up their credit cards on useless crap followed by playing Xbox games instead of learning new skills to acquire said job while chugging down their second bag of Doritos and ultimately looking so repulsive that even the most heinous woman would never dare to approach them.

Yes, welcome to the real world.

The Real World

It’s not a pretty world – it’s a world which requires you to work for your results, one which gives you back what you put in and one that requires constant innovation of yourself. In short, it sucks.

I talk a lot about my love for stocks and how I believe they are some of the best investments vehicles on the planet. You may personally believe that stocks are for one-legged gimps who smell like broken sewer pipes and go the way of bonds or real estate or what have you – even so, none of these investments can even compare to the most important one that you can possibly make: yourself.

In one of my earlier articles I wrote about how everything you do is an investment – and all that still applies. How will you ever be able to make enough money to own a petting zoo full of endangered animals if you refuse to learn new skills to get you there? How will you ever be able to look like one of Hercules’ descendants without hitting the gym more than once a week? How will you ever be able to…you get the point.

So, how can you get what you want?

Invest in yourself

And how can you invest in yourself?

College

College is typically the first and definitely most expensive vehicle that most people tend to use to invest in themselves – mainly because they almost always get an excellent return on investment.

Of course, some of you may think that the sole purpose of college is to provide you with such fabulous opportunities such as meandering from keg party to toga party in a drunken stupor while hooking up with questionable members of the opposite sex – turns out that’s not the only thing it’s for!

If you want to be doctor or engineer or some other highly specialized profession, chances are you’re not going to get far without that shiny piece of paper (a.k.a. a diploma) hanging fancily on your wall. Even though those steep tuitions may seem larger than Jennifer Lopez’s behind, your annual salary will pay it off many times over in the future.

Books

Believe it or not, college doesn’t teach you everything, in fact, as soon as you land a job you are going to have to learn and relearn bigger and more important things that actually have a tangible value in the real world. Thankfully, books exist that can accelerate this process or simply remove the need for a college education completely (in special cases of course).

So, brush the dust off that book collection of yours and get reading. If you have no books, I highly recommend you go buy a ridiculously large stack of them or even hit up the library (you cheap bastard!).

Books should help develop the cornerstone(s) of your thinking, what your books teach you are crucial to you getting a better chance of getting out of the potato peeling factory and on the road to financial independence.

Seminars and Conferences

You might have noticed ads for different seminars while reading the paper. While not all of them are intended to bring out the better “you” as in some are just there to get your money and make you sell ash to smelter dealers, some are purely educational and are of high value for the people that do make use of them.

Plus, you are more than likely to meet a lot of like minded people that are facing the same dilemmas as you and even a few people whose knowledge you might be able to mooch off of. Contacts are priceless; make great use of the time you spend with people. Be bold, outgoing, ask questions and say things as they are.

The World Wide Web

Turns out the internet can offer you more than just porn; if used properly, the internet can be one of the greatest tools for getting your noggin up to par with your wants and dreams. Simply put, you can find virtually anything on this contraption; that is of course if you are in the mood for discovering something in the first place.

Some random posts you might enjoy: