Warren Buffett Says What Separates the Doers From the Dreamers Really Comes Down to 1 Easy Choice

Your overall success in life may very well depend on it.

Warren Buffett is considered to be one of the greatest investors of all time and is consistently ranked among the richest people in the world. When Buffett offers up recommendations, people’s ears perk up.

The Oracle of Omaha once advised people to invest as much as possible in a commodity that anyone, anywhere, can have access to regardless of how much money they have.

In fact, Buffett went as far as saying that one can never invest too much in this indispensable asset. 

Yourself.

Buffett once shared with Good Morning America one of the best ways to achieve success and be a doer, instead of merely a dreamer:

 Investing in yourself is the best thing you can do. Anything that improves your own talents.

Three ways to make the most of your investment

You probably won’t get a better return on life than when you invest in your professional development, career growth, education, job skills, leadership competencies, and the like. But investing in yourself may be about the simple, everyday things that most of us so often neglect to keep us functioning at our best. Here are three to consider improving: 

1. Invest in improving your health and well-being

Seriously, at this stage of our human existence, with pandemics, recessions, and inflation bearing down on us, self-care should be your starting point. We need to be firing on all cylinders to make the most of every day. As leaders, your customers, employees, communities, and family members depend on you to keep the world “spinning on its axis” in your local context. Think about what area of your mental, physical, or even spiritualhealth you’re neglecting right now. Your plan of action doesn’t have to be time-consuming and too demanding. Just be mindful of improving one area of your well-being. For example:

• Mental health: Soak up a self-help book (a few pages a day will do), journal, practice mindful meditation, spend more time with the people you love, take paid time off, and choose every opportunity to express your joy to others.
• Physical health: Exercise (even if it’s just for 10 minutes), cut out junk food and excessive sugar, drink one gallon of water per day, go for more nature walks, and get at least seven hours of shut-eye every night.
• Spiritual health: Pray (whether you’re religious or not isn’t the point; it’s meant to connect you to your “higher power”), practice gratitude by writing a gratitude list for as little as three minutes a day, slow things down by practicing more patience, and be kind to others. 

2. Invest in feeding your mind

One of the best secrets to Buffett’s success is that he is continuously learning. Charlie Munger, the vice chairman of Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway corporation, once said this about Buffett:

Warren Buffett has become one hell of a lot better investor since the day I met him, and so have I. If we had been frozen at any given stage, with the knowledge we had, the record would have been much worse than it is. So the game is to keep learning, and I don’t think people are going to keep learning who don’t like the learning process.

The pathways for learning these days are numerous and easily accessible, whether it’s through conferences, free online courses, podcasts, or soaking up the wisdom of mentors and sages over coffee. 

Buffett has a strategy that he follows religiously: Go to bed a little smarter each day. He has literally applied this over his lifetime to gain an enormous competitive advantage.  

The way he does it is to simply grow his mind — something that anybody with a fair amount of steady discipline is capable of doing. Buffett knows that the mind is the most powerful weapon to succeed in business, which is why he spends 80 percent of his working day reading and thinking. When asked how to get smarter, Buffett once held up stacks of paper and said he “read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge builds up, like compound interest.”

3. Invest in doing what you love to do

The biggest lesson on improving your self-worth from Buffett stands the test of time and is especially apropos in the age of quiet quitting: Do what you love. Buffett once said:

I get to work in a job that I love, but I have always worked at a job that I loved. I loved it just as much when I thought it was a big deal to make $1,000. I urge you to work in jobs that you love. I think you are out of your mind if you keep taking jobs that you don’t like because you think it will look good on your résumé. 

Do what you love and stop working in dead-end jobs with little pay and no purpose. Sound familiar? That’s the battle cry of today’s workers during this Great Reset. While Buffett’s comment, you may object, is easy to remark when you’re a billionaire many times over, quite truthfully, Buffett was already doing what he loves long before he became successful. 

While there are certain risks involved in chasing work or a career you love, consider the payoffs of this investment. When you love what you do, it just doesn’t feel like work. Doing what you love is a major contributor to true happiness in life. It will pay endless emotional dividends.

I’ll end with Warren Buffett again, who said, “I love every day. I mean, I tap dance in here and work with nothing but people I like. There is no job in the world that is more fun than running Berkshire, and I count myself lucky to be where I am.”