MBA2206 How Much You Should Spend on Your Professional Development

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Podcast so let's jump right into the budget question. How much should you spend on your personal development? And the simple answer is, as much as possible. I'm serious. One of the best investments you can make in life, period, is investing in yourself. Improving your mindset, improving your skills, improving the way you think, perfecting your craft, just getting better will pay back tenfold. Why do I say that? Because this is how economics works. You get paid as an entrepreneur, as a business, as a thought leader, as a whatever, based on the value you add to the world. And the way you become valuable is you improve yourself. That's how you're able to provide value. Valuable people provide value to the marketplace, and that's why they get paid well. So if you want to get paid more, you have to become more valuable. Let's say you're a copywriter and you want to demand more. You want to be able to charge more for your copywriting skills. Well, that only happens when you become more valuable, when you become a better copywriter. So the more you invest to make that happen, the more you'll be able to charge. Now think about you as a business owner. You do a lot of things as a business owner. You lead, you manage. You might do certain things in the business, like you might be a coach and you teach. You might do sales, you might do some marketing. The point here is that there are skills that you are utilizing or leveraging so that you can be able to get more business. Now think about what if you were twice as good at those skills, you'd get twice as much business. And this is just not going to happen by accident. You have to make the time and you need to invest the money to get better. So I'm a big, big fan of investing in yourself. It's like what Alex Hormozy says, don't invest in the S&P 500 at the start of your career. Invest in the SME 500, meaning invest in yourself. So how much should you be spending on yourself? Now, remember, this investment is a business expense because you are doing professional development. This is something that you're using to improve your business. Now, of course, speak to a financial expert. I'm not a financial expert. Speak to your accountant to make sure that's all in the up and up. But the point here is that generally this is the case. Now, I once heard my buddy Ayman Abdullah, who is an amazing business coach and was the president of AppSumo for several years, took the company from 3 million to 100 million. He says you should never spend more on your car than on yourself in terms of professional development. So if you have a monthly payment on your car for $500 a month and you're spending less, your personal development, there's something wrong here. One, a car is not an investment, it's a liability. The price goes down the more you use it, right? The more time goes by. On the contrary, when you invest in yourself, it's an asset, right? You're improving yourself. You're getting better over time. You can leverage that asset to bring in more money. So I like to start with a professional development budget, a monthly budget that really kind of puts me a little bit uncomfortable, especially if you've never done this before. Start off with how much your monthly car payment is. If you don't have a monthly car payment, pick a number that is a little bit kind of out of your comfort zone in terms of spending on yourself, but it's still doable in terms of your budget. You're not really stretching your budget too much. So a good number to start with, I like to say, if you're comfortable, is $500 a month. That's $6,000 a year. Now, personally, and this is just me, and this is not you, this is where I started about 10 years ago, but it's not uncommon for me to spend $3,000 a month on personal development. Why? Because I see it as an investment. Okay, that's $36,000 a year. If I am investing $3,000 a month, whether it's a combination of courses and coaching and books and conferences, I'm confident that those things will help me earn a whole lot more than that every single year. So, for example, if I had a coach that I paid $2,000 a month for. It's $24,000 a year. It's very likely that that coaching will help me get a whole lot more revenue than just $24,000 extra every year, even if it's just purely accountability or somebody helping me out to stay on track, let alone the skills I'll build and the things I will learn and the things I will implement in my business. So if you're just starting out, if you've never done this before, a good place to start is $500. And again, everybody's budget is different. If that doesn't stretch you too much financially, then I would say go for it. Now, it's up to you how you want to spend that $6,000 a year, $500 a month. But I'm going to give you some recommendations to kind of help you get started. The first thing I want to recommend is the most bang for your buck. The most bang for your buck professional development tool are books. As you might know, I read over 50 books a year. Some of them are great, some of them are not so great, but all of them, I've learned something from them. And for the price, some of them being a few dollars on Kindle, some of them being, you know, 20, $30 on hardback. This is nothing compared to what I get out of the book. And what I love about books is that I have them. I can refer to them, I can go back to them, I can reinforce what I learn. Books are an incredible valuable tool for you to progress pretty quickly in your journey of entrepreneurship. And they're incredibly inexpensive. This is why I don't mind spending 50 to $100 a month on books. Some people prefer audiobooks, and people prefer paper hardback. Some people prefer Kindle. I actually like a combination of all of them. Sometimes I like listening to an autobiography when I'm in the gym. Sometimes I like to have the book in my hands when I'm at the park or the beach. Sometimes I like to have it on my Kindle so I can read it in bed or travel with it easily. Some of my books, I get them in different format. My next recommendation, where to spend your personal development budget is live coaching and training. Why do I recommend this? Because I've bought so many online courses, so many training programs, so many coaching programs, and in my experience, there's something about being live and attending live that allows you to really focus and make sure you get the most out of it. In the moment, you carve out the time, you show up, you Take notes. There is no tomorrow, there's no delaying. There's no I'll do this later, as you might have with a on demand course. This is why completion rates on on demand courses are abysmal. Less than 3% complete the course, let alone implement what's in the course. This is why I'll pay more money if the course is live or if the course includes some sort of weekly calls or coaching. This allows me to interact and be able to ask questions and get the most out of it. And it forces me to block the time in my calendar to attend and consume the content. If you're somebody that really just can't carve out the time and make sure you watch the whole course and implement and do all the worksheets and things like that, then I highly recommend you go with a live course or a coaching program. You're going to get a whole lot more from that. I also recommend group settings. As a student, I get a lot more from a group setting because I'm not only learning from the teacher, but I'm learning from the other students and the questions they're asking and the hot seats and the coaching that's happening. I have a peer group with me that I can network with but also learn from because as I'm going on my own journey, let's say I'm just taking one on one coaching and I'm going on my journey. I'm going to make some mistakes along the way. I'm going to learn from those mistakes. But if I'm in a group setting, in a group coaching setting, other people are going to make mistakes, share their mistakes, and I get to benefit from learning from other people's mistakes. So it's kind of like I'm moving faster than somebody who's doing it alone because I'm kind of learning more in a short period of time. The next thing on the list, I would say, is live events. We talked about that yesterday in Q and A Wednesday. But live events are a great way for you to learn from people, network. Learn about if you're doing the right things, if you basically comparing notes with other people. It's not necessarily for the actual content or the actual sessions you'll be attending at the conference, but more of what you're going to learn from the side chats and the networking and the dinners you're going to have at the event. Next on the list is short courses. These are on demand courses. I like short on demand courses that I can consume quickly in less than two hours. The shorter the better. If the course is one hour, it's even better. I don't like courses that try to cover everything under the sun. I want to go to a course and learn something very quickly. Kind of see it as like a workshop where I'm learning something very specific. So instead of me trying to learn everything in marketing, I go to a short workshop or course just focusing on how to write great headlines. Why? Because I just can't implement everything under the sun immediately. It's better for me to just to focus in on one skill so that I could learn it and implement it in my business immediately with very little delay. I got more on today's topic about how much to spend on your professional development and where to spend your budget to get the most out of your money out of your investment.

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Sxm to wrap up today's lesson, if you want to have a valuable business, a valuable career, a valuable life, then you have to invest in yourself. No one's going to do this for you. This is something that people don't tell you. No one's going to carve out the time or the money to invest in yourself. This is your responsibility. No one's going to force you to do it. No one's going to come and save you and say, hey, here's a plan and make you do and hold you accountable. You need to be disciplined enough to say, hey, I am worth the investment. Now you might be saying, omar, I don't know where to start when it comes to like, what do I need help in what course? What books? What should I pick up first? What should I invest my money in first? Well, I would say look at your business and ask yourself what area if I improved in this area would make the most impact on my business, make the most impact on my bottom line, get me a quick return on investment. Meaning if I learned how to master something and I implemented in my business, I know for sure I'll be able to recoup that investment and Then some. So one of the things I did about six or seven years ago is invest in my public speaking skills because I knew that if I was better on stage, if I was better on podcasts, whether it's my own podcast or being a guest on somebody else's podcast, that I would make a better impression on people and it would help with getting people to our website and market our business and just help my overall brand. I knew how critical that was and I needed help with that. So I spent some money on it. And not only did I see the return on investment in terms of the traffic it was sending our website because I was doing better on shows, I was doing better on my webinars, I was doing better on stages. I also saw my confidence grow. I also felt better about who I am as an entrepreneur, as a person, and that impacted different areas of my business. That also got me a return on investment. I hope that helps. I hope you loved today's episode. If you did leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, we'd love to hear what you think of the show. If you're on Spotify, you can give us a star review by following the show. Thank you in advance for doing that. It means a whole lot to us. We read every single review and it lets us know what to double down on so that we can keep doing it on the show. Thanks so much for listening. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. My only regret in life is that I didn't start investing in myself earlier. I only started investing in myself by buying myself books and courses at the age of, I think about 21 is when I started. I had the money when I was younger. You know, I could have spent money on myself and improving myself at a part time and full time job many times where I was earning decent income. But I didn't really spend on improving myself. I feel like I kind of lost out and that's lost time I can never get back. So if you haven't done this yet, if you haven't really allocated the budget to invest in yourself, do it now. Because every day that goes by, you're going to regret it. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in Tomorrow's episode Freeride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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