Last Updated on August 2, 2026 by Michelle
What if the most valuable investment you ever make isn’t in the market, but in the person making the investments?
When people discover that I’ve spent more than twenty years working in investment banking, they almost always ask me the same question.
“What’s the best investment you’ve ever made?”
They’re expecting me to name a company.
Perhaps an ETF.
Maybe a stock I bought at just the right time.
I always smile because the answer they expect isn’t the answer I want to give.
The best investment I ever made never appeared on my brokerage statement.
In fact, if you looked at my portfolio, you wouldn’t find it anywhere.
Yet it has generated greater returns than any financial investment I’ve ever owned.
It was an investment in becoming the person capable of building the life I wanted.
At the time, I didn’t know that was what I was doing.
Looking back, I can see it now.
I Thought I Was Building a Portfolio
In 2018, I started tracking every dollar I spent.
There was nothing particularly inspiring about it.
No grand vision.
No dramatic turning point.
I simply wanted to understand how much I was spending. This had a clear purpose – I wanted to know how much passive income I needed to sustain my lifestyle after I stopped working.
Like many people, I thought becoming financially free was mostly about investing wisely.
So I downloaded an app and began recording every expense.
Coffee.
Groceries.
Transport.
Lunch.
Every dollar had somewhere to go.
It was repetitive.
Sometimes boring.
Certainly not something I imagined writing about years later.
If someone had told me then that this simple habit would change my life, I would have laughed.
It was just a daily habit, and maybe a bit a bit extra.
Or so I thought.
Looking Back, I Was Building Something Else
It’s funny how we only understand some investments in hindsight.
A few years after I started tracking my expenses, I began learning French on Duolingo.
Not because I needed French for work.
Simply because I like the language and wanted to learn.
Then I started strength training consistently.
I filled my daily commute and evening walks with podcasts about psychology, investing and personal growth.
I began writing on weekends.
I journaled more often.
Recently, I even started ending each week by writing down moments I felt grateful for after being inspired by something Jay Shetty shared.
None of these habits felt extraordinary.
In fact, they all felt wonderfully ordinary.
At no point did I think,
“These are the investments that will shape my future.”
But perhaps that’s the nature of compounding.
While it’s happening, it rarely feels like progress.
It simply feels like showing up.
Again.
And again.
We Build Two Portfolios in Life
For most of my career, I believed I was building one portfolio.
My financial portfolio.
The investments that would one day provide enough freedom for me to leave corporate life and dedicate myself to BYORM which is what I love working on, even if it didn’t pay me.
That portfolio mattered.
It still does.
But somewhere along the journey, I realised I’d been building another portfolio without even knowing it.
An identity portfolio.
Unlike a financial portfolio, you can’t see it on an app.
You can’t calculate its return.
Nobody asks how it’s performing.
Yet it quietly compounds every single day.
Every workout adds to it.
Every book you finish.
Every promise you keep to yourself.
Every difficult conversation you choose not to avoid.
Every evening you decide to learn instead of endlessly scrolling.
Every night you decide to go to sleep instead of endlessly scrolling.
Every time you choose your future over your comfort.
These investments don’t immediately change your life.
They change you.
And over time, you become someone capable of creating a life that once felt impossible.
The Real Return Was Never Money
Today, people sometimes ask me how I found the confidence to leave a successful career after more than two decades.
The honest answer is that confidence didn’t arrive one morning.
It accumulated.
Quietly.
Almost invisibly.
It grew every time I honoured a commitment I’d made to myself.
Every month I invested before spending.
Every workout I completed even when I wasn’t particularly motivated.
Every article I wrote after a full week of work.
Every podcast I listened to instead of letting my commute disappear unnoticed.
Every small promise I kept became another vote for the person I wanted to become.
Looking back, I don’t think I was building discipline.
I was building trust. With myself. The best kind of trust.
Trust that if I said I would do something, I would.
That kind of trust changes how you see yourself.
And perhaps more importantly, it changes what you believe is possible.
My Greatest Asset Isn’t My Portfolio
Today, I feel incredibly grateful for the financial freedom I’ve built. I am not there yet, but I have the confidence that I am well on my way to it.
It has given me choices.
It has given me peace of mind.
It has given me the confidence to prepare for a life beyond an employee’s life.
But if someone asked me to choose between keeping my investment portfolio or keeping the person I’ve become while building it, I know exactly which I would choose.
Because markets rise and fall.
Portfolios grow and shrink.
Money comes and goes.
But becoming someone who is curious, disciplined, optimistic and willing to keep learning—that stays with you.
If everything disappeared tomorrow, I would still have the habits that helped me build it in the first place.
And perhaps that’s what real wealth looks like.
The Investment That Made BYORM Possible
People sometimes ask me when BYORM began.
Most assume it started when I launched a website or published my first article.
I don’t think it did.
I think BYORM began years earlier.
It began every time I chose to become just a little more aligned with the person I hoped to become one day.
Every habit.
Every investment.
Every walk spent learning.
Every journal entry.
Every quiet Saturday morning writing instead of waiting for inspiration.
Without realising it, I wasn’t just preparing to leave my career.
I was preparing for my next one.
My second life didn’t begin when I decided to create BYORM.
It began years earlier through thousands of ordinary decisions that no one else noticed.
Perhaps We’re Asking the Wrong Question
We spend a lot of time asking ourselves whether our investments are performing well.
It’s a sensible question.
But lately I’ve been wondering whether there’s a better one.
Not,
“How is my portfolio doing?”
But,
“Who is my portfolio helping me become?”
Because while our financial portfolio compounds our wealth, our identity portfolio compounds something even more valuable.
The person we’ll become in five years.
In ten years.
In the second half of our lives.
Perhaps that’s why I no longer think the best investment I ever made was a stock, an ETF or anything that appeared on a brokerage statement.
The greatest investment I ever made was quietly becoming someone my future self could rely on.
Everything else—including financial freedom—simply became a dividend of that investment.
At BYORM, we often talk about designing the second half of life intentionally.
Looking back, I realise that design didn’t begin with a financial plan.
It began with a series of ordinary choices that slowly shaped an extraordinary identity.
Maybe that’s the investment that matters most.
Not the one that grows your money.
The one that grows you.
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