When I first got into marketing and sales of an educational product I was inspired by a seminar where the person making great sales spoke about his income and how he believed in investing and not in saving alone. Post that seminar, I started researching more and more about it and I learnt about the epic author & I wouldn’t be wrong in saying, I thought he was the world’s 'best selling' financial education author. I'm referring to the terrific author & living genius Robert T Kiyosaki. It's then when I learnt that world’s best and most powerful people who control a lot of wealth are investors.

I was then forced to ask myself what do I want to be in my life, a small business owner, someone who just makes ends meet and thinks life is large in small things, someone who builds a big business or someone who is an investor & live the small things & the big things. I knew I had to become an investor someday. It’s definitely easy said than done. I dreamt of it all, more than a decade ago & I still am. Presently am building my businesses big & I know I stand a few years, or little less than half a decade, away from being an investor but the best part still lies in the fact that I knew I had to become one someday. To get there it was important I understood Business plans, technology, markets, operational challenges, supply chain, real estate, people, places and so much more and all my experiences have given me enough of that.

The one question that I always kept in mind about my mind-set helped me with the clarity I needed at each stage; 'Am I into investing or investors?'. This question helped me align all my actions to being an investor someday & not really think my life is going to change once I successfully chase & convince investors. I shall first invest efforts & get investments of money & somebody invest capital into company besides investing intellectual capital, strategy & knowhow.

The resource I initially had when I had never still earnt my first pie was "TIME" and it is today, in my hindsight, true that TIME is MONEY. My question always pushed me to think about being investor of my time & then from one of the books of Mr Warren Buffett I learnt that a great investor waits for the results to show up & doesn't panic just because the market does. I invested my time into multiple areas of life and started to enjoy the benefits of that.

I successfully built the training brand i3, multiple social projects, myself as an Internationally successful speaker who is invited globally at various forums. I realise today that Investing & Investors are supposed to act together to build visions & ideas. You gotta be into both at the same time, Invest what you have & Invite other interested investors too who would then add value to the vision to multiply it faster than you alone could have.

I invested time, strategy & efforts in building my ideas, skills & people with me. Today I am delighted to stand among the people who scrutinise B-Plans & evaluate them. I invested my belief in people & ideas. Many failed & many succeeded. I had to learn the hard way that not all the people would understand the vision I have, the way I have seen it, even if it meant I saw it for them, because it's hard for them to relate as they would themselves haven't seen their glory to the heights I could. I learnt that these failures tag us the path to glory & move us forward, provided we're on the look out for growth. Otherwise these failures can be depressions in disguise. For me, I always have been a learner & learnt loads from my failures & those of others too.

If you are into investing efforts, time & strategy & need investors to invest capital, you must build the synergy & stay clear of what you are aiming to achieve with the idea, strategy, business & eventually serving the end beneficiary with. It stands today that I welcome investors to be a part of my ideas & together make great things happen & I soon, in a few years, will see you on the other side of the table if you have an idea, where, I shall be happy to evaluate its worthiness to invest.

Are you into investing or investors? Keep asking yourself!