When Wall Street collapsed ten years ago, a lot of people lost their life’s savings overnight.

I remember reading about a stand-up comedian who had retired a few years before the crash, having to go back to work trying to make people laugh after losing all his money, as all his money was tied up in a Lehman Brothers fund.

When they went down, so did everything he owned.

It must have been hard to make a joke out of that.

People are always looking for that perfect investment. One that gives great returns with little or no risk. They are difficult, if not impossible, to find.

What if I could tell you of a completely risk-free investment, and one that guarantees fantastic returns, would you think I’m crazy?

Well it just so happens that one such investment does exist.

This investment is not monetary, but it will make your life richer than any amount of money will.

It is simply investing in yourself.

Chris and I talked at length about the importance of investing in yourself and your skills in our interview on The Broughton English Show.

In today’s society, everyone is obsessed with motivation. “You need to be more motivated!”, “Motivation will give you everything you’ve ever wanted!”. But we know that motivation is related to emotions.

You need to feel motivated.

You can’t just be motivated.

It’s as if I told you to be sad right now. You can’t just feel sad when somebody tells you to.

Likewise, you can’t just feel motivated when someone tells you to.[thrive_leads id=’1049′]

So what happens is that people sit, waiting for that moment when they feel motivated before starting a project, or investing in themselves.

And, of course, that moment never arrives.

You will never magically feel motivated.

You cannot create the feeling of motivation.

But what if you create an environment that will make you feel motivated?

To do this, you need to start investing. Investing is kind of hard and unnatural for humans. It requires sacrificing something now, in the present, to get something back in the future, far far away in the future.

Humans, by nature, are not very good at thinking in this way.

But investing is the only way that you guarantee obtaining more in the future (well, unless you invest with Lehman Brothers…).

When you start investing in your English, it doesn’t matter if you are motivated or not because you are contributing to developing your skills.

Likewise, you can be super motivated, but if you aren’t investing in your English, all that motivation is for nothing.

Now here’s the reality.

You cannot increase your English level today.

Impossible.

Sorry.

But you can do something today that will contribute to improving your English skills.

How can you do this?

Well, you can follow the advice of the world’s most famous and successful investor: Warren Buffet.

He attributes his success to three things: “Living in America, having some lucky genes, and the compound effect”.

Now you may not have any control over the first two, but the only one that really matters is the third: the compound effect.

He always says that when he buys shares, he only considers the value that they will have in twenty years.

He knows that if they increase in value just a little bit, but every day. Well, in twenty years, those small incremental increases compound and create a huge amount of money in return.

Something I always recommend to my students is to apply the compound effect to their learning.

Try to improve your English by 1% today.

Only 1%.

And then make sure you improve it another 1% tomorrow. Then the next day, and the next.

Then 1% in the morning, and 1% in the afternoon.

These small but consistent improvements will have more effect on your English learning than anything else you can do.

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As the old saying goes, “Slow and steady wins the race”.

A simple way to do this is to learn one new thing every day in English.

Have a purpose when you have contact with English to guarantee that you’ll learn something.

If you read this post purposefully, you should be able to learn at least ten new things.

There’s a whole world of English out there waiting for you! Go learn one thing, invest in yourself, and reap the rewards in the future.

That’s when you’ll feel motivation.

Then there’s no stopping your progress.