The Decision That Changed My Life Forever

Growing up, there were always movies and TV shows that talked about the proverbial fork in the road.

Typically, one side of the road leads people to continue leading the same lives they’re already living. And the other takes the person on an unknown, hard, and an often dangerous path that they hope takes them towards achieving their dreams and goals.

When these shows talked about these kinds of life-changing decisions and their potential paths, they were often hyperbolic and overly dramatic.

Or so I thought…

But we’ll get back to that in a bit.

First I need to tell you about the power of compounding.

The Immense Power Of Compounding

While our belief in compounding and its massive power varies in us; as value investors, we are all believers of the effects of compounding to some degree…

Compounding of money, time, learning, and pretty much everything.

But this doesn’t mean we always believed or knew what this power was.

And even if we did; few of us realize how powerful compounding truly is over time. Even though we’re in the finance arena that relies on compounding every day, year, and decade.

So what does this have to do with the first paragraph above?

Everything as it turns out…

Chaos Theory And The Butterfly Effect

One of the movies that affected my outlook on the proverbial fork in the road was the movie the Butterfly Effect with Ashton Kutcher.

The movie wasn’t great in terms of quality.

But in getting me to think, it did its job.

How one decision, event, thought, or mistake can change your entire life.

Again, even as a kid, I knew this was an overly dramatic look at making and living with decisions but it still got me thinking about different scenarios.

• What would have happened if I would have kissed the girl?
• What would have happened if I wouldn’t have kissed that girl?
• What would my childhood have been like if I didn’t play sports growing up?

And on and on, most of the time, the thoughts I had about this as a kid revolved around typical teenage boy things like the above examples.

But every once in a while I still think about how different my life could have been if certain of my decisions were different…

If I wouldn’t have gotten a job at Burger King when I was in high school I would have never dated and then married my now wife…

This means we wouldn’t have any kids…

This means I wouldn’t live in Florida…

This means both of our entire lives would be completely different.

I never look back on things like this and ever think of them as regrets… It’s just more of a thinking and gratitude exercise for me.

Why?

Because I try not to live with regrets.

And because I find it intellectually stimulating for a few minutes, every once in a while, to just think about random stuff.

And also because most of the time when I think about these differing situations, it leads to my suicide.

The One Decision That Changed My Life Forever

Until the age of 17, I lived a pretty typical middle-class teenage boy’s life.

I spent my days at school, hanging out with friends, chasing girls, playing sports, and playing video games.

That is until one day I woke up and felt incredibly dizzy.

This feeling was there every day for a few months, then went away for a few months, then came back for a few months, and on and on until about the age of 22 or 23.

Then the dizziness came one day, stayed, and hasn’t gone away completely since… I’m now 31.

Around the age of 23, I’d been “learning” about investing for several years already. I put learning in quotations because I was really just screwing around at that point.

About this same time, the rest of my personal life was a horror show…

My personal investment portfolio was down 50% within months of starting to invest real money.

I had no skills.

I had no job.

I couldn’t do more than 1 hour worth of anything any day because the dizziness was so bad.

One day, I thought about killing myself.

That night I broke down to my wife when she got home from work and I was bawling like a child.

And to top it off, my wife was pregnant with our first child…

I always wanted to be a dad but because of the above things it put even more pressure on me – I put even more pressure on myself – to do something…  Anything productive with my life to provide for my now growing family.

Shortly, after I found out my wife was pregnant, I came to one of these crossroads mentioned above.

And I still remember it vividly almost 10 years later.

I was sitting at our kitchen table, tears in my eyes, writing things down that I could do to someday make money for my family even if the dizziness never got any better.

The list was:

• A) Become a politician… But no one likes politicians and I’m a horrible liar so that was out.
• B) Become a writer… That was out too because I was an awful writer.  I was so bad that one of my high school teachers said about a paper I wrote – “I hope you never become a writer because this paper is terrible.” It was… I got a D on the paper and almost flunked my Senior Year level English class.
• C) And the third option was to keep doing what I was doing by focusing on investing… But instead actually learn the craft of investing well and dedicate myself to it.

As mentioned above, I’d been learning about investing for years at this point but most of that knowledge was useless because I’d been focusing on the wrong things.

Most of the time, I only looked at the companies’ ratios, and if they were “good”, I’d invest in them.

I often didn’t even know what industry or business the company operated.

This is why Mr. Market kicked me in the teeth and gave me a 50% loss within months of starting to invest real money.

But let’s get back to the story…

I remember sitting at my kitchen table with tears in my eyes staring down two paths after I decided what I was going to do…

1. Keep doing what I’m doing and hope everything gets better at some point. This was the easy way out.
2. Take the unknown path and work as hard as I can towards my real goals and dreams. The hard, unknown, and dangerous path.

The easy path I was already on… This is the path that led me to almost killing myself.

But this terrifying thought wasn’t even the turning point for me.

Neither was being there for my wife and soon to be first daughter…

At that point of deep depression me becoming a dad was actually a negative for me…

I felt like I was a burden to them and I thought they’d be better off if I freed them from my burdens and health issues so they can live a better life without me.

Or at least that was the depressing way I thought then.

I sat there for hours trying to decide which path I wanted to go down… The easy path and my likely suicide, or the hard, unknown, and potentially dangerous path of dedicating myself to something.

Something that I knew little about.

Something where I had zero ideas of how to make money.

And somewhere where I still had almost zero knowledge of anything because of my prior lack of focus and trying to do things the easy way without truly working and learning.

I knew the path would be extremely difficult due to my health issues but it was still better than suicide.

Mostly out of me being incredibly stubborn, I chose the unknown path of working towards my goals and dreams instead of the easy way I was doing things before.

This is the one decision that changed my life forever.

This is the one decision that has led me here to you reading this today.

And this is the one decision that led me out of that deep dark state mentioned above to helping hundreds of thousands of people worldwide.

How Has This One Decision Compounded Since Then?

I’ve now got three daughters.

Still married to my high school sweetheart. We started dating in June 2003, so we’ve now been together for 15 years.

I’ve written 2 full-length books and have plans for more.

Produced higher returns in the first six years of my career than the Great Warren Buffett did in the first six years of his career.

Built courses teaching others how to value invest.

I’m a member of the Rutgers University CX Advisory Board.

I’ve gone after acquisitions worth more than $40 million.

And had our online content viewed by more than 350,000 people from 183 of 195 countries in the world.

This is a long way away from suicide.

The compounding effect from this single decision is still affecting my life positively today and changed my life forever.

And while I’m grateful for all of this and what’s to come, I’m not writing this post or anything in it for me.

I’m writing this 100% for you.

To prove to you that you can do anything you want and aspire to.

Even if you have severe health issues, or came from a bad family situation, or are poor, or whatever your situation is.

If you continue making positive life-changing decisions you can change your life and your situation.

It’s not going to be easy…

Hell, it’s going get life and spirit crushingly difficult at times. And you will want to quit often.

Don’t.

Keep moving forward…

Keep working towards reaching your full potential.

And keep reaching towards your goals.

There are still days I want to quit, do nothing, and just “be normal” and “do normal” things.

But I keep pushing forward because I want to create a better life for my family and those like you that I serve every day.

If you continue making the hard positive decisions to change your life… If you continue to learn and improve and compound those decisions and experiences every day… You will reach your goals at some point.

You will reach your full potential.

And you’ll help many others along the way as well.

Maybe these forks in the road aren’t as overly dramatic and hyperbolic as I thought they were growing up… Maybe in real life they’re even more powerful and dramatic than in the movies.

If I Could Go Back In Time, Would I Change Anything?

Every time I tell my story people immediately ask me the above question.

And my immediate answer is always…

“No”.

Every time I say this to people they look at me like I’m nuts.

I’m used to this look not just because I’ve gotten this question dozens of times now.  But also because every doctor I talked to for the first 5 years of dealing with the dizziness I saw the same look…  Disbelief.  Every doctor for the first five years of dealing with this treated me like I was lying.

I can see that same look in this person’s eyes today… They don’t believe me even so they ask again…

“But what about losing years of your life to the dizziness, you wouldn’t change that?”

I answer “no” again.

But this time I explain further…

“If I went back and changed the dizziness, I likely wouldn’t be with my wife, wouldn’t have my kids, I wouldn’t be doing anything I’m doing now to help people around the world, and I wouldn’t be here talking with you today.

My struggle has made me who I am…  I would never change that.”

But I also didn’t want to wallow in it either.

I made the conscious choice to improve my life… Even though I knew it would be almost impossible.

This is the power of decisions we make every day in our lives.

Choose today to make a powerful positive decision in your life that could end up changing your life forever.

Choose the hard and unknown path to improve your life and your situation.

Don’t take the easy way out or any situation… The easy way is usually the wrong way.

Keep reaching towards your full potential.

And keep moving forward.

You never know how your positive, hard, unknown decisions will compound in your life. But if you keep pushing and learning it will be towards your goals and dreams.

Always in your service,

Jason Rivera