The Decision That Changed My Life Forever – And The Power Of Compounding

When I was a kid 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 often dangerous path that they hope takes them towards achieving their dreams and goals.
When shows talked about these 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.

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 it every day, year, and decade.
So, what does this have to do with the first paragraph above?
Everything.

Chaos Theory And The Butterfly Effect

One of the movies that affected my outlook on the proverbial fork in the road was 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.

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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.

One example, If I wouldn’t have gotten a job at Burger King 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, occasionally, to just think about random stuff.
What does any of this have to do with you reading this today.

Again, everything.

The One Decision That Changed My Life Forever

Around the age of 23, I’d been “learning” about investing for several years already. I put learning in quotations because I was just screwing around at that point.
How do I know this? Because my personal investment portfolio was down 50% within months of starting to invest real money.

I’d spent years “learning” about investing by myself. To only months later get my teeth kicked in by Mr. Market.

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

Ouch.
Why did this happen?

Because I wasn’t truly investing. It was more like playing around.

At 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.

After losing 50% of my portfolio in months and a child on the way, I remember sitting at my kitchen table with tears in my eyes staring down two paths.

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

I sat there for hours trying to decide which path I wanted to go down. The easy path I was already on. 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. But I also knew I had to do something different than what I was doing which led me to losing 50% of my investment portfolio in months.

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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 to reaching almost 1 million 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 18 years.
The first pic above was one of our first ever pictures… This is our family now.
I’ve written 2 full-length books and have plans for more.
Produced investment returns in the portfolios I manage of 23.5% per year on average in the first 9 years of my career… Not compounded.
This is just behind The Great Warren Buffett in the first 9 years of his career when he produced average annual returns of 24.2% per year at the Buffett Limited Partnership.
The returns I’ve produced legitimately make me one of the best stock pickers on Earth over the last 9 years.
I’ve 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 $80 million total.
I’ve advised companies with access to more than $1 billion in capital.
My team and I have helped feed more than 1,000 people in the Philippines with our charitable donations.
Our online contents gotten viewed by almost 1,000,000 people from almost every country on Earth.
And I was recently named a Top 100 Global Leader In Finance.
The compounding from this single decision is still affecting my life positively today. And transformed it forever.
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.
This is 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 just want a better life.
Decide today to make that happen.
How?
By making positive life-changing decisions.

A word of warning though. It’s not going to be easy.

Hell, it’s going to get life and spirit crushingly difficult at times. And you will want to quit often.
Don’t.

Keep moving forward.

Keep working towards your full potential.
Keep reaching towards your goals.
And you’ll help many others and achieve things you cannot even imagine.

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.

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 it forever.
If you’re ready to make a dramatic change in your own life and work toward your goals of becoming a great value investor reply to this message and say YES and I’ll send you more info about our newly relaunched Masterclass.
Always in your service,
Jason Rivera

P.S. Every time I repost a version of this, I get nasty comments and letters talking about how this isn’t really how the butterfly effect/chaos theory works. I know. I’m just using it as an illustration to prove the point of constant positive decisions.

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