Dear Grads,

You’re probably receiving a lot of unsolicited advice right now. We happen to love talking about finances all day, so we hope you’ll forgive one hot tip, a piece of investment advice that could last you the rest of your life.

Keep investing in yourself.

This investment adjusts for inflation, and it grows along with you! When we invest in ourselves, we are seeking to improve our value to others. The more valuable we make ourselves, the more an employer or customer might pay us. Not to mention, improving ourselves often leads to more interesting and rewarding life experiences.

You have intangible assets that led you to this moment: remember, not everyone earns a diploma or degree. Don’t take for granted the skills, knowledge, strengths, and abilities that you’ve developed already. All those qualities add up to form your “human capital,” the value you might contribute through your work and your community in the years to come.

Great news: many aspects of human capital are free. Years ago, we knew a senior officer at a large publicly traded company whose most obvious superpower was kindness. After they moved on to a role somewhere else, people familiar with them always remembered that trademark feature—how the executive had helped them in the past, how they had made people feel.

Kindness is free. So are dependability, enthusiasm, diligence, and all the other traits people appreciate in each other. They can be developed, like muscles.

Other aspects of human capital require time and money, sometimes lots of both. Think of the education and training required of surgeons, for example. Choosing your educational path and planning a career are beyond the scope of this note, but you might consider how you make your choices.

How will the path help you be of service to those around you? What impact would you like to make in your corner of the world, as you move through it? You have a chance to create value, no matter where you’re headed next.

Developing your human capital is the foundation of building wealth. Whether it’s growing your earning potential on the job, choosing a new path as your talents develop, or finding a way to invest to leave a legacy, the power of compounding starts now, from the skills that got you here.

It all starts here, and it’s the one piece of investment advice that could last your lifetime. But hey, that’s just our two cents.

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