Naked as a Baby
Now imagine you were thrown naked into a new and foreign environment. Think of one where you look different from everyone else, and you don’t speak their language. Far away from modern civilization. What do you do? How do you survive? You have absolutely nothing with you, so what now?
This is where one of the 4 capitals we discussed in the previous segment comes into play. That of personal capital. As mentioned last time, personal capital is all the skills, knowledge and abilities that you possess that no one can take away without inflicting bodily or psychological harm upon you.
Think of language, physical skills (sports, dancing), charisma and knowledge (science, sales, accounting.) Now in our aforementioned scenario, all you have is the God given abilities you have and the skills you’ve developed. Now it’s a matter of interacting with your environment in such a way that gets you what you need.
How To Get More Personal Capital?
Moving on, how do we obtain more personal capital? How do we invest with a positive return? Well it could be through a number of different ways. It could be an outright time investment, say if we decided to do pushups everyday, but you could also begin investing your financial capital as well, say if you purchased a gym membership that provided a better environment to get you to achieve that level of personal capital.
Or if it is a skill that perhaps requires taking a course or reading a book, it would entail a time and money investment. But any number of different combinations. Of course emotional capital can also be drawn upon, ‘ep’ as in the people around you encouraging you to get in shape as well as your own inner strength. Which ultimately it is your personal capital that will ultimately lead to you gaining the financial capital that you want through the craft that you perfect.
Think of it this way, we were born with little, yet through individual effort, we surround ourselves with the people and things we have today (in the simplistic sense). All that outcome was derived through investment into our personal capital.
Kingston S. Lim 