
If a young guy had come to you in 2005 and asked you to paint his new offices and then offered to pay you in either a few thousand dollars or just the equivalent in company stock, you would probably have gone for the cash.
Right?
Especially if the company seemed on the whole a sort of a pointless network for college kids.
Fortunately for the painter David Choe, he picked the stock.
Which is now worth more than $200 million.
The young man was Mark Zuckerberg, found of Facebook.
That’s a heck of an ROI.
We are always looking for a Return On Investment in business.
Return on cash.
Return on time.
Return on people.
Sometimes we are successful. Sometimes not. It’s part of the game.
But there is one resource that is almost guaranteed to give maximum upside.
Knowledge.
Have you ever tried to calculate what the ROI is on learning how to write?
It’s so high there’s no point in doing the maths.
Many of the resources we invest in are finite – staff time, stock, rent.
We can use them for a fixed period of time but then we have to invest again.
Knowledge is infinite.
You invest once then deploy it again and again.