treasure

What’s in Your Portfolio

What’s In Your Portfolio?

A portfolio is generally understood as a collection of valuables; whether artistic drawings, important papers, or financial investments. It reflects the talents and treasures of the owner, and is generally carefully cultivated and added to over a period of time. But to increase the treasures in your portfolio, you must first focus on increasing your talents.

A recent issue of Forbes Magazine featured The Best Investment Advice of All Time, which profiled insider tips from some of the financial industry’s best known thought leaders. These were financial gurus such as T. Rowe Price, Jr., George Soros, Sir John Templeton, David Tepper, Sam Zell and Warren Buffett who built their professional expertise and personal portfolios based on their intellect and abilities. They had to invest in their talent before building their treasure.

These talents or skillsets include knowledge, wisdom, abilities, experiences and interests. And most of all they include your innate gifts, those characteristics endowed upon you from birth that attract you and compel your learning decisions. Properly applied they develop and produce treasures.

Your Talents Form A Foundation For Your Treasures

Building and investing in a portfolio of talents is equally important as your portfolio of treasures. Here are several great examples.

Jeff Maggioncalda – courtesy of www.FinancialEngines.com

Several decades ago when Jeff Maggioncalda was newly married, he created a simulation engine to model the results of one million Monopoly games to generate the probabilities and payoffs for its various properties, and used this as a cheat sheet to beat his wife at the game.  Later, Jeff used his ability to develop simulations to found Financial Engines, a company which provides financial advice to almost 800,000 employees at 553 large employers. Because Jeff invested in himself first he was able to transform his ideas and skills into a lucrative business, and build his portfolio.

 

 


 

Floyd Mayweather, Jr. courtesy of Wikipedia

Floyd Mayweather, Jr. is the world’s highest paid athlete with $105 million earned in the boxing ring over the past year. According to Wikipedia, he is currently undefeated as a professional and is a five-division world champion, having won ten world titles and the lineal championship in four different weight classes.  His father, a boxer and trainer, started taking him to the gym as soon as he could walk, and fitted him for his first pair of boxing gloves at the age of seven. Floyd developed his skill by investing years of practice in the gym, but it was fueled by an innate love for the sport. This propelled him to his current position atop the list of highest paid athletes, with a portfolio to match.

 

 

 

 

Sarah Ketterer courtesy of Columbia Business School

Sarah Ketterer was born into the investment world. Her father, John Hotchkis, founded several successful asset management companies where she worked during the summers; but she didn’t initially pursue a career there. After several educational and professional shifts, Sarah eventually became interested in understanding and organizing the data used to make investment decisions, and joined her father’s firm to start a new international equity arm. From there, she and a partner developed a new model of money management, and in 2001 started their own international asset management business. Their unique approach which combines quantitative computer program probability predictions with fundamental analysis of stocks has paid off, and in the past 18 months their assets have more than doubled to $33 billion.

Leave a Legacy

The typical result of building a successful portfolio of treasures is to bestow it upon your heirs, or to donate it to a worthy cause. Some have amassed family fortunes in a trust for generations to come. Others have joined Bill Gates’ and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge, a commitment by the world’s wealthiest individuals and families to dedicate the majority of their wealth to philanthropy. Whether your portfolio is valued at $10,000 or $10 million or $10 billion, if properly managed its value may outlive you.

Similarly, a successful portfolio of talents can add value to others and provide benefits for those around you and for future generations. Inventors and innovators like Steve Jobs, George Washington Carver, and Thomas Edison have proven this already.

So what’s in your portfolio of talents, and how will that transfer to your portfolio of treasures? What assets do you have in terms of your skillsets, abilities, interests, and experiences? Whether you’re just holding a job, or in the midst of a successful career, it’s important to hone in on those elements upon which your success has been or can be built. Doing so will not only drive the right decisions to maximize your future personal development and professional career choices, but will enable you to provide lasting benefit to others in their growth and development.

Copyright 2014 Priscilla Archangel

Read Forbes Magazine’s June 30, 2014 issue for more information on Maggioncalda, Mayweather and Ketterer. Learn more about Mayweather’s early years here.

 

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The Gift the Keeps on Giving

The Gift That Keeps On Giving

What do you give the person who seems to have everything? You give something that costs you little.

What do you give the person who seems to have nothing? You give something that costs you much.

That’s what Warren Buffett, Bill and Melinda Gates, and 65 other billionaires have decided to do. They’ve pledged to give half of their net worth to philanthropy.In June 2010, Buffet and Gates started the Giving Pledge where they challenge billionaires across the world to sign a pledge committing to give half of their money to charity during their lifetime. For Buffett, this focus on giving started when he was in his 20s studying wealthy industrialists such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan, and their prolific giving to science, arts and culture. (See Wall Street Journal article for more info.) Now that Buffett has long been established as a billionaire, he is doing the same. He and others are using their wealth to make a difference in every area of life across the world.They are leveraging the fruit of their talents to impact the world.They’ve realized that after a certain point, wealth and riches mean nothing if you can’t use it to help others who may be less fortunate.

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Buffett and Gates’ initiative is admirable because they’ve made it a priority to lead others in giving. Specifically, they established themselves as ACEs, and you can do the same.

Accountability – They challenged other billionaires to be accountable to each other on how they use their wealth. You can identify others who, like you, have an abundance of resources. This shouldn’t be hard, because like attracts like. The people who are your closest friends, with whom you have the most in common, probably have similar resources. Challenge them, hold them accountable to use those resources to make a difference in the lives of others who are less fortunate.

Change – They believe that their wealth can create change for the good. What unfortunate situations seem to pierce your heart the most?  Is it poverty, sickness, children who lack the benefit of music, art or sports in their educational system? These issues weigh on your spirit for a reason; so that you can do something to make a difference in that arena, using your resources to bring about change.

Expectation – They created an expectation that their giving makes a difference in the future of others. You too can expect that your gift will change the lives and environment of others. You can create your own self-fulfilling prophecy that you expect good results from your investment.

Since very few of us are billionaires, does that mean that we can’t have an impact in the world?  Does that mean that we can’t use our comparably limited assets to help others?  We each have an abundance of resources in the form of our time, our talent or our treasures which we can give freely to others.

  • Our time represents what we value most.  Take a look at how a man or woman spends their time each day, and you’ll know what’s most important to them.
  • Our talent represents the abilities, skills and knowledge we possess that we can share with others. Freely sharing our talent will reduce expenses and costs to others.
  • Our treasure represents financial resources that we’ve earned or inherited that can fund the good works of others.

One person’s time, another’s talent, and yet another’s treasures all working together are essential to improve the lives of people on every continent. So don’t wait for the government or someone else to allocate resources to a problem, or to make it a priority. Determine how you can make a difference. Determine how you can lead others to give extraordinary things in extraordinary ways.

“We have a choice. We can make our kids billionaires and it will ruin them. Or we can realize how blessed we are and try to spread those blessings around. My view has always been that success unshared is failure.”John Paul DeJoria, founder of the Paul Mitchell hair-products empire who grew up homeless. (The Biggest Gift In The World, WSJ Magazine, November 2011, p. 104)

“But this I say, He which soweth sparingly shall reap also sparingly; and he which soweth bountifully shall reap also bountifully. Every man according as he purposeth in his heart, so let him give; not grudgingly, or of necessity; for God loveth a cheerful giver. And God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that ye, always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to every good work.”(2 Corinthians 9:6-8) King James Study Bible

Copyright 2011 Priscilla Archangel

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