Individuals invest in their own ideas the way companies do. Each one of us have our own ideas to implement and because we don't have to report to anyone and because there is no framework in place, we are not organized about how we go about implementing the ideas and tracking the return on investment of those ideas. For those who know the power of compounding know that overtime everything compounds and the investment today is going to be 10 times more, 10 years from now (when I say investment, I mean money or work).
With that, the best foot forward at this point would be to invest in 3-4 ideas for the long-term. The article at McKinsey Quaterly on Just-in-time strategy is very apt for companies as well as individuals. Fact: We know what we like, we know what we'd like to see us doing 10 years from now; the investment that is required for us to realize what we want to do later in life is the implementation (right now) of a portfolio of ideas and habits. We also know that the way companies are run are not really optimal because a sense of ownership of work can never be enforced, it is only to be realized by the employees of a company. Now, when we invest in oneself, we really own the investment and take care of it...therefore, there is no way we are going to find sense-of-ownership problems with our work/investments (don't worry, we will have a lot of other problems to fix).
Some of my ideas and way-of-life have already been implemented for over 2-3 years and I can see that pursuing anything for a few years makes you really good at it. Most of us (below 50 years old) have a long long way to go and it's time to heavily invest on oneself, and not just that, we need to track/monitor/improve our investments religiously. That is, don't just make an investment, run with it on a regular basis.
