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You wouldn't think that Jim Cramer's long-term investment advice and a famously spiteful song by Bob Dylan both have a subtext that encourages Generation Breakthrough to embrace our entrepreneurial spirit. Read how... You ain't got nothing to lose!

 

Money certainly plays a role in the Generation Breakthrough philosophy. As such, we will discuss it relatively often, in general terms. In this unique case, however, this advice applies equally to money management as well as a key factor of Generation Breakthrough's entrepreneurial motivation.

 

Hopefully pursuing the Generation Breakthrough philosophy will help you make a lot of money. But whether you make money by pursuing your dream, or by climbing a ladder as an employee, once you have money, saving it and having that money make more money is also important. Nearly all financial experts recommend you save at least 20% of your income, and in my previous full-time job I had managed to do just that. I then followed conventional advice, investing it very conservatively.

 

But I learned quite a different investment strategy from reading Jim Cramer's first investing advice book called Real Money, the one he wrote just before he got his TV show on CNBC. It still has great general investing advice, covering some basic rules AND the rationale behind those rules, but more importantly, he also steps out on a limb and offers some controversial advice encouraging speculative investing for young people. This advice also unknowingly relates more closely to our inspiration than merely to our bank accounts.

He explains the somewhat obvious fact, that when you are older, you can't afford to risk the money you've already saved for retirement on something with only a small chance of a big pay off. But when you're young, even if you only have a little money, you should take huge risks with a portion of it, if only because, if you lose it all, you still have the rest of your life to make up for it with a salary based income.

But if that investment works out (and he recommends doing homework to increase your chances) that little amount of money can multiply several times over. 

 

This method is in fact actually how he became wealthy. And the same thing even worked for a very close friend of mine. In college, he invested some money he made from a summer job in a company that he believed had a revolutionary product and would change an entire industry. I'm not sure of the exact figures, but the product was a hit, and he multiplied his initial small investment by at least TEN, maybe a lot more!

 

For detailed instructions on how to intelligently invest in speculative stocks, here's a link to purchase the book on Amazon:

 

I believe, Cramer's educated 'gambling' advice is valuable input for all young people, but there is more that Generation Breakthrough can reap from this insight. We need to apply it, not only to investing our money, but also to the more abundant and high-value asset Generation Breakthrough has: TIME! 

Instead of investing all our time (probably more time than you want) in a low-yield 'secure' job, especially since you can come back to the same or a similar job if you need to later, rather we need to spend the valuable asset of the time we have now, on something with a chance of wild success. In the end, if you don't make it, you haven't really lost anything. You can still fall in line as a normal ladder-climbing employee like everyone else with out being left behind.

However, there's a big difference between investing money in speculative stocks and investing your time in a lofty endeavor of your own that puts the odds in your favor. YOU control the outcome of your endeavor. No matter how closely you watch a stock and devote time, money, or prayers, you can't prevent it from failing. But if you focus your energy on succeeding, that so-called 'risk' is all but erased.

Generation Breakthrough member "SRF" commented in our blog titled "What Have We Got To Lose?" with a lyric from Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone": "When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose." This inspired me to write this bog about investing your money and time when you're young.

I have always believed Mr. Robert Zimmerman's themes are amazingly insightful. In this particular song, when he sang "How does it feel / to be on your own / with no direction home / a complete unknown / like a rolling stone?" I thought he was just sticking it to an acquaintance who fell from hubris to poverty. 

And maybe all he was trying to do was just dis some chic. But listening to it from Jim Cramer's risk perspective, I see a little more. The song's uplifting melody paired with my recollection of the original phrase that inspired the song, "A rolling stone gathers no moss," I believe Dylan may also be extolling the virtues of being free from the chains that hold you back, i.e. the 'moss'. 

Again, we aren't encouraging Generation Breakthrough to live on the streets, but figuratively, as young people, we need to realize that there isn't anything holding us back. We are rolling stones, incapable of gathering moss.

So Bobby, you're asking "How does it feel?"

I say rather liberating! We're young. We have nothing to lose. We can only improve.