On Money: I Started Investing Before I Understood It

My dear Avyaansh,

I want to tell you about the first time I invested money. I was twenty-three, earning a Navy salary that felt like a fortune compared to what my family had. I had no idea what a mutual fund was. I did not understand compound interest. I could not have told you the difference between a stock and a bond if my life depended on it.

But someone on the ship — a senior officer who had been quietly building wealth for fifteen years — told me something I never forgot. He said: "The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is today. Stop waiting to understand everything. Just start."

So I started. I put a small amount into a mutual fund that I chose almost at random. I barely looked at it for six months. And then one evening, sitting in the mess hall, I checked my phone and saw that my money had grown. Not by much. A few hundred rupees. But something shifted inside me that night, Avyaansh, and it has never shifted back.

That money had grown while I was sleeping. While I was doing push-ups on the deck. While I was standing watch at two in the morning. It asked nothing of me. It just quietly worked.

That was the night I understood that money is not just something you earn with your time. It is something you can put to work so it earns for you. And the difference between those two ideas — trading time for money versus making money work for you — is the difference between a lifetime of exhaustion and a lifetime of options.

Nobody in my family taught me about investing. Not because they did not care, but because they did not know. They worked hard, earned honest money, spent it on necessities, and started over every month. I do not want that cycle to continue with you.

I made every mistake you can imagine in the early years. I panicked when the market dropped and sold things I should have held. I chased hot tips from friends who knew even less than I did. I put money into things I did not understand because someone on YouTube said it would double in a year. It did not double. It halved.

But here is what I want you to hear: even with all those mistakes, starting early was the single best financial decision I ever made. Because time is the secret ingredient that no amount of cleverness can replace. A mediocre investment held for twenty years will almost always beat a brilliant investment held for two.

The Navy gave me a salary. It did not give me financial education. Everything I know about money, I taught myself — through books, through painful experience, through watching what worked and what did not over more than a decade. And the single most important lesson from all of that learning is embarrassingly simple.

Start before you are ready.

That is it. That is the whole secret. Not which stock to pick. Not which fund has the lowest expense ratio. Not whether to invest in gold or crypto or real estate. All of those questions matter, and you will learn the answers over time. But none of them matter if you never start.

I have seen brilliant people — engineers, doctors, officers with salaries three times mine — who never invested a single rupee because they were "waiting to learn more first." They are still waiting. And the years are still passing. And the compound interest they could have earned is gone forever, because time does not wait for anyone to feel ready.

There is a fear that comes with money, Avyaansh. A fear that lives in people who grew up without much of it. The fear says: what if I lose it? What if I make a mistake? What if I am not smart enough to do this?

I carried that fear for years. Sometimes I still carry it. But I learned to act despite the fear, because the cost of inaction is always higher than the cost of imperfect action.

The biggest investment you will ever make is in yourself. Acquire high-value skills. Read like your future depends on it — because it does. The money will follow the value you create. But let it compound from the start, not from the moment you feel ready.

I am writing this letter because I want you to have what I did not have: someone sitting you down and saying these words plainly. Money is a tool. It is not evil and it is not sacred. It is a tool that gives you choices. And the earlier you learn to use that tool, the more choices you will have.

You will not understand all of this now. That is fine. I did not understand it either when I started. But I started anyway. And that made all the difference.

Start before you are ready, Avyaansh. Your future self will write you a thank-you note.

— Your Dad

Har Har Mahadev 🔱