You know that feeling when you’re sitting in a meeting and you think to yourself: this isn’t worth my time?
Whether you’re grinding away at a corporate job or running your own business, we’ve all been there. That moment of clarity when you realize this hour could be better spent literally anywhere else.
That instinct (knowing where your time is best spent) is crucial. But when it comes to investing, most people ignore it completely.
They either waste time trying to learn everything, or they waste their future by learning nothing and handing it all off to someone else.
The Two Bad Options
Most investors fall into one of two traps.
The first is abdication. This is Wall Street’s pitch: you’re too busy, let us handle it. You hand everything to your “money guy” and hope for the best.
But what happens more often than not? You pay fees, they earn commissions, and they stuff you into the same five or six funds they put everyone else into. There’s no bespoke “wealth management” strategy for your situation. Their primary incentive is keeping your assets under their management.
Worst of all? You usually end up with no idea what you actually own or why you own it.
The second trap is the DIY approach. You decide to take control, which sounds great in theory. But because you want to be “diversified,” you’re suddenly trying to learn everything.
Stock analysis. Option trading. Buying and managing rental property.
You end up mediocre at all of it because these are outside your core area of competence. And most critically, all this time pulls you away from the thing you’re actually best at: your job or your business, aka the thing that makes you the most money.
That’s not diversification. It’s dilution.
The Better Way
This is one of the reasons I love real estate syndications for busy, high-earning professionals and business owners.
You don’t need to master a dozen different skills. You just need to get good at exactly two things:
Evaluating deals
Evaluating sponsors
That's it. Real estate fundamentals aren’t rocket science, and you can get up to speed faster than you think. After reviewing a handful of deals, you start recognizing patterns. You know what questions to ask. You can spot red flags.
And once you’ve invested, your time commitment drops to essentially zero. You’ve deployed the skill (and your capital), and now other people are doing the work.
Each new investment takes maybe a few hours of evaluation. Then you’re done. Your capital is working while you're back to focusing on what you do best.
Where Should You Focus?
Remember that meeting instinct? That clarity about when something isn’t worth your time?
Apply it to investing: ask yourself where your limited attention gets the highest return on both your time and your capital.
For most high earners, that answer is syndications. A few hours to evaluate each deal, then your capital goes to work while you get back to what you do best.
You maintain control without the distraction. And your learning compounds instead of diluting across a dozen half-mastered strategies.
That sounds like time well spent to me.