As a passionate baseball player, I was pleased to hear that the next book we were going to read was about baseball. In my fourth grade English class, the teacher would read a book while the class would follow along with our copies. The book, which mixed a fight with a childhood illness with kids love for the sport captivated me. The fact that this kid was not physically able to play baseball made me feel fortunate, because I was able to play the sport I enjoyed. After this book I was told bad news. The next book would be about a kid who was a landscaper. Disinterested, I merely acted like I was following along in my book when the teacher was reading.  The unexciting narratives of the manual labor that he performed bored me. While my eyes went up and down the pages my mind was on anything but the story. It was not until this landscaper met a mentor that I started paying real attention. The mentor advised him to start hiring employees to keep up with the demand for his landscaping company’s services.  Furthermore, the mentor advises him to invest in stocks. What is a stock? I had never heard of this term before. The only real takeaway from this book about stocks that I got was that they can make you lots of money. When the young landscaper invested in a stock suggested by his mentor he saw a massive gain on his money. It went from a one-man landscaping side job to a full-fledged company with employees and investments. This short-term accumulation of wealth for such a young kid inspired me. My honeymoon phase with stocks was intense. I sought to learn how to make these kinds of returns in this short amount of time. The only problem with this was the risk. For every story of someone making ten times their investment there seemed to be more than ten of them losing it all. My problem was that I was looking at stocks the wrong way. I was looking at them as a collection of mystic charts that go up and down. I didn’t yet realize that stocks reflect a company. All a stock is, is just a small share of a company. This is when I discovered long-term investing. A method pioneered by billionaire Warren Buffet. This strategy focuses on investing in stocks over a span of decades and capitalizing on the long-term growth of a company. When talking to my dad about this new interest he offered to invest on my behalf. I gave him one hundred dollars of my Christmas and birthday money and we created a plan for how to invest it. Still hopeful of getting rich fast, I was looking for the highest returns possible. Because at the time trading fees were still high and it wasn’t free to trade stocks, I was stuck with trading funds. Funds being a collection of many stocks. Looking at the returns I noticed that the highest performers yielded around 10% returns. A whopping 10$ on my 100$ invested. Now disinterested, I didn’t really bother anymore with stocks. Not until I came across the idea of compound interest. While the 100 dollars producing 10 dollars a year doesn’t seem like much, 100 invested every month over 40 years turns into over 600,000. This idea of interest earning on itself year over year is what made Warren Buffet his billions. When I read his book The Snowball Effect it intensified my confidence in this idea. While he didn’t invest much, he invested over a long period of time and achieved good returns. These returns over time are the snowball. When rolling a snowball, the bigger the snowball gets the more snow it can attract and so on. The more you make the more you make. Re-motivated stock investing has been a hobby ever since. Anytime I received money for Christmas or my job it would go straight into my brokerage account. Also, much of my free time would be dedicated to reading, listening, and watching investors, and educating myself on investing. Finance is an area of interest I am lucky enough to pursue at US and one I hope to pursue beyond.