Money feels loud these days. Everywhere you look, someone is talking about making it fast or trying to keep up. Rising costs don’t make it any easier, and the online culture adds pressure to figure things out early, even when most people are still trying to find their footing. It creates a mix of urgency and confusion, an overwhelming public assumption that everyone should understand money instinctively, even though financial education can be limited.
That tension is often the real barrier long before anyone even thinks about investing. Why does that tension exist, and how can a financially green generation approach a new and intimidating necessity with confidence? Finance Professor and investor Yosef Bonaparte offers a perspective shaped by years of observing how young adults learn, react, and make financial decisions.
The part no one admits they’re unsure about
A significant part of the struggle starts earlier than most people realize. Many don’t actually know whether they’re financially literate, and that uncertainty alone can create a sense of falling behind. Financial literacy is the ability to understand basic money ideas: how saving works, what interest is, why debt grows, and how to make simple financial decisions. When that feels unclear, everything that comes after feels unclear too.
Bonaparte sees this often. People want to make wise choices with their money, yet they’re unsure how to assess their own knowledge or where to begin. He noted useful tools, including his own AI-driven literacy self-assessment. Still, the emotional weight remains the same: it’s hard to feel adequately invested when you’re not sure you understand the basics in the first place.
This is the real starting point. The challenge isn’t a lack of money; it’s a lack of clarity. And without that clarity, building confidence around investing becomes even harder.
What social media doesn’t show you about money
If the first barrier is not knowing where to start, the next one is feeling like everyone else is already ahead, and social media can create a self-conscious echo chamber. Every swipe can reveal the next 20-something earning six figures, flipping crypto overnight, launching a side hustle, or living a lifestyle that feels ten steps ahead of where many people are. Even when it’s clear that it’s curated, it can still sting, and create a quiet pressure to match an unattainable pace.
That same pressure shows up in financial choices, too. Instead of slowing down or learning the basics, people speed up as they buy into trends, treat hype like strategy, or leap into markets they don’t understand because it feels risky to be the only one not doing it. This FOMO is one of the most common emotional traps in money management, not because people want to overspend or invest impulsively, but because comparison convinces them they’re falling behind.
Money moves become reactive instead of intentional. It creates anxiety, avoidance, and second-guessing, which only makes investing feel even more intimidating.
The fear behind the money
If people move past the noise and comparisons, they might hit a new speed bump: the fear of getting it wrong. Losing money, choosing incorrectly, not knowing enough – these worries can make investing feel like something you should avoid until you somehow figure it out. The truth is, the fear itself is what keeps many people from starting.
This is where mindset becomes part of the conversation. Investing isn’t so much about putting money somewhere as about understanding risk and developing a failsafe investment philosophy when things get uncomfortable. Bonaparte explains that many beginners misread normal market behavior. “When the market goes down, it doesn’t mean the company’s earnings are going down,” he said. But because people assume every dip is a disaster, they panic and move too fast.
He sees this especially when new investors buy an asset, watch it fall, and rush to sell. His guidance is the opposite. If you choose an investment, prepare to hold it for a meaningful stretch of time — “at least five years,” as he put it — unless something fundamental changes about the company itself. The point is to avoid reacting to noise and instead understand the bigger picture behind what you own.
So the intimidation isn’t about the numbers, but the emotions behind them. And the sooner people learn to separate the two, the easier it becomes to approach investing with clarity instead of fear.
Learning before earning
Building confidence as an investor doesn’t start with money. It starts with learning how things work, taking small steps, and practicing patience long enough to see patterns instead of reacting to every shift. That’s where growth actually happens. Understanding risk, trying things out with low stakes, and staying consistent over time all help build the discipline people need before they begin.
Bonaparte turned to pop culture to make this point more straightforward. When asked for an example of what learning looks like in real time, he mentioned Gabriele Muccino’s 2006 film The Pursuit of Happyness. The movie tells the story of someone stepping into a field about which he knew nothing and committing to the process while building competence through effort – a great reminder that knowledge compounds the same way money does.
He also pointed to Shaquille O’Neal, who used his basketball career as leverage and gradually expanded into investing by learning, joining networks, and treating every opportunity as a chance to build expertise. That mix of curiosity, education, and long-term thinking is what Bonaparte considers the real foundation of early investing.
For investing-curious folks, Bonaparte recommends dollar-cost averaging. That approach lowers pressure and reduces timing anxiety, keeping the focus on consistency rather than perfection. Because at the end of the day, investing early is about confidence, and confidence grows with practice, never with a specific dollar amount.
This shift in thinking sets the stage for new opportunities that open up once you understand what you’re doing, including the ones Bonaparte himself once discouraged.
A new take on high-risk bets
Bonaparte’s biggest investing surprise? How his own thinking shifted. For a very long time, he discouraged students from unicorn investing because the risk felt too high and the odds too uncertain. But watching newer tech waves evolve, especially fields like quantum, pushed him to rethink his stance. In his view, there is room for people to explore these opportunities if they genuinely understand the business they are investing in and accept the possibility of losing money.
He is careful to say that unicorn investing is not a shortcut or a hidden path to guaranteed success. Apps like Robinhood make it easier to participate, but ease is not the same as wisdom. Bonaparte warns against overconfidence, panic selling, and the belief that anyone can outsmart the market by chasing fast wins. Those emotional patterns, more than the investments themselves, are what put new investors at risk.
What he encourages instead is curiosity with responsibility. Learn the company, know why it exists, and study the model behind it. He has been deepening his own knowledge in this area so he can eventually teach it with the same clarity he brings to traditional investing. And for readers, that shift says something important. Even high-risk spaces can be approached thoughtfully when the foundation is strong.
Invest in the person before the plan
Besides all that market strategy, Bonaparte brings it back to something more fundamental: personal growth. Financial growth is essential, but personal growth shapes every financial decision people will ever make. As he put it, “Educate yourself, explore the world, challenge yourself.” Travel, new environments, learning outside your comfort zone, and spending time on self-understanding all build the kind of judgment that carries into long-term wealth. Those investments sharpen how people think, evaluate risk, and recognize opportunity. Money compounds, but so does experience, and that is the foundation that supports every other kind of investing.
Moving from fear to clarity
Money can feel intimidating, which is why investing often feels even harder. But learning early, even in small ways, builds confidence long before anyone has real money to put on the table. With curiosity, patience, and a steady mindset, people can shape habits that serve them for years. Because the fundamental shift isn’t about acting like an investor — it’s about learning to think like one.
