Beating the Street

I recently read a book titled, "Beating the Street" by Peter Lynch.  Peter was in charge of the Magellan Fund for Fidelity for 13 years.  I have always been a little curious about the Stock market, and am always looking for ways to make my money work for me.  I felt like reading this book was a great opportunity to gain understanding of picking stocks.
I wanted to share one bit of information that I found particularly interesting.  This comes from page 33 in my edition. 

"If you had invested $1,000 in the S&P 500 index on January 31, 1940 and left it there for 52 years, (1992, which this book was written shortly after) you'd know have $333,793.30 in your account...If you'd added $1,000 every January 31st throughout those same 52 years your $52,000 investment would now be worth $3,554,227.  Finally if you had the courage to add another $1,000 every time the market dropped 10 percent or more (this happened 31 times in 52 years) your $83,000 investment would now be worth 6,295,000."

I find this so fascinating.  I know its not a get rich over night scheme, and if you had put $1,000 dollars in the S&P 500 in 2000, you'd still only have $1,000 or so right now.  It's not for sure and you need to make wise investments (and this book does a great job of explaining how to look for stocks). Its hard to do, and takes time and research (something schools don't teach a lot of), but from the research I have done, it looks well worth it to me to be making investments in my future, even if that means going with out somethings that I really want now.  And I try to pick companies that are invested in things that I feel good about or that I use.  I don't want to pick companies that aren't doing the right thing.  Which makes picking even harder, because some of those companies are very good at making money, but I don't believe in what they are doing or selling, so I choose to pick a different company.