Exponential Personal Growth

The power of compounding is undeniable. Here’s the basic idea: using compound interest, your savings and investments grow exponentially over time. A compelling example of the power of compound interest is the compounded penny. Let’s say you were given a choice between a penny compounding daily for thirty days or $1,000,000. What will you choose? The people who do not understand the power of compounding will choose the one million dollars. However, for those who took time to crunch the numbers, if you have one penny, and the amount doubles each day for 30 days, it will grow to $5,368,709.12, fives times more than the other option.

If you think about it, you can also apply the benefits of compounding to other aspects of your life. You can invest in yourself by learning, improving, and mastering useful and interesting skills. Let’s say you make an effort to improve a skill one percent each day. In a hundred days, you will be 100% better than you are currently. In a year you will be 3.65X better compared to when you started. While this example is not linear like the penny illustration, the benefit is just as powerful. Using compounding to grow as a person can be life-changing.

It’s not that difficult to find something that you can incrementally improve in your life. It can be as simple as doing short daily exercises like walking to improve your health. You can start reading books on topics that you are interested in to add to your knowledge. You can smile more to improve your interactions with your family, friends, colleagues, and strangers if you want to work on your social skills. Over time, if you consciously and continuously pursue improvements in different aspects of your life, chances are you will love, respect, and appreciate the person looking back at you in the mirror.