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Everyone Knows That Compound Interest Multiplies Your Money, But it Also Multiplies Your Success
Overnight success takes about ten years, and the fastest gains come at the end
“The rate of payoff for persevering during those dark days isn’t linear. It’s exponential.”
-Dorie Clark, The Long Game
Human beings have great difficulty understanding compound interest and exponential growth.
For example, most people forget that Warren Buffet only became a millionaire in his thirties, a billionaire in his fifties, and that he made most of his money after the age of 60 — and he’s been investing since he was a child!
What that means is that for a long, long time — most of his life, actually — Warren Buffet wasn’t a billionaire.
It happened slowly, and then it happened all at once.
Most growth is like this, and there’s a “hockey-stick” shaped growth pattern that appears over and over again in varied domains. There’s no (visible) progress for a long, long time, and then growth accelerates straight up and you have the “overnight success” that took ten years.
It’s true that you get out of life what you put in, but once you’ve taken care of the inputs, you honestly just have to wait!
