Don’t Quit Your Compounding Too Early

If you expect compound growth to look like linear growth, you'll quit long before you reach your potential.

Want to get notified about new posts? Join the mailing list and follow on X/Twitter.

Most people are not stuck because they lack potential; they are stuck because they keep interrupting their compounding.

And one of the most common mistakes that leads people to quit their compounding too early is expecting results to grow in direct proportion to input.

But that’s not how compound growth works. That’s the linear growth mindset.

And if you don’t understand the difference, you may never commit to something long enough to reach your potential.

We’re so used to linear conversions, where you multiply the input by a conversion rate to get the output.

• I worked X hours; multiply that by my hourly rate to get my income.
• There are X people coming for dinner; multiply that by the portion size to get the amount of food I should cook.

But if you look beneath the surface, so much of life is about building systems – companies, relationships, etc.

And systems typically have some kind of self-sustaining nature to them, a kind of momentum where the more they grow, the easier it is to continue growing.

That’s compound growth.

A key mathematical feature of compound growth is that, at the beginning, it may look slow compared to linear growth, but it will catch up after a while and then far outperform linear growth by the end.

If you don’t understand this phenomenon then you will be constantly tempted to quit because you don’t think you’re making enough progress.

For instance, say you compound 1% growth, 100 times.

And you look around at people who you think have compounded 1000 times, and you think, “I should be getting 10% the results that they are, because I’m 10% of the way along in the journey – I’ve taken 100 steps compared to their 1000.”

And you haven’t even made it 1% of the way to where they are, so you assume something is wrong, for whatever reason you’re going too slow to ever make it to their level, and you quit.

But in reality, you could very well be on the same trajectory as them!

I know it sounds insane, but even if you are on the same trajectory as them, your results at 10% of the way through their journey may still feel negligible compared to theirs.

• 1% growth, compounded 100 times, yields a 1.7x multiplier (1.01¹⁰⁰).
• 1% growth, compounded 1000 times, yields a 20959x multiplier (1.01¹⁰⁰⁰).

These are two data points on the same compound growth curve.

This is another reason why it’s so important to measure your growth by looking at how far you’ve come, instead of constantly looking at how far you still have to go to reach the most accomplished people you look up to.

Want to get notified about new posts? Join the mailing list and follow on X/Twitter.