Compound Improvements

The easiest way to earn money, improve a product or learn new skills is very simple. Compounding.

If you invest money today in an Index fund and just leave it for 30 years you’ll probably be shocked how little it increases in the first 20-25 years and how much it increases after that. Even a 5% return per year returned into the initial investment with give huge returns given long enough.

It’s the same for skills.

This chart show what a 1% improvement every day for a year looks like. After 365 days you have an almost 38x improvement! But see how the first 200 days don’t feel so special, this is when it’s easy to give up as progress is hard and improvement comes slowly.

This is the same chart for a 1% improvement per week for a year. After 52 weeks you have a 1.7x improvement, still not bad! If someone told you that if you improve 1% a week for a year you’ll be 70% better at the end of the year I think you’d be happy.

And finally 1% improvement per month for 12 months. This gives a 13% improvement after a year, still not a bad payoff for being 1% better at something per month.

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