Hidden Compounding

“ 1 million, $2 million, $3 million, $20 million…oh I’m so good at math” - Jay Z”

The little lies you tell yourself, that french fry you ate on a diet, the email you didn’t send when you said you would, the gym session you told yourself you were too tired for. These little, tiny, almost negligible lies get together at the end of each day and whisper to your self conscious that it’s ok, it was just one fry and as you soak that idea in, the fry’s add up and the number of gym sessions go down.

Without you noticing, the capacity for these little lies grow like gremlins, slowly and unnoticeably, they eat away at your future growth potential and given a long enough period of time it can shift the trajectory of your life like the shifting of the tectonic plates.

Kobe Bryant told a story about his summer workout routine. Staring at 4a.m. not to get his workout out of the way for the day but to get an entire training session in before his regularly scheduled workouts. He emphasized that by doing this every single day during the off season, year after year, the sheer volume of extra work he put in put him so far ahead that no one would be able to catch up no matter how hard they’d try.

While Kobe was looking to maximize the compounding effect, most of us have oriented ourselves in a way that makes us feel like cutting corners is a way to save time on a commute while using Waze. The modern world is demanding and looking for a bit of relief wherever possible is a rational pull that we are all tempted with. We just have to do the math and assume that anything you do one you’ll likely do again, and decide from there.