Compounding Success
I’m really excited to share some thoughts with you today. This is the next installment in the series around applying financial concepts to your life. Today, the concept is around compound interest. From the financial/investing perspective, real wealth grows through the power of compound interest.
The concept is simple. We talked about automation last time and how you put a certain amount into your investing every single month. That amount grows, and the compound interest grows your money even more over time.
Here’s the hard part with compound interest, or the idea of it: as humans, we’re not good at thinking for large durations of time. We can conceptualize what happens in a month, a week, a day, or until our next meal. However, we really can’t conceptualize what one, five, or ten years looks like. I think if we could wrap our brains around it, we would all see more success in our lives.
So, here’s how it’s supposed to work in life. You decide where you want to go or designate a milestone. You then figure out the process to get you there. Then you keep doing it until you get the result you wanted. That’s it. There might be shortcuts or ways to hack the system, but you just keep going until you reach your goal. So where do we go wrong?
Last week, I was in Colorado for a week-long meditation retreat. It was my first time doing something this long. I had done three days that were online with people around the world, but this was 1,900 people in a room together, meditating for 35 hours throughout the week. It was challenging yet the most transformational event I’ve ever been to in my life! Most days started at 6 am and ended around 7 pm, with long breaks in between. I met some really amazing people and think they’ll be lifelong friends.
When the week started, 80 percent of us were new to meditating. Sitting for such a long time was difficult, and most of us had distracting thoughts that pulled us out of the meditation. We had three meditation sessions each day, with teaching sessions in between. The teacher constantly reminded us to release control and trust in the process. The more we fought the process, the more difficult it would become.
Do you know what was pretty amazing? By the sixth day, we started meditation at 4 am. This meditation had some breathwork in it. We sat for parts of it and laid down for other parts. We all just went with it and refocused our minds throughout the meditation. Do you know what time it was when we finished? 8:45 am. We meditated for almost five hours! The crazy part was I thought it had only been two hours.
Now, meditating in certain ways does have the ability to distort your sense of time. However, we realized that we could not have done that one day, and we appreciated how far we’ve come in just six days. As we talked about it with each other afterward, what surprised me was how we still all thought we didn’t do very well or got distracted by thoughts or aches in our bodies, but it didn’t align with the reality that we meditated for almost five hours. Something about the process allowed us to do it, and within six days, all 1900 of us had embraced that process.
You see, it always works when it comes to processes like compound interest. Things go wrong because we pull money out or stop contributing (although your money would still grow if you did that). In our own lives, the equivalent would be sneaking in a treat when you’re on a diet or easing up on the workouts because you’ve lost some weight. It could be spending time to build rapport with potential clients or employees, then stopping after you’ve converted them.
So, here’s what I’d like us all to reflect on: What process(es) have you veered away from? How can you get back to implementing those processes? What or who do you need to support you in those processes?
Send me an email or direct message, and let me know!
Coach Kev helps people find calm, clarity, and confidence in their life while trusting the process. Contact him at kevinkoocoaching@gmail.com, or follow on IG and YouTube @kevinkoocoaching
