Compound effect: Why should you never underestimate the power of compounding.
Domino effect: 🁭🁯
Do you know about the domino effect? If you know about it, then we'll done if you don't then let me explain.
So, in the book 'The One Thing' by Gary Keller. He mentions that "In 1983, Lorne Whitehead wrote in the American Journal of Physics that he’d discovered that domino falls could not only topple many things, but they could also topple bigger things. He described how a single domino is capable of bringing down another domino that is actually 50 per cent larger."
You won't understand the power of the domino effect by a simple definition so let me explain it to you.
Consider a domino 2 inches tall. So according to the definition, a domino can bring down another domino which is 50 percent larger. So the 2-inch domino can bring down a 3-inch domino and the 3-inch domino can bring down a 4.5-inch domino.
It's a geometric progression and you will be surprised to know that the 17th domino can topple a domino almost the size of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the 23rd domino is the size of the Eiffel Tower! Going on like that the 31th domino is 3000 feet above Mount Everest and the 57th is almost the distance to the moon.
This is actually just one example of the power of the compounding effect.
Let me tell you some more.
The Rice and the Chess Board story:
There was once a king in India who was a big chess enthusiast and had the habit of challenging wise visitors to a game of chess. One day a traveling sage was challenged by the king. The sage having played this game all his life all the time with people all over the world gladly accepted the King's challenge. To motivate his opponent the king offered any reward that the sage could name. The sage modestly asked just for a few grains of rice in the following manner: the king was to put a single grain of rice on the first chess square and double it on every consequent one. The king accepted the sage’s request.
Having lost the game and being a man of his word, the king ordered a bag of rice to be brought to the chess board. Then he started placing rice grains according to the arrangement: 1 grain on the first square, 2 on the second, 4 on the third, 8 on the fourth and so on.
Following the exponential growth of the rice payment, the king quickly realized that he was unable to fulfil his promise because on the twentieth square, the king would have had to put 1,000,000 grains of rice. On the fortieth square, the king would have had to put 1,000,000,000 grains of rice. And, finally, on the sixty-fourth square, the king would have had to put more than 18,000,000,000,000,000,000 grains of rice which is equal to about 210 billion tons and is allegedly sufficient to cover the whole territory of India with a meter-thick layer of rice.
The king then realised that he couldn't give the sage so much rice but he said that he would pay him the debt.
So this story also demonstrates the power of exponential growth or compound effect.
Just being 1% better every day:
The author of the book 'Atomic Habits' is James Clear. In his book, he tells us that making small insignificant changes every day leads to great results in future.
Here is what he has to say about it:
"In the beginning, there is basically no difference between making a choice that is 1 per cent better or 1 per cent worse. (In other words, it won't impact you much today.) But as time goes on, these small improvements or declines compound and you suddenly find a very big gap between people who make slightly better decisions on a daily basis and those who don't.
Here's the punchline:
If you get one per cent better each day for one year, you'll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.
This is why small choices don't make much of a difference at the time, but add up over the long term."
So, he also emphasised that the power of compounding or compound effect is exceptional and one should not underestimate it.
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