If I said to you “I’ll give you £1 million right now or I’ll give you one penny today and double the amount of pennies you have every day for the next 30 days.” which would you choose?
Now if you’re anything like me when I first read this you went with the £1 million. Of course, right!! Why wouldn’t you?
Well, the rules of exponential growth and compound interest are why!
With the penny on day 2 you would have – you guessed it – two pennies. On day 4 you’d have 8p. Day 10 you’d have £10.24. Day 15 £327.68. But still nowhere near a million, right? Well, here is where it gets interesting. By day 20 you have £10,485.76. But by day 25 you have £335,544.32. Maybe you can see where this is going… If you keep doing the math by day 30 you have a whopping £10,737,418.24. So that’s almost £10 million MORE than the original million! Fascinating isn’t it. This is the same principle of why (if it was possible) to fold a piece of paper in half 42 times, it would reach all the way to the moon!
Apart from the fact I think it’s just mind bogglingly fascinating it’s also relevant to human and business performance.
When you train your employees with high quality, thought provoking and developmental training like that provided at Coach and Thrive you are improving your employees by various percentage points in various areas. These all add up exponentially, and when you create real change in people, in the way they think, the way they show up and the way they interact with people, this creates increases across all facets of their personality. If you do this with all of your employees, all of a sudden you have a whole work force all making various percentage increases across hundreds of different areas in thousands of different ways and the impact of that is massive!! It’s like a tidal wave of passion, creativity, confidence, respect, support, feedback, learning, development, encouragement, commitment, drive, motivation, there’s no stopping that, your competitors don’t stand a chance!
It’s the same in Coaching. Coaching helps you to improve and develop in every aspect of your life. Let’s take happiness, if your happiness increased by 1% it would show up in every other area of your life, so all of those would increase a bit too. If you’re happier you’re going to show up better to everything else you do. This is sometimes referred to as aggregation of marginal gains. This is how the British Cycling Team went from a mediocre team about 15 years ago, their last major win being in 1908 to winning the Tour de France and a 70% of the gold medals available in the 2012 Olympics.
So, if you were able to improve by 1% each day for an entire year, those gains would mean that you were 37 times better at the end of the year!! Isn’t that amazing. So why not take the challenge? Come and get some Coaching and we will look at how we can put marginal gains to work for you.
On the flip side this is also why so many people give up with new habits, fitness, healthy eating, diets, hobbies etc. We expect to see linear progress, like a straight line on a graph, but it doesn’t work like that.
It follows the exponential line, and we don’t see any real change for a while, it takes time for changes to happen because early on we’re just doubling the pennies. You can think of it like a pump getting water out of a well. You have to pump it and pump it to draw the water out of the well, the pressure needs to build, and for a while you won’t see any water, perhaps a few drops. If you gave up then, the water would sink back down into the well and you may well die of thirst. You have to keep the pumping going even when you can’t see the water. Once it gets to the top though and the water starts flowing, it’ll bring water with every pump. Often in life we give up before the water starts. Keep pumping my friends and enjoy the water of life!! Even when you can’t see the results yet, keep pumping!! They’re just around the corner, building like the pressure in the pump in the well. If we stick with it and put in the work eventually the growth we want will shoot up and it’s so much easier keeping a moving ball rolling. Compound interest, exponential growth and marginal gains are all connected and once we’re aware of them, we can start making them work for us. As with everything in life – that which you are aware of you can control, that which you are unaware of controls you.
If you’re interested in this theory or thinking I can recommend two books – one called Atomic Habits by James Cleary and one called the Compound Effect by Darren Hardy.
