A hack to become exponentially better at everything

This article is derived from the transcript of my podcast on the same topic. You may also listen to the podcast here :)

Hey! I hope you are having a good day and all your loved ones are safe and sound.

Today, I will shed some light on how we can become exponentially better at life by applying this one little hack.

You may have heard or read about the fundamental concept I will talk about, but the hack I will share is something I came up with just a few days ago, so sit tight, and let's get started.

You may have also read statements like, if you had invested $10 in some ABC stock ten years ago, it would have become $1 Million by now.

And you may have seen the equation, which goes like

1^365 = 1 while 1.01^365 is closed to 38,

This means that if you do anything slightly better every day for a year, you will become way better compared to if you didn't do anything differently during that year.

The math behind this is elementary, but it doesn't come naturally to our monkey brains as we are used to thinking very linearly.

Like if I were to explain in terms of money:

You may have heard that if you are getting a compound interest on something, you are better off than getting simple interest.

Because in the case of simple interest, you earn interest only on the amount you had invested, but your interest earned is not added to the principal amount for future interest calculations.

But in the case of compound interest, your interest earned earns you more interest in the future. This may not sound like a big deal in the short term but can significantly impact the long term.

Please bear with me while I share one such example:

Let's say you hypothetically are joining a new company with a 3-year contract where you get two compensation options to choose from:

The first one being ₹1 Lakh (₹1,00,000) a month for 3 years

The second one being 1 Paise (₹0.01) in your first month, but it will double every month for 3 years

In the first option, by the end of three years, you will have ₹36 Lakh (₹36,00,000).

In the second option, by the end of three years, you will have more than ₹68 Crore (₹68,00,00,000)

Yeah, the power of compounding is that amazing!

In the second example, by the end of 12 months, you just had ₹20, but you had around ₹34 Crore (₹34,00,00,000)  in the 35th month.

All this is great for the money, but how does it apply in our everyday life?

Let me give you a few examples:

Let's say if you just removed 100 calories from your diet for 2 years, you will become relatively much leaner compared to your twin, who kept eating the same amount of calories.

And if you just spent 5 minutes every day talking to your partner about their work, you would have a relatively better relationship with your partner years down the line.

You can be on the wrong side of the compounding as well.

If you just added 100 calories to your diet for 2 years, you and your twin won't look as identical as you both did 2 years ago.

And let's say you are a victim of repeated bad behavior in your work environment, and you don't report it. There is a high possibility that your work environment will become so toxic that you may end up leaving your job just for that one reason.

So we always want to be on the right side of compounding. Because as Albert Einstein once said

Compound Interest is the 8th wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn't, pays it.

This is all theory that you may have already heard, but I wanted to give you a very actionable hack.

To ensure that we are doing something to stay on the good side of compounding, I propose a small 5-minute activity that you can do every day.

So to begin with:

Pick top-3 areas of your life where you feel you want to become slightly better every day.

Let's say you want to be better at your relationships, better at coding, and better at playing the guitar.

Now you just write answers to these three questions every day:

1) What did I do today to become a slightly better coder? Your answer could be, I wrote a hello world program

2) What did I do today to get slightly better at my relationships? Your answer could be, I had a conversation with my partner about their work while being mindfully present.

3) What did I do today to get slightly better at guitar? Your answer could be, I learned what the 5 chords of the guitar are.

Also, it isn't a rule to have 3 questions; you can have as many as you like, but just make sure to have at least 1 so that you are compounding in at least 1 area of your life.

Just to summarise:

You simply write down the things that you did on a particular day to get slightly better in the critical areas of your life.

You can call this your compounding journal if you would like :)

And yeah, that's about it, happy compounding!

If you found this article helpful, please share it with someone you would like to see compound with you.

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