“A year from now you will wish you had started today”
Karen Lamb
We all have projects we’d like to start but keep putting them off for some reason. Maybe it’s exercising, starting a YouTube channel, or eating healthier. But like Naval Ravikant once said “Intentions don’t matter. Actions do.” So we must start and we must do it now. In the world of finance, there’s a concept known as compounding. This is when you start getting interest on interest because your money is continuously reinvested. There are two secrets to compounding. First, you never stop it unnecessarily. Second, you must start now so that you start getting interest as soon as possible. In other words, procrastination is the enemy of compounding. You see this concept all the time and not just in the world of investing. The compound effect has a wide range of applications, affecting everything from exercising to learning from books.
It’s easy to underestimate the power of compounding. We tend to rationalize everything we do, as well as everything we don’t do. But while it’s easy to convince ourselves that not taking the first step to something is the right thing to do, that’s often a mistake. When interviewed by Howard Stern, film director James Cameron said he used to work as a truck driver. Whenever he had some free time though, he’d go to the USC library to study. The director of three of the highest-grossing films of all time made a difference because he started sooner, even if it was difficult at times.
In the interview, Cameron said, “I’d go down to the USC library and pull any thesis that graduate students had written about optical printing, or front screen projection, or film technology. That way I could sit down and read it, and if they’d let me photocopy it, I would. If not, I’d make notes.” In other words, he taught himself how to make movies by reading doctoral dissertations graduate students have written.
If you find yourself going to a university library to read doctoral dissertations on optical printing, maybe that’s a sign of obsession. But while it’s easy to read that story and think that was the right choice at the time because Cameron ended up making some of the highest-grossing movies in the history of cinema, I’m sure he had moments of self-doubt when he was younger. The thing that made a difference though, was that he started and that he continued doing so despite the moments of self-doubt.