The Crazy Power of Compounding to Help You Overcome Even Your Biggest Mistakes

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“We tend to overestimate what we can do in a day, and underestimate what we can achieve in a decade. Miraculous things can be accomplished if you give it 10 years. A long game will compound small gains that will be able to overcome even big mistakes.”

-Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice for Living

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In the long game of personal development, it’s much more helpful to focus on our current trajectory than our current results.

It’s where we’re headed that matters more than where we are now. When we change where we’re headed and allow compounding to do its thing, then it’s only a matter of time before we overcome virtually any mistake we may have made in the past.

But first, a short detour into the hopeful-yet-frightening world of life extension…

As I write this, it’s only 2024. Philosophers like Will MacAskill believe that should humanity surmount its current problems and protect itself from future existential threats, we could be looking at potentially millions of years of human history yet to come!

It’s often difficult to put such huge numbers into context, but even today, some of the damn-near futuristic medical advances that are either available now or coming soon used to belong to the realm of science fiction. Now they’re science facts.

Soon, “middle age” could mean your seventies or eighties. Seriously.

On a personal level, although the length of our lives is uncertain, embracing long-term strategic thinking can help us make smarter moves in the present that will set us up for extreme success in the future.

My advice is to plan in decades, even while you commit to taking massive action today. Entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk refers to this as macro patience, micro speed. It’s where you realize that every single moment of every single day matters, but you’re not in a rush to achieve results, because you know that if you take the required amount of action every single day, you’re going to get somewhere amazing eventually.

And remember, this is true no what matter what you’ve done (or failed to do) in your life so far.

You picked the wrong career? Who cares? You’re what, 35? Recent scientific advances mean that you could live for another hundred years. Pick a new career and go all in. By the time you establish yourself, you might be 40, but you’re STILL young at 40. Decades of professional success ahead of you.

You married the wrong person? Don’t stay miserable for decades. Even 50 or 60 isn’t too old to start again. Even if you end up dating for 5–10 years before getting married again, you could be looking at decades of marital bliss with the partner of your dreams — even if you were divorced at 50.

You made a dumb financial decision? Who hasn’t? As long as your earning potential remains somewhat intact, and you never stop hunting for opportunities (not to mention becoming more financially literate and gaining control over your spending), you could be well into what society calls “middle age” and still have decades and decades and decades left to figure it all out.

Mind you: that doesn’t mean that you can afford to waste any time. Surely, you and I have wasted more than enough time already.

It’s time to stop the bleeding and jealously protect our time like most people do their money. You have to view people wasting your time as STEALING from you — because that’s exactly what they’re doing.

But take heart that your situation is far from hopeless, no matter what.

The potentially vast human future that is opening up before us today can help us to stretch our own time horizons, and help us realize that we have no time to waste, but we have all the time we need.

You don’t have infinite time, but you have more time than you think.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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