How Powerful Is Compounding?
Start with a stack of pennies (a very, very large stack). Place one penny on a checkerboard square and double it as you move to each square. You would have two pennies on the second square and four on the third square and so forth. How much money will you have sitting on the 64th square? Answer: You would beat Bill Gates’ highest level of net worth at $90 billion one million times over! That’s over 8,000 times the GDP of the United States last year. And it all started with one penny. Here’s the mysterious part: after the first row, your total is only $1.28. You’ll break the $327 mark after the second row and $83,886 after the third. There are only five rows remaining so it hardly looks like you’ll reach that astronomical level, but you will. It all happens in the last few squares, when the compounding effects kick in. Just as the tortoise proved to the hare in Aesop’s fable, slow and steady wins the race Don’t think you need to step up to the plate with the biggest bat you can find and
