Keep at it and Your Results Go to the Moon

 

The Voyage to the Moon

There are a number of saying that describe the principles of hard work and sticking with things. For example you have slow and steady wins the race. This phrase is adapted from Aesop's fable, The Tortoise and the Hare. If you're not familiar with the story, it's about a tortoise and a hare that decide to race. The Hare being much quicker than the tortoise assumes that it will win the race and takes off quickly out of the gates. The tortoise however, slowly moves along at his own pace, gaining ground on the finish line. After some time, the hare realizes how far ahead it is and decides to stop and take a nap. Shortly there after the tortoise comes upon the sleeping hare and passes them right by. The hare eventually wakes up and looks back to see there is no tortoise. They laugh at how slow the tortoise must be and decide to jog toward the finish line. To their horror they find that the tortoise has actually beaten them across the finish line.

The moral of this story is, not to be impatient and not to be cocky. The hare for all of his superior speed took off too quickly, got tired and assumed he could nap without losing. The tortoise moved along at a reliable consistent pace and eventually passed up the hare. In life you will have opportunities to move quickly in short bursts and that's OK. What you want to be sure that you're doing is always moving toward your ultimate goals. This is true whether it's winning a race or winning a large investment portfolio for retirement.

The subreddit r/wallstreet bets is a great example of the hare. They make big bets and want to get rich quickly. Some of them did, but many are losing a fortune right now as stocks they made bets on are heading in the wrong direction. Investors who choose a more steady long term approach such as investing in resonate investment trusts, index funds, bonds etc, will definitely not get rich overnight. However, the magic of compound interest will continue to add up day after day, year after year, until they've achieved much more than they could have putting their money in the bank and with almost none of the risk of betting on a single stock.

I've recently been reading the book Atomic Habits by James Clear  and he talks a good deal about habits and people want to see immediate results and are often discouraged when they don't get them. This is why people are so apt to fall for things like get rich quick schemes, or lose weight fast systems. They sound good, because they get you from point a to point b quickly. As someone who lost 60 pounds while we've been stuck at home, I can tell you that the opposite is true. It takes a daily commitment of doing the right actions over and over again. At first there are no apparent results, but suddenly you start to see them. Over time they begin to accelerate until you have met your goal.

Whether you are working to become a master woodworker, a top level computer programer or achieve technical investor status, you must be willing to put in the time and resources to get there. To get rich you can start with just $500 per month when 20 and you'll be a millionaire by the time you're ready to retire at age 68. As a matter of fact, you'll be a multi millionaire because that investment of $500, increased for inflation will net you more than $4.5M when you're at retirement age. Why? The S&P 500 had returned an average return on investment of over 8% since 1957. That return is even higher at 10% to 11% if we look back to 1926 through today.

The interesting thing is just how quickly that investment grows. If you invest for 10 years you will have roughly $100K in the bank. That won't make you a millionaire and won't let you retire. The interesting thing about compound interest is that at age 50 you will have just under $1M dollars. Only 3 times the time input and 10 times the result?

I took a note based on one of the graphs in James' book that really illustrates this well. 

Linear Vs. Exponential Growth | Disappointment of Impatience 

Looking at the graph above, we see that we have outcomes on the Y axis and time on the X axis. The linear progression that our brains expect is plotted as the black line and the green line represents the exponential progression. As you can see the linear line that our brains think should happen is much higher than the exponential line for some time. However, when you build upon what came before, over and over again, you will eventually see the exponential growth start to turn upwards, surpass the linear growth line and eventually appear to trend straight up. 

That growth passes the linear curve at a point where it looks like there was an overnight success.  Suddenly I figured out how to lose weight! Suddenly I made a lot of money investing! Suddenly I'm a good cabinet maker! The news loves to report these stories because they are exciting and we love to hear them because we dream of being the person that got rich, got famous or got whatever they wanted quickly. 

This time period between when the linear growth is ahead of the exponential growth curve is called the Valley of Disappointment by clear. It's the time period where the improvements seem so imperceptibly small that people become easily discouraged and give up. If you put $600 in a savings account each week, but put $500 in an S&P 500 Index fund each week, the bank account will appear to be growing much faster. After not too long, however, the index fund will pass the savings account and there will be no way that saving can ever catch up.

When you learned to walk you did not stand up from a crawl one day and start walking everywhere you went. You had to try to stand and fall over and over again. Then you had to attempt to take a step only to fall on your face. You were a baby and were compelled to keep trying. Attempt after attempt, day after day, you tried over and over to take step after step. Eventually you learned to do it and could even run. Your parents felt like it happened so quickly, but the reality is that even asa baby you had to put in the hard work to earn the ability to walk.

Whether you are working on writing a novel, growing your YouTube channel or investing for retirement, consider a slow and steady pace as part of your strategy. It allows you to reliably and sustainably achieve great results without the disappointment of the get rich quick mentality that we so easily fall into. 

Do you struggle with patience or waiting for results to build up? I want to hear about it! Post below or contact me!