From Mignon McLaughlin’s The Complete Neurotic’s Notebook, “Albert Einstein when asked what he considered to be the most powerful force in the universe answered: Compound Interest!”  “What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.”  

Compound interest is the price paid for the use of borrowed money added to the amount originally borrowed.  When we allow a bank, investment firm or other institution to use our money we get a return on our investment.  One form of return is interest.  If we lend over a big period of time, the interest earned accumulates or compounds.  Leveraging compound interest can grow our assets significantly over time.  The key aspect is time.  It takes a great deal of time to grow assets with compound interest.  When our assets grow, the grow in a manner that’s nonlinear and ever-increasing provided the rate of return remains positive.  As Einstein is attributed to saying, using time as leverage is one of the most powerful forces in the universe.

Relative to the business of you, we can leverage our actions over time.  The way to do this is to have a plan with an end state we imagine and keep in our mental model.  When we know what we want to create and keep that image in our noggins, we see opportunities where we wouldn’t if we didn’t know what we truly desire.  A 65,000 word book can be written with as little as 10-20 minutes a day over three years.  A huge website, blog or Pinterest account can be created with small additions in small amounts of time. A few second here and there can create amazing results.

When people come across what we have creating using the opportunities we opened for ourselves, they think it’s amazing and wonder where we find the time.  We all focus so much on here and now, we forget the amount of time we have spent in our lives and how much time we have available in the future.  We spend time worrying or stressing how things ought to be.  We yearn for things to be different from what is happening around us.  In doing so, we close our perception to the opportunities that exist in every moment.

It’s critical to have a plan.  However in the moment, we simply have to relax, find the fun and use the opportunities that present themselves.  Having planned what we want to create, we can put the opportunities to use in a manner that supports what we truly want.  So ask yourself, are you leveraging your actions right now to support the future you want to create?