I've been thinking about the concept of Compounding - how everyone knows about the inherent benefits it provides and yet is so hard to practice. Compounding, as a concept is very hard to grasp, especially because its counter-intuitive. If someone told you to invest just $5 everyday, with an annual return on that investment of 10%, that you'd become a millionaire by the age of 31, you'd probably kick them out and forget about it the next day. Why? Because human minds can comprehend linearity much better than exponentialitiy. Now, imagine you save $5 a day every day from the moment you're born. That would amount to $1825 a year. To become a millionaire, it'd take you about 548 years. The striking contrast between 31 years and 548 years!
You can see this everywhere. It's easy to think about what 8+8+8+8+8+8+8+8+8+8 evaluates to (it's 80). But if I ask you to calculate 8*8*8*8*8*8*8*8*8*8, you'll likely bang your head. We plan our lives linearly, high school -> college -> job -> marriage -> retirement -> death. I'm not sure what lead to this thinking, but I'm assuming since our current human mind is a culmination of decades of survival-ship, grasping exponentiality wasn't exactly on the to-do list. As a result, everything we think about - viz-a-viz - the decisions we take, are based on linearity.
This is probably why its so hard to commit to habits - personal, professional, physical, financial - that could hugely compound over time and give exponential returns. But since we think about it linearly, we expect the benefits to be linear too. Six days in the Gym should mean six packs. But it rarely works that way - an exponential graph lags behind a linear one in the nascent phases, but greatly overhauls the latter, given a long enough time horizon.
Benefits of compounding are huge. Everyone understands that. Warren Buffet is universally considered one of the greatest investing minds of this generation. His estimated net worth was around a staggering $84.5 billion in 2020. But, $81.5 billion of $84.5 billion came after his 65th birthday. Our minds are not built to understand such absurdities. He described it as a snowball rolling down a hill. By the time it reaches the bottom, it is much larger. This is provided you have a long enough hill. Everyone believes in compounding, but to take decisions based on it, is an entirely different matter.