This month HBO has released the brilliant documentary "Becoming Warren Buffett." I have always been a fan of documentaries but found Warren Buffet a little quirky, so I was pleasantly surprised by the documentary. I figured out that Warren and I both had a childhood fascination with Compound Interest, I think Warren has done better with that fascination than me. Warren considers compound interest the 8th wonder of the world, and as the world's wealthiest person, it is the perfect case study. Buffet shares several stories of how compounding or exponential growth fascinated him.
The first story was a fable were a farmer meets with the King and plays the Wheat and Chessboard game. The game goes like this, you put 1 grain of wheat on the first square and double the amount on each successor square. Buffet being a math wiz laughed and stated that by the time you get to the 64th square, it would require all the wheat in the village or 2 to the 64th. This exponential logic applied to finance and business becomes his life's work.
Being sales, I am always looking for ways to use compounding; I want to have clients recommend and refer me. I work to prevent mistakes instead work on recovering from them. I love the idea of each day building off the previous instead of starting from scratch.
In business today the most visible examples of compounding are on social networks like LinkedIn.
If you are game let us try an experiment, let's see how long it takes to spread this post to all 500 million Linkedin users. If each reader Liked, Shared and Commented we would be able to see the exponential effect and be a great case study. In your comment call out two friends so that they can help with the power of compounding, the 8th wonder of the world.
As a Reward for commenting and sharing, I will email you via LinkedIn my "Unlimited Leads" a 20-page book on the approach and apps I use to group over 300% last year. Just send me an email after you have liked, commented and shared.
Thanks for stopping by and check out the documentary,
Brian