Compounding Goodness

This title resulted from a “brain boner” I got the other day – my mind got so worked up with excitement that this phrase came to mind. A few different experiences swirled around in my head and clicked, resulting in a Eureka moment. This is often the case with my best insights; they’re like desserts emerging from a hodgepodge of ingredients that are the experiences of life.

Here’s what swirled around:

• Nassim Taleb’s idea to “seek opportunities with little to no known downside and large unknown upside.”
• The factthat 99% of Warren Buffet’s net worth has come after the age of fifty. This is due to compounding, a concept which is tough to grasp and even tougher to practice.
• A recent conversation with my Idea Sex FWB (friend with benefits) – we gather weekly to share ideas, resulting in the birth of new ones, hence the phrasing, “Idea Sex.” In this recent convo, we touched on regret minimization frameworks, which led to the question, “What will I never regret?” And I realized that being kind is something I’ll never regret.
• Year-end musings on gratitude – recognizing that most of the best moments of my life came as the result of serendipity.
• A random insight on my perfectionism. Not only do I criticize whether I’ve done the right things, or how well I’ve done them, but also how quickly I’ve done them. The speed is the key insight here, and it caused me to begin dollar cost averaging crypto again, as I hope to someday buy land and build a house on it. Saving for this is the right move, and I’d been beating myself up about not doing it fast enough. But, as the saying goes, “Good things take time.”

Some of these experiences occurred 4+ years ago, others just this week, to form a present-moment Eureka. After gestating, out popped an offspring – a new idea.
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Compounding Goodness​
​As a personal growth junkie, this gave me a full nerdgasm. But what does it mean? Compounding allows small, repeated actions to generate massive returns, especially in the long run. Warren Buffet is as good an example as it gets.

Being kind has no known downside. It also has a large uncapped upside. Maya Angelou said,

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

If you want to make a true, lasting impact on people, be kind to them. Not just polite, but kind. Benevolent. People remember it.

None of the regrets I have come from being kind. I never wish I was rude to someone. In fact, most regrets involve moments where I was unkind, either to others or to myself.

As I did my year-end review, I realized that many of my best moments last year, and throughout my life, were the result of complete serendipity.

Finally, I realized that by being kind today, even if I don’t get the exact outcome I want right now, I’m investing in my future serendipity. It’s impossible to predict the outcome of today’s kindness in the future.

I can say with one hundred percent certainty that I have a large memory bank of one-off acts of kindness from people. The sort of events that may have been trivial for them but totally made my day or restored my faith in humanity. And these events are positive sum, not zero sum. Don’t confuse this with manipulation though. These acts of goodness have no score associated with them. That’s precisely what makes them special. Nobody loses when we are all kinder to one another.
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Calculating Goodness ROI

​I can’t say what your exact returns will be if you practice compounding goodness. No one can. But, I can say with certainty they are exponentially higher than practicing compound rudeness or apathy.

In this realm, a little bit goes a long way. Armchair quarterbacking is a terrible way to predict specific investment returns. And yet, when reviewing my life, damn near all my best moments were due to a random act of kindness in the past, which triggered a connection that resulted in some novel, memorable event. And, in seeing that, I determined this is not just correlative; it is causal.

These serendipitous moments of awesomeness occur precisely because a memory cued by an act of kindness germinated a new connection in my brain.

As the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction, and here’s an example of how this has worked in my life in mysterious ways:

• A former roommate of mine and I got along. We weren’t close, but we gelled enough. A single catchup over a Facebook message resulted in me getting a job at Google.
• One of my first days at work, my boss, a former D1 cross country athlete, mentioned a personal challenge he was trying. Run 30 minutes for 30 days in a row. He invited the team to join. I was the only one who responded, and we began running after work on Tuesdays. We are still in contact from time to time.
• One day, he and I met for coffee, and the conversation drifted to kettlebells, and I mentioned a guy I followed on Instagram, who holds world records in kettlebell events. My old boss told me they were high school buddies, and offered to make an introduction. I then met the kettlebell dude at an infrared sauna and float tank place. He had trained extensively with someone I loosely followed online, Paul Chek.
• This led to me studying at the CHEK Institute, with the most rigorous approach to holistic health I’ve ever seen.
• That eventually led to how I’m supporting myself today.

Can we say for sure that calling this roommate caused all of these events? No. But I can say for sure that if I didn’t make that call, they probably wouldn’t have happened.

NOTE TO SELF: Go for it. A little dab’ll do ya. Like Hansel and Gretel, sprinkle bits of goodness everywhere you go. They may lead you to places only fairytales can describe.

Πηγή: stegdrew.com