The Compounding Interest of Good Habits
By: Jimmy Cerone
Tags: Tim Ferriss, Ideas, Compounding Interest, Habits, Productivity

The Quick Version

Compounding Interest of Habits = The improvements in process and results that come from doing the same activity repeatedly over an extended period of time.

Compounding interest of habits seems to work best for activities that are:

Durable (they can be recorded in some way and thus shared)

Field independent (the habit can be generalized to help in many areas of life)

The Long Version

Before we dive into the “story” part of this article, I’d like to define compounding interest in the realm of habits, as I think it’s not a 1 to 1 transfer from the world of finance.

Compounding Interest of Habits = The improvements in process and results that come from doing the same activity repeatedly over an extended period of time.

The Inspiration | My Compounding Habit

After a few blog posts, I started realizing that instead of explaining my ideas over and over again to different friends, I could send them all my article.

Not only that, as I began roaming the forums of the internet, I found that as I gave out advice I could attach my articles for a more in depth look at the topic I was covering.

What really caught my eye about this compounding interest, in numeric form, was my view count. A few months ago, after little attention to my Medium, my monthly view count dwindled to below 100 per month.

When I started writing an idea a day, my reads shot up. Unlike before, where I’d have to promote like crazy to get any reads at all, the sheer volume of my writing meant that every story resonated with someone.

The cumulative totals, 4 reads here, 5 reads there, started to add up. When you’ve put out 40 stories, that makes for nice numbers (for me at least), even if none of them goes “big”.

Even better, the compound value of my previous stories grew as I wrote more and more. My past writing, forgotten out of neglect, started to get reads as well.

These new stories I was writing were acting as entry points for new readers, driving them to old content as well as new.

The result? My views per month has quadrupled, up to 400 a month and my “reads” are higher than ever before.

In the past, when I’d tried to promote the small number of stories I wrote, I’d see a temporary spike in numbers. While the numbers spiked, few people read what I wrote. So while I was reaching lots of people, little of what I said resonated.

Relying on organic reach now, I’m finding that more people are reading my stuff, even as a similar amount are viewing my posts.

All this is due to the compounding interest of the daily writing habit.

Aside from the sheer results, the compound interest has also shown up in improvements in my process.

Since I can now use old articles as references, I am starting to develop templates and guidelines which speed up my writing and reduce my cognitive load.

Further, I am starting to create different categories (Book Club, Shark Stank, General) that further focus my lens and help me to write better, faster.

All these improvements have come from compound interest, or as I defined earlier, the power of doing the same thing repeatedly for an extended period of time.