3.11 Compounding self-development
There are lots of reasons people don’t want to do self-development. It’s not a walk in the park. It involves growing pains, and that phrase is way too lightweight for the kind of pain you can encounter.
As you can guess from the other pages in this chapter, I’m a big fan of doing our inner work. But you have to decide if it’s right for you, if it’s something that will make your life better.
But on this page, I’m recommending that if you decide to go for it that you really go for it. Instead of inching forward, struggle by struggle, you learn how to play big and take leaps. And get the full pleasure of self-development that’s there to be gotten.
To explain what I mean, I’m going to start with compound interest and then come back to self-development…
Say you have the good fortune to be able to set aside some money each month to invest in a fund that pays interest on your principle. You can choose to have them send you the interest you earn each quarter, or you can reinvest it.
If you reinvest it, you’re compounding. Each time you accrue interest, you keep it in the fund and it becomes part of the principle. And because your principle is now larger, your interest becomes larger, and the total value of your fund increases.
There is no instant win with compounding. It takes time. At first, it increases slowly. So slowly lots of people opt out and try for quick gains in stocks with hot reputations. But if you stick with compounding, as time goes on your gains are bigger and bigger, until you get to the point that when you open your statement you’re so happy you decided to go with compounding.
Let’s look at the numbers…
If you save $10,000 a year for 20 years, at the end of that time you’ll have $200,000 in your account.
But if you invest $10,000 a year for 20 years at 5% interest per year, at the end of that time you’ll have $373,726, or almost twice as much.
Let’s say you extended the time period to 40 years…
You’d have $400,000 in your savings account.
But you’d end up with $1,338,798 in your investment account. That’s almost a million dollars more from compounding.
That’s the power of compounding. And why it works is because the interest keeps growing faster and faster as time passes, because…
Interest keeps feeding interest.
It’s in a positive feedback loop.
Very fun.
And guess what?
You can compound self-development, too.
It’s like the rich get richer except we’re not talking about money. We’re talking about you becoming a richer version of yourself.
Self–development can feed itself, so that…
The deeper you go with self-development the deeper you can go.
And…
The better you get at it, the better you can get at it.
And the reason is simple. You’re not just developing yourself…
You’re learning how to develop yourself as you do the work of developing yourself.
You get better at it because you’re strategically and consciously developing the skills and the mindset and the passion that go with self–development.
And with each victory you have along the way, you’ll begin to have more faith in your ability to make progress, so you’ll be more willing to take on each new challenge. And that very willingness makes you more successful until the process becomes self-reinforcing.
There comes a day when you surprise yourself because you’re actually eager to break into the next blind spot. You now have a different relationship with blind spots. A mature relationship. You know how to tackle them and win. And you’re building the confidence that comes with successive victories.
In the process, your relationship with self-development itself changes. This is no longer a struggle for you. More and more it becomes a pleasure. You might even get to the point where beyond the specific benefits it brings you love it so much…
You’re into it for its own sake.
At some point…
The pain/pleasure ratio flips.
In the beginning phase, there’s significantly more pain than pleasure. But as time passes, the pleasure increases, it comes into its own, until finally it eclipses the pain.
And then…
Self-development becomes more play than work.
I wish somebody had told me this when I was in my 20s. I wish someone had shown me how the compound mastery of self-development works. I think I would have been much more proactive and made much faster progress. It’s hard to put your heart into something that you believe is ultimately futile.
And here’s something to remember…
If you’re trying to develop a self you hate, that’s hard, discouraging work.
If you’re developing a self you’ve come to love, or at least believe you will come to love, that work is infused with delight.
There was a time when I had co-dependent relationships with people. Because of my approval-seeking and the people-pleasing that came with it, I was not able to stand on my own two feet. I was dependent on other people instead of independent within myself.
And it was a long, hard slog to get past that behavior. But…
With each step forward, I was more motivated to do the work and take the next step forward.
There was a time when I thought I was going to have to keep struggling with this issue for my whole life. But not so.
Now if someone tries to suck me into a co-dependent rescue or a co-dependent relationship, I don’t even have to think about it. I get triggered. It’s like I have an allergy. And my response is just simply and immediately, “NO!”
Then depending on the situation, I might explain myself. And tell the person attempting to rope me in, that if she wants to talk about quitting co-dependent behavior, I’d be glad to have that conversation with her.
I have to say, that for me, coming from a place of deep despair about myself, decades of despair, to get to where I can relax and trust myself and know that I’m really living a different kind of life now and I don’t have to stand guard, and I don’t have to constantly police myself to stay okay, that’s a sweet pleasure.
