Compounding Cheaters
Compound interest doesn’t like cheaters.
Albert Einstein, the famous theoretical physicist is quoted to have said: “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it … he who doesn’t … pays it.” How a physicist got to be talking about finance, I don’t know. But one thing that compounding teaches is that small steps over time, become very big shifts. He who exercises daily, will over time see results that are an effect of compounding.
As it works in finance, so it does in fitness, and every other area of life. When planning for a road-trip, especially one that will take you across multiple countries for a month, it is important to be careful about time. Our schedule considered borders, distance, the time that Google Maps suggested it will take, and more. We also had to have rest days planned ahead so that people can recuperate. The planning went on for 7 months as we kept refining with each new more accurate information.
And how long did this plan that took 7 months to prepare stick? 1 day. Just the second day as we arrived at the Malawi border, we started getting delayed. We had planned 3 hours at the border, we spent 6. We had planned to sleep in Lilongwe; we ended up at Mzuzu because of the bad road. In between the police delayed us by 1 hour. 1 hour is small in a 31-day trip, but as true about all things compounding, every small thing added together, with interest, becomes very big things.
By the time we were in Lusaka we were 1 day behind schedule, by the time Eric and Daud were driving the two Mercedes cousins out of Livingstone, we were 2 days behind schedule. We would never catch up to the schedule. Once that first delay came in, it meant that everything else had to be improvised. That flexibility is important, even if you took your time to plan out the time.
In Nairobi I went to a market to buy fridge magnets as memorabilia. I had a whole day without work as my colleagues one after the other started flying back to their countries. My flight was in the evening, so I had the day at the hotel. I wrote the first article of this series, All Dar at the hotel.
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The rest of the group drove out of Livingstone and headed to Botswana via Kazungula bridge. The kilometre compounded one after the other as they started driving in Botswana. The warning they received was simple: Watch out for the elephants. They thought it was a joke until they had to bring the cars to a screeching halt right before hitting an elephant in the dark of the night.
The roads were good at first but the last 300 kilometres between Nata and Maun, were absolutely terrible. They were so bad that they outdid Malawi. For the first time, we witness road signs that say “Potholes”. Those 300km took 8 hours to drive, and almost hitting an elephant.
The drive to Maun was for something we had scheduled: Mokoro and the Okavango Delta. But even this schedule could not happen. Rain changed everything. Safari vehicles couldn’t do it, let alone our Mercedes sedans. We had to let it go.
Every single delay, no matter how small, was showing up with compounding effect. By the time they arrived at the reserved accommodation, it was 3am. The host was asleep, understandably so. So just one week into the road-trip, people slept in their cars.
In Nairobi my driver picked me up and took me to Jomo Kenyatta International. I checked-in, and got to my gate for boarding. And ‘true’ to their MO, KQ announced a delay. Of course, this delay was different, since at Oliver Thambo International I had another flight to catch. One delay was threatening to compound into more problems.
As the delay had been pushed by an hour each other, I joined a conversation of a white mother and her 3 children — a son and two daughters — they live in Johannesburg and were flying back from visiting the beautiful islands of Zanzibar in Tanzania. We joked around about the compounding effect that a small delay can cause.
I liked something she said just before midnight as we were waiting for our flight: ‘In life, those who ignore the effect of small decisions today are compounding cheaters’. I asked what ‘compounding cheaters’ mean. She smiled and said, ‘Adults who lie to themselves that their today doesn’t affect tomorrow’.
A small crease on the tarmac unfixed becomes potholes. Potholes become time wasted in slower driving, and more expenses in car fixing, and buying new tires, and arriving at your accommodation at 3am, and sleeping in the car, and being 3 days behind schedule. All of it, is compounding.
Don’t ignore small things.
