Applying your skills is like earning money. Growing your skills is like growing your money with compound interest. Warren Buffet, one of the world’s wealthiest people had this advice about growing your money:
Time is your friend, impulse is your enemy. Take advantage of compound interest and don’t be captivated by the siren song of the market.
This advice applies to enriching your life, too. Though money can help, growing your life skills impacts all parts of your life, including money, enjoyment, and purpose.
By starting early you develop for a longer time and can take advantage of your growth sooner. The benefits build each time and last across your lifetime.
Compounding your character strengths and life skills by improving in some area, just 1% each day, day after day, can increase surprisingly quickly. That’s like 1% interest on a $100 investment, compounded daily, which after one year would be worth over $3,700.
And the siren song Buffet urges you to ignore? This song is the thing that distracts you with false promises from what matters most. If something sounds too easy and too amazing, it probably is. Resist it and focus on what matters.
Example: Don vs. Gerald
Don is a doer. Each day, he does what he does best. He works hard and contributes his time to repairing the homes of people in his church. Each week he fixes two problems. He justifiably feels pride and even more, knows he’s helping. After a year, he’ll have helped fix over 100 problems. That’s a big impact!
Gerald is helping Don. He likes knowing that, through their work, people won’t be cold or have high energy bills. Gerald takes a project per week. After a year, he’ll have fixed 50 problems.
Gerald knows he doesn’t have the time to devote to the work that Don does. After a while, he does something remarkable. He stops altogether to take time to think. He decides he’s going to spend time talking to others about what they do. Pretty soon, word gets around and they have five times as many projects coming in per weeks as before, while he’s stopped contributing to getting it done.
Don stops him at church. “What are you going to do about this, Gerald?” he asks.
Gerald replies, “I’m so successful with my ‘sales’ I’m going to talk to more people.”
“Why would you do that?” Don demands. “We can’t handle the work we have now, and you’re not helping.”
“You’ll see – just trust me,” Gerald says.
Gerald goes around explaining to others how there are so many deserving elders who need help with their homes. He signs up more people to volunteer their time. Gerald has built his sales skills and then his persuasion skills while keeping his fixit skills, too. With five more people working, they’re able to complete all the new work with a little more capacity.
But problems occur. Several of the volunteers want to quit saying that it just isn’t satisfying to them. Gerald talks to them and realizes they feel underappreciated. He asks them to wait just a while. He starts a facebook page to appreciate the volunteers and asks all the seniors who’ve had help to post on the page with pictures and personal thank yous to the volunteers. Now Gerald is starting to see how to motivate others through what drives them.
Don is happy. He keeps working on the projects, feels super appreciated, and gets credit as the founder of this all-volunteer group. Gerald is wondering about how he can improve his skills and talking about taking some more time off to research other needs of seniors.
Gerald has grown skills he wants to grow to support his vision of helping others. He learned to ask what would help him better reach his goals and then set out to achieve the improvements. Importantly, these skill improvements have compounded his abilities which compounded his impact.
We Want to Help You Compound Your Potential
We’re your hosts, Debbie Leasure and Dr. David Leasure. We built Head4Knowledge to serve one purpose: to help you and anyone else who wants to become all they want to be by sharing what we know. We built Head4Knowledge with our combined 50 years of working professionally, teaching, developing curriculum, and researching learning and performing. Access these resources to find inspiration, tools, techniques, and resources that you can practice, every day to be better tomorrow:
- treat yourself kinder
- focus on the positive
- define your life’s purpose
- set goals, create plans, and be a master tasker who does the most important things first
- self-assesses to improve your performance
- help others succeed
- and learn many more techniques to help you be more effective
Head4Knowledge is not a grab bag of tips and hacks to make pieces of your life better. It’s a comprehensive system for becoming your vision of who you want to be and getting done what matters most to you.
Each week we’ll post new blogs, create new podcasts, and improve our courses to help you keep improving. Subscribe to our blog and podcast, and join our free performing & learning community or take one of our free courses.
Suggested Next Step
Compound your potential by thoroughly learning an area of performance. Through head4knowledge, you’ll get access to an organized and ever growing set of resources to help you grow each day. Subscribe at the bottom of this page to receive updates when new resources are added.
Our Mission
The mission of Head4Knowledge.com is to help people, ages 13-113, achieve success in life, on their terms, using the knowledge, skills, brain tools, and methodologies needed to compound what helps them live more purposeful and satisfying lives.
David & Debbie LeasureBanner Image Credit
Thanks to Jakob Owens for his photo we call “Light the Spark of Growth” from upshot.com.