011 Exponential growth and compounding
It's likely that you may have come across the story of the wheat and chessboard problem, where an ancient Indian Minister when asked for what he wanted as a reward for his great invention of the game of chess, requested his ruler (king) provide him with as much wheat amounted to if a chessboard were to have wheat placed upon each square of the 64 squares on the board such that one grain were placed on the first square, two on the second, four on the third and so on (doubling or squaring the number of grains on each subsequent square). The ruler laughs it off thinking that the inventor wanted such a small sum for such an amazing invention, only to have court treasurers report the unexpectedly huge number of wheat grains would outstrip the ruler's resources (and the entire world's, today, by an insane factor of 2,000 times total production). The total amount of wheat grains summed up to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 (eighteen quintillion, four hundred forty-six quadrillion, seven hundred forty-four trillion, seventy-three billion, seven hundred nine million, five hundred fifty-one thousand, six hundred and fifteen)
* For a visual representation, click here.
This is a really an astounding story to hear for the first time. Who would have thought 64 squares could mean so much! Yet, even after hearing this story quite a lot don't precisely believe or execute through the lens of the power of compounding and it's impact.
We can use the incomprehensible power (to the naked eye) of compounding in our everyday life to make chunks of improvements and lead better, productive lives. By doing small things everyday, slowly moving forward, step by step, making progressive improvements, then making progressive improvements of the previous progressive improvements, that is to say making continuous improvements and then be surprised when pondering over the fact that such small work everyday, compounding through the time has accumulated to so much improvement.
The Amazing Things & Ideas list this week:
Book I've been reading this week:
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Four Parts by Douglas Adams. Greatest (and the first) science fiction book I've ever read so far.A quote by someone else I found amazing:
"It takes curiosity to learn. It takes courage to unlearn.
Learning requires the humility to admit what you don't know today.
Unlearning requires the integrity to admit that you were wrong yesterday.
Learning is how you evolve. Unlearning is how you keep up as the world evolves." — Adam Grant (Tweet)An informative yet hilarious YouTube video (a must watch!):
When a physics teacher knows his stuff !! — Walter Lewin
"Physics works and I'm still alive!"
All articles from this week on arjunkhemani.com:
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