The compound interest of focus

“All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.” Naval Ravikant

I have always believed focus is the one main differentiator for success, regardless of which area of life we are talking about.

But I haven’t thought about the compound interest of focus until I truly realized its impressive impact.

That being said, it is not only about dedication — it is about the compound interest of dedication.

Imagine a girl -let’s call her Ana- decides to start her new lemonade venture.

For each hour she would pay attention at her newest lemonade store, she would be opening up a full array of possibilities that will, at the same time, create new time and focus for the business in the future, which will, all in all, build newer and newer arrays of infinite possibilities, creating a virtuous circle.

So, for each hour she worked, she opened up newer possibilities of selling more lemonade, but also developed newer lemonade-derivate products, hire new people, attract new customers by improving customer experience, find out new marketing channels, optimize conversion rates, open an e-commerce store, etc. This would be an endless list.

At the end of the day, sure, what matters the most is quality time, not quantity. But quantity enables quality.

If you’re the whole day dedicated to understanding the best pricing for your lemonade product -and of course only if you’re good at it-, you’d try out many different experiments until you find out the best optimal price. 

The final finding would be the result of the best performing quality time on the whole process (the aha moment), but it wouldn’t have happened without the entire process itself — thus, quantity enables quality.

Now let’s try to see the outcome of focus’ compound interest. 

The most obvious one is sales. If based on your focus you’re selling 10 lemonades per hour, then your compound interest focus rate will be taking at least 10 lemonades at a basis for forecasting next month’s sales. All above that should be calculated as compound interest based on focus and dedication.

If Ana would have not left her job for dedicating full time on her newest company, and if she had not been working long hours, she would have never discovered the optimal pricing for selling 10 lemonades per hour, and definitely would never have had any chance to allocate 10 lemonades as a basic start for her following monthly forecast. 

And now these 10 sales allowed her to hire a store manager—she can now afford paying someone else to attend her kiosk while gaining space for building other stuff at the company.

So, her calendar is now freed up in 60% from being all day talking to customers to now being able to building new products and thinking about how to attract more customers.

Each hour dedicated to attracting new customers functions as leverage for adding the lifetime value brought by new customers that will arrive the following month based on her new strategy. Each new customer is the result of the compound interest of focus.

Each hour dedicated to building new products operates as leverage for adding the lifetime value brought by a new lemon and vegan ice cream that she came up with to start selling the following month. Every purchase of this new ice cream needs to be measured as the result of the compound interest of focus.

This is how growth happens. This is how focus enables growth to happen. And this is, again, the magic of the compound interest created by focusing 100% on your endeavor.

And we can see the same in every side of life.

Each 15 minutes dedicated to enlarging your biceps at the gym augments the basis of muscle for the next 15 minutes on the following day. You would never acquire a larger musculature just going once per month to the gym.

Each hour dedicated to your family and friends enables a better, stronger relationship. Each time you see them creates the basis for the next time you visit them, allowing innumerable new conversation lines that would allow a stronger personal approach for the next encounter.

Each 10 pages of that book you are reading allows you to reach your 10 annual books goal you decided on January, while augmenting your cognitive and technical abilities.

Focus has innumerable valuable variables, and it’s the recipe of success in different areas of life. But the most precious worth of focus is not about how you’re developing things at the time of being focused. It’s much more about the compound impact it creates for the following time, making it impressively efficient for enabling success.