Ever Increasing Power

A lot of people dream of financial freedom. If you research a little into the topic and wade through all the sketchy ads and get-rich-quick schemes, you will sooner or later find the compounding effect.

In my studies at university I specialized in finance. A large part of that major is about calculating risks and future returns on investments. I calculated enough to understand that small regular contributions have an outsized return if you factor in positive interest rates and disregard risk. All very theoretical.

The main lesson or promise is: save some money regularly and it will grow to something much larger than you ever thought. The sum of your contributions is ultimately way smaller than the final outcome. Meaning: the compounding effect multiplies your returns. Amazing, isn’t it?

I think that the same is true for many other aspects of life. For example: If you exercise a little every day, the long term health benefits outweigh the sum of the work you put into it each time you work out.

I have started learning how to code and more specifically web development in the beginning of January 2024, so roughly 2-3 months ago. Each day I invested varying amounts of time to learn new skills, programming languages, frontend frameworks, etc. Some days it was just 30 minutes and on others it was 5 hours a day. I plan to work on average 5 hours per day on my vision: build a profitable software as a service (SaaS) business that can run with little supervision.

In the beginning everything felt easy because I made quick progress.

• Set up a website? Not too difficult.
• Style it with CSS? Fine!
• Make it even nicer with TailwindCSS? No problem.

However, I then faced some more difficult topics: work with JavaScript, implement user authentication, connect to databases, select the right frontend framework and so on. I still haven’t found the perfect solution for most of my questions.

At times I felt that I didn’t make any progress or in some cases I even thought I had wasted a lot of time learning the wrong framework or technology.

Still, I just kept on going because I plan to run a marathon and not a sprint, even tough I raced off the starting line initially.

I then very quickly realized that the knowledge which I had been acquiring accumulated and that I learned new concepts a lot quicker than I initially thought.

For example: I learned React and the frontend framework Remix (which bases on React) for a few weeks. Since I really struggled learning it due to the lack of beginner-friendly learning resources, l decided to shift and have a look at other frameworks.

Now I’m learning Svelte and Sveltekit and it has gone way smoother and quicker. Thanks to a large part to the official Svelte Introduction-training which is free and easy to follow.

However it is also because I have already learned quite a lot in the past weeks. I noticed that I didn’t need to start from zero and learn everything from scratch again. Svelte is quite different from React, but it is also a JavaScript framework and it bases on the same core technologies which build the web. By learning how Remix works, I learned more about how the web works and that is now helping me learn Svelte.

In a different universe I may have started with Svelte and then struggled and moved to Remix. Who knows. In the end the learning journey is the one that really counts.

I really got the feeling that the more I learn, the quicker I get learning even more things. A compounding effect.

The key here is the return which I get on my “investment”. I feel like the time and effort are multiplied and this creates enormous motivation.

This may now sound incredible and too good to be true. In some part it is: I know full well that the learning speed will decrease at some point. I expect that I will not learn as fast forever, but at the moment, I get more return on each day of learning.

Also, I realize that I still have a lot to learn. It’s a paradox. The more l learn, the more I see what I don’t yet know. Learn one thing, hear about 10 others. Learn those and repeat.

I am still only scratching the surface. Let’s see where it goes!