Hey Reader,
Plant a single Chinese bamboo seed, water it every dawn, wait … and wait. For five grinding years the plot looks barren. Then — bang!—in the fifth rainy season the stalk rockets almost 90 feet in barely six weeks, with bursts of up to four feet a day. Farmers shrug; outsiders swear it’s sorcery. Everything meaningful happened underground where no-one was watching.
Entrepreneurship is the same private agony. We queue up email sequences, tweak funnels, go live on Instagram, and month after month the Stripe balance yawns back at us. Nothing’s wasted: the root system is wiring itself for a hurricane of orders you can’t yet see.
Dig up the seed to “check progress” and you kill the future skyscraper.
Lagging indicators — revenue, testimonials, follower counts — turn up fashionably late. Leading indicators — emails captured, discovery calls booked, prototypes shipped — whisper the real story, but they’re boring so most founders stop tracking them. That impatience is fatal. Warren Buffett pocketed 99 % of his net worth after he turned 50 and still calls compounding “a snowball — you just need a really long hill.”
Compounding is dull before it’s dazzling. “Get 1 % better each day and you’re 37 × better in a year” isn’t Instagram fluff; it’s straight arithmetic.
James Clear didn’t shift Atomic Habits to millions overnight — he published two blog posts a week for three straight years first.
Bill Gates’ lens helps: we overestimate what we can do in one year and underestimate what a decade can deliver. Zoom out, and tiny daily deposits become tidal waves of market share, brand equity and personal credibility.
3 ACTION TIPS
- Lead-Measure Power Hour
Block a non-negotiable hour at the top of your day — phone off, tabs closed — dedicate ALL your activities that move your primary lead metric (new leads, sales, calls). Protect this hour like a doctor's appointment - DO NOT SKIP IT. One focused hour beats eight distracted ones, and the fine keeps you honest.
- 90-Day Compound Habit
Choose one daily activity with asymmetric upside — podcast outreach, short-form video, handwritten thank-you notes — and execute without a single miss for 90 Days. The scoreboard will keep the dopamine flowing.
- Public Lag Diary
Once a month send a “Bamboo Report” to your list: what you tried, what rooted, what’s still dormant. Teaching the lesson cements your own patience and positions you as the guide, not the guru.
We've got this …
