What mindset has made you successful?

I hated my summer vacations.

Really!

When summer vacations started, all my friends were excited … except me!

Why?

My father made me work EVERY single summer … I had no option, and I hated it!

I got very angry because my dad pushed me to work — but as payday got closer and closer, my anger eased. “You owe me, dad!” I would say to him after each workday.

Later, when I got his paycheck, by the end of the week, my dad would say to me, “Now I don’t owe you anything!”

I grinned and felt satisfied as if Friday was my “payback time.”

Then Monday came again. I hated Mondays, and the cycle started all over again. This would repeat every week: “You owe me, dad!”

”Now I don’t owe you anything!” he would say with the cash in his hand.

My dad was patient enough to teach me a lesson I will never forget. He patiently waited until my summer ended, and when I was back in school, one day he came to me and said, “I don’t owe you anything!”

”That’s right,” I said proudly, “I didn’t work for you this week.”

”Where’s all your money?” he asked.

“Saved,” I answered, yet, I knew I had spent most of it.

”You burned your work,” he said.

”I said I saved it,” I answered arrogantly.

”You worked all summer long, for what? To buy a few things and save some cash? I don’t owe you anything; you burned your work!” he said.

”What do you mean?” I asked confused.

”Hector, never forget this, you can ‘burn your work,’ or you can ‘compound your work.’”

“Compound?” I asked.

I remember I was working on a puzzle. He said pointing to it, “How many days have you been putting this puzzle together?”

“About two weeks,” I answered.

”Two weeks?” he asked.

”Yes, every day I find a few pieces, I put them in the right spot and continue the next day.”

”What if every Friday I came in here and destroyed your progress?”

”Why would you do that!” I asked angrily.

”That’s what I did each Friday that you got paid! Yes, you accumulated work from Monday to Friday, but, your paycheck eliminated all your accumulated work and you went back to zero!”

”Yes, you owed me!” I said.

”But you didn’t build anything!”

”Well, I made some money!” I answered.

”But every Monday, you started back from ZERO, just like if I came here every Friday, paid you and destroyed your puzzle so that you had to start all over again.”

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Now, to answer your question, what mindset has made you successful?

My dad taught me early the mindset of investing my work building something, not to “burn” my work where there’s no real compounding benefits.

I call it “compounding work,” or the “snowball effect,” which is simply growing something continuously.

 

Today, everything I work for, every working hour of every workday, I invest my time building or improving something.

That’s how wealth is made. It’s gained by growing something, by compounding our daily efforts towards building an asset, not “burning” my efforts.