on compounding effects

work on planting the seeds now.

gain the courage to go through the doors that are presented to you.

say yes to things.

be nice to people.

see your friends.

be curious.

these are all small things. they require small amounts of effort. the effort sometimes feels difficult to justify because “life” and “work” get in the way. but this will help life and work more than anything else because this effort deployed many times over long periods have a remarkable compounding effect that compounds and provides outsized returns in the long term!

what got me thinking about this was recently hitting one of my goals for the year which was to join a team sport and go regularly. I had been playing a lot of 1v1 sport, which is great fun and will continue, but the team aspect opens up the field to many other sports and I was keen to get into something new. in my mind it would probably have been something like basketball, cricket of football yet it unexpectedly turned out to be ultimate frisbee… in a park 15 min cycle away from me, with a delightful, motivated and competitive group of people, and there’s always at least 10 of us.

I was invited by the amazing Boris Bedzent, a good friend since only 2 years, who turned up to one of my monthly Ahuja Supper Clubs (which was another goal for the year). how did the supper clubs start? I made a ton of friends in London, and I have at least 15 years of mini cooking experiments, trial and error, reading up, watching cooking youtube, laboriously documenting every one of my favourite recipes (in Obsidian), and then having the guts to just invite 12 people over to my house, and cook 12 different dishes for them, and then do that every month, and then start actually suggesting an optional contribution for it (which everyone is happy to pay!)

learning to cook over many years directly contributed to two of my big goals for this year.

now I’m wondering how cooking will get me to 2000 ELO in chess before 2026…