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Ben Hunt's avatar

Hey Wisen! Ben here,

With regards to the unintuitive nature of compounding returns over a long period of time, I wanted to understand better how we advanced our society so quickly and why it appears to be going faster day by day.

With regards to investing, the current human lifespan is just out of reach from truly seeing the absurd affects first hand of continuously small compounding over long periods of time.

This is the avg annual returns at 100-500 years with 3% CAGR compound annual growth rate

19.21863% (100 years)

184.67790%

2366.17116%

34105.92955%

524375.44683% (500 years)

542K% is absurd.

However, I think this might be slightly flawed.

"But most of us struggle to grasp the power of tiny continuous improvements. A 1% improvement may seem marginal, but do it every day for one year you will improve 37x!"

This assumes that you continually make 1% improvements every single day (1% better than the previous day). I think it's actually linear. You save 1% of your days time every day, but you aren't 1% better than the previous day). At the end of the year, given that you do this 365 days a year, you will save 3.65 days worth of time.

maybe more if you take that 1% of time savings each day and try to increase your productivity further.

Given all this, I think TDD saves me more than 1% in productivity :)

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James Cauwelier's avatar

Looking at the software engineering space and what is published, there always seems to be ‘something’ that is ‘driving development’.

TDD = Test Driven Development

BDD = Behavior Driven Development

DDD = Domain Driven Development

etc

All of these encode an intent with which software development proceeds. And that, IMO, generates the critical question: What is the most beneficial way for me to provide direction and momentum to the work I am doing?

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