A few weeks ago, a colleague sent me an email about compounding minds. Some people learn fast and then plateau. Others take much longer to understand things, sometimes frustratingly so, but they never really stop. While everyone around them levels off, they keep going. Small gains stack on top of one another, quietly, year after year, until late in the game they add up to something the fast learners never reach. It is the same logic as compound interest, applied to a person. And it shows up often in neurodivergent minds.
I have been rereading that email. I found a lot of myself in it. Especially now, when so many pieces of the puzzle seem to be falling into the right place.
You see, I have always had a difficult relationship with time.
My life has moved either very fast or very slowly. This may be tied to my obsession with Zen, and with living in the present moment. Or maybe time, for me, has simply never moved in a straight line.
Start with the fast part. I was born premature. I finished my mother’s milk after fifteen days. I was eating biscuits at three weeks and meat at six months. I said my first words at four months, started school at five, and had more energy than three children put together.
But everything was also slow. And it is the slow part that marked my life the most.
I was the last one to understand the drills at football practice before doing them. My voice changed at twenty. After several years of working on my breath, I still do not have a clear physical perception of the soft palate or the diaphragm, things that should probably be second nature by now (by the way, a couple of doctors mentioned ideomotor apraxia, and that explanation makes sense to me). I walked my first Camino de Santiago at thirty. I grew my beard and my hair long well after adolescence. I founded a company at thirty-eight.
And there are still many things I have not done, things I feel are somehow written into my destiny. I joke about marrying in my forties and having several children. People laugh, but I am actually serious. I could become a martial arts instructor at sixty, or a musician at seventy. As I have written many times, destiny has surprised me again and again.
All of this to say that when I think about compounding, everything makes sense.
Compounding minds work differently. Where others scatter their seed wherever it falls, we spend months, sometimes years, looking for fertile ground instead of asphalt. We play the slow game of making the smart choices, or at least we try to. Maybe we are afraid of mistakes, maybe we are perfectionists, maybe we simply need more time before action becomes possible. But I have come to believe that we ruminate so much that, when we finally do something, it is our “alea iacta est” moment. We cross the Rubicon and we do not look back.
The hard part is the waiting. And in all that waiting, you have three roads.
The first, and the most dangerous, is comparison. It will make you crash. The path of others is different from yours, so the measurement is meaningless from the start, and chasing it only pulls you off your own line. I have my own ways of dealing with it, maybe worth a separate post, but we are all prone to it. Be aware.
The second road, dangerous in its own way, is ego. You convince yourself that the world is wrong and you are right. It takes guts, broad shoulders, and a fair dose of arrogance. You have to carve your own path while everyone around you is already choosing theirs. I do not criticize the people who take this route, mostly because I have probably been the best possible example of it. But precisely because of that, I know its downsides. Ego can protect you from giving up too soon, but it can also make you deaf. It can turn slowness into superiority, and patience into resentment. It can make you confuse being misunderstood with being right.
The third road is faith. Trusting that everything is happening for a reason, and that it will turn out right. Not as an excuse for passivity, and not as a way to pretend that everything is fine, but as the discipline of continuing without demanding immediate proof. To anyone who thinks faith is naive, I would offer my favorite argument from Thomas Aquinas. For Aquinas, faith is an intellectual act, and its object is truth. The highest knowledge we can reach, the knowledge of God, comes through it. Faith, in the end, is the highest form of knowledge.
Not everyone is a compounding mind.
But if you are, skip the comparison, watch the ego, and keep the faith. The math only works if you give it time. So give it time.
You will not regret it.
