What Warren Buffett can teach us about improving our health

I’d be smug too if I had the patience this man has shown the past 70 years

Recently I finished reading ‘The Snowball’ by Warren Buffett.

(It only took me about 3 years of dipping and out of it)

But I’ll save you the mountains of wisdom and give you the ‘too long didn’t read’ most powerful piece of advice he gives.

In it, he talks about the main strategy he used to build his ridiculous wealth.

That is ‘compounding interest’.

It’s a pretty simple premise:

1. You invest some money into something regularly

2. It begins making a return

3. Instead of taking those returns out you just keep it in the investment

4. You now have a bigger amount each time earning interest

5. You become a gazillionaire in 50 years (okay maybe not always)

Thus the term the snowball…

The snowball starts tiny at the top of the hill and begins rolling down.

With each roll, it accumulates more and more snow until it’s an absolute boulder of icy power by the time it reaches the bottom.

Our habits are much the same.

Making a small positive change now will appear to achieve absolutely nothing today…

Or the next day…

Or the day after that…

But over time this begins accumulating more and more momentum until these small changes not only become automatic habits but powerful drivers of huge long-term change.

This is why making slow sustainable changes now isn’t sexy.

But it sure as shit works long-term.

No marketer will sell based on this stuff, we want everything yesterday, and we often want to do it by making MASSIVE changes right away to feel like it’ll get us to the destination quicker.

But it rarely does, the bigger the snowball (change we have to make), the more momentum we’ll need to generate to get it moving.

This could be manageable when it’s the only thing we’ve got to focus on.

But when you’ve got a family, a job, friends, hobbies, booze, stress, emotional eating, and a dodgy back to boot it’s pretty damn tough.

So next time you’re thinking of making positive changes to your health, think about the snowball instead.

It might be the most powerfully simple strategy you’ll ever need.