125 lbs, compounded

A $150 deposit doesn't change your life. Neither does one run where you're gassed before the first kilometre is done. I've done thousands of both, and for a long stretch it looked like nothing was happening.

I'm a power engineer on a 28-day rotation in northern Alberta. I think in numbers for a living, so I notice when the same number runs two parts of my life that have nothing to do with each other.

Here's the one that runs everything: compound interest.

Not as a finance trick. As the plain math behind any slow change. It's the reason I lost 125 lbs, and it's the reason I dug out of debt years before that. Two different chapters of my life. Same mechanism.

This one's for anyone sitting in the flat part of a curve right now, doing the work and seeing nothing.

You put in a small amount. It earns a little. Then the little bit it earned starts earning too, and so does the bit after that. Small base, steady rate, enough time, and the line stops being a line. It starts to bend.

The catch is when it bends. Early on, the curve is almost flat. You can do everything right for months and the graph still looks broken. Most people are standing right there when they quit. Not because it stopped working, but because it hadn't visibly started yet.

I wrote a whole issue back in June about how most days nothing happens in a TFSA. This is the same idea, pointed at your entire life instead of one account.

I hit 320 lbs. I hated how I looked and I avoided cameras.

The way down was not dramatic. No single workout did anything. A run that felt pointless. A walk I didn't want to do. The lifts that creep up a little at a time. None of it moved the scale in a way you'd notice on any given Tuesday.

But it stacked. 320 became ~195. 125 lbs gone, in a line so slow I only really see it when I look at old photos. That's the part nobody posts. The result was loud. The method was silent.

In July 2024 I finally cracked under 100 kg. 99.6 on the scale. I'd chased those double digits for years, and there they were.

Then I got comfortable. By January 2025 I was back up to 109.6. Ten kilos the wrong way, in six months.

So I started the boring part over. Same small inputs, more focus this time. A year later, this past January, I hit my lowest ever: 88.3 kg.

This part happened earlier, and I want to be clear it was a separate stretch of my life. The money got fixed around 2019. The weight didn't come off until years later, once the financial base was already repaired. The two never overlapped. The only thing they share is the method.

Back then I was about $180,000 deep in consumer debt, with a net worth near $80,000 at the low. I'm not a financial advisor. I'm a guy who made a pile of expensive mistakes and then spent years quietly undoing them.

I sold the truck. A one-ton dually Ram I didn't need, gone in September 2019 for a cheaper $30,000 Jeep. A year later I sold the Jeep too and downsized to a 2009 Honda Fit. $4,200, no A/C, no cruise control. I still drive it today.

Then I started moving small, boring amounts into investments on a schedule and didn't stop. No windfall fixed it. The deposits did, one unremarkable transfer at a time, the same way the runs did.

The method is still running today, and it's still boring.

In June alone I made about 10 separate deposits into my TFSA. A $150 here, a $200 there, a couple of $500s. About $2,400 total. Not one of them felt like anything.

Training was the same story. I worked 21 days straight this month with no day off, day shift rolling into a week of night-shift overtime, and I still trained twice almost every day. A 25-minute Z1 bike before shift. A lift after. A treadmill run at 3 AM because that was the only window. Nothing heroic in any of it.

That's the whole job. Two small inputs a day. A couple hundred dollars on a schedule. Repeat while it looks like nothing is happening.

Here's the turn. You don't get to control the shape of the curve. You don't decide when it bends. You only decide whether you keep adding to it on the flat part, when there's still no evidence you should.

That's the entire skill. And it's rare exactly because it's boring. Most people need the graph to reward them before they'll keep going, and the graph doesn't work that way. The payoff is real, but it's always late, and it only shows up for the people who were still making deposits back when it made no sense to.

The slow way isn't the scenic route. It's the only one that ever held for me. Twice, in two different chapters, on two things that had nothing else in common.

Coming up: the first monthly report, a month of training and money laid out side by side on the same page.

Reply and tell me the flat part of the curve you're stuck in right now, and how long until you'll let yourself believe it's working.

— Kiegan