deceptively simple question: given a list of cities and the distances between each pair, what is the shortest possible route that allows a salesman to visit each city once and return to the starting point? Suppose I have to visit five cities; then there are five choices for the first one, four for the next, and so on, which makes 5 × 4 × 3 × 2 × 1 = 120 different routes. I can check the total distance of each of the 120 alternatives and find the best route. Easy for a computer. But what if there are many more? Take the example of having to visit a city in each of the 50 American states. This time, there are 50 x 49 x 48 x … x 1 different routes( mathematicians write this as 50!). It is a 64-digit number. In his brilliant book Mathematical Intelligence, Junaid Mubeen says that“ if you had the most super of super computers, computing each exact route in the time it takes light to cross the width of an atom, you would still have to wait for the age of the universe multiplied trillions times for the program to produce an answer … Even among those problems that can be solved by machines, certain solutions might be impossible to come by because it demands too much processing power for a computer to handle.” This is an extreme example of a problem that seems simple in the moment but can become overwhelming when scaled, revealing how rapidly complexity can grow beyond intuition.
Compound interest
Back to compound interest. Perhaps the ultimate example of an investor who made that eighth wonder of the world that Einstein referred to, work for him, is Warren Buffett. Buffet will celebrate his 96 th birthday in August this year. He started investing at the age of 11( he purchased three shares of a company called City Service Preferred). His time in the markets, therefore, spans almost 85 years. As of 2026, Buffett’ s net worth is around US $ 143 billion. Of course, the figure will fluctuate daily based on the stock price of Berkshire Hathaway, where most of his wealth is held. Now, this is a big number, a very huge number. But here is the statistic that will most probably stump you; in fact, due to the problem of exponential growth bias, our minds are simply not built for such seeming absurdities: US $ 140 billion of Warren Buffett’ s US $ 143 billion net worth( 98 %) came after his 60 th birthday. And if we go further back to age 55, the age at which South Africans can start cashing in their retirement annuities, his net worth then was around US $ 700 million, which means that 99.5 % of his net worth today came after 55. It boils down to this simple fact: Buffett’ s fortune is not so much due to him being a good stock picker. Yes, he was better than average. But, to his own admission, he made many mistakes, and in some years, his returns were, frankly, miserable. No, it was all about time in the markets, allowing for exponential growth to work its magic.“ The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient,” is one of Buffett’ s quotes. If Buffett had started investing in his early 30s( like many of us, after exploring the world and finding our passions) and retired in his 60s, the world would not have known of him. Yes, his skill might be investing, but his real magic, his secret sauce, was time. There are many books on investing and personal finance, on economic cycles and trading strategies, thousands. But it seems the really important one should simply be titled: Invest in a balanced portfolio, sit on your hands, and wait. Simple as that.
“ We are quite skilled at tackling problems that impact us in the moment but we are exceptionally poor at tackling much bigger problems in the distant future.”
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