One Million Dollars or…

Today I’m giving you a choice.

Humor me and answer the following question right away in your head:

Would you like one million dollars today or one penny doubled every day for a month?

If you picked a million dollars today, congrats!

You’ve got a million dollars in your pocket and that is life-changing!

But, if you waited 30 days and doubled your initial penny investment every day then you would have $5,368,709.12

I’m no mathematician, but 5 mil is more than 1 mil.

And yet, when people are asked this question, many take the 1 million today.

Why?

It’s now. It’s immediate and you don’t have to do the math. It just doesn’t seem like one penny could ever reach one million dollars in 30 days and yet it exceeds it by 5x.

Where’s The Lesson Here?

There are a couple of ways I could go about connecting this to something more relevant that I like to write about, but to me, this feels a little bit like the difference between paid Google Ads (PPC) and SEO.

In most cases, you can make “a million dollars” from PPC fast, but if you just wait and put in the same amount of effort, you could get 5x that amount over a longer period of time with SEO.

Now this is the real world and it’s not hypothetical.

You could and probably should do both an investment in SEO and PPC, but keep in mind that SEO has the compound effect that PPC just doesn’t have.