A lot of people throw around the word exponential, thinking that it means a lot or a lot more. It doesn't mean that and it's actually kind of difficult to understand at an intuitive level.
However we actually feel that it's very important that as many people understand it as possible.
We want to give you a kind of gut feeling of how it works and what it means.
This whole video is going to be completely visual apart from just a little tiny bit of maths which will make sense to everyone.
We think first let's look at this example. So this is a pond.
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It's got one Lily Pad in it.
Imagine that this Lily Pad is going to reproduce once every day and all of its offspring are going to reproduce once every day as well.
How long do you think it will take before the entire Pond is covered in these plants?
Just think about that while we go through day by day.
So here's day two still lots of room in the pond.
Day three they've doubled again.
Day four still plenty of room. It's almost all open water.
Now day five.
Day 6.
Day seven.
Day 8.
Within 8 days we've gone from 1 to 128 Lily Pads.
Let's go back and look at the halfway period in time day four.
Here we might be halfway through in time but we are definitely not halfway full in the pond.
It's the second last day that the pond is half full.
This kind of growth is kind of counterintuitive and when something is going through exponential growth in the early stages most people completely underestimate how quickly things are going to change even when the exponential growth has been going on for quite a while.