To paraphrase a [supposed] quote by Einstein, compound interest is ridiculously powerful. This isn’t immediately obvious or natural to humans because by and large we’re not good at exponential thinking. Exponential growth tends to sneak up on us. By definition, it starts with relatively slow growth, but “explodes” later on. We can get “lulled to sleep” by steady small gains: +1%, +1%, +1%, +1%, etc. It looks like you’re creeping along at a turtle’s pace, so you nod off briefly, but when you wake up it turns out that “turtle” has circumnavigated the world several times.
To give a concrete example, if you were to improve at some skill 1% every day for a year you would end up almost 40 times better than you started. Do that every day for 2 years, you would end up over 1,400 times better than you started. At 10 years, you would be 5,929,448,572,069,368 (almost 6 quadrillion or 6,000 trillion) times better.
That’s with a relatively low growth rate too. If you were say start with 1 penny ($0.01) and double your number of pennies everyday (+100%), before the end of the first year you would have more pennies than there are atoms in the universe.
So yeah, pretty ridiculously powerful.