The king's chessboard

This story book is about a king that wanted to reward his wise man for solving a problem for his king. When the man refused to accept a reward for his service to the king, the king insisted. Thus, the man simply asked for a grain of rice on the first day, 2 grains on the second day and so on for each of the 64 squares on a king's chessboard. For example: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16..... The king agreed immediately without much thinking.

For the first half of the request, the king was laughing at how trivial the reward was. However, situation get out of control later due to the power of compounding. The growth in the number of rice grains accelerated, slowly at first but went off the charts. On the 64th square of chessboard, there was really mind boggling as the number of rice grains became 2^(n-1) = 2^(64-1) = 9,223,372,036,854,775,808.

Can you imagine if the wise man asked for 1 cent on the first day and doubled it on the following day until the 64th day?

Now, can you see how powerful the compounding is? No wonder it is regarded as "The 8th Wonder of the World". Since it is so powerful, we must make full use of this principle with our money.