A great analogy well worth reading. I urge you to read the full story.

JADAV PAYENG lives on a remote river island in India and is eloquently known as “Forest Man.” He has been planting trees his entire life, one at a time, to revive the ecosystem of his native land. Today, the island is a dense 1,300-acre forest. It’s home to hundreds of thousands of trees and a variety of animals, such as tigers, deer, monkeys and elephants. How did he do it? Payeng credits nature.

In a 2017 interview with NPR, he said, “It’s not as if I did it alone. You plant one or two trees, and they have to seed. And once they seed, the wind knows how to plant them, the birds here know how to sow them, cows know, elephants know, even the Brahmaputra river knows. The entire ecosystem knows.”

From my perspective, building a forest, where once there was barren land, isn’t that different from saving for retirement. When you graduate from college with little or nothing in the bank, you’re starting with an empty desert. As you contribute to your retirement account every paycheck, bit by bit and over many years, you’re planting your own future forest.

Source: Into the Woods – HumbleDollar