The Compound Effect

by Darren Hardy

One of his philosophies is, “Be the guy who says ‘no.’ It’s no great achievement to go along with the crowd. Be the unusual guy, the extraordinary guy.”

It's even easier to be the unusual guy when you're the ONLY GUY! I'm the adult, I'm the man. Nobody tells me who, what, when, and where to think.

Dad gave me a serious head start on the discipline and mentality it takes to be dedicated and responsible, to achieve whatever I set out to achieve.

Today, Dad and I joke about what an addictive overachiever he trained me to be.

“There are lots of ways to screw up a kid,” Dad says. “At least my way was a pretty good one! You seemed to have done pretty well.”

I’m a true believer in the Compound Effect because Dad made sure that I lived it, each and every day, until I couldn’t live any other way if I tried.

The Compound Effect is the principle of reaping huge rewards from a series of small, smart choices.

Thia is it! The cusp/gist of the book.

It’s interesting that wealth tends to skip a generation. Overwhelming abundance often leads to a lackadaisical mentality, which brings about a sedentary lifestyle.

If we want to succeed, we need to recover our grandparents’ work ethic.

Promise yourself that you’re going to let go once and for all of your lottery-winner expectations because, let’s face it, you only hear stories about the one winner, not the millions of losers. That person you see jumping up and down in front of the Vegas slot machine or at the Santa Anita horse track doesn’t reveal the hundreds of times that same person lost.

By the end of this book, or even before, I want you to know in your bones that your only path to success is through a continuum of mundane, unsexy, unexciting, and sometimes difficult daily disciplines compounded over time.

Your biggest challenge isn’t that you’ve intentionally been making bad choices. Heck, that would be easy to fix. Your biggest challenge is that you’ve been sleepwalking through your choices. Half the time, you’re not even aware you’re making them! Our choices are often shaped by our culture and upbringing.

For most of us, it’s the frequent, small, and seemingly inconsequential choices that are of grave concern. I’m talking about the decisions you think don’t make any difference at all.

This is true. Small decisions lead up to a larger problem later in life.

The instructor turned to the easel and wrote 100/0 on the paper in big black letters. “You have to be willing to give 100 percent with zero expectation of receiving anything in return,”

You cannot see what you don’t look for, and you cannot look for what you don’t believe in.

As pertains to attitude.

During our time in business, I wasn’t inspecting what I was expecting. I could justify it by saying I trusted him, but the truth was I was guilty of being lazy by not watching the finances more diligently.

This is how I feel about ROTH IRA's.

The biggest difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is that successful people are willing to do what unsuccessful people are not.

In buying this book, you’re basically paying me for my opinion, my guidance. This is where I’m going to become a hard-ass and insist you track your behaviors for at least one whole week. This book isn’t designed to entertain you; it is designed to help you get results. To get results, you have to take some action.

Truth be told....

All winners are trackers.

At any given moment, I want you to know exactly how well you’re doing. I’m asking you to track yourself as if you’re a valuable commodity.

In Brian Tracy’s book Focal Point (Amacom, 2002), he models how to improve any area of your life by 1,000 percent.

“My son, you have just demonstrated the power that habits will have over your life!” the teacher exclaimed. “The older they are, the bigger they get, the deeper the roots grow, and the harder they are to uproot. Some get so big, with roots so deep, you might hesitate to even try.”

You’ve got to want to get up and go, go, go, go, go—for years!

Until you’ve set your desire and motivation in place, you’ll abandon any new path you seek to better your life.

Enemies give us a reason to stand tall with courage.

But, really, it doesn’t matter what the motivation is (as long as it is legal and moral); you don’t have to be motivated for great humanitarian reasons. What matters is that you feel fully motivated.

This is certainly true of one of history’s most celebrated football coaches, Pete Carroll. When we featured Carroll in SUCCESS magazine in September of 2008, he explained his early motivation like this: “When I grew up, I was a little dink. I couldn’t do much because I was just too small. It took me a couple years to get in a place where I could be competitive. All that time, I was living with the fact that I was much better and I needed to fight to prove it. I was frustrated because I knew I could be special.”

The underdog little-man syndrome used in a positive way.

By our very nature, we are goal-seeking creatures. Our brain is always trying to align our outer world with what we’re seeing and expecting in our inner world.

When most people set out to achieve new goals, they ask, “Okay, I have my goal; now what do I need to do to get it?” It’s not a bad question, but it’s not the first question that needs to be addressed either. The question we should be asking ourselves is: “Who do I need to become?”

Habits and behaviors never lie. If there’s a discrepancy between what you say and what you do, I’m going to believe what you do every time.

If you say self-improvement is a priority, but you spend more time with your Xbox than at the library, I’m believing the Xbox.

Now you get to decide whether that’s okay, or if you want to change.

My anticipation of getting in the water was actually worse than the reality of just jumping in.

When it comes to changing bad habits at home, I’m a toe dipper. But in my professional life, I find that taking the big plunge is far more effective.

“It’s not so much what you attempt to take out of your diet,” he explained to me. “It’s what you put in instead.” This has become his analogy for life. Instead of thinking that he has to deprive himself, or take something out of his diet (e.g., “I can’t eat a hamburger, chocolate, or dairy”), he thinks about what he can have instead (e.g., “Today I’m going to have a salad and steamed vegetables and fresh figs”).

Personally, I’m always happy when something is hard. Why? Because I know that most people won’t do what it takes; therefore, it will be easier for me to step in front of the pack and take the lead.

Like waking up early for the gym.

Science shows that patterns of thoughts and actions repeated many times create what’s called a neuro-signature or a “brain groove,” or a series of interconnected neurons that carry the thought patterns of a particular habit.

Newton’s First Law, also known as the Law of Inertia: Objects at rest tend to stay at rest unless acted on by an outside force. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion, unless something stops their momentum.

Your old ways and your old conditioning are just like the inertia of the merry-go-round or the pull of gravity. Everything just wants to stay at rest. You’ll need a lot of energy to break your inertia and get your new enterprise under way. But once you get momentum, you will be hard to stop—virtually unbeatable—even though you’re now putting out considerably less effort while receiving greater results.

The law of inertia says objects at rest tend to stay at rest—that’s the Compound Effect working against you.

How do you get Big Mo to pay you a visit? You build up to it. You get into the groove, the “zone,” by doing the things we’ve covered so far: 1. Making new choices based on your goals and core values 2. Putting those choices to work through new positive behaviors 3. Repeating those healthy actions long enough to establish new habits 4. Building routines and rhythms into your daily disciplines 5. Staying consistent over a long enough period of time

The greater the challenge, the more rigorous our routines need to be.

Of all the high-achievers and business owners I’ve worked with, I’ve seen that, along with good habits, each has developed routines for accomplishing necessary daily disciplines. It’s the only way any of us can predictably regulate our behavior.

The key to becoming world-class in your endeavors is to build your performance around world-class routines. It can be difficult, even futile, to predict or control what will show up in the middle of your workday. But you can almost always control how your day starts and ends.

The world looks, acts, and responds to you very differently when you start your day with a feeling and orientation of gratitude for that which you already have.

It’s important to cash out your day’s performance. Compared to your plan for the day, how did it go?

Look at your routines. If something that used to energize you has become same-old/same-old, or is no longer generating powerful results, switch it up.

Winning the race is all about pace.

Build your bookend morning and evening routines.

We’ve also discussed the fact that you are 100 percent responsible for your life. You alone are responsible for the choices you make and the actions you take.

Although it’s true that we can eat without thinking, it’s easier to pay attention to what we put in our bodies because food doesn’t leap into our mouths. We need an extra level of vigilance to prevent our brains from absorbing irrelevant, counterproductive or downright destructive input.