The Compound Effect: Jumpstart Your Income, Your Life, Your Success

by Darren Hardy

I wrote this book to take you back to basics.

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

The secret to success was then, and is now, hard work, discipline, and good habits.

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

“You have to be willing to give 100 percent with zero expectation of receiving anything in return,” he said. “Only when you’re willing to take 100 percent responsibility for making the relationship work will it work. Otherwise, a relationship left to chance will always be vulnerable to disaster.”

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

You may have heard about tracking before. In fact, you’ve probably done your own version of this exercise. But I also bet you aren’t doing it now, right? How do I know? Because your life isn’t working as successfully as you’d like. You’ve gotten derailed. Tracking is the way to get it back on track.

Aristotle wrote, “We are what we repeatedly do.”

There’s a story about a man riding a horse, galloping quickly. It appears that he’s going somewhere very important. A man standing along the roadside shouts, “Where are you going?” The rider replies, “I don’t know. Ask the horse!” This is the story of most people’s lives. They’re riding the horse of their habits, with no idea where they’re headed. It’s time to take control of the reins and move your life in the direction of where you really want to go.

From what we’ve already discussed, you know successful people aren’t necessarily more intelligent or more talented than anyone else. But their habits take them in the direction of becoming more informed, more knowledgeable, more competent, better skilled, and better prepared.

With enough practice and repetition, any behavior, good or bad, becomes automatic over time.

The problem is that the payoff or instant gratification derived from bad habits often far outweighs what’s going on in your rational mind concerning long-term consequences. Indulging in our bad habits doesn’t seem to have any negative effects at all in the moment. You don’t have that heart attack, your face doesn’t shrivel up, you’re not standing in the unemployment line, and your thighs aren’t thunderous. But that doesn’t mean you haven’t activated the Compound Effect.

Your choices are only meaningful when you connect them to your desires and dreams. The wisest and most motivating choices are the ones aligned with that which you identify as your purpose, your core self, and your highest values. You’ve got to want something, and know why you want it, or you’ll end up giving up too easily.

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People are either motivated by something they want or something they don’t want.

The person who has a clear, compelling, and white-hot burning why will always defeat even the best of the best at doing the how

In one of my interviews with Brian Tracy, he put it this way: “Top people have very clear goals. They know who they are and they know what they want. They write it down and they make plans for its accomplishment. Unsuccessful people carry their goals around in their head like marbles rattling around in a can, and we say a goal that is not in writing is merely a fantasy. And everybody has fantasies, but those fantasies are like bullets with no powder in the cartridge. People go through life shooting blanks without written goals—and that’s the starting point.”

Success is something you attract by the person you become.”

Get out your little notebook and write out your top three goals. Now make a list of the bad habits that might be sabotaging your progress in each area. Write down every one

If you say you’re a dedicated professional, but you show up late and unprepared, your behavior rats you out every time.

Get rid of whatever enables your bad habits.

“You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.”

According to research, it takes three hundred instances of positive reinforcement to turn a new habit into an unconscious practice—that’s almost a year of daily practice!

Lack of consistency is the Achilles heel of the human species.

I love what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said so eloquently: “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge.”

Science shows that patterns of thoughts and actions repeated many times create what’s called a neuro-signature or a “brain groove.” This is a series of interconnected neurons that carry the thought patterns of a particular habit. Attention feeds the habit. When we give our attention to a habit, we activate the brain groove, releasing the thoughts, desires, and actions related to that habit. Luckily, our brains are malleable. If we stop giving attention to the bad habits, those grooves weaken. When we form new habits, we drive new grooves deeper with each repetition, eventually overpowering the previous ones.