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by
Darren Hardy
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December 10, 2020 - January 4, 2021
Your decisions shape your destiny. Little, everyday decisions will either take you to the life you desire or to disaster by default. In fact, it’s the littlest decisions that shape our lives.
success isn’t about doing five thousand different things well. Success is doing the right things well five thousand times over.
In the same way a two-millimeter miscalculation can send you veering wildly off your life’s course, a mere two-millimeter readjustment can also bring you right back home.
choose today to take control of your life and make decisions that shape the destiny you desire.
Remember, success is simple. Do the right things—and keep doing them day in and day out—and I know you will experience the best life has to offer.
I have one warning: earning success is hard. The process is laborious, tedious, and sometimes even boring. Becoming wealthy, influential, and world-class in your field is slow and arduous.
You do not need new information—you need a new plan of action. It is time to create new behaviors and habits oriented away from sabotage and toward success. It’s that simple.
“It doesn’t matter how smart you are or aren’t, you need to make up in hard work what you lack in experience, skill, intelligence, or innate ability. If your competitor is smarter, more talented, or experienced, you simply need to work three or four times as hard. You can still beat them!”
“Be the guy who says ‘no.’ It’s no great achievement to go along with the crowd. Be the unusual guy, ‘Be The Exception’”
We’ve been socialized to believe in the fairy-tale endings found in movies and novels. We’ve lost sight of the good, old-fashioned value of hard and consistent work.
the Compound Effect The Compound Effect is the principle of reaping huge rewards from a series of small, smart choices. What’s most interesting about this process to me is that, even though the results are massive, the steps, in the moment, don’t feel significant.
Small, Smart Choices + Consistency + Time = RADICAL DIFFERENCE
The most challenging aspect of the Compound Effect is that we have to keep working away for a while, consistently and efficiently, before we begin to see the payoff.
The secret to success was then, and is now, hard work, discipline, and good habits.
Our expectations of what it really takes to create lasting success—things like grit, hard work, and fortitude—aren’t alluring, and thus have been mostly forgotten. We’ve lost respect for the strife and struggle of our forefathers. The massive effort they put forth instilled discipline, chiseled their character, and stoked the spirit to brave new frontiers.
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.
the life we end up with is simply an accumulation of all the choices we make.
Everything in your life exists because you first made a choice about something. Choices are at the root of every one of your results.
Each choice starts a behavior that over time becomes a habit. Choose poorly and you just might find yourself back at the drawing board, forced to make new, often harder choices. Don’t choose at all and you’ve actually made the choice to be the passive receiver of whatever comes your way.
In essence, you make your choices and then your choices make you. Every decision, no matter how slight, alt...
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“How many of my behaviors have I not ‘voted on’? What am I doing that I didn’t consciously choose to do, yet continue to do every day?”
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.
as long as you’re making choices unconsciously, you can’t consciously choose to change that ineffective behavior and turn it into productive habits.
One Thanksgiving, I decided to keep a Thanks Giving journal for my wife. Every day for an entire year, I logged at least one thing I appreciated about her—the way she interacted with her friends, how she cared for our dogs, the fresh bed she prepared, a succulent meal she whipped up, or the beautiful way she styled her hair that day—whatever.
My appreciation, gratitude, and intention to find the best in her, I held in my heart and eyes each day. This caused me to show up differently in my marriage, which, of course, made her respond differently to me. Soon, I had even more things to write in my Thanks Giving journal!
GO TO THECOMPOUNDEFFECT.COM/RESOURCES TO DOWNLOAD A COPY OF THE GRATITUDE ASSESSMENT WORKSHEET
“You have to be willing to give 100 percent with zero expectation of receiving anything in return,”
“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.”
If I always took 100 percent responsibility for everything I experienced—completely owning all of my choices and all the ways I responded to whatever happened to me—I held the power.
You alone are responsible for what you do or don’t do, or how you respond to what’s done to you.
If it was to be, it was up to me. I was free to fly.
By choosing to be officially liberated from past, present, and future victimhood, I’d hit the jackpot. I had the unlimited power to control my destiny.
The difference is when luck came my way, I took advantage of it.”
The (Complete) Formula for Getting Lucky: Preparation (personal growth) + Attitude (belief/mindset) + Opportunity (a good thing coming your way) + Action (doing something about it) = Luck
“I don’t like to gamble, but if there’s one thing I’m willing to bet on, it’s myself.”
luck is all around us. It’s simply a matter of seeing situations, conversations, and circumstances as fortuitous. You cannot see what you don’t look for, and you cannot look for what you don’t believe in.
However this luck was delivered to you—from the universe, God, the Lucky Charms leprechaun, or whomever or whatever you associate delivering your good fortune—it’s now your job to act on it.
Luck is an equal-opportunity distributor. Lady luck shines on all, but rather than having your umbrella overhead, you’ve got to have your face to the sky.
I wasn’t inspecting what I was expecting.
Jim Rohn said, “The day you graduate from childhood to adulthood is the day you take full responsibility for your life.”
The first step toward change is awareness. If you want to get from where you are to where you want to be, you have to start by becoming aware of the choices that lead you away from your desired destination. Become very conscious of every choice you make today so you can begin to make smarter choices moving forward.
track every action that relates to the area of your life you want to improve.
The biggest difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is that successful people are willing to do what unsuccessful people are not.
Tracking is my go-to transformation model for everything that ails me.
track your life with the same intention: to bring your goals within sight.
you can’t make the most of who you are—your talents and resources and capabilities—until you are aware of and accountable for your actions.
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. Because you are.
Did you know that every dollar you spend today, no matter where you spend it, is costing you nearly five dollars in only twenty years (and ten dollars in thirty years)? That’s because if you took a dollar and grew it at 8 percent, in twenty years, that dollar would be worth almost five. Every time you spend a buck today, it’s like taking five dollars out of your future pocket.
every time you look at an item that costs fifty dollars you have to ask, “Is this item worth $250?” If it’s worth $250 to you today, then it’s worth buying.
Once you start tracking your life, your attention will be focused on the smallest things you’re doing right, as well as the smallest things you’re doing wrong. And when you choose to make even the smallest course corrections consistently, over time, you’ll begin to see amazing results.
