The Compound Effect

The genius of Darren Hardy’s book The Compound Effect: Jumpstart Your Income, Your Life, Your Success is that it stops you in your tracks—long enough, and convincingly enough—to reckon with the “compounding interest” reality of life. Hardy captures it well:

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.

This book will help you think about the long game—in both life and leadership. And as a leader, you already know: the long game is the only one that matters.

Check out these Book Notes to get an overview of the value of this book.

Chuck Olson
Founder
Lead With Your Life

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

Author: Darren Hardy

Copyright: 2012

Book Description:

No gimmicks. No Hyperbole. No Magic Bullet. The Compound Effect is based on the principle that decisions shape your destiny. Little, everyday decisions will either take you to the life you desire or to disaster by default. Darren Hardy, publisher of Success Magazine, presents The Compound Effect, a distillation of the fundamental principles that have guided the most phenomenal achievements in business, relationships and beyond. This easy-to-use, step-by-step operating system allows you to multiply your success, chart your progress and achieve any desire. If you’re serious about living an extraordinary life, use the power of The Compound Effect to create the success you want.

Book Quotes:

What this book is about, with all the unnecessary noise, fat, and fluff removed, is what really matters. What really works? What half-dozen basics, when focused on and mastered, constitute the operating system that can help you achieve any goal you desire and live the life you were meant to live? This book contains those half-dozen fundamentals comprising the operating system called the Compound Effect. LOCATION: 176

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. LOCATION: 242

What they don’t realize is that these small, seemingly insignificant steps completed consistently over time will create a radical difference. Let me give you a few detailed examples. Small, Smart Choices + Consistency + Time = RADICAL DIFFERENCE. LOCATION: 249

The Compound Effect is predictable and measurable—that’s great news! Isn’t it comforting to know you only need to take a series of tiny steps, consistently, over time, to radically improve your life? LOCATION: 324

The truth is, complacency has impacted all great empires, including, but not limited to, the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English. Why? Because nothing fails like success. Once-dominant empires have failed for this very reason. People get to a certain level of success and get too comfortable. LOCATION: 346

When you understand how the Compound Effect works, you won’t pine for quick fixes or silver bullets. Don’t try to fool yourself into believing that a mega-successful athlete didn’t live through regular bone-crushing drills and thousands of hours of practice. She got up early to practice—and kept practicing long after all others had stopped. She faced the sheer agony and frustration of the failure, loneliness, hard work, and disappointment it took to become No. 1. 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. LOCATION: 370

Our choices can be our best friend or our worst enemy. They can deliver us to our goals or send us orbiting into a galaxy far, far away. Think about it. Everything in your life exists because you first made a choice about something. Choices are at the root of every one of your results. LOCATION: 400

In essence, you make your choices and then your choices make you. LOCATION: 405

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. They can be so entwined in our routine behaviors and habits that they seem beyond our control. LOCATION: 415

Nobody intends to become obese, go through bankruptcy, or get a divorce, but often (if not always) those consequences are the result of a series of small, poor choices. LOCATION: 421

You’ve allowed yourself to make a choice without thinking. And as long as you’re making choices unconsciously, you can’t consciously choose to change that ineffective behavior and turn it into productive habits. It’s time to WAKE UP and make empowering choices. LOCATION: 438

You alone are responsible for what you do or don’t do, or how you respond to what’s done to you. LOCATION: 485

My mentor Jim Rohn said, “The day you graduate from childhood to adulthood is the day you take full responsibility for your life.” LOCATION: 529

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. LOCATION: 538

The biggest difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is that successful people are willing to do what unsuccessful people are not. LOCATION: 550

If you’ve been living on autopilot and allowing your habits to run you, I want you to understand why. And I want you to let yourself off the hook. After all, you’re in good company. Psychological studies reveal that 95 percent of everything we feel, think, do, and achieve is a result of a learned habit! LOCATION: 791

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. LOCATION: 830

Supersmall, seemingly inconsequential adjustments can and will revolutionize everything. The best illustration I can give you to emphasize the power of small adjustments is that of a plane traveling from Los Angeles to New York City. If the nose of the plane is pointed only 1 percent off course—almost an invisible adjustment when the plane’s sitting on the tarmac in Los Angeles—it will ultimately end up about 150 miles off course, arriving either upstate in Albany or in Dover, Delaware. Such is the case for your habits. A single poor habit, which doesn’t look like much in the moment, can ultimately lead you miles off course from the direction of your goals and the life you desire. LOCATION: 836

Forget about willpower. It’s time for why-power. 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. LOCATION: 857

The power of your why is what gets you to stick through the grueling, mundane, and laborious. All of the hows will be meaningless until your whys are powerful enough. Until you’ve set your desire and motivation in place, you’ll abandon any new path you seek to better your life. If your why-power—your desire—isn’t great enough, if the fortitude of your commitment isn’t powerful enough, you’ll end up like every other person who makes a New Year’s resolution and gives up too quickly and reverts to sleepwalking through poor choices. LOCATION: 866

The access point to your why-power is through your core values, which define both who you are and what you stand for. Your core values are your internal compass, your guiding beacon, your personal GPS. They act as the filter through which you run all of life’s demands, requests, and temptations, making sure they’re leading you toward your intended destination. Getting your core values defined and properly calibrated is one of the most important steps in redirecting your life toward your grandest vision. LOCATION: 890

Creating new habits (and burning new grooves into your brain) will take time. Be patient with yourself. If you fall off the wagon, brush yourself off (don’t beat yourself up!), and get back on. No problem. We all stumble. Just go again and try another strategy. Reinforce your commitment and consistency. When you press on, you will receive huge payoffs. LOCATION: 1231

Some of our best intentions fail because we don’t have a system of execution. When it comes down to it, your new attitudes and behaviors must be incorporated into your monthly, weekly, and daily routines to effect any real, positive change. A routine is something you do every day without fail, so that eventually, like brushing your teeth or putting on your seatbelt, you do it without conscious thought. LOCATION: 1317

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. I have routines for both. I’ll share aspects of each here to give you some ideas and to help you better understand the power and importance of building your new behaviors into disciplined routines. LOCATION: 1354

Every Sunday night…we have our RR (Relationship Review). This is a practice I picked up from relationship experts Linda and Richard Eyre. During this time, we discuss the previous week’s wins, losses, as well as the adjustments we need to make in our relationship. We start the conversation by telling each other a few things we have appreciated about the other during the previous week—it’s helpful to start with the good stuff. Then, using an idea I picked up from my friend Jack Canfield, we ask each other, “On a scale of one to ten (ten being the best), how would you rate our relationship this week?” This gets the discussion of wins and losses flowing—oh, boy! Then we discuss the adjustments that need to be made through this follow-up question: “What would it take to make your experience a ten?” By the end of the discussion, both of us feel heard and validated, and we have made our observations and wishes clear moving into the next week. This is an incredible process. I highly recommend it… if you dare! LOCATION: 1419

Hopefully by now you understand exactly how important your choices are. Even those that seem insignificant, when compounded, can make an extreme impact on your life. 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. That said, you must also realize your choices, behaviors, and habits are influenced by very powerful external forces. Most of us aren’t aware of the subtle control these forces have on our lives. For you to sustain a positive trajectory toward your goals, you’ll need to understand and govern these influences. This is to ensure they support rather than derail your journey toward success. Everyone is affected by three kinds of influences: input (what you feed your mind), associations (the people you spend time with), and environment (your surroundings). LOCATION: 1526

It’s important to understand that your brain is not designed to make you happy. Your brain has only one agenda in mind: survival. It is always watching for signs of “lack and attack.” Your brain is programmed to seek out the negative—dwindling resources, destructive weather, potential threat—whatever’s out to hurt you. So when you open up those news alerts on your phone in the morning and get bombarded with all those reports about robberies, fires, attacks, and the tanking economy, your brain lights up. LOCATION: 1540

Jim Rohn taught that we become the combined average of the five people we hang around the most. Rohn would say we could tell the quality of our health, attitude, and income by looking at the people around us. The people with whom we spend our time determine what conversations dominate our attention, along with the attitudes and opinions we are regularly exposed to. Eventually, we start to eat what they eat, talk like they talk, read what they read, think like they think, watch what they watch, treat people how they treat them, even dress like they dress. The funny thing is, more often than not, we are completely unaware of the similarities between us and our circle of five. LOCATION: 1628

Remember the adage: “Never ask advice of someone with whom you wouldn’t want to trade places.” LOCATION: 1740

Note: should you wish to find any quote in its original context, the Kindle “location” is provided after each entry.