The Compound Effect – Influences

Everyone is affected by three kinds of influences: input (what you feed your mind), associations (the people with whom you spend time), and environment (your surroundings).

1.  Input: Garbage In, Garbage Out

You get in life what you create. Expectation drives the creative process. What do you expect? You expect whatever it is you’re thinking about. Your thought process, the conversation in your head, is at the base of the results you create in life. So the question is, What are you thinking about? What is influencing and directing your thoughts? The answer: whatever you’re allowing yourself to hear and see. This is the input you are feeding your brain. Period.

2.  Associations: Who’s Influencing You?

Who do you spend the most time with? Who are the people you most admire? Are those two groups of people exactly the same? If not, why not? 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, and to which attitudes and opinions we are regularly exposed. 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 an our circle of five.

3.  Environment: Changing Your View Changes Your Perspective

The dream in your heart may be bigger than the environment in which you find yourself. Sometimes you have to get out of that environment to see that dream fulfilled. It’s like planting an oak sapling in a pot. Once it becomes rootbound, its growth is limited. It needs a great space to become a mighty oak. So do you.

Creating a positive environment to support your success means clearing out all the clutter in your life. Not just the physical clutter that makes it hard for you to work productively and efficiently, but also the psychic clutter of whatever around you isn’t working, whatever’s broken, whatever makes you cringe. Each and every incomplete thing in your life exerts a draining force on you, sucking the energy of accomplishment and success out of you as surely as a vampire stealing your blood. Every incomplete promise, commitment, and agreement saps your strength because it blocks your momentum and inhibits your ability to move forward. Incomplete tasks keep calling you back to the past to take care of them. So think about what you can complete today.

* Source: The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy