Darren Hardy
20100101
The Compound Effect is based on the principle that decisions shape your destiny. Little, everyday decisions will take you either to the life you desire or to disaster by default. Darren Hardy, publisher and editorial director of SUCCESS magazine, present The Compound Effect, a distillation of the fundamental principles that have guided the most phenomenal achievements in business, relationships, and beyond.
Let’s say you’re weight training and your program calls for you to do twelve repetitions of a certain weight. Now, if you do the twelve, you’re fulfilling the expectation of your program. Great job. Stay consistent, and ultimately, you will see this discipline compound into powerful results for you. Yet, if you get to twelve, even if you’ve hit your max, and you push out another three to five reps, your impact on that set will be multiplied several times. You won’t just add a few reps to the aggregate of your workout. No. Those reps done after you hit your max will multiply your results. You’ve just pushed through the wall of your max. The previous reps just got you there. The real growth happens with what you do after you’re at the wall.
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).
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.
Ever wonder why successful people tend to get more successful… the rich get richer… the happy get happier… the lucky get luckier?
They’ve got MOMENTUM. When it rains, it pours.
But momentum works on both sides of the equation–it can work for you or against you. Since the Compound Effect is always working, negative habits, when left unchecked, can build up steam and send you into a tailspin of “unlucky”circumstances and consequences. The law of inertia says objects at rest tend to stay at rest–that’s the Compound Effect working against you.
What stands between you and your goal is your behavior. Do you need to stop doing anything so the Compound Effect isn’t taking you into a downward spiral? Similarly, what do you need to start doing to change your trajectory so that it’s headed in the most beneficial direction? In other words, what habits and behaviors do you need to subtract from and add to your life?
Your life comes down to this formula:
YOU → CHOICE (decision) + BEHAVIOR (action) + HABIT (repeated action) + COMPOUND (time) = GOALS
We all come into this world the same: naked, scared, and ignorant. After that grand entrance, the life we end up with is simply an accumulation of all the choices we make. 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. 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 made the choice to be the passive receiver of whatever comes your way.
The Compound Effect is the principle of reaping huge rewards from a series of small, smart choices. What’s most interesting about this process is that, even though the results are massive, the steps, in the moment, don’t feel significant. Whether you’re using this strategy for improving your health, relationships, finances, or anything else for that matter, the changes are so subtle, they’re almost imperceptible. These small changes offer little or no immediate result, no big win, no obvious I-told-you-so payoff. So why bother?