If you have ever wished you could find the step-by-step guide to success and high achievement, let me recommend The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy. If you are not familiar with Darren he is the publisher and editorial director of Success magazine. Darren also is an entrepreneur, author, speaker, and peak performance mentor. If you don’t subscribe to Success magazine I would also highly recommend that as part of your monthly reading routine. I get more ideas about life, success, and achievement from the pages of Success than just about anywhere else I turn to during a typical month.
Choices, Habits, and Momentum
The Compound Effect is a clear and concise guide to showing you what it takes to achieve consistent, repeatable success in your life and in everything you try to accomplish. Darren focuses on the basics of making good choices, developing positive habits, and being consistent over time. This consistency over time is what builds momentum and ensures success. Many other authors have taken a more technical approach with gimmicks and other products that will help you succeed. In The Compound Effect Darren takes a practical and real world approach to making positive changes in your life. Darren quotes from the many successful people that he has interviewed over the years with Success magazine, as well as using examples from his own life to make the point. Personally, I really enjoyed the personal examples that he uses in the book. Darren Hardy has accomplished a great deal of success at a very early age by employing the ideas that he puts forth in the book. It always helps when I am reading someone else’s idea of what it takes to be successful if that person has actually been successful using those ideas.
“Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves; they therefore remain bound.”
James Allen
The Secret Formula
If your eye’s skipped forward down the page to this heading you are not alone. Our quick-fix, just give me the answer society has trained us to just get the secret formula and move on to the next thing. Mr. Hardy does an excellent job, and he does it very early in the book, explaining that there is no secret formula. There is a formula, but it is not a secret. Successful people around the world have been using this formula for centuries, and here it is:
Small, Smart Choices + Consistency + Time = Radical Difference
As the author says in the book, “Your only path to success is through a continuum of mundane, unsexy, unexciting, and sometimes difficult daily disciplines compounded over time”. The question you have to ask your self is if you are compounding positive choices and habits or negative ones. You are definitely compounding something, but what is it? What I have learned in reading this book is that I am not intentionally making bad choices, which lead to bad habits, which then compound negatively over time. That would be easy to fix. I am “sleepwalking through my choices” not really viewing them as choices at all. Choices about how I spend time or choices about what I eat all seem to not be choices at all. But they are and when I am ready to wake up to that fact I will be able to make conscious choices that drive positive habits that I can consistently perform over time for a compounded positive result.
The Track to Success
I wanted to share with you just a couple of the many ideas and suggestions that the author makes during the course of the book. Again, these are things he personally did to accomplish great things in his own life.
- Track every action – whether you are working on better money management or trying to lose weight you need to start by becoming aware of the choices you are currently making. To do this you need to track everything you do in the area you are trying to improve. If improving your budget, track every penny that you spend for the next 30 days. If trying to lose weight, track everything you put in your mouth and every minute you exercise over the next 30 days. By tracking what you are doing your eyes will be opened to what is really going on and allow you to make corrections to your choices and develop new, more positive habits.
- Build a daily routine of good habits – 95% of everything we think, feel, do and achieve is a result of a learned habit. Our habits and routines allow us to use minimal conscious energy for everyday tasks. By tracking your actions (step #1 above) you can begin to see patterns or habits that you have learned over time. Identify the habits that you need to change and begin today to establish a daily routine of good habits.
- Set Goals – to be really honest with you this has been a tough one for me. I have goals, don’t get me wrong, but I do not write them down and review them frequently like the most successful people among us do. After ready this book however, I am now writing and reviewing my goals. As the author writes and as I am learning first hand, “something almost magical happens when you organize and focus your creative power on a well defined target”.
- Be consistent – in the book Darren uses the metaphor of a well pump to describe the role of being consistent has on your overall success. If you have ever seen a hand pump for a well you know that you must pump the handle for several minutes before any water begins to flow. Once it is flowing, a slow and steady pumping continues to generate results. If you stop pumping, for even a few seconds, the water falls back down the pipe into the well and you have to start all over again. The same is true with everything we do in life. Getting started is not really that hard, but when the incredible results we hope for do not come “overnight” then we stop and whatever progress we have made falls back into the well. Darren provides many good examples about how consistency over time is the heart of the compounding effect of success.
- Adjust your influences – the author points out that we are all influenced in three ways, inputs, associations and environment. That what we feed our minds, who we hang around with and our surroundings. By monitoring and controlling how and who is influencing us we can increase our potential to succeed. Mr. Hardy gives many good ideas in the area of controlling these influences in order to provide you the greatest chance of success.
I guess the bottom line learning for me from this terrific little book is that you have incredible power to change your life by changing your choices. If you want to grow and change then you must make small, good choices that develop positive habits that you can do consistently over time that allow you to experience a positive compound effect.
Buy more than one copy and give one to someone you know that would benefit for these lessons. That’s what I did and it was a really good experience for me as well to be accountable in the reading and application of these truths.
It has been my experience after 30 years in the corporate world that people often have trouble communicating when the stakes are high. By “stakes are high” I mean that the message being delivered or received is not necessarily a positive or encouraging one. It might be feedback on your performance, correction of your behavior, or an assessment of the attitude you displayed at a recent family gathering. Truth be told, most of us would rather just avoid those direct and often painful conversations even though we know that by doing so the problem or situation will more than likely repeat itself in the near future.
