Book Title: The Compound Effect
Author: Darren Hardy
Date of Reading: December, 2017
Rating: 8/10
What is the book about as a whole:
How to use the power of the Compound Effect to achieve wealth and success in your life by doing one simple action right over time.
What is being said in detail:
Darren Hardy shows how to use the Compound Effect to transform your relationships, business, wealth, and general success in life.
He explains that you still haven’t experienced the full power of the Compound Effect. But if you want to do that, you should follow this 5-step process.
1. Make new choices based on your goals and core values
2. Put those choices to work through new positive behaviors
3. Repeat those healthy actions long enough to establish new habits
4. Build routines and rhythms into your daily disciplines
5. Stay consistent over a long enough period of time
The book hammers the point of taking small, daily, consistent actions that will bring massive results in the future. Hardy explains that you need to create a sustainable daily habit because that’s the only thing that will compound over time and bring results.
The chapters are filled with real-life examples of people who followed the compound effect and those who didn’t.
Hardy uses the last two chapters of the book to talk about achieving momentum and the influences other people and the environment have over us.
He emphasizes momentum as a massive amplifier to your habits. Once you achieve momentum in the field you want to compound, you become an unstoppable train. The habits you do every day become easier to maintain and the results become visible.
When it comes to influences, he warns us about the quote “garbage in, garbage out,” focusing on social media and TV consumption. Also, Hardy warns about your social circle and finding the people who can uplift you and make you better. “You are the average of five people you hang out with the most,” is written everywhere in the chapter.
Most important keywords, sentences, quotes:
If all we needed was more information, everyone with an Internet connection would live in a mansion, have abs of steel, and be blissfully happy. New or more information is not what you need—a new plan of action is.
“There are lots of ways to screw up a kid,” Dad says. “At least my way was a pretty good one! You seemed to have done pretty well.”
Small, Smart Choices + Consistency + Time = RADICAL DIFFERENCE
In essence, you make your choices, and then your choices make you.
Have you ever been bitten by an elephant? How about a mosquito? It’s the little things in life that will bite you.
You alone are responsible for what you do, don’t do, or how you respond to what’s done to you.
Preparation (personal growth) +
Attitude (belief/mindset) +
Opportunity (a good thing coming your way) +
Action (doing something about it) =
Luck
The magic is not in the complexity of the task; the magic is in the doing of simple things repeatedly and long enough to ignite the miracle of the Compound Effect.
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.
Step by step, day by day, your choices will shape your actions until they become habits, where practice makes them permanent.
A daily routine built on good habits is the difference that separates the most successful among us from everyone else.
So, what is yours why? You’ve got to have a reason if you want to make significant improvements to your life. And to make you want to make the necessary changes, your why must be something that is fantastically motivating—to you. You’ve got to want to get up and go, go, go, go, go—for years! So, what is it that moves you the most? Identifying your why is critical.
Habits and behaviors never lie. If there’s a discrepancy between what you say and what you do, I’m going to believe what you do every time.
There is one thing that 99 percent of “failures” and “successful” folks have in common—they all hate doing the same things. The difference is successful people do them anyway. Change is hard. That’s why people don’t transform their bad habits, and why so many people end up unhappy and unhealthy.
Law of Inertia: Objects at rest tend to stay at rest unless acted on by an outside force. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless something stops their momentum. Put another way, couch potatoes tend to stay couch potatoes. Achievers—people who get into a successful rhythm—continue busting their butts and end up achieving more and more.
You win when you take the right steps day in and day out. But you set yourself up for failure by doing too much too soon.
…because if you don’t get into something you can maintain, you won’t do it at all.
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).
Learning without execution is useless. Motivation without action leads to self-delusion.
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Book review (personal opinion):
The Compound Effect is one of those books that doesn’t look sexy but makes things work. It’s about doing the small, easy tasks, day in, day out until you start noticing the results. It’s the only thing that works.
But people usually don’t want to wait three years to lose 30 pounds or they don’t want to wait five years for the business to grow to seven-figures. And that’s why true change never happens in their lives and the compound effect doesn’t take hold.
The principles in this book are simple to do, but they’re also simple not to do. If you decided to do them, you will reap massive benefits just like I did.
Rating: 8/10
This book is for (recommend):
- A 45-year-old struggling with the jo-jo effects of diets for the past ten years
- A 20-year-old student looking for solid investments in skills that will bring results over decades
- A starting entrepreneur who needs to understand that overnight success takes ten years
If you want to learn more
Here’s Darren Hardy talking about the power of daily actions.
The Power of Daily Action – Darren Hardy
How I’ve implemented the ideas from the book
The compound effect changed my life completely. I’ve been reading 20 pages of a book a day and in three years, I read 115 books. I wrote a minimum of 500 words a day and it accumulated into half a million words in two years. Heck, I walked the pilgrimage of Santiago el Camino (175 miles). I crossed it by going one step at a time.
One small actionable step you can do
Identify one thing in your life where you want to start compounding results. Once you do, start a small, daily activity that you can maintain over time. A couple of examples would be:
- Write a paragraph daily (if you want to write a book)
- Eat one less slice of bread (if you want to lose weight)
- Contact one new lead (if you want to build a business)
- Take a short walk every afternoon (if you want to lead a healthy life)
Get The Compound Effect on Amazon