The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy Summary
The Book in 1 Sentences
The Compound Effect: Multiply Your Success One Simple Step at a Time
“This book is about success and what it really takes to earn it. It’s time someone told it to you straight. You’ve been bamboozled for too long. There is no magic bullet, secret formula, or quick fix.
You don’t make $200,000 a year spending two hours a day on the Internet, lose 30 pounds in a week, rub 20 years off your face with a cream, fix your love life with a pill, or find lasting success with any other scheme that is too good to be true.
It would be great if you could buy your success, fame, self-esteem, good relationships, and health and well-being in a nicely clam-shelled package at the local Walmart. But that’s not how it works. ...
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 take you to any goal you desire and help you live the life you were meant to live? This book contains those half-dozen fundamentals; they comprise the operating system called the Compound Effect.” ~ Darren Hardy
7 BIG Ideas
The Compound Effect Book Summary
Darren says: “The Compound Effect reveals the “secret” behind my success. I’m a true believer in the Compound Effect because Dad made sure that I lived it, each and every day, until I couldn’t live any other way if I tried.”
1. The magic of the compound effect
“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.
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?
Most people get tripped up by the simplicity of the Compound Effect. ... What they don’t realize is that these small, seemingly insignificant steps completed consistently over time will create a radical difference.”
So, here is the formula: “Small, Smart Choices + Consistency + Time = Radical differences.”
Darren gives us a few examples of the Compound Effect.
“But as Jim Rohn would say, “What’s simple to do is also simple not to do.” 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.”
“Jim Rohn taught that we become the combined average of the five people we hang around the most.”
The Magic Penny
"If you were given a choice between taking $3 million in cash this very instant and a single penny that doubles in value every day for 31 days, which would you choose? If you’ve heard this before, you know the penny gambit is the choice you should make—you know it’s the course that will lead to greater wealth.
Yet why is it so hard to believe choosing the penny will result in more money in the end? Because it takes so much longer to see the payoff. Let’s take a closer look.
Let’s say you take the cold, hard cash and your friend goes the penny route.
On Day Five, your friend has sixteen cents. You, however, have $3 million.
On Day Ten, it’s $5.12 versus your big bucks. How do you think your friend is feeling about her decision? You’re spending your millions, enjoying the heck out of it, and loving your choice.
After 20 full days, with only 11 days left, Penny Lane has only $5,243. How is she feeling about herself at this point? For all her sacrifice and positive behavior, she has barely more than $5,000. You, however, have $3 million.
Then the invisible magic of the Compound Effect starts to become visible. The same
small mathematical growth improvement each day makes the compounded penny worth $10,737,418.24 on Day Thirty-one, more than three times your $3 million.
In this example we see why consistency over time is so important.
On Day Twenty-nine, you’ve got your $3 million; Penny Lane has around $2.7 million. It isn’t until Day Thirty of this 31-day race that she pulls ahead, with $5.3 million. And it isn’t until the very last day of this monthlong ultramarathon that your friend blows you out of the water; she ends up with $10,737,418.24 to your $3 million.
Very few things are as impressive as the “magic” of compounding pennies. Amazingly, this “force” is equally powerful in every area of your life."
Darren gives us more examples about the magic of the compound effect in his book.. Get it here!
2. Your only path to success
“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.
Know, too, that the results, the life, and the lifestyle of your dreams can be yours when you put the Compound Effect to work for you. If you use the principles outlined in the The Compound Effect, you will create your fairy-tale ending.”
“The greater the challenge, the more rigorous our routines need to be.”
3. Awareness + Tracking
“Right this moment: Pick an area of your life where you most want to be successful. Do you want more money in the bank? A trimmer waistline? The strength to compete in an Iron Man event? A better relationship with your spouse or kids?
Picture where you are in that area, right now. Now picture where you want to be: richer, thinner, happier, you name it. 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.”
“Track every action that relates to the area of your life you want to improve.”
“You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret to your success is found in your daily routine.”
4. Achieving your goals
“Alright, let’s map out your process for achieving the goals you’ve decided upon. This is the doing process—or, in some cases, the STOP-doing process.
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) + COMPOUNDED (time) = GOALS
That’s why it’s imperative to figure out which behaviors are blocking the path that leads to your goal, and which behaviors help you accomplish your goal.”
“If you want to sail your life in a new direction, you have to first pick up the anchors of bad habits that have been weighing you down. The key is to make your why-power so strong that it overwhelms your urges for instant gratification.”
5. Build momentum
“The same thing happens when a rocket ship launches. The space shuttle uses more fuel during the first few minutes of its flight than it does the rest of the entire trip. Why? Because it has to break free from the pull of gravity. Once it does, it can glide in orbit.
The hard part? Getting off the ground. Your old ways and your old conditioning are just like the inertia of the merry-go-round or the pull of gravity. Everything just wants to stay at rest.
You’ll need a lot of energy to break your inertia and get your new enterprise under way. But once you get momentum, you will be hard to stop—virtually unbeatable—even though you’re now putting out considerably less effort while receiving greater results.”
“How do you get Big Mo to pay you a visit? You build up to it. You get into the groove, the ‘zone,’ by doing the things we’ve covered so far:
1) Making new choices based on your goals and core values
2) Putting these choices to work through new positive behaviors
3) Repeating those healthy actions long enough to establish new habits
4) Building routines and rhythms into your daily disciplines
5) Staying consistent over a long enough period of time
Then, BANG! Big Mo knocks in your door (that’s a good thing)!) And you’re virtually unstoppable.”
“It’s not easy to build momentum but once you do, look out!”
“The key is to start NOW. Every great act, every fantastic adventure, starts with small steps. The first step always looks harder than it actually is.”
6. Bookend Your Days
“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.”
Darren walks us through his AM and PM Bookends.. Check it out in his book!
7. It’s time to make a new choice
“No matter where you are, or what year it is when you find this book, if I could, I’d ask you these simple questions: “Look back on your life five years ago. Are you now where you’d thought you’d be five years later? Have you kicked the bad habits you had vowed to kick?
Are you in the shape you wanted to be? Do you have the cushy income, the enviable lifestyle, and the personal freedom you expected? Do you have the vibrant health, abundant loving relationships, and the world-class skills you’d intended to have by this point in your life?”
If not, why? Simple—choices. It’s time to make a new choice—choose to not let the next five years be a continuum of the last. Choose to change your life, once and for all.
Let’s make the next five years of your life fantastically different from the last five!”
And remember “Your life is the product of your moment-to-moment choices.”
That was my QUICK summary of the great book The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy. If you’re interested, get your copy. There is a HUGE amount of life-changing ideas in this book, and we’ve only touched on a tiny bit of it.
Buy The Book: The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy
GET Blinkist 7 Days FREE Trial
3000+ Book Summaries
(Audio and Text)
