40 pages • 1 hour read
Darren HardyThe Compound Effect: Jumpstart Your Income, Your Life, Your Success
Darren HardyNonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Influences”
Three key external sources can influence our attitudes: media, other people, and the environment.
We get in life what we most think about. Our minds are designed to prioritize awareness of danger. The media announces bad news around the clock, which puts us in a constant state of alarm. In listening to news reports, our minds are like drinking glasses: “You put in sensational news, salacious headlines, talk-show rants, and you’re pouring dirty water into your glass” (119). This distorts our view of the world and dampens our creativity.
Instead, people should flush out their minds with the clean water of “[p]ositive, inspirational, and supportive input and ideas” (120). We can limit our exposure to angry social media, skip past the frantic ads, and refrain from watching the mental junk food on TV. Most people watch two months’ worth of television every year.
Hardy curates his news feeds so they only report news of specific interest to him. He also uses commuting time to listen to instructional audio—which, in the course of a year, is equal to two semesters’ worth of college lectures.
Secondly, our social “reference group,” the people we spend a lot of time with, determines much of our success. We tend, in health and wealth, to be the average of our reference group, and can gauge our own wellbeing simply by observing the qualities of our friends and associates. The influence of our reference group is subtle: They nudge us in one direction or another. Whatever they eat, believe, and talk about, we tend to adopt, good or bad.
It’s useful to take inventory of these associates and consider whether to adopt new friends whose attitudes more closely reflect our goals. Some people might be better as acquaintances with whom we spend short amounts of time—three minutes, for example, instead of three hours or three days—while others we may wish to release entirely. To find new associates more aligned with your goals, we should go to places where they congregate.
A “Peak-Performance Partner” is someone you trust with whom you periodically discuss goals, and you hold each other accountable for reaching them (131). As for mentors, obtain writings and speeches by well-known people you admire and absorb their influence. Friends also can mentor you; let them be “brutally honest,” and be willing to offer advice if asked. Select a group of your acquaintances as a “board of advisers” whom you can consult (134).
The third influence on our outlook is our environment. While working in San Francisco real estate, Hardy often visited a wealthy enclave across the bay, Tiburon, where he dined at a wonderful harbor restaurant. Looking up the hillside, he noticed a blue house that seemed ideal. The blue house went on sale: Its view of the Bay area was spectacular, and Hardy bought it on the spot. His visits to Tiburon inspired a vision of a better life, and finally he moved there.
Changing one’s environment begins with improving the one you have. Remove clutter and anything else that distracts or dissuades you from moving toward your goals. Unfinished tasks likewise clutter our minds and reinforce a sense of failure. The things we tolerate come to define our lives.
Chapter 5 Analysis
Chapter 5 examines the external influences that can help or hinder advancement toward our goals. Hardy stresses three forces: media, acquaintances, and environment. One’s relationship with them requires constant vigilance.
Media attracts us with reports of alarming developments. Most of the time, these have nothing to do with our own lives, yet it’s hard to discriminate between important bad news and news that’s merely luridly fascinating. People love stories, but a continuous barrage of disaster tales—a war halfway around the world, a raging forest fire 1,000 miles away, a terrible bus accident in a foreign country—can seriously dampen our mood, even when they’re remote from us.
It’s true that what happens elsewhere can, in the modern age, affect everyone on Earth. However, this merely makes more difficult the task of discriminating between dangers that must be addressed and those that don’t matter to us.
Acquaintances can also have a bad effect. Hardy quotes American entrepreneur Jim Rohn’s famous saying that we’re the average of the five people with whom we most associate. Thus, we should be choosy about those five people. When we realize that a friend behaves or thinks in ways that don’t fit our goals, we face the tricky problem of removing ourselves from their company. They’ll likely want to continue the relationship and will oppose our decision.
One of Hardy’s workarounds is simply to limit the amount of time spent with certain people. Those with whom you can have a positive interaction for three minutes, or even three hours, may not be good company over three days or three weeks. A variation on this is to discern the qualities or interests you share with someone and focus your time on those things. You may not wish to go barhopping with a given person, but you can enjoy conversations with them on topics of mutual interest. In these ways we can curate our friendships so that our interactions reflect the best that we and others have to offer.
A critic might comment that, if a person is the average of their five closest associates, then moving to a new and better group of five will tend to lower that group’s average due to your inferior influence. Hardy might answer that the group instead pulls you up to their level, where your unique contributions may raise the group’s level even further.
Hardy also brings up The Importance of a Positive Outlook. This is a recurring theme in self-help books and in The Compound Effect. Hardy says that “you will get in life what you accept and expect you are worthy of” (136). Our beliefs limit what we think we can achieve, and we won’t advance any further than those beliefs allow.
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