The Compound Effect: Jumpstart Your Income, Your Life, Your Success

Hardy chides his competitors in the self-improvement field who try to sell instant success programs to gullible readers. Real success, he insists, comes from hard work applied continuously over years. His formula for propelling the hard work required contains three principles: assuming responsibility, changing bad habits to good ones, and finding one’s great inspiration, or “why-power.”

A central habit, exerting effort, anchors the process. Many of life’s most important goals—financial success, a happy family life, excellent health—require a few to several hours of work each day. There’s no escaping the labor involved—“[Y]our only path to success is through a continuum of mundane, unsexy, unexciting, and sometimes difficult daily disciplines compounded over time” (16-17). This isn’t glamorous, Hardy says, but it works. The results pay off handsomely, and that is when the value of effort becomes obvious.

Given the need for hard, consistent work, Hardy offers tips that greatly ease the burden. One needs only to make very small, positive changes to one’s behaviors; habitually applied, these shifts take advantage of the Compound Effect, spreading out the effort over time and creating big successes after a year or so.

People can leverage the “why-power” of their biggest dreams by linking the new habits to their desires. If losing weight or saving money leads to the realization of big dreams, making an effort will seem small by comparison. “Why-power” animates all the efforts we must make to reach our goals. The hours required each day to achieve success will seem trivial; we’ll be eager to do them when we see how our efforts lead us to the things we really want in life.

When problems happen, it’s tempting to blame others or circumstance. However, this has no power to improve the situation. It’s true that, had the other person or circumstance not gone wrong, all would be well, but it’s futile to wait for things to improve themselves. Instead, it’s wise to assume 100% responsibility for the outcomes we want and take it on ourselves to make the improvements required to get there. This sounds hard and unfair, but it has the distinct advantage of actually solving problems: “We can all take back control by not blaming chance, fate, or anyone else for our outcomes” (64).

Most of the effort is in the launch of a new habit. Once it’s formed, momentum kicks in and maintains it. The hard work of starting a new behavior shifts into the relatively easy work of maintaining the habit.

Despite our best efforts, outside influences may erode our beliefs and standards. News and other media, for example, can muddy the mind’s clarity with continuous, lurid reports of conflict, murder, disease, and other alarming events: “It’s a never-ending battle to be selective and to stand guard against any information that can derail your creative potential” (118).

On a path toward success, people often face “moments of truth” that define their character (140). In these moments, increasing our effort to a level that’s just beyond our normal capacity will reap enormous benefits and raise our ability to do even more in the future. Such exertions often make the difference between winning and losing.

Working hard, then, is a requirement for success. Doing so in the smartest, most efficient ways possible—making small, consistent, positive changes, finding inspiration from one’s life purpose, maintaining momentum, and accelerating toward victory in moments of truth—lead to success in ways that energize us rather than exhaust us.