The compound Effect By DARREN HARDY

To understand what the compound effect is, let’s play out a little scenario. Now pretend someone offered you the following put in 30 minutes a day the same time every day to push your skills and show improvement at the end of the first week you’ll get $10, with a 10% raise at the end of each week if you consistently put in the time day after day. Or you were offered $5,000 to put in the same amount of time but you don’t need to do it on a consistent basis and you don’t need to improve your skills. You can just use your existing skill set. Now, which would you take?

Let’s say you took the first option and your friend takes the second and you start putting in a small amount of consistent work each day. After an entire month of daily effort you’ve made 51 dollars and one cent. Meanwhile your friend has cashed in a check for $5,000. After the second month, your friend is rubbing it in your face. He just made $10,000 cumulatively, not needing to push himself and here you are working day after day for a petty 125 dollars 81 cents.

At this point, your family starts suggesting that you should take the other offer as it’s still on the table but you don’t get discouraged. You believe in what you’re doing and you know the hard work will pay off one day.

After the third month people are getting downright angry with you. You’ve only made 235 dollars and 24 cents. They think you’ve made a stupid decision and beg you just take the other offer but you ignore them and keep proceeding.

A year goes by and you only have 15,541 dollars to your friend’s 60,000. He’s living a comfortable life and doesn’t really have a care in the world. Meanwhile people are openly ridiculing you for giving up such a great opportunity to make easy money.

Only after 16 months, will you have made the same amount of money as your friend. Your friends and family only have one thing to say, “it’s about damn time!” After 16 months of putting in the work day after day and receiving a 10% increase at the end of each week, only now are you starting to see significant results. The next month you make $40,000 in one month, the month after that you make $59,000. At the end of that second year you have accumulated just over 2.2 million dollars, an average of 1.1 million per year, to your friend’s $60,000 year.

Your family and friends are dumbfounded. Your friend can’t help but think he’s missed out on something significant. Sure he’s comfortable with 60,000 a year but he’s filled with regret. What the story illustrates is that small unsexy but smart decisions made consistently every day that are in alignment with your big vision lead to seemingly incomprehensible and incredible results; results that you can be truly proud of one day.

Author Darren Hardy calls this ‘the compound effect.’ Darren is a multi-millionaire and he’s constantly interviewed six successful entrepreneurs a month for his magazine success and he’s found that almost all self-made success uses the compound effect. He says, “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. The changes are subtle. They’re almost imperceptible.”

The small changes you make every day offer no immediate result; no big win and no obvious ‘I told you so’ pay off. So why bother?  It’s hard not to think this way when we live in a culture that promotes what Darren calls a microwave mentality. We expect instant downloads, fast food and same-day shipping. To stay true to the compound curve we need to trade the need for immediate results with immediate alignment with our core values.

Darren says your core values are your internal compass; your guiding beacon, your personal GPS. They act as the filter through which you run all life’s demands, requests and temptations, making sure they’re leading you towards your intended destination. Getting your core values defined and properly calibrated is one of the most important steps in redirecting your life towards your grandest vision.

When you know that what you’re doing from moment to moment, that the choices and decisions that you’re making from moment to moment are in alignment with your core values, you stop needing to have instant results show up in your life. You’re content in knowing that you are becoming the person that you want to become.

To discover your core values within your work setting, complete the following exercise. Think of someone successful within your field or the field you want to work in that you respect then ask yourself ‘what key attributes most contribute to their success?’ Darren says that most of us are sleepwalking through our daily choices. Half the time we’re not even aware that we’re making them.

To make sure that you are aware of your choices during your work hours, you could start writing down every work-related decision that you make at the top of each hour. Write down what you focused on the last hour then at the top of the page write down your core values. Objectively cross out every decision that you made that doesn’t align with your core values.

This exercise will help sharpen your focus. You will start to notice things that aren’t in alignment with your core values almost immediately. Knowing that you’re making small decisions that are moving you towards the person you want to become is enough to quiet your mind from wanting to see instant results.

The act of aligning each work decision with your core value will provide you with the reassurance and motivation to stick with your daily pursuit of achieving a compounded incredible result in your life.

Sometimes, knowing that we’re making good choices isn’t enough to know that we were on the right path; the compound path. We need to focus and measure the percent gains, not then that actual gains. In the initial example if you would have focused on the net income you were making each month and how petty it was in comparison to your friend then you would have given up but by focusing on the month-over-month return; the percent gain you were achieving each month you developed a certainty to stick with it.

So during your pursuits, actively measure the percent gains and focus on your momentum. If your efforts are producing month over month or week over week improvements and your daily choices are aligning with your core values then you need to be patient.

We humans routinely overestimate what we can produce in a week but we vastly underestimate what we can produce in a few months or a few years of stained effort.

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